There used to be three joss houses, or Chinese temples, and a theatre with a large troupe of players, including a lady star, a rarity, as usually all the actors are men. There was weird music to be heard, there were feasts and fortune tellers and funerals where the chief figure was rushed at break-neck speed to the cemetery, followed by a spring wagon load of food while loyal friends scattered bits of paper to distract the attention of the devil in his pursuit of the newly dead.
But the life was not all picturesque. There were slave women and tong wars and murders and individual persecutions of Chinese by low grade whites, and ever the haunting memory of the massacre of 1871 when nineteen Chinese lost their lives at the hands of a mob.
The changing of prestige of hotels has marked the changing city. Just now the Biltmore holds the center of the stage, last year it was the Ambassador, once it was the Bella Union, perhaps the most interesting of them all, dating as it did, back into pueblo days. The Pico House of the early seventies prided itself on rivalling the San Francisco hostelries, but before a decade had passed it had to yield first place to the St. Elmo, the place chosen in which to do honor to Mrs. Hayes, the wife of the President. I have personal memories of both the Pico and the St. Elmo. In the first we once stayed several days during one of my earliest trips to Los Angeles, and in the second I climbed the red velveted stairs, holding my mother’s hand to greet the chief lady of the land. The poor old place is now a ten cent lodging house, just north of the post office.
When the Nadeau, towering four stories and containing all the latest wrinkles, was completed it easily assumed first place, but in such a bustling, booming town it soon had to pass the favor on to the Hollenbeck; then came the Westminster and the Van Nuys, which I believe still clings to a little back-water distinction.
The sudden end of the boom about eighty-seven had one very excellent result, it saved us the chagrin of having our finest caravanserie called Hotel Splendid—it never got beyond the foundations, out at Tenth and Main. Perhaps the name was no worse than San Francisco’s Palace which has built about itself such a tradition that no one stops to consider the self-assumption of its designation.
During those boom years Los Angeles was having its first experience of rapid growth, and we were almost as proud and boastful then as we are now,—at least in quality if not in quantity. It seemed just as exciting to suddenly grow from ten to fifty thousand, as it does to aim at a million or two. We hadn’t invented the name realtor for our land sellers or established courses at college in realtoring, but there were already enterprising boosters. One of them displayed in his office window this hospitable biblical text: “I was a stranger and ye took me in.”
It was during that period that we boldly discarded gas as a means of lighting our streets and adopted electricity, the first city in the land to do it. How imposing were our six tall poles each carrying four arc lights, four substitute moons, protected by a little tin umbrella. What strange and beautiful blue light filtered through our windows, making on the walls black shadows of the swaying eucalyptus branches like Japanese silhouettes.
The summer that we first had these wonder lanterns the very sky put on a nightly pageant of color, most gorgeous sunsets to celebrate our progress, and incidentally to mark the fact that the upper air was full of a fine ash from a volcanic eruption in far away Java.
I wonder what we could do now if the railroads should start another rate war as they did when the Santa Fe first came into Southern California. Tickets from the middle west dropped to five dollars, and on one day went down to one. We would need a host of Aladdins with obedient genii to build in a minute not palaces but just plain houses and schools,—the fact is that one or two such magic builders would not at all be despised by our present boards of education.
I have spoken of stores and public buildings and hotels and real-estate offices but they were not all that the streets afforded; there was a barber shop where father and I got our respective hairs cut, accepting the fragrant offering of bay rum, supposed to ward off head colds due to the exposure of lightening one’s head covering, but refusing emphatically the hair oil in the pink, brass-nozzled bottle. Then there was the fruit stand next to Wollacott’s Wholesale Liquor Establishment near the post office where we bought the ceremonial bananas that completed the barbering, bananas at five cents apiece. If none could be found a like amount was invested in sugary peppermint drops. These delicacies were eaten at the little Wells Fargo office on the east side of Temple block where there was time enough and little enough doing for Mr. Pridham and father to tilt back their round chairs and have a good gossip.