In February, the Postmaster packed the furniture and other outfit—only two or three good loads—and moved the Post Office to the Hellman Building, at the corner of North Main and Republic streets; but it was soon transferred to an office on Fort Street, south of Sixth, a location so far from the center of the city as to give point to cards distributed by some wag and advertising rates for sleeping accommodations to the new office. In that year, the sum-total of the receipts of the Los Angeles Post Office was not much over seventy-four thousand dollars. During the twelve months of the Boom, mail for over two hundred thousand transients was handled; and a familiar sight of the times was the long column of inquirers, reminding one of the famous lines in early San Francisco when prospectors for gold paid neat sums for someone else's place nearer the general delivery window.
I have told of some incidents in the routine of court proceedings here, in which both judge and counselor played their parts. Now and then the juror also contributed to the diversion, as was evidenced in the late eighties when a couple of jurymen in a San Gabriel Cañon water case created both excitement and merriment through a practical joke. Tiring of a midnight session, and bethinking himself of the new invention to facilitate speaking at a distance, one of the jurors telephoned police headquarters that rioters were slashing each other at a near-by corner; whereupon the guardians of the peace came tearing that way, to the merriment of the "twelve good men and true" peeking out from an upper window. The police having traced the telephone message, the jury was duly haled before the judge; and the latter, noting the reticence of the accused, imposed a fine of twenty-five dollars upon each member of the box for his prank.
William H. Workman, who had repeatedly served the City as Councilman, was elected Mayor of Los Angeles in 1887. During Workman's administration, Main, Spring and Fort streets were paved.
About 1887, Benjamin S. Eaton, as President, took the lead in organizing a society designed to bring into closer relationship those who had come to California before her admission to the Union. There were few members; and inasmuch as the conditions imposed for eligibility precluded the possibility of securing many more, this first union of pioneers soon ceased to exist.
Professor T. S. C. Lowe, with a splendid reputation for scientific research, especially in the field of aëronautics—having acquired his first experience with balloons, as did also Graf Ferdinand Zeppelin, by participating in the Union army maneuvers during our Civil War—took up, in the late eighties, the business of manufacturing gas from water, which he said could be accomplished beyond any doubt for eight cents a thousand feet. C. F. Smurr, the capable Los Angeles agent of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, as well as Hugh Livingston Macniel, son-in-law of Jonathan S. Slauson and then Cashier of the Main Street Savings Bank, became interested with Lowe and induced Kaspare Cohn and me to participate in the experiment.
Accordingly, we purchased six acres of land on the southeast corner of Alameda and Seventh streets for fifteen thousand dollars, and there started the enterprise. We laid pipes through many of the streets and, in the course of a few months, began to manufacture gas which it was our intention to sell to consumers at one dollar per thousand feet. The price at which gas was then being sold by the Los Angeles Gas Company was one dollar and fifty cents per thousand, and we therefore considered our schedule reasonable. Everything at the outset looked so plausible that Smurr stated to his associates that he would resign his position with the railroad and assume the management of the new gas works; but to our chagrin, we found that gas was costing us more than one dollar per thousand, and as one discouragement followed another, Smurr concluded not to take so radical a step. Yet we remained in business in the hope that the Los Angeles Gas Company would rather buy us out than reduce their price fifty cents a thousand feet, and sure enough, it was not so very long before they did. The large gas tank now standing at the corner of Seventh and Alameda streets is the result of this transaction.
Late in the spring, Senator Stanford and a party of Southern Pacific officials visited Los Angeles with the view of locating a site for the new and "magnificent railroad station" long promised the city, and at the same time to win some of the popular favor then being accorded the Santa Fé. For many years, objection had been made to the tracks on Alameda Street, originally laid down by Banning; and hoping to secure their removal, Mayor Workman offered a right of way along the river-front. This suggestion was not accepted. At length the owners of the Wolfskill tract donated to the railroad company a strip of land, three hundred by nineteen hundred feet in size, fronting on Alameda between Fourth and Sixth streets, with the provision that the company should use the same only for railroad station purposes; and Stanford agreed to put up a "splendid arcade," somewhat similar in design to, but more extensive and elaborate than, the Arcade Depot at Sacramento. Soon after this, the rest of that celebrated orchard tract, for over fifty years in the possession of the Wolfskill family, was subdivided, offered at private sale and quickly disposed of.
The old-fashioned, one-horse street car had been running on and off the tracks many a year before the City Railroad, organized, in the middle eighties, by I. W. Hellman and his associates, W. J. Brodrick, John O. Wheeler and others, made its more pretentious appearance on the streets of Los Angeles. This, the first line to use double tracks and more modern cars with drivers and conductors, followed a route then considered very long. Starting as it did at Washington Street and leading north on Figueroa, it turned at Twelfth Street into Olive and thence, zigzagging by way of Fifth, Spring, First, Main, Marchessault, New High, Bellevue Avenue, Buena Vista, College, Upper Main and San Fernando streets, it passed River Station (the Southern Pacific depot on San Fernando Street), and ran out Downey Avenue as far as the Pasadena Railroad depot.
The year 1885 saw the addition of another Spanish name to the local map in the founding of Alhambra, now one of the attractive and prosperous suburbs of Los Angeles.
Sometime in the spring of 1885, or perhaps a little earlier, the Second Street Cable Railway was commenced when Isaac W. Lord turned a spadeful of earth at the corner of Second and Spring streets; and within a few months cars were running from Bryson Block west on Second Street over Bunker Hill along Lakeshore Avenue and then by way of First Street to Belmont Avenue, soon bringing about many improvements on the route. And if I am not mistaken, considerable patronage came from the young ladies attending a boarding school known as Belmont Hall. Henry Clay Witmer was a moving spirit in this enterprise. In course of time the cable railway connected with the steam dummy line, landing passengers in a watermelon patch—the future Hollywood.