USA > California > Los Angeles County > History of Los Angeles county, Volume I > Part 33
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"Old things are passing away," says the ad; "behold all things have be-
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come new. Passing events impress us with the mutability of human affairs. The earth and its appurtenances are constantly passing from one phase to another. Change and consequent progress is the manifest law of destiny. The forms and customs of the past are become obsolete and new and enlarged ideas are silently but swiftly moulding terrestrial matters on a scale of enhanced magnificence and utility.
"Perhaps no greater proof of these propositions can be adduced than the evident fact that the old mercantile system heretofore pursued in this community with its 7x9 stores, its exhorbitant prices, its immense profits, its miserable assortments of shop-rotten goods that have descended from one defunct establishment to another through a series of years, greeting the beholder at his every turn as if craving his pity by a display of their forlorn, mouldy and dusty appearance. These rendered venerable by age are now considered relics and types of the past.
"The ever-expanding mind of the public demands a new state of things. It demands new goods, lower prices, better assortments, and more accom- modations. The people ask for a suitable consideration for their money and they shall have the same at the new and magnificent establishment of
WHEELER & JOHNSON,
"in the House of Don Abel Stearns, on Main Street, where they have just received $50,000 worth of the best and most desirable merchandise ever brought to the country.'
When the customer had been sufficiently impressed by the foregoing propositions and deductions they proceed to enumerate, and here are a few of the articles :
"Groceries, soap, oil, candles, tobacco, cigars, salt, pipes, powder, shot, lead. Provisions, flour, bread, pork, hams, bacon, sugar, coffee. Dry Goods, broadcloths, cassimeres, blankets, alpacas, cambrics, lawns, ginghams, twist, silks, satins, colored velvet, nets, crepe, scarlet bandas, bonnets, lace, collars, needles, pins.
"Boots, shoes, hats, coats, pants, vests, suits, cravats, gloves, hosiery.
"Furniture, crockery, glassware, mirrors, lamps, chandeliers, agricul- tural implements, hardware, tools, cutlery, house furnishing goods, liquors, wines, cigars, wood and willow ware, brushes, trunks, paints, oils, tinware and cooking stoves.
"Our object is to break down monopoly."
Evidently their method of breaking down monopoly was to monopolize the whole business of the town.
When we recall the fact that all of this vast assortment was stored in one room and sold over the same counter we must admire the dexterity of the salesman who could keep bacon and lard from mixing with the silks and satins, or the paints and oils from leaving their impress on the broadcloths and velvets.
Ladies' bonnets were kept in stock. The saleslady had not yet made her appearance in Los Angeles, so it was the sales gentleman that sold bonnets. Imagine him fresh from supplying a purchaser with a side of bacon, and then fitting a bonnet on the head of a lady customer, giving it the proper tilt and sticking the hat pin into the coil of her hair and not into her cranium.
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Fortunately for the salesman, the bonnets of that day were capacious affairs, modeled after the prairie schooner, and did not need hat pins to hold them on.
The old time department store sales gentleman was a genius in the mercantile line ; he could dispose of anything from a lady's lace collar to a caballada of broncos.
Here is the quaint advertisement of our pioneer barber. The pioneer barber of Los Angeles was Peter Biggs-a gentleman of color who came to the state as a slave with his master, but attained his freedom shortly after, his arrival. He set up a hair cutting and shaving saloon. The price for hair cutting was a dollar-shaving 50 cents. In the Star of 1853 he advertises a reduction of 50 per cent. Hair cutting 50 cents, shampooing 50 cents, shaving 25 cents. In addition to his tonsorial services he advertises that he blacks boots, wait on and tends parties, runs errands, takes in clothes to wash, iron and mend; cuts, splits and carries in wood; and in short performs any work, honest and respectable, to earn a genteel living and accommodate his fellow creatures. For character he refers to all the gentlemen in Los Angeles. Think of what a character he must have had.
