Historical and biographical record of Los Angeles and vicinity : containing a history of the city from its earliest settlement as a Spanish pueblo to the closing year of the nineteenth century ; also containing biographies of well known citizens of the past and present, Part 25

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1901
Publisher: Chicago : Chapman Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 996

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The morning of May 15 was set for the attack. To avert suspicion Sheriff Rowland remained in the city. The attacking force, eight in number, were under command of Under-Sheriff Albert Johnson, the other members of the force were Major H. M. Mitchell, attorney-at-law; J. S. Bryant, city constable; E. Harris, policeman; W. E. Rogers, saloonkeeper; B. F. Hartley, chief of police; and D. K. Smith, citizen, all of Los Angeles, and a Mr. Beers, of San Francisco,

special correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle.

At 4 A. M. on the morning of the 15th of May the posse reached Major Mitchell's bee ranch in a small cañon not far from Greek George's. From this point the party reconnoitered the ball- dit's hiding place and planned an attack. As the deputy sheriff and his men were about to move against the house a high box wagon drove up the cañon from the direction of Greek George's place. In this were two natives; the sheriff's party climbed into the high wagon box and lying down, compelled the driver to drive up to the back of Greek George's house, threatening him and his companion with death on the least sign of treachery. Reaching the house they sur- rounded it and burst in the door. Vasquez, who had been eating his breakfast, attempted to escape through a small window. The party opened fire on him. Being wounded and finding himself surrounded on all sides, he surrendered. He was taken to the Los Angeles jail. His injuries proved to be mere flesh wounds. He received a great deal of maudlin sympathy from silly women, who magnified him into a hero. He was taken to San José, tried for murder, found guilty and hanged, March 19, 1875. His band was broken up and dispersed.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE GREAT REAL ESTATE BOOM OF 1887.

T N THE history of nearly every great Ameri- can city there is an epoch which marks a turning point in its civic life. The great epoch in the civic life of Los Angeles is that which is always spoken of as "The Boom." An event is referred to as occurring "before the boom," "during the booni," or "after the boom."

By the "boom" is meant the great real estate bubble of 1887. Boom, in the sense we use it, is intended to express a sudden inflation of values; and on the western side of our continent it has superseded the older used and more expressive word-bubble. Boom-"to rush with vio- lence"-is better suited to the dash, the im- petuosity and the recklessness of western specu-

lators than the more effeminate term-bubble. Boom has come into our literature to stay, how- ever unstable it may be in other places. It is scarcely a dozen years since our great real estate boom or bubble burst. Those who were wounded in the pocket by its bursting have long since recovered and their financial scars have disappeared. The serio-comic features and the wild excesses of the booming days of '87 are about all of it that live in our memories. The little white stakes that marked the corners of the innumerable lots in the numerous paper cities and towns have been buried by the plowshare or gnawed away by the tooth of time, and the sites of the cities themselves forgotten.

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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.

In the archives of the Los Angeles County Recorder's office may be found the outlines of the history of the boom. It is a "true, full and cor- rect" record of the plats of cities and towns-the record of subdivisions and resubdivisions of lots, blocks and tracts in and additions to cities and towns-filling twenty large map books-the records of a single year, that of 1887. These are the merest skeletons of its history-the bony corpses of the boom, so to speak. The embellish- ments are wanting-the literature dispensed broadcast by the founders of these cities and towns and their agents, the literature that de- scribed in well rounded phrase the advantages of these cities as future commercial emporiums and health resorts; that told of railroads, transconti- mental and local, that were building for the especial benefit of these commercial centers; that landed their beauty of scenery and their mildness of climate-all these are wanting in the records; and those triumphs of the lithographer's art that embellislied the literature of the boom are want- ing too-the princely hotels; the massive busi- ness blocks; the avenues lined with tropical plants and streets shaded with evergreens; all these are wanting in the records, too. The literature of the boom perished with the boom; buried in waste baskets and cremated in kitchen stoves.

Communities and nations as well are subject, at times, to financial booms-periods when the mania for money-making seems to become epidemic. The South Sea Bubble; the Darien Colonization Scheme; the Mississippi Scheme of John Law; the Northern Pacific Railroad Bubble of Jay Cooke -- have each been followed by finan- cial panics and Black Fridays, but the experience of one generation is lost on the succeeding. Ex- perience as schoolmaster is too often a failure.

There were no booms in Los Angeles under Spanish or under Mexican rule. Then all vacant lands belonged to the pueblo. If a man needed a building lot lie petitioned the comision- ado or, later on, the ayuntamiento for a grant of a lot. If he failed to use the lot it was taken from him. Under such conditions neither real estate booms nor real estate agents could flourish.

After the discovery of gold in California, Los Angeles experienced its first real estate boom. In 1849 the Ord Survey lots were put on the market and a number of them sold. There was a great demand for houses. Buildings framed and ready for putting together were shipped around Cape Horn from Boston, New York, London and Liverpool.

