USA > California > Los Angeles County > Los Angeles > A history of California and an extended history of Los Angeles and environs : also containing biographies of well-known citizens of the past and present, Volume I > Part 42
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"Even this performance was surpassed later on in the boom. The sale of lots in a certain town was to begin Wednesday morning at the agent's office in the city. On Sunday evening a line of prospective purchasers began to form. The agent, as an advertising dodge, hired a large hall for the display of his would-be in- vestors. At stated intervals the line formed, the roll was called and woe to the unfortunate who failed to answer to his number; his place in the line was forfeited and he was compelled to go down to the foot. Financially, the agent's scheme was a failure. The crowd was made up principally of impecunious speculators and tramps who had hoped to sell out their places in the line.
"An aristocratic and euphonious name was desideratum to a new-born town, although, as in the following case, it sometimes failed to boom the prospective city. An enterprising news- paper man found a piece of unoccupied land on the line of the Santa Fe Railroad-that is, a piece not occupied by a town site-and found- ed the city of Gladstone. An advertisement pro- lific in promises of the future greatness of the city, and tropical in its luxuriance of descrip- tive adjectives, proclaimed among other induce- ments to buy that a lot had been deeded to the premier of all England, and it was left to be in- ferred that the 'grand old man' might build a princely residence on his lot and become one of the attractions to draw dwellers to the new city. In olden times, when a conqueror wished to destroy a rival city, he razed it to the ground, caused the plowshare to pass over its ruins and
sowed the site with salt. The city of Gladstone was prevented from rising above the ground by the caustic criticisms of a rival newspaper man, the plowshare has passed many times over its ruins and its site has been sown in barley. The enterprising newspaper man lost his land (he held it by contract to purchase only), the surveyor who platted the town lost his pay and Gladstone lost his lot.
"Of the phantom cities of the boom, cities that have faded from mortal view, cities that have become spectres that rise out of the mists of the past to haunt the dupes who invested their money in them, of these Carlton is a good illustration. It was located on the slope of the Santa Ana mountains, east of Anaheim. It is described as commanding a beautiful view of the valley of the Santa Ana, with a glimpse of the Pacific ocean in the distance. View was its chief resource-the only commodity other than town lots it had to offer. The promises of its projectors were unbounded, and the credulity of its investors seemed to be unlimited. Rail- roads were to center there. There manufac- tories were to rear their lofty chimneys, and the ever-present hotel in the course of erection was to be a palace of luxury for the tourist and a health-restoring sanitarium to the one-lunged consumptive.
"Promises were cheap and plentiful, and so were the lots. They started at $25 each for a lot twenty-five feet front ; rose to $35; jumped to $50, and choice corners changed hands all the way from $100 to $500.
"One enterprising agent sold three thousand, and many others did their best to supply a long- felt want-cheap lots. Capitalists, speculators, mechanics, merchants, day laborers, clerks and servant girls crowded and jostled one another in their eagerness to secure choice lots in the coming metropolis. Business blocks, hotels, restaurants and dwelling houses lined the streets on paper. A bank building, with a costly vault, was in course of construction, and it continued in that course to the end. A railroad was sur- veyed to the city and a few ties and rails scat- tered at intervals along the line. A number of cheap houses were built, and a population of three or four hundred congregated there at the
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height of the boom, and for a time managed to subsist in a semi-cannibalistic way on the dupes who came there to buy lots. The site of the city was on the mountain side above the zanja (ditch), and the water supply of the inhabitants had to be hauled up hill in water carts. The productive land lay far below in the valley, and the cities of the plain absorbed all the trade. When the excursionist and lot-buyer ceased to come, 'Picturesque Cariton,' 'Nature's Rendez- vous,' as its poetic founder styled it, was aban- doned, and now the jack-rabbit nibbles the grass in its deserted streets and the howl of the coyote and the hoot of the boding owl echo amid its ruins-that is, if there are enough ruins to make an echo.