There is often both tragedy and comedy, as well as business, mixed up in advertisements. In the Star of forty-eight years ago appears the ad of a great prize lottery or gift enterprise. It was called the "Great Southern Distribution of Real Estate and Personal Property," by Henry Dalton. The first prize was an elegant modern built dwelling house on the Plaza valued at $11,000. There were 84,000 shares in the lottery, valued at $1 each, and 432 first class prizes to be drawn. Among the prizes were 240 elegant lots in the Town of Benton. Who among you pioneers can locate that lost and long since forgotten metropolis of the Azusa-the City of Benton ?
For some cause unknown to me the drawing never came off. A dis- tinguished pioneer sued Dalton for the value of one share that he held. The case carried from one court to another and fought out before one legal tribunal after another with a vigor and viciousness unwarranted by the trivial amount involved. How it ended I cannot say. I never traced it through the records to a finish.
Old ads are like tombstones. They recall to us the memory of the "has beens ;" they recall to our minds actors who have acted their little part in the comedy or tragedy of life and passed behind the scenes, never again to tread the boards.
And now, in the Wonder City of the West, it is like hearing the tenuous voices of a dream to read these old advertisements and to pass in memory's review the long departed merchants of the Los Angeles that used to be.
Vol. I-9
CHAPTER XXII
THE PORT O' SHIPS
California has a coast line approximately 1,000 miles in length, with only two natural harbors. It has bights innumerable and many coast inden- tations that are no more than roadsteads in which ships of small burden might anchor safely from a storm if the storm were not over violent. But it has only two natural harbors-San Francisco and San Diego.
Sometime in some far-away and forgotten age of the earth a seismic disturbance doubtless caused a mile or so of the coast line opposite the rocky farallones to sink into the sea, the waters of which immediately poured into a vast area of low valley lands and thus was formed the mag- nificent and peerless harbor of San Francisco. It was so named by Fray Junipero Serra in honor of the patron saint and founder of his order, San Francis of Assisi.
And the mile or so of land that an earthquake sank into the sea, thus forming an entrance to the harbor of Saint Francis was fitly and beautifully named the "Golden Gate" by Capt. John C. Fremont, the immortal "path- finder," in one of his official reports to the Government at Washington.
Just how the harbor of San Diego was formed by Nature, we are not aware, having seen no account of it, but this would be beside the board, anyway. It is enough to know that it is there-the Bay of San Diego shining blue against the sea-beautiful and lovely, a haven not alone for ships, but a great port in which the armadas of the world could assemble with ease.
We are not to be misled by the maps that were made and sent to Spain by the ancient mariners who first sailed the coast of California. If they were to be believed, California fairly bristled with harbors. They even mapped California out as a great island.
The fact is that almost any hole in the coast would do for a harbor for the little tubs of ships in which Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the discoverer, and Sebastian Viscano and Sir Francis Drake sailed in the old times of the sea. The wonder is that they sailed so far, and made conquest of the whole earth, indeed, in these little ships, aboard of which the man of the present day would not care to venture across the quiet and placid waters of the channel between San Pedro and the Island of Santa Catalina.
Wherefore, we are to observe that what might be considered a port a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, would by no means constitute a port for the great ocean burden-bearers of today.
Now, as all the world knows, the port of the City of Los Angeles is the Bay of San Pedro. And it will doubtless prove interesting to know with what favor or disfavor that indentation of the coast was regarded by the old-timers.
In his log book, referred to at more length in an early chapter of this
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book, we find that one Rodriguez Cabrillo, the discoverer of California and the first white man ever to lay eyes on San Pedro as far as we know, refers to the harbor as being "a Port enclosed and very good." But, as we have previously remarked, while the Bay of San Pedro in the year 1542 might have been "a Port enclosed and very good" for the little galleons of Cabrillo, we may as well be frank to admit that it wouldn't be anything like that at all for the present day liners and freighters that now find anchorage there in ever increasing numbers. However, Los Angeles cannot be so poor in gratitude as to fail to remember always that so great a sailorman as Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who was also the first sailorman to put into our harbor, was very complimentary to it.
Still, it was always regarded as a harbor, more or less, and when a ship was built at the Mission of San Gabriel a century ago, it was launched at San Pedro as being the natural and best adapted place from which to launch a ship.
