My father first saw Los Angeles in January, 1854, when he was camped with his sheep on the Rancho San Pasqual; his arrival was a few months later than that of Mr. Harris Newmark, who, in his book Sixty Years in Southern California, so vividly describes the village as he found it.
By the time I knew it there had been a great change. There were some sidewalks, water was piped to the houses, gas had been introduced; several public school buildings had been built; there were three newspapers, The Star, The Express, and The Herald. The public library had been founded,—it occupied rooms in the Downey Block where the Federal Building now stands, and Mary Foy, one of Los Angeles’s distinguished women, had begun her public service as a young girl in attendance. Compared with what it had been twenty years before, Los Angeles was a modern, civilized city; compared with what it is now, it was a little frontier town. At school I once learned its population to be 11,311.
We lived first on Temple Street, near Charity. Once Los Angeles boasted Faith and Hope Streets as well, but only Hope remains, for Faith has turned to Flower, and Charity masquerades as Grand.
Next door to us lived a Jewish family whose girls sat on the front porch and amazed me by crocheting on Sunday. I had not known that any Jews existed outside the Bible. Perhaps this family was the nucleus for the present large colony of Hebrews that now fills the neighborhood.
Temple Street was new and open for only a few blocks. Bunker Hill Avenue was the end of the settlement, a row of scattered houses along the ridge fringing the sky. Beyond that we looked over empty, grassy hills to the mountains. Going down the first hillside and over towards Beaudry’s reservoir for a picnic, I once found maidenhair ferns under some brush, and was frightened by what sounded like a rattlesnake—probably only a cicada. Court Street disappeared in a hollow at Hope, where a pond was made interesting by a large flock of white ducks.
Across the street from us on top of a hill that is now gone, at the head of a long flight of wide steps, stood “The Horticultural Pavilion,” destroyed a few years later by fire. It was replaced by Hazard’s Pavilion, an equally barn-like, wooden building on the site of the present Philharmonic Auditorium. The first Pavilion held county fairs, conventions, and operas. It was in this place that I once had a great disappointment, for when I was hearing Pinafore a child ahead of me suddenly coughed and whooped, and I was removed with haste just at the most entrancing moment. The opera had been put on in London first in the spring of ’78. It had reached Los Angeles by ’79, and we revelled in its wit and melody with the rest of the world.
It must have been somewhat later than this that the city took such pride in the singing of one of its own girls, Mamie Perry (Mrs. Modini-Wood) who was educated abroad and made her debut in Italy. Another name that will recall many a concert and social event to old timers is that of Madame Mara.
In this building I once saw a strange instrument, a box into which one could speak and be heard half a mile away at a similar contraption—a very meek and lowly promise of our present telephone system.
At this fair, where there were exhibited fruits, jellies and cakes, quilts and long strings of buttons, when the mania for collecting them was at its height, I remember that some ladies, interested in the new Orphans’ Home, served New England dinners, in a room decked as an old fashioned kitchen with spinning wheels and strings of corn and drying apples. Among them were my mother and Mrs. Dan Stevens, two slender, dark-haired young women, wearing colonial costume and high combs—my mother, who so soon after left this world, and Mrs. Stevens, still among us, loved and honored for her many good works.
Mrs. Stevens tells me that this was at the time of the visit of President and Mrs. Hayes and a party of government officials, the first president of the United States to come to California. All Los Angeles turned out to welcome them, although there was enough bitter partisan feeling left to cause some neighbors of ours to walk past him in line while refusing to shake the hand of the man who they believed usurped Tilden’s rightful place.