The Jacob Miller Ranch at the foot of Nichols Canyon.
Mascarel hung on to his land through boom and bust real estate cycles over the next twenty-five years, becoming the longest original land holder in Hollywood. In 1901, he would create a Hollywood subdivision on his property called Vista del Mar and profit handsomely. His family sold the last two parcels of the Mascarel ranch in 1966 for $103,000.
John Bower, however, was not so lucky. Many speculators had bought lots in his proposed subdivision, including Senator Cole’s brother. However, when the first real estate boom, fed by the Los Angeles press, collapsed in 1880, it broke Bower and thousands of others who had recklessly bought property in Southern California. His only contribution remained Hollywood Boulevard’s natal name, Prospect Avenue, that remains east of Vermont Avenue.
The O.E. Roberts orchard met the Clausen Ranch (on the right) at the foot of Beachwood Canyon at Franklin Avenue.
THE FROSTLESS BELT
German-born Jacob Miller operated a marble-cutting business in Los Angeles. In 1877, he bought the Nichols’ cattle ranch with its rambling wooden farmhouse and attempted the first farm along Prospect Avenue. Maybe it was the cow manure, but the land proved fertile. With the help of his wife’s uncle, who was a nurseryman, Miller’s experiments with tropical fruits proved the existence of a frostless belt in the Cahuenga Valley. Two years later, Miller was making national horticultural news by planting date palms, coffee, cherimoyas, papayas, and avocados (the first in California).
Acres of vegetables, two or three crops a year, near clapboard homes appeared on both sides of Prospect Avenue. O.E. Roberts bought a large tract of land on Franklin Avenue. between Gower and Vine Streets in 1886 where he raised a truck garden and tropical fruit. A Prussian built his home at Franklin and Bronson Avenues and grew peas, beans, tomatoes and peppers, the last two growing all winter. J.B. Rapp won national attention by planting pineapples on 40 acres north and south of Franklin Avenue at Beachwood Drive, where he also grew exotic fruits, vegetables and cut flowers to sell for profit. On John Bower’s property at Prospect and Pass, the new owner planted two orchards of fig and apricot trees along with a wooden building to candy the fruit in summer.
Soon the produce from local gardens and orchards along Prospect Avenue, most of it grown with Chinese labor, proved more than the 11,000 people in Los Angeles could consume. Wagons of produce traveled to Redondo Beach for ocean shipment to San Francisco.
The sheep businesses continued to thrive among the remaining Nopal cactus. When landowners granted permission for grazing, herders drove animals between the scattered farms, going from one undeveloped spot to another.
The completion of a national rail connection to Los Angeles in 1882 conquered the American West. The Los Angeles press, pushing to revive the sagging real estate market, pumped up Nopalera’s frostless belt, a half mile to a mile and a half in width along the future Hollywood Boulevard. Horticulture, now a hobby for middle-class Americans, brought tourists in increasing numbers to witness the exotic farms and flower gardens that flourished in Nopalera while eastern homes froze in winter snow.
MRS. HOLLYWOOD
At twenty-one, Daeida Hartell, a handsome and somewhat serious woman, had much in common with the widowed Harvey Wilcox, six years her senior. She had a sharp intelligence and a strong sense of religion. A backbone of principles refined her character. She shared with Harvey an enthusiasm for real estate. Her family had been among the first settlers in Ohio in 1787 and owned large tracts of land staked from the United States Government.
Daeida Wilcox and Harvey Wilcox.
Daeida had great admiration for Wilcox. Starting as a cobbler, he had earned a small fortune in downtown Topeka, Kansas, real estate. Crippled from the knees down from a youthful bout of polio, he compensated for his loss of movement with a love of horses. When he met Daeida, he owned two fine white stallions, Duke and Royal. Harvey matched Daeida’s strong religious beliefs with the added fire of an ardent Prohibitionist.
They married in Topeka in 1883, the year both of them heard the call “Westward ho!” Like hundreds of others, they headed to Los Angeles on the newly completed Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe railroad with Harvey’s prized horses and a coachman.