"Of the purely paper cities of the boom, Bor- der City and Manchester are the best illustra- tions. An unprincipled speculator by the name of Simon Homberg secured two quarter-sec- tions of government land situated respectively forty and forty-three miles northeast of Los Angeles. These were the sites of Homberg's famous or rather infamous twin cities. Border City was appropriately named. It was located on the border of the Mojave desert, on the northeastern slope of the Sierra Madre mount- ains. (It was named Border City because it was located on the eastern border of Los Ange- les county.) It was most easily accessible by means of a balloon, and was as secure from hos- tile invasion as the homes of the cliff dwellers. Its principal resource, like Carlton, was view- a view of the Mojave desert. The founder did not go to the expense of having the site sur- veyed and the lots staked off. Indeed, about the only way it could be surveyed was through a field glass. He platted it by blocks and re- corded his map. The streets were forty feet wide and the lots twenty-five feet front by one hundred deep. The quarter-section made nine- teen hundred and twenty lots, an average of twelve to the acre. Such width of street Hom- berg found to be a waste of land, and in laying out the city of Manchester he was more eco- nomical. Out of the quarter section on which that city was located he carved two thousand three hundred and four lots, or about fourteen to the acre. All streets running east and west
were 27 2-13 feet wide, and all running north and south were 34 2-7 feet wide. The lots were twenty-five feet front by ninety-five deep. Manchester was a city of greater resources than Border City. Being located higher up the mountain, it had a more extended view of the desert.
"These lots were not offered for sale in Southern California, nor to those who might in- vestigate and expose the fraud, but were ex- tensively advertised in Northern California, in Oregon, in the eastern states, and even in Eu- rope. It would seem almost incredible that Homberg could have found dupes enough to buy such property unsight, unseen; yet, judg- ing from the records, he sold about all of his four thousand lots, and his profits must have footed up in the neighborhood of $50,000. So many of his deeds were filed for record that the county recorder had a book of records con- taining three hundred and sixty pages, especial- ly prepared with printed forms, of Homberg's deeds, so that when one was filed for record, all that was necessary to engross it was to fill in the name of the purchaser and the number of the lot and block.
"The lots cost Homberg about an average of ten cents each, and were sold at all prices, from $1 up to $250 each, the prices varying ac- cording to the means or the gullibility of the purchaser. One buyer would pay $250 for a single lot; the next investor might get ten or a dozen for that sum. One enthusiast in San José invested $1,000 in a bunch of forty- eight lots, securing at one fell swoop four busi- ness blocks in the center of Border City. Near- ly every state in the Union had its victims of misplaced confidence in the future of Homberg's twin cities. Nor were his operations confined to the United States alone. England, Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden furnished him dupes as well.
"The magnitude of our great boom can be measured more accurately by a money standard than any other. The total of the considerations named in the instruments filed for record dur- ing the year 1887 reached the enormous sum of $98,084,162. But even this does not tell half the story. By far the larger number of lots
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and blocks in the various tracts and town sites that were thrown on the market were sold on contract, the terms of payment being one-third or one-fourth cash, balance in installments pay- able in six, twelve or eighteen months, a deed to be given when the final payment was made. But few of the agreements were recorded. Fre- quently property bought on agreement to con- vey was resold from one to half a dozen times, and each time at an advance; yet the consider- ation named in the deed, when given, would be the sum named in the original agreement. Deeds to the great bulk of property sold on con- tract in 1887 did not go on record until the fol- lowing year, and many of them not then. Thou- sands of contracts were forfeited and never ap- peared of record. It is safe to estimate that the considerations in the real-estate transactions during 1887 in Los Angeles county alone reached $200,000,000.
"So sudden and so great an inflation of land values was perhaps never equaled in the world's history. When unimproved land in John Law's Mississippi Colony sold for 30,000 livres ($5,- 550) a square league, all Europe was amazed and historians still quote the Mississippi bubble as a marvel of inflation. To have bought a square league of land in the neighborhood of some of our cities in the booming days of 1887 would have taken an amount of money equal to the capital of the national bank of France, in the days of John Law. Unimproved lands ad- joining the city of Los Angeles sold as high as $2,500 per acre or at the rate of $14,400,000 a square league. Land that sold at $100 an acre in 1886, changed hands in 1887 at $1,500 per acre; and city lots bought in 1886 at $500 each, a year later were rated at $5,000.