As the gold excitement decreased the city gradually sank into a comatose state-took a Rip Van Winkle sleep for twenty years or there-

abouts. Times were hard, money scarce and real estate low. Markets were distant, trans- portation was high and most of the agricultural lands were held in large tracts. These condi- tions began to change about 1868. The Stearns ranchos, containing about 200,000 acres, were subdivided. Settlers from the New England and northwestern states began to come in and the push and energy of these began to work a trans- formation in the sleepy old ciudad and the coun- try around. Between 1868 and 1875 a number of the large ranchos were subdivided, several colonies were promoted and new towns founded.

From 1875 to 1881 was a period of financial depression. The Temple and Workman Bank failure, a succession of dry years that ruined the sheep industry, overproduction, high freight rates and a poor market for our products brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy. The building of the Southern Pacific Railroad eastward gave us a new and better market for our products in the mining regions of Arizona and New Mexico. The completion of this road in 1882 gave us a new transcontinental route and immigrants began to arrive direct from the east- ern states. The price of land steadily advanced and gradually we recovered from our financial depression.

Up till 1886 the growth of our cities and towns had kept pace with the growth and development of the surrounding country, the crying need for new cities and towns had not been heard. The merits of the country had been well advertised in the eastern states. Excursion agents, real estate dealers, and the newspapers of Southern California had depicted in glowing colors the salubrity of our climate, the variety of our pro- ductions, the fertility of our soil and the immense profits to be made from the cultivation of semi- tropical fruits. The last link of the Santa Fe Railroad system was approaching completion. In the spring of 1886 a rate war was precipitated between the two transcontinental lines. Tickets from Missouri River points to Los Angeles were sold all the way from $1 to $15.

Visitors and immigrants poured in by the thousands. The country was looking its love- liest. Leaving the ice and snows of Minnesota, Iowa and Kansas, in three or four days they found themselves in a land of orange groves, green fields and flower-covered hills. In the new land they found everybody prosperous, and these visitors returned to their homes to sell their possessions and come to the promised land.

The more immediate causes that precipitated our great real estate boom of 1887 may be briefly enumerated as follows:

First .- The completion of a competing trans-

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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.

continental railroad, with its western terminus at Los Angeles, and an era of active local railroad building and railroad projecting in Southern California.

Second .- High prices for all our products, an easy money market and employment, at high wages, for all who wished it.

Third .- An immense immigration, part of it in- duced to come on account of a better climate and greater rewards for labor, and part of it attracted by reports of the large profits to be made by speculating in real estate.

Lastly .- The arrival among us of a horde of boomers from western cities and towns-patriots, many of them, who had exiled themselves from their former places of abode between two days- fellows who had left their consciences (that is, if they had any to leave) on the other side of the Rockies. These professionals had learned the tricks of their trade in the boom cities of the west when that great wave of immigration which be- gan moving after the close of the war was sweep- ing westward from the Mississippi River to the shores of the Pacific. These boomers came here not to build up the country, but to make money, honestly if they could not make it any other way. It is needless to say they made it the other way.

During 1884-5-6 a number of lots were put on the market, but these were made mostly by sub- divisions of acreage within or of additions imme- diately joining the older established cities and towns. Very few new town sites had been laid off previous to 1887. As the last section of the Santa Fe Railway system approached completion the creation of new towns began, and the rapid- ity with which they were created was truly aston- ishing. During the months of March, April and May, 1887. no less than thirteen town sites were platted on the line of this road between Los An- geles and San Bernardino and the lots thrown upon the market. Before the close of 1887, be- tween the eastern limits of Los Angeles City and the San Bernardino county line, a distance by way of the Santa Fe Railroad of thirty-six miles, there were twenty-five cities and towns located, an average of one to each mile and a half of the road. Paralleling the Santa Fe on the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, eight more towns claimed the attention of lot buyers, with three more thrown in between the roads, making a grand total of thirty-six cities and towns in the San Gabriel Valley. The area of some of these was quite extensive. "No pent up Utica con- tracted the powers" of their founders. The only limit to the greatness of a city was the boundary lines of the adjoining cities. The corporate limits of the city of Monrovia were eight square miles; Pasadena, with its additions, the same;

Lordsburg spread over eight hundred acres; Chicago Park numbered nearly three thousand lots, located in the wash of the San Gabriel River. The city of Azusa, with its house lots and suburban farm lots, covered an area of four thou- sand acres.

The craze to secure lots in some of these towns is well exemplified in the first sale of lots in Azusa. The founding of the city of Azusa was intended to satisfy a long felt want. The rich valley of the Azusa de Duarte had no commer- cial metropolis. Azusa City was recognized by real estate speculators as the coming commercial center of trade for the valley, and they thought there was money in the first pick of lots. The lots were to be put on sale on a certain day. Through the long hours of the night previous and until nine o'clock of the day of sale a line of hungry and weary lot buyers stood in front of the office where the lots were to be sold. Number two claimed to have been offered a thousand dollars for his place in the line; number three sold out for five hundred dollars; number fifty-four loudly proclaimed that he would not take a cent less than a cool hundred for his chance. Number one was deaf to all offers; and through the weary hours of the night he clung to the "handle of the big front door," securing at last the coveted prize-the first choice. Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of lots were sold the first day. The sale continued three days. Not one in ten of the purchasers had seen the town site, not one in a hundred expected to occupy the land purchased.