It seems that Sebastian Viscano in the year 1602 also regarded San Pedro (the original name of which, by the way, was San Miguel,) with much favor. He also said it was a good port.
All these ancient reports of San Pedro, however, became little or not at all known to the commercial world, being buried in the archives of Spain throughout the long years of nearly two centuries when California was as much forgotten as though the good Lord had never created it.
But in the year 1835 a Yankee sailor came to California who made San Pedro and all the other harbors and ports of California familiar to com- merce. And the way he did it was by writing about them in a book which was widely read and which had created, indeed, a profound sensation. This book was called "Two Years Before the Mast," and was written by Richard Henry Dana, a Harvard undergraduate, who, on account of an affliction of his eyes which jeopardized his sight, put out to sea from New England on a long voyage around the Horn.
Dana said that San Pedro when he saw it first, eighty-five years ago, was not a land-locked bay, but rather one with little more than a crescent- shaped shore, really an open roadstead protected mainly by the outjutting Palos Verdes Hills and the Island of Santa Catalina lying lengthwise with the coast and less than eighteen miles away. On the bluff at the foot of the hills, and facing the sea, a wooden shed was the only building Dana could see from the deck of his little vessel. He wrote in his story of this voyage :
"I learned to my surprise that this desolate-looking place furnished more hides than any port on the coast. It was the only port for a distance of eighty miles, and about thirty miles in the interior was a fine plain country filled with herds of cattle, in the center of which was the Pueblo of Los Angeles-the largest town in California-and several of the largest Missions, to all of which Los Angeles was the seaport."
Cargo from vessels was at this time taken to the land in small boats, while the merchandise-mostly hides-taken in exchange was rolled down the bluff and taken from the shore to the vessel in the same boats.
Twenty-four years later Dana again called at the port, and in the follow- ing words describes the changes that had already taken place in it :
"I could scarcely recognize the hill up which we rolled and dragged and
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pushed our heavy loads. It was no longer the landing place. One had been made at the head of the creek, and boats discharged and took off cargoes from a mole or wharf in a quiet place safe from Southeasters. A tug ran to take off passengers from the steamer to the wharf-for the trade of Los Angeles is sufficient to support such a vessel.
"I walked along the shore to the new landing place where there were two or three storehouses and other buildings fronting a small depot ; and a stage coach, I found, went daily between this place and the pueblo."
This stage line was for nearly forty years the common carrier between the pueblo and the harbor.
During this period many Americans settled in Los Angeles and it rapidly became the trading place of prime importance to the entire Southwest, and the harbor section grew to have a population of about 3,000 persons.
The time came at last when all these comparatively small traffickings became things of the past and Los Angeles had grown to be a real city with an ever-expanding fertile agricultural country back of it, with a transcon- tinental railroad running into it, and its affairs constantly assuming huger proportions.
Then the open roadstead at San Pedro and the one wooden wharf that ran out from it wouldn't do at all, and Los Angeles was stared in the face by the solemn fact that it had to have a real harbor and not one that was merely a make-believe.
And so, as it had always done when it needed anything, it went out and got it. If Nature had not made an honest-to-goodness harbor of San Pedro, then Los Angeles itself would make one there.
Thinking upon things like this, there are three outstanding facts of Los Angeles concerning which Nature did not provide for it and which it pro- vided for itself. The first of these things is the railroad-a transcontinental railroad which was surveyed and was being constructed many miles away across the desert, leaving Los Angeles stranded and not even within hailing distance of it. But Los Angeles went out to the desert and said to the railroad: "Hey, Railroad, you are overlooking a big bet; you just turn yourself around a little and run over here to Los Angeles." And the rail- road did it. In later times it had no river to supply it with water. So it trekked 250 miles over hills and valleys and across deserts, found a river flowing from the eternal snows of the Sierras, bought it and paid for it and turned it into big pipes with the result that the city will have water and plenty of it as long as it lives. In the same way it had no harbor that could be called a harbor. So it just naturally went to work and dug out one.
When it came to the point that Los Angeles had to have a real harbor, there was a big fight over it-a long and bitter fight. Men still not very old can remember it.