"The great booms of former times measured by the money standard, dwarf into insignifi- cance when compared with ours. The capital stock of John Law's National Bank of France, with his Mississippi grants thrown in, figured up less than $15,000,000, an amount about equal to our real-estate transactions for one month ; yet, the bursting of John Law's Mississippi bub- ble very nearly bankrupted the French Empire. The relative proportions of the South Sea bub- ble of 1700 to our real estate boom are as a
soap bubble is to a mammoth balloon. The amount of capital invested in the Darien Colo- nization scheme, a scheme which bankrupted Scotland and came near plunging all Europe in- to war, was only 220,000 pounds sterling, a sum about equal to our real-estate transfers for one day.
"From a report compiled for the Los Angeles County Board of Equalization in July, 1889, I find the area included in sixty towns, all of which were laid out since January 1, 1887, estimated at 79,350 acres. The total population of these sixty towns at that time was placed at 3,350. . Some of the largest of these on paper were without inhabitants. Carlton, containing 4,060 lots, was an unpeopled waste; Nadeau, 4,470 lots, had no inhabitants; Manchester, 2,304 lots, no inhabitants; Santiago 2,110 lots, was a de- serted village. Others still contained a small remnant of their former population. Chicago Park, containing 2,289 lots, had one inhabitant, the watchman who took care of its leading ho- tel; Sunset, 2,014 lots, one inhabitant, watch- man of an expensive hotel which was in the course of construction when the boom burst. (The building was burned a few years since.)
"The sites of a majority of the boom cities of twenty years ago have been returned to acreage, the plowshare has passed over their ruins and barley grows in the deserted streets.
"The methods of advertising the attractions of the various tracts, subdivisions and town sites thrown on the market, and the devices resorted to to inveigle purchasers into investing were va- rious, often ingenious and sometimes infamous. Brass bands, street processions, free excursions and free lunches, columns of advertisements rich in description and profuse in promises that were never intended to be fulfilled, pictures of massive hotels in the course of erection, litho- graphs of colleges about to materialize, lotteries, the prizes in which were handsome residences or family hotels, railroads that began and end- ed in the imaginations of the projectors-such were a few of the many devices resorted to to attract purchasers and induce them to invest their coin.
"Few, if any, of the inhabitants to the manor born, or those of permanent residence and re-
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putable character engaged in these doubtful practices and disreputable methods of booming. The men who blew the bubble to greatest in- flation were new importations-fellows of the baser sort who knew little or nothing about the resources or characteristics of the country and cared less. They were here to make money. When the bubble burst they disappeared-those who got away with their gains, chuckling over ill-gotten wealth; those who lost, abusing the country and vilifying the people they had duped. Retributive justice overtook a few of the more unprincipled boomers and they have since done some service to the country in striped uniforms.
"The collapse of our real-estate boom was not the sudden bursting of a financial bubble, like the South Sea bubble or John Law's Mississippi bubble, nor did it end in a financial crash like the monetary panics of 1837 and 1857, or like Black Friday in Wall street. Its collapse was more like the steady contraction of a balloon from the pressure of the heavier atmosphere on the outside. It gradually shriveled up. The considerations named in the recorded trans- fers of the first three months of 1888 ex- ceeded $20,000,000. After that they decreased rapidly."
CHAPTER XXXIX. LOS ANGELES CITY.
FROM PUEBLO TO CIUDAD. (From Town to City.)
F OR fifty-five years after its founding Los Angeles was officially a pueblo. In 1835, as narrated in a previous chapter, the Mexican congress raised it to the rank of a city. It was only in official records and communica- tions that it was accorded the dignity of a "ciu- dad" (city). The people spoke of it as el pueblo -the town. American writers of the decade previous to the American conquest all speak of it as the pueblo, and one of them, Hast- ings, who came to California overland in 1843 and wrote a book describing the country and telling how to get there, seems not to have heard its real name, but designated it "Poablo below," and San José "Poablo above." Los Angeles was often spoken of as El Pueblo abajo, the town below ; and San José, El Pueblo, the town above. Hastings, with his imperfect knowledge of Spanish, seems to have taken these as the real names of the towns.
