Small boys turned an honest nickel or two by providing plank foot-bridges or selling individual “crickets” which the wayfarer might take with him from corner to corner. As the sun came out and the mud thickened the streets became like monstrous strips of sticky fly paper. We walked the cobblestone gutters until our rubbers were in shreds, or, when necessity drove us into the gum, lost them.
A friend assures me that one Sunday morning she set out for a church near the center of the city, that she made slow progress for a block and a half, and then, realizing that so much time had passed that she could not arrive in time for service, turned around and went home. It had taken her an hour and a half to make the round trip amounting to three blocks.
There is no mud so powerful when it is in its prime as adobe, and when it dries in all its trampled ridges and hollows, it is as hard as a rock. It takes all summer to wear it down level, ready to begin over again with the new rains. There are a few places yet, where, some rainy day if you are feeling extra fit, you may try a stroll across a Los Angeles street and learn to sympathize with a captured fly.
Certain other interesting kinds of soil are also covered up in Los Angeles. On the southwest corner of Temple and Broadway there is mica cropping out between the strata, and up by Court Street Angel’s Flight there is a nice white formation very like chalk. I liked to cut it into odd shapes.
CHAPTER XI
MORE ABOUT LOS ANGELES
I am still a person somewhat young and lively who has had the strange experience of seeing barley fields sprout houses like the magic soldiers from the sowing of dragon’s teeth; of finding cactus and gravel and sage turned over night into leagues of orange trees; of watching my little city multiply itself a hundred fold. What wonder that I cannot forbear to talk about it! to tell of how once upon a time the street of sky-scrapers was a shaded way before a few rose-covered cottages, or how the hills of Hollywood were bare brown velvet beyond the vacant fields that lay west of Los Angeles’ Figueroa Street, itself unfinished. When we looked over the town from our home on the Court Street hill we saw a place of trees and cottages, of open spaces and encircling groves. Only to our left were business houses, and they neither high nor imposing. On Poundcake Hill, where now the County Court House rises, was the square, two-storied high school building, which a few years later crossed Temple Street on stilts, and went over to its new abiding place on California Street.
Just below us was the old jail, enclosed by its high white fence which may have shut in prisoners and shut out the curious who approached on Franklin Street, but whose secrets were wide open to the sky. Once our whole back yard and the top of our chicken house and barn were black with men strangely eager to look down upon a fellow man whom we, the public, were hanging high upon a gallows within that old stockade. We children were shut in the house and did not see, but the next day my small brother and another tiny boy were found trying to hang each other.
The jail was in the rear of the city buildings, a row of low adobes on Spring Street, opposite the old court house, the one built by John Temple. Nearby, the post-office occupied the first floor of the new I. O. O. F. building, a little too far south to be sure,—nearly to First Street,—but perhaps the spaciousness and freshness compensated for its distance from the business center to the north. Across the way from it there stood a small white cottage, with a hedge of cypress and a lawn. My first school was around the corner in a similar white house, and on my way home I was permitted to stop and get our mail from our box at the post-office.
The shopping district ran from this “civic center” up to the plaza, the very region that is now being retrieved for the heart of the public life of Los Angeles city and county.
Not long ago I discovered, stranded high on the front wall of an old brick building, the abandoned sign of “The Queen,” the store from which came my “pebble-goat” school shoes, the store itself long ago having followed the shoes “to the bone yard.”