The fight was between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the people. The Southern Pacific Railroad wanted the harbor located at Santa Monica, which would not only be to the railroad's advantage, but would give that once aggressive and pugnacious institution control over the commercial des- tinies of Los Angeles for all time to come. The people wanted the harbor at San Pedro, where it would be owned and controlled by the people. And, after years of acrimonious struggle and bickerings, the people won their point.
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The story of the building of the Port of San Pedro, now known officially as the Harbor of Los Angeles, is of intense interest, and we are indebted to Mr. Christopher Gordon of the harbor commission for a relation of the following important facts :
About 1870 the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad was built to connect Los Angeles with Wilmington. This road was later transferred to the Southern Pacific Company as an inducement for it to build from San Francisco through Los Angeles and on into Texas.
This railroad construction naturally gave a great impetus to the business of the port, and about this time the United States Government began to take a hand in improving it in the interest of navigation and commerce.
At this time less than two feet of water covered the entrance to the inner harbor at low tide.
In 1871 the Federal Government commenced jetty construction at Dead Man's Island, with a view to having the tides scour out a deeper channel to Wilmington. This plan was successful, and with a little dredging and the expenditure of about $400,000 such improvement in port conditions was effected that about 1885 a new realization of the port's significance was had and a movement was started to have the Government build a breakwater to protect the outer harbor.
The Southern Pacific about this time extended its Wilmington branch on into San Pedro, and in 1891 the Los Angeles Terminal Railway built a railroad on Rattlesnake Island, thus opening up the east side of the harbor by rail communication.
The Government then undertook to build the breakwater, and this was completed about 1910 at a cost of $3,100,000 and with a length of 11,050 feet.
Later, at its outermost end, a splendid lighthouse was built.
During these years much dredging was done by the Government, not only in the main channel and turning basin, but also in the east and west basins, and later a considerable amount of dredging was done by the city in the east basin and in the Wilmington and the Mormon Island channels.
The harbor lines as fixed about this time have a length of about twenty miles-a pier line frontage that can be increased very considerably by the dredging of slips.
About this time the State of California transferred to the City of Los Angeles all its tide land holdings in and about the harbor, and these, after much litigation, became finally-to the extent of nearly 2,000 acres-the holdings of the city. Of these about 400 acres are in the outer harbor.
In 1906 Los Angeles extended its boundaries to the harbor district towns.
In 1907 the first Board of Harbor Commissioners of the City of Los Angeles was created by city ordinance. This Board proceeded energetically with the steps necessary to bring the harbor district within the corporate limits of the city, to the end that the financial strength of the big and growing city might be employed in developing its harbor.
Early in 1909, by act of the State Legislature, the consolidation of the harbor municipalities with the city became possible. As an inducement to consolidation the city agreed to spend $10,000,000 in harbor development,
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and in August of that year the entire harbor district became a part of the city.
In 1910 the city voted $3,000,000 in harbor bonds to start the work, and in 1912, after litigation by opposing interests, this money became available.
In 1913 the city voted a bond issue of $2,500,000. These issues with $4,500,000, voted in 1919, making up the $10,000,000 agreed upon.
The events of these few years really constituted the birth of a great seaport, and in 1912 a newly organized board proceeded at once to prepare for the shipping that was expected to come with the opening of the Panama Canal.
A reinforced concrete wharf 2,520 feet long was built on the west side of Pier 1 and another 400 feet long at the head of the west channel-both in the outer harbor. On the 2,520-toot wharf was built a steel and concrete transit shed 1,800 feet long by 100 feet wide, with clear span, with concrete fire walls 600 feet apart, steel smoke aprons and automatic sprinkling system-one of the finest buildings of its kind in the country.
Five railroad tracks and a 50-foot concrete roadway were installed on the pier, and a magnificent reinforced concrete warehouse, 152x480 feet in area and having six stories and a basement, equipped with automatic sprin- kler system, whip hoists, elevators, outside stairways, cargo chutes, two railroad tracks inside the building and, in fact, all that goes to make it the pier of its kind in the United States.