Its elevation to a ciudad by the Mexican con- gress made no change in its form of government. The ayuntamiento was still the ruling power, and the number of its members was not in- creased. The ayuntamiento was abolished at the
beginning of the year 1840. The Mexican con- gress had enacted a law allowing ayuntamientos only to cities with a population of four thousand and upwards. The ayuntamiento of Los Angeles was re-established in 1844, and continued the governing body of the city until superseded by the common council July 3, 1850.
In the beginning Los Angeles was symmet- rical. The pueblo contained four square leagues (Spanish). In the center was the plaza, 75x100 varas. It was the geographical center of the settlement. One league toward each wind you reached the pueblo's boundary lines. The nar- row streets went out from the plaza at right angles to its sides. The houses faced inward upon it. As the town grew it wandered off from its old center and became demoralized. The streets crooked to suit the convenience of house builders. The houses stood at different angles to the streets and the house lots were of all geometrical shapes. No man had a written title to his land. Possession was ten points of the law. Indeed, it was all the law he had to pro- tect his title. If he ceased to use his land he might lose it. Anyone was at liberty to denounce unused land, and the ayuntamiento, on proof being made that it was unused, declared the possession forfeited.
Broadway ( Fort Street) From the Fort to Second Street, 1886
Nadeau Hotel Erected 1882
26
26
Present Site of Baker Block-Arcadia Block in Rear Home of Don Abel Stearns, Erected 1836 Business Center 1860 to 1880
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With the fall of the missions a spasm of terri- torial expansion seized the colonists. In 1834 the territorial legislature, by an enactment, fixed the boundaries of the pueblo of Los Angeles at "two leagues to each of the four winds, measuring from the center of the plaza." This gave the pueblo an area of sixteen square leagues, or over one hundred square miles. Next year (1835) Los Angeles was made the capital of Alta Cali- fornia by the Mexican congress and raised to the dignity of a city; and then its first real estate boom was on. There was an increased demand for lots and lands, but there were no maps or plats to grant by and no additions or subdivisions of the pueblo lands on the market. All the unoccupied lands belonged to the munici- pality, and when a citizen wanted a house lot to build on he petitioned the ayuntamiento for a lot, and if the piece asked for was vacant he was granted a lot-large or small, deep or shal- low, on the street or off it, just as it happened.
With the growth of the town the confusion and irregularity increased. The disputes arising from overlapping grants, conflicting property lines and indefinite descriptions induced the ayuntamiento of 1836 to appoint a commission to investigate and report upon the manner of granting house lots and agricultural lands. The commissioners reported "that they had con- sulted with several of the founders and with old settlers, who declared that from the founding of the town the concession of lots and lands had been made verbally without any other formality than locating and measuring the extent of the land the fortunate one should occupy."
"In order to present a fuller report your com- mission obtained an 'Instruction' signed by Don José Francisco de Ortega, dated at San Gabriel, February 2, 1782, and we noted that articles 3, 4 and 17 of said 'Instruction' provides that con- cession of said agricultural lands and house lots must be made by the government, which shall issue the respective titles to the grantees. Ac- cording to the opinion of the city's advisers, said 'Instruction,' or at least the three articles re- ferred to, have not been observed, as there is no property owner who can show a legal title to his property.
"The commissioners cannot do otherwise but
call attention of the Most Illustrious Ayunta- miento to the evil consequences which may re- sult by reason of said abuses, and recommend that some means may be devised that they may be avoided. God and Liberty."
"Angeles, March 8, 1836. "ABEL STEARNS, "BACILIO VALDEZ, "JOSE M. HERRERRAS, "Commissioners."
Acting on the report of the commissioners, the ayuntamiento required all holders of property to apply for written titles. But the poco tiempo ways of the pobladores could not be altogether overcome. We find from the records that in 1847 the land of Mrs. Carmen Navarro, one of the founders of the town, was denounced (filed on) because she could not show a written title to it. The ayuntamiento decided "that as she had always been allowed to hold it, her claim should be respected because she was one of the founders," "which makes her entitled to a lot on which to live."
March 17, 1836, "a commission on streets, plazas and alleys was appointed to report a plan for repairing the monstrous irregularity of the streets brought about by ceding house lots and erecting houses in this pueblo."
