The republication, in the Los Angeles Express of March 23d, 1908, under the caption, "Twenty-five Years Ago To-day," of several paragraphs, savoring of village gossip such as the following—
Some very fine nugas [nougats?] are to be seen at Dol's Commercial Restaurant. They are meant for the silver-wedding feast at Mr. Newmark's—
calls to mind an event of March 21st, when my wife and I celebrated our silver wedding at our home on Fort Street. At half-past six in the evening, all of my employees sat down at dinner with us, having come in a body to tender their congratulations. A reunion of three generations of the Newmarks, some of whom then saw one another for the first time, came to a close a week or two later.
As the anniversary approached, I prepared a surprise for my wife, arranging that her brother, Abraham Newmark of St. Louis, should be present in Los Angeles for the occasion. His visit, however, had a grievous termination: while in San Francisco on his way home from Los Angeles, death came to him suddenly in the home of a friend.
In May, the Los Angeles Board of Education sold the northwest corner of Spring and Second streets—a lot one hundred and twenty by one hundred and sixty-five feet, where the City, in 1854, had built the first schoolhouse—to the city authorities for thirty-one thousand dollars; and the next year the Council erected on the inside sixty feet the first municipal building of consequence. When the Boom was at its height in 1887, the City sold the balance of the lot with its frontage on Spring Street and a depth of one hundred and five feet for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, to John Bryson, Sr., an arrival of 1879 and ten years later Mayor of Los Angeles; and George H. Bonebrake (who came a year earlier than Bryson, and was in his day a prominent financier) opened, if my memory serves me correctly, the first agency for Eastern vehicles. Together, they built the Bryson Block.
This sale and purchase reminds me that when the lot was cleared to make way for the new City Hall, ten or twelve fine black locust trees were felled, much to the regret of many old-timers. These were the same shade trees for the preservation of which Billy McKee, the early schoolmaster, had risked bodily encounter with the irate waterman.
When the Board of Education sold this lot, it bought another, which extended from Fort Street to Spring between Fifth and Sixth streets and had a frontage of one hundred and twenty feet on each street. The price paid was twelve thousand five hundred dollars. This is the lot now known as Mercantile Place, whose retention or sale has been so much debated and which, with its many small stores, reminds the traveler not a little of those narrow but cosy, and often very prosperous, European streets and alleys on both sides lined with famous shops.
August 22d was the date of the City ordinance creating Elysian Park, the act leading the early settler back to pueblo days when the land in question passed from Mexican to American control and remained a part of the City lots, already described, and never subdivided and sold.
The last companies of volunteer firemen were organized in 1883, one being in the Morris Vineyard, a district between what is now Main, Hill, Fifteenth and Sixteenth streets, and the other in East Los Angeles, where a hose company was formed.
During September or October, a party of distinguished German bankers and statesmen, who had come to the United States to investigate certain branches of business, visited Los Angeles. The most important of this commission was Dr. Edward Lasker of the German Reichstag, other eminent members being Henry Villard, President of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and Judge Siemens, President of the German Bank of Berlin. A committee, consisting of I. W. Hellman, C. C. Lips, M. Morris, A. W. Edelman, Conrad Jacoby, Dr. Joseph Kurtz and myself took charge of these gentlemen, as well as a number of others, whose names I forget. Dr. Lasker, during his brief stay, accepted the hospitality of my home, and there received considerable honor at the hands of his German admirers, a large body of enthusiasts serenading him. Even while with us, it was evident that Dr. Lasker was an ailing man; and on the fifth of the following January, while riding in a carriage in Galveston, he suddenly died.