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 this 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 investors. 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 a de- sideratum to a new born town, although, as in the following case, it sometimes failed to boon the prospective city. An enterprising newspaper man found a piece of unoccupied land on the line of the Santa Fe Railroad-that is, a piece not oc- cupied by a town site-and founded the city of Gladstone. An advertisement prolific in prom- ises of the future greatness of the city, and trop-

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ical in its luxuriance of descriptive adjectives, proclaimed among other inducements to buy that a lot had been deeded to the premier of all Eng- land, and it was left to be inferred that the "grand old man" might build a princely resi- dence on his lot and become one of the attrac- tions to draw dwellers to the new city. In olden times, when a conqueror wislied 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 pre- vented from raising 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 enter- prising 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 liad to offer. The promises of its projectors were un- bounded, and the credulity of its investors seemed to be unlimited. Railroads were to center there. There manufactories 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 com- ing metropolis. Business blocks, hotels, restau- rants and dwelling-houses lined the streets on pa- per. A bank building, with a costly vault, was in course of construction, and it continued in that course to the end. A railroad was surveyed to the city and a few ties and rails scattered at in- tervals along the line. A number of cheap houses were built, and a population of three or four hun- dred congregated there at the height of the boom,

and for a time managed to subsist in a semi-canni- balistic 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 Carlton," "Na- ture's Rendezvous," as its poetic founder styled it, was abandoned, and now the jack-rabbit nib- bles 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, Border City and Manchester are the best illustrations. An unprincipled speculator by the name of Simion Homberg secured two quarter sections of gov- ernment land situated respectively forty and forty-three miles northeast of Los Angeles. These were the sites of Homberg's famous or rather in- famous twin cities. Border City was appropri- ately named. It was located on the border of the Mojave Desert, on the northeastern slope of the Sierra Madre Mountains. (It was named Border City because it was located on the eastern border of Los Angeles County.) It was most easily accessible by means of a balloon, and was as secure from hostile invasion as the homes of the cliff dwellers. Its principal resource, like Carl- ton, was view-a view of the Mojave Desert. The founder did not go to the expense of having the site surveyed 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 recorded 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 econom- ical. 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 soutlı 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 investigate and expose the fraud, but were extensively ad- vertised in Northern California, in Oregon, in the eastern states, and even in Europe. It would

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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.

seem almost incredible that Homberg could have found dupes enough to buy such property un- sight, unseen; yet, judging from the records, he sold about all of his four thousand lots, and his profits must have footed up in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars. So many of his deeds were filed for record that the county recorder had a book of record containing three hundred and sixty pages, especially prepared with printed formis, of Homberg's deed, 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 one dollar up to two hundred and fifty each, the prices varying according to the means or the gul- libility 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 a thousand dollars in a bunchi of forty-eight lots, securing at one fell swoop four business blocks in the center of Border City. Nearly 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 during 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 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 payable 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 convey was resold from one to half a dozen times, and each time at an advance; yet the consideration named in the deed, when given, would be the sum named in the original agreement. Deeds to the great bulk of property sold on contract in 1887 did not go on record until the following year, and many of them not then. Thousands of contracts were forfeited and never appeared of record. It is safe to estimate that the considera- tions 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 his- torians still quote the Mississippi bubble as a marvel of inflation. To have bought a square league of land in the neighborhood of some ot our cities in the boomning 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 adjoining 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 inl 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 insignificance 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 burst- ing of Jolin Law's Mississippi bubble very nearly bankrupted the French Empire. The relative proportions of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, to our real estate boom are as a soap bubble is to a mammoth balloon. The amount of capital in- vested in the Darien Colonization scheme, a scheme which bankrupted Scotland and came near plunging all Europe into war, was only 220,000 pounds sterling, a sum abont 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 inhabi- tants. Carlton, containing 4,060 lots, was an unpeopled waste; Nadean, 4,470 lots, had no inhabitants; Manchester 2,304 lots, no inhabi- tants; Santiago 2, 110 lots, was a deserted 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 hotel; Sunset 2,014 lots, one inhabitant, watchman 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 a dozen 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

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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD.

to to iuveigle purchasers into investing were various, often ingenious and sometimes infamous. Brass bands, street processions, free excursions aud 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, lithographs of colleges about to materialize, lotteries, the prizes in which were handsome residences or family hotels, railroads that began and ended in the im- aginations of the projectors-suchi were a few of the many devices resorted to to attract pur- chasers and induce them to invest their coin.

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Historical and biographical record of Los Angeles and vicinity : containing a history of the city from its earliest settlement as a Spanish pueblo to the closing year of the nineteenth century ; also containing biographies of well known citizens of the past and present, Part 25

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918 Publication date: 1901 Publisher: Chicago : Chapman Pub. Co. Number of Pages: 996

Author: Guinn, James Miller, 1834-1918
Publication date: 1901
Publisher: Chicago : Chapman Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 996