The Wilcoxes bought an elegant home at 11th and Figueroa Streets, the most fashionable neighborhood in that era, eventually selling it for a profit and moving to Hill Street. With his wife as advisor, Harvey opened a real estate office on Spring Street. He bought three tracts of land in various parts of the city, including much of the present USC district, and subdivided them
While Harvey worked, Daeida tended the home fires and gave birth to a son. Their happiness proved short-lived. Nineteen months after his birth, their infant son died, leaving heartbroken parents.
To console themselves, the couple began to take Sunday drives in an open coach with their startlingly beautiful team of white horses. They explored the undeveloped basin along the narrow dirt roads that led out of Los Angeles into the mountains and down to the shoreline. As they admired the landscape, they kept their eyes open for a spot away from dirty, loud Los Angeles teeming with busy, ambitious people.
The Wilcoxes sensed another land boom. With two transcontinental rail lines to Los Angeles, price wars had lowered the cost of train travel. For a bargain $25, a first generation of American retirees, mostly middle-aged Eastern city dwellers, could migrate west, buy a new home on a large lot in a warm climate, and start a hobby farm while gambling on rising real estate prices.
The couple particularly enjoyed the Cahuenga Valley, with its sea vista and refreshing breezes. Hiking in the sheltered canyons proved an added pleasure. Daeida narrowed their choice to the grove of established fig trees at Pass Road and Prospect Avenue. They bought John Bowers’ tract.
A carriage ride through Hollywood.
A MAN AND HIS MAP
Combining acreage from four separate parcels, Wilcox eventually owned from Gower Street to Whitley Avenue and Sunset Boulevard to Franklin Avenue, excluding the Mascarel tract. Using Chinese and Mexican labor, he began clearing the land, staking it according to the four points of the compass. Glowing before him like a new civilization, his subdivision was a god-fearing suburb with a country club feel, white homeowners and a small commercial area to support them. He shared his dream with prospective buyers with the fervor of a true believer. The two most necessary things in Harvey Wilcox’s subdivision were trees and the prohibition of alcohol.
The law prevented Wilcox from grading roads because he did not live on his property. He could and did plant trees — hundreds of them, mostly pepper trees that would remain a defining part of Hollywood into the 1950’s. His choice of trees, planted in straight lines along future streets, indicated what kind of town he planned. Peppers work in rural areas where their tiny and copious leaf litter disappears back into the soil. For towns with sidewalks, they would be a headache. Their juicy seedpods stained the cement like blood.
Daeida commuted regularly with Harvey. She concentrated on making the fig business work, caring for the trees and experimenting with methods of drying fruit. She also nursed a Chinese laborer who had badly cut his head during Harvey’s rush to prepare the tract for sale.
It was during a visit back home to Ohio in 1887 that Daeida first heard the word Hollywood. During a conversation with a fellow traveler, the woman revealed that she owned an estate in Illinois named Hollywood. Daeida loved its connotation of nature and culture. Harvey thought so highly of it, he named his subdivision Hollywood.
Harvey Wilcox registered this map for his Hollywood home subdivision.
Wilcox’s pepper trees line Prospect Avenue.
During rest breaks and lunches, Harvey and Daeida sat in the shade of the fig barn near Prospect Avenue and Pass Road, refining his map of Hollywood with its ramrod-straight streets, parks, and picnic grounds. The two amused themselves creating street names. Cahuenga Boulevard gave a nod to the meandering Old Pass Road that Harvey’s map obliterate
d. Romaine (later Gower) ran along Rapp’s vegetable garden. Sunset Boulevard and Prospect Avenue came with the neighborhood. For a personal touch, there was a street for Harvey — Wilcox Avenue, and one for Daeida — Dae Avenue (later Hudson Avenue and Schrader Boulevard). They named two streets after the children of Mr. Weid, the Dane who farmed plots of land around Nopalera. Weid owned and lived in Holly Canyon near the fig ranch. His two children crossed the Wilcox property daily on their way to a one-room school at Sunset and Gordon. Daeida and Harvey named the children’s path after them, Ivar and Selma Avenues.
Hollywood’s first mansion, the Hurd House, on the northwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue (demolished).
Wilcox’s immediate neighbor to his west did not wish to subdivide. Henry Hancock preferred to lease his land to farmers. Others in the area, however, jumped eagerly into real estate. Colonel Griffith, the future donor of Griffith Park, acquired large parcels of Rancho Los Feliz. He made clear his intent by laying a branch of train track off the Los Angeles-Burbank Southern Pacific route near the L.A. River directly into his property at Sanborn Junction where Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevards meet.