The commission reported in favor of "formu- lating a plat of the city as it actually exists, on which shall be marked the names of the streets, alleys and plazas, also the house lots and com- mon lands of the pueblo." But nothing came of the report, no plat was made, and the ayunta- miento went on in the same old way, granting lots of all shapes and forms.
In March, 1846, another commission was ap- pointed to locate the bounds of the pueblo lands. All that was done was to measure two leagues "in the direction of the four winds from the plaza church," and set stakes to mark the boundary lines. Then came the American con- quest of California, and the days of poco tiempo were numbered. In 1847, after the conquest, another attempt was made to straighten and widen the streets. Some of the Yankee spirit of fixing up things seems to have pervaded the ayuntamiento. A street commission was ap-
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pointed to try to bring order out of the chaos into which the streets had fallen. The commis- sioners reported July 22, 1847, as follows : "Your commissioners could not but be amazed seeing the disorder and the manner how the streets run. More particularly the street which leads to the cemetery, whose width is out of proportion to its length, and whose aspect of- fends the sense of the beautiful which should prevail in the city." When discussing this state of affairs with the sindico (city attorney) he in- formed us that on receiving his instructions from the ayuntamiento he was ordered to give the streets a width of fifteen varas (about forty- one feet). This he found to be in conflict with the statutes. The law referred to is in Book IV, Chapter 7, Statute 10 (probably a compilation of the "laws of the Indies," two or three cen- turies old, and brought from Spain). The law reads : "In cold countries the streets shall be wide, and in warm countries narrow; and when there are horses it would be convenient to have wide streets for purpose of an occasional de- fense or to widen them in the form above men- tioned, care being taken that nothing is done to spoil the looks of the buildings, weaken the points of defense or encroach upon the comfort of the people."
"The instructions given the sindico by the ayuntamiento are absolutely opposed to this law, and therefore illegal." It probably never oc- curred to the commission to question the wisdom of so senseless a law; it had been a law in Spanish America for centuries and therefore must be venerated for its antiquity. A blind, un- reasoning faith in the wisdom of church and state has been the undoing of the Spanish people. Apparently the commission did nothing more than report. California being a warm country, the streets perforce must be narrow.
The same year a commission was appointed to "square the plaza." Through carelessness some of the houses fronting on the square had been allowed to encroach upon it; others were set back so that the boundary lines of the plaza zigzagged back and forth like a Virginia rail fence. The neighborhood of the plaza was the aristocratic residence quarter of the city then, and a plaza front was considered high-toned. The
commission found the squaring of the plaza as difficult a problem as the squaring of a circle. After many trials and tribulations the commis- sioners succeeded in overcoming most of the irregularities by reducing the area of the plaza. The houses that intruded were not torn down, but the property line was moved forward. The north, south and west lines were each fixed at 134 varas and the east line 112 varas. The ayuntamiento attempted to open a street from the plaza north of the church, but Pedro Cabrera, who had been granted a lot which fell in the line of the street, refused to give up his plaza front for a better lot without that aristocratic appendage which the council offered him. Then the city authorities offered him as compensation for the difference a certain number of days' labor of the chain gang (the treasury was in the usual state of collapse), but Pedro could not be traded out of his plaza front, so the street took a twist around Pedro's lot-a twist that sixty years has not straightened out. The irregularities in grant- ing portions of the unapportioned city lands still continued and the confusion of titles increased.
In May. 1849, the territorial governor, Gen- eral Bennett Riley, sent a request to the ayunta- miento for a city map and information in regard to the manner of granting lots. The ayunta- miento replied that there was no map of the city in existence and no surveyor here who could make one. The governor was asked to send a surveyor to make a plan or plat of the city. He was also informed that in making land grants within "the perimeter of two leagues square the city acted in the belief that it is entitled to that much land as a pueblo."
Lieut. E. O. C. Ord, of the United States army, was sent down by the governor to plat the city. On the 18th of July, 1849, he sub- mitted this proposition to the ayuntamiento: "He would make a map of the city, marking boundary lines and points of the municipal lands for $1,500, coin, ten lots selected from among the defined lots on the map and vacant lands to the extent of 1,000 varas to be selected in sec- tions of 200 varas wherever he may choose it, or he would make a map for $3,000 in coin."
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