Second Street, Looking East from Hill Street, Early Seventies
Eugene Meyer and myself attended the wedding, leaving Los Angeles by stage and completely surprising the merry company a few moments before the groom's father performed the ceremony. The fair bride was Miss Sophie Cahen, and the occasion proved one of the very agreeable milestones in an interesting and successful career. The first-born of this union, Henry M. Newmark, now of Morgan & Newmark, has attained civic distinction, being President of the Library Board.
The reason we journeyed north by stage was to escape observation, for since the steamer-service had been so considerably improved, most of our friends were accustomed to travel by water. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company at that time was running the Senator, the Pacific, the Orizaba and the Mohongo, the latter being the gunboat sold by the Government at the end of the War and which remained on the route until 1877; while the line controlled by Goodall, Nelson & Perkins or Goodall, Nelson & Company had on their list the Constantine, the Kalorama, the Monterey and the San Luis, sometimes also running the California, which made a specialty of carrying combustibles. A year later, the Ancon commenced to run between San Francisco and San Diego, and excepting half a year when she plied between the Golden Gate and Portland, was a familiar object until 1884.
The Farmers & Merchants Bank, on June 15th, 1874, moved to their new building on the west side of Main Street, opposite the Bella Union.
On July 25th, 1874, Conrad Jacoby commenced in the old Lanfranco Building the weekly Sued-Californische Post; and for fifteen years or more it remained the only German paper issued in Southern California. Jacoby's brother, Philo, was the well-known sharpshooter.
Henry T. Payne, the early photographer, was probably the first to go out of town to take views in suburbs then just beginning to attract attention. Santa Monica was his favorite field, and a newspaper clipping or two preserve the announcements by which the wet-plate artist stimulated interest in his venture. One of these reads:
Mr. Payne will be at Santa Monica next Sunday, and take photographic views of the camp, the ocean, the surrounding scenery, and such groups of campers and visitors as may see fit to arrange themselves for that purpose;
while another and rather contradictory notice is as follows:
To make photographs of moving life, such as Mr. Payne's bathing scenes at Santa Monica next Sunday, it is absolutely necessary that everybody should keep perfectly still during the few seconds the plate is being exposed, for the least move might completely spoil an otherwise beautiful effect. Santa Monica, with its bathers in nice costume, sporting in the surf, with here and there an artistically-posed group basking in the sunshine, ought to make a beautiful picture.