Wilcox’s neighbor to the south, Senator Cole, continued Colonel Griffith’s train track from Sanborn Junction to Colegrove’s main intersection of Santa Monica and Vine. There in 1884, Cole financed a general store with the first post office in the Cahuenga Valley that Cole’s son, Seward, operated. Harvey Wilcox’s Hollywood was only one of over 60 new town sites near Los Angeles in 1887 competing for investors to “buy land and wear diamonds” as one land advertisement put it.
Wilcox made his first big sale to a wealthy Colorado miner, E.C. Hurd, who bought the entire northwest block of Prospect east of Wilcox Avenue. Hurd built a fancy home on the corner, landscaping it with rare trees and shrubs.
Hurd helped Wilcox gather a group of investors to buy the Second Street Railway and rename it the Cahuenga Valley Railroad. The line started at First and Hoover Streets and continued down Beverly Boulevard to Western Avenue, and up Western to Prospect Avenue. Wilcox threw in some of his own money to bring the line down Prospect to Wilcox Avenue. Less substantial than a kiddy park ride, the small steam engine with one car started with five trips a day but proved unreliable, often refusing to run for weeks. Undaunted, Harvey Wilcox would then personally drive customers from Los Angeles.
The rarely-working Cahuenga Valley Railroad pauses at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue.
Ivar Weid assisted a man named Weyse in buying land at Argyle Avenue and Yucca Street from Don José Mascarel. They planned a huge hotel. During the real estate boom of 1886-1889, several pretentious hotels went up around Los Angeles to accommodate visitors. When workmen began digging a pit for the Weyse hotel’s basement, they unearthed Native American relics. It confirmed what the old-timers told everyone: “Indians” used to live here. The hotel project excited Wilcox. He put it on his map of Hollywood and named a street after the entrepreneur, although Weyse Avenue eventually became Vine Street.
LEMON LANE
Commercial citrus groves had appeared in Los Angeles in 1838. By 1850, one grower had 70 acres of downtown planted with lemon and oranges. Scurvy was a common malady in the gold rush era, and citrus prevented the condition. Lemons in that era sold for $1 each. By the mid-1880s, Los Angeles pushed for more commercial buildings and a new railroad station. The citrus industry had to move.
When a crippled German named Henry Claussen, who lived at the foot of Beachwood Canyon, successfully raised oranges in 1890, it helped Wilcox considerably with land sales. Several prospective orchardists bought Hollywood property. E.C. Hurd bought land south of Prospect Avenue, between Wilcox and Hudson Avenues, across from his fancy house. He and a partner planted Hollywood’s first lemon orchard. Another buyer planted lemon trees on the southeast corner of Prospect and Weyse (Hollywood and Vine).
J.P. Rapp went to lemons. Jacob Miller went to lemons. A lemon orchard appeared on a corner of Prospect Avenue near a new street named Lemona (later Wilton) Avenue. Citrus groves, with a home for the orchardist, eventually covered the area between Prospect and Sunset Boulevard from Edgemont Avenue to Gardner Street. Orange Avenue remembers the orange orchard on the site of Hollywood High School.
One iconoclast during the citrus years, Mr. Spires, chose to plant olive trees. In 1890, he picked a hill along Prospect that early Hollywood knew as Olive Hill, but now is Barnsdall Park.
A lemon grove at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.
Local water was being consumed at full capacity before anyone seriously addressed the problem. Traditionally, water for the early Cahuenga ranches came from wells near the lake at King’s Road and Melrose Ave. Many relied on water that ran from the local canyons. A spring at the mouth of Western Canyon supplied the vegetable farms between Prospect and Franklin Avenues. Jacob Miller got his supply from Nichols Canyon. A man at the western end of Prospect Avenue. named Harper produced water for his new lemon orchard and home from deep wells in Laurel Canyon. He had enough water to pipe to ranchers along Prospect Avenue as far as Lemona Avenue. Windmills with tanks also pulled up ground water for irrigation. Early farmers settled for a bucolic well and bucket, but by the 1890’s, deeper wells operated with gasoline pumps. Senator Cole had a motor-driven well south of Sunset near Gower. Harvey Wilcox and Mascarel both had windmills and tanks for water. Hurd put in a deep well and built a water pipe from Sepulveda Canyon at a cost of $50,000.