On Pier "A" about 3,000 feet of creosoted pile wharf was constructed, and on it four steel on wood frame transit sheds all 100 feet in width, single span, with automatic sprinklers, and of lengths varying from 500 to 1,000 feet each; with four railroad tracks serving them and a 50-foot concrete roadway.
At this enormous pier docked the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company and the Independent Steamship Company, and later the Pacific Steamship Company, the Los Angeles-Pacific Navigation Company, the Williams-Dimond Line and the California Pacific Steamship Company.
At the head of Slip 5 was constructed a wharf 670 feet long, and on it . a transit shed 100x530 feet with railroad and highway service, as on the other piers.
Ferry terminals were installed at various places in the harbor. A vast amount of dredging was done in order to furnish adequate depth for the ships that were expected.
A fish harbor was created on Terminal Island, on which the fishing fleet could tie up to a 1,600-foot wharf that was constructed in front of the area set aside for fish canneries.
A wholesale fish market was constructed on the west side of the main channel, in which all of the wholesale dealers in fresh fish could be accom- modated on equal terms and in a perfectly modern and sanitary building.
At First Street a wharf 330 feet long was constructed and on it an umbrella shed and a two-story building to house the pilots, the port warden, the wharfinger and offices for the steamship company using the wharf.
On the main turning basin was built, for the Standard Oil Company, a wharf 800 feet long, and across the way a wharf for the Union Oil Com- pany, while on the breakwater a loading station site was provided for the General Petroleum Company.
GENERAL VIEW OF THE LUMBER RECEIVING SECTION, LOS ANGELES HARBOR
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A municipal belt railway was decided upon, and to date some fourteen miles of this railway have been built.
In addition to creating paved roadways serving all wharves, additional approaches to the harbor were created.
In the midst of this construction activity the great war was started, and as this took nearly all ships from the Pacific, the benefits expected from the Panama Canal could not materialize. As the funds for harbor development were exhausted about the same time, the work of harbor building, in large part, ceased for about four years and until a new bond issue by the City of Los Angeles of $4,500,000 was voted and harbor work resumed.
This Reclaimed Acreage is Central Point in $6,000,000 Fish Industry.
The Harbor Department operates on Santa Catalina Island its own quarry, from which the rock needed for bulkheads, roads, etc., is taken.
It is now installing the latest mechanical appliances for handling cargo with speed and cheapness.
It has plans of further harbor development pressingly needed that will require, in addition to the present bond fund of $4,500,000, another $10,000,000 at least to complete.
The war, which took away the shipping, created in the harbor a large shipbuilding industry consisting of two shipyards with three ways each for wooden ships, and two shipyards with six ways each for steel ships. It was at least partly the means of locating the largest United States submarine base on the Pacific Coast in the harbor. It greatly increased the fish canning industry, an industry which in and about the port engages seven or eight hundred fishing boats.
The war helped to increase the fuel oil, gasoline and kerosene business in the port.
The war increased the demand for raw cotton, so that California and Arizona went into cotton-growing with great and surprising success, and Los Angeles Harbor became an important cotton port, and port officials installed a high density cotton compress.
A large refrigeration and ice-making plant is about to be installed to meet the growing demands of the fishing industry.
A vegetable oil trading and refining plant is being installed to take care of the vegetable oil business coming from the Orient and the South Seas.
A stockyard is being created to take care of importation of stock.
A supply of steam coal has been provided in the port for bunkering coal-burning ships. The bunkering of ships with crude oil is taken care of by three of the largest companies in the country, one of which has an enor- mous oil refinery a few miles from the port, and another is completing an enormous oil refinery within the harbor district.
A 10,000-ton floating dry dock is nearing completion.
A new and very fine fire boat has lately been built and brought into the service of the port.
The United States Navy on the Pacific uses the port extensively, and the flagship of the admiral has Los Angeles as its home port.
The Globe Milling Company maintains and operates a grain elevator on the main channel.
Five of the largest lumber companies have extensive yards and mills on the waterfront.
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A 10,000-ton marine railway for ship repairs, etc., is about to be installed on the west basin.
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