Eventually, the heavy blasting of water prospectors destroyed the stream that had run through Laurel Canyon for eons.
Mr. Harper built his home (at left) on the western end of Hollywood Boulevard near Laurel Canyon.
Muller’s Hollywood Cash Grocery at Sunset between Ivar Avenue and Vine Street, 1893.
The Sackett Hotel, southwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga Boulevard.
Blondeau Tavern, northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, 1890.
The La Baig’s Casa Cahuenga (aka Six-Mile House) northeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street.
The Cahuenga Valley Railroad stands in front of the Hurd house in 1889.
HOLLYWOOD OR BUST
In 1887, the real estate boom sputtered and Harvey Wilcox felt it. The Weyse Hotel was first to fail, with only its foundation completed. The land returned to José Mascarel. He gave it to his daughters, who tried to sell it for years. The hotel’s abandoned stone entrance near Yucca Street and Vista del Mar Avenue stood for fifty years as Hollywood’s first broken dream.
Wilcox was merely one of many who discovered he would not get rich quickly in California real estate. Writer Horace Bell, who witnessed this boom, called it “one of the crimes of the age. Only a few people profited by it while hundreds of thousands were trapped into insane purchase of property and crazy speculation, and finally ruined.” The Los Angeles press had fed the frenzy. Developers had cleared orchards, vineyards, barley fields and vegetable gardens in and around Los Angeles, vast acres of farmland. The scars took years to heal.
Wilcox had not been so reckless, but his wealth slipped through his fingers. Orchardists who had bought from him backed out of their purchases. Most had already filled their land with baby citrus trees, so Wilcox felt compelled to return everyone’s money twofold. The Wilcoxes had to sell their fancy home in Los Angeles, pack up their belongings, and move to Hollywood. Wilcox arranged to relocate a simple wooden farmhouse left behind by a failed orchardist. He moved their new home to the northwest corner of Prospect and Cahuenga.
Wilcox could grade roads now that he lived in Hollywood. He kept himself busy establishing his rectangular grid of streets between the pepper trees. He worked hard to sell lots, offering free chicken dinners to prospective buyers. Interest was tepid.
He scaled down his plan for a hotel. He gave Horace Sackett three prime lots at Prospect and Cahuenga for the folksy Sackett Hotel. Its main floor contained a corner general store and a Prospect Avenue lobby with a parlor and a kitchen.
A lobby stairway led to eighteen rooms with one shared bathroom. Sackett kept a vegetable garden on the adjoining two lots.
Despite the real estate slowdown, Wilcox solidified his plans to make Cahuenga and Sunset Boulevards’ junction a business center for both Hollywood and Colegrove, keeping Prospect free for fine homes. The local meat-delivery man, Jacob Muller, established Hollywood’s first meat market, Hollywood Cash Grocery, at Sunset near Cahuenga. Muller and family lived above the store until he could afford a house on Wilcox Avenue.
A severe rain in 1889 buried Senator Cole’s rail to Colegrove under sand. It stopped functioning for a decade. E.C. Hurd helped Wilcox forge ahead, buying out the Cahuenga Valley Railway and financing its continuation down Prospect to Highland Avenue. A regular steam engine with an open car for passengers replaced the simple locomotive.
A disagreement between landowners on Prospect and Sunset Boulevard, west of Highland Avenue, arose as to which street the rail line would continue to Laurel Canyon. The ones objecting to a Prospect Avenue route surreptitiously one night laid the track south to Sunset. They crossed a consenting owner’s private property and finished the rail to Laurel Canyon.
On the outskirts of Wilcox’s property, Frenchman Martin La Baig bought a corner of Sunset and Gower. He built a small structure known as the Six-Mile House or Casa Cahuenga. He sold meals, beer, wines and liquor. It must have aggravated Prohibitionist Wilcox to have liquor served on both sides of his property. The Eight-Mile House in Cahuenga Pass continued to be a stopping point for those who wished to drink and drive.
The Story of Hollywood Page 3
