Hollywood Police Station on Cahuenga Boulevard, 1904 (demolished).
Another necessary ordinance regulated driving animals through the streets. Herds exceeding 200 cows, horses, or mules or 2,000 sheep, goats, or pigs required additional herders. Animal farms still prospered in the eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard and in the San Fernando Valley. The movement of animals to and from vacant grazing land created havoc. The bright, new businesses at Highland Avenue had to contend with herds of sheep running up Highland, creating intolerable dust flurries. The first class of Hollywood High School, temporarily on the ground floor of Highland’s Masonic Hall, staged a protest downtown against herding during school hours. Even after the school moved to its permanent site (on land donated by George Dunlop, successfully attempting to appease those who had opposed him as mayor), animal herding disrupted classes.
Hollywood High School, northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue (demolished). The Hollywood Hotel’s cupola appears in the right background.
Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards looking north. The de Longpre home is in the background.
The most notorious lawbreaker in this era was Daeida Beveridge’s own husband, Philo. The City of Hollywood prosecuted him for serving alcohol at a banquet in the Hollywood Hotel. He had arranged a dinner to address the matter of road development between Los Angeles and Hollywood. He admitted, the day after, that the lemon-colored liquid in the water glasses was white wine. Among the witnesses, G.T. Gower (son of John Gower) testified that he recognized the wine, but did not drink it; George Dunlop drank it; a man named Hampton not only drank it but judged it excellent. Although the jury voted two to one for acquittal, some locals boiled that Philo had thwarted their anti-liquor laws.
Wilcox Hall on the southeast corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards (demolished).
THE CENTER OF HOLLYWOOD
Street numbers arrived in 1904 with the gas company. The first gas line from the city came down Sunset to Hollywood Boulevard and then followed Hollywood to Highland. Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards became ground zero, with street numbers going in four directions from the intersection. (This would change later.)
Hollywood Boulevard had curbs running from Western to La Brea. Everyone talked about getting streetlights. The rail line was double-tracked and cars traveled every ten minutes. The Hollywood Water Company had nineteen hundred taps in town. Grammar schools appeared on Lemona (Wilton) and Selma Avenues.
Hollywood Boulevard looking east to Cherokee Avenue. The Janes residence is in the middle right. The Hurd residence is on the far right.
Dr. Palmer continued fussing over Highland’s commercial development. With the official title of Hollywood City Health Officer, he focused on the pharmacist at Highland Avenue whom he accused of publicly revealing patients’ medical information. His threats to open a rival pharmacy pushed Palmer into developing a commercial area on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard between Cahuenga and Wilcox. Dr. Palmer had already built a brick home on this site in 1904 for his new wife and growing family. Next to this home, he built a pressed-brick building and rented a storefront to the accused pharmacist, who moved his business from Highland Ave. Palmer leased another storefront to a photographer who took souvenir pictures of tourists visiting the de Longpre home.
Highland Avenue looking north from Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood’s first bank is on the right. The Masonic Hall is north of it.
Dr. Palmer felt a bank was also necessary. As he explained to Mrs. Beveridge, Cahuenga business people would not have to travel to “the other end of town” (Highland Avenue.). Daeida was reluctant, but Palmer wheedled, describing the bank as more of a real estate promotion. Philo Beveridge was also not enthusiastic. He had become one of the leading speakers at banquets in the Hollywood Hotel, and as everybody’s friend, did not think Hollywood needed competing banks. In any case, the Beveridges banked in downtown Los Angeles. Palmer, however, had secured Daeida’s word. She felt obligated to build him a bank.
Hollywood City Hall and Firehouse on Cahuenga Boulevard (demolished). Photo was taken after Los Angeles’ incorporation of Hollywood, 1912.
A two-story building, Wilcox Hall, appeared at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. Palmer used Mrs. Beveridge’s personal bank as a correspondent for his new venture and became the president. Philo was a director and de Longpre a shareholder. Daeida sewed the curtains for the plate glass windows in front. When the doors opened, there were only two employees. One was the janitor. (It was upstairs in Wilcox Hall that Philo Beveridge stood trial for breaking Hollywood’s liquor laws by serving wine at dinner.)
Eventually there were two banks in the one downstairs office. A state bank was required by law to make real estate loans. By 1907, Palmer’s two banks had equaled the rival Highland bank in financial resources.
While Palmer fretted over local concerns, the Beveridges began taking their family on extended trips out of the country, mostly to Asia. With land selling at profitable prices, they could afford to enjoy themselves.
Whitley’s partners were equally successful. By 1904, Ocean View Tract had sold out, giving its investors a 60 percent profit. After paying a final dividend, the business disincorporated. For his bonus, Whitley received the property renamed Whitley Heights and got to name a street after himself. To celebrate his success, he installed the first streetlights in Hollywood, incandescent bulbs on poles along Wilcox Avenue in front of his home.
The tourists continued to come in droves. The Hollywood Hotel added an annex in 1905 to bring its room capacity to 144. The hotel now commanded the entire north block of Hollywood Boulevard from Highland to Orchid Avenues.
Several hundred visitors passed through de Longpre’s studio daily until a couple of sightseers stole some knickknacks and de Longpre closed his home to the general public. (Petty thefts must have occurred more than once.) Still, when the Shriners had a convention in Los Angeles, de Longpre sent ten thoudsand invitations to an ‘At Home’ in his famous studio. Eight thousand Shriners showed up.
After eighteen years in business, the Sackett Hotel closed it doors. Hollywood Hotel’s competition had proved too much. The hotel’s shuttering rattled the Cahuenga faction.
Mrs. Beveridge enticed the Hollywood Board of Trade to move from their Highland Avenue headquarters. She offered two lots on the west side of Cahuenga Boulevard, a half block south of Hollywood Boulevard, for a city hall. With most members (whose names included Gower, Bartlett, de Longpre, Caroline Wakeman, A.Z. Taft and Sanford Rich) living on east Hollywood Boulevard, the board accepted the offer. (The board’s effectiveness might be measured by the fact that for the next five years, the nearby Sackett Hotel remained mostly empty.) The building that went up for Hollywood’s City Hall also served as the fire station. The city widened Cahuenga Boulevard, now the official town center, to seventy-five feet from Sunset to Hollywood Boulevards.
Guests arrive at the new front wing of the Hollywood Hotel, 1905.
The Highland faction bristled. The only paper in town, the Cahuenga Valley Sentinel, attacked the Beveridges, Dr. Palmer, and the Board of Trade, calling them “the Beveridge discontents” and labeling Wilcox Avenue the “Beveridge dead line.” The accused charged the Sentinel of partisanship and the unfounded rumor that Whitley owned the paper. The injured Cahuengans collected money and made an offer on the paper. Instead, the editor transferred it to another party and left town.
Dr. Palmer lead the offended crowd in creating a rival newspaper, the Hollywood Citizen, published weekly from Palmer’s new brick Boulevard building. The editor received exact instructions never to mention the Cahuenga Valley Sentinel, to represent fully the city trustees and the board of trade meetings, to praise everyone who deserved it, and to submit all criticism to Dr. Palmer’s committee before publishing. By 1906, the paper moved to the corner store in the empty Sackett Hotel.
When the Highland Avenue faction had a surveyor out measuring Highland into the Pass, Dr. Palmer sprung into action. As Daeida B
everidge was in Japan with Philo at the time, Dr. Palmer represented her interests. Within the week, he had surveyed the old Cahuenga Pass Road and gathered petitions from everyone who wanted it improved. City workers supportive of the Highland Avenue interests conveniently lost Palmer’s papers until he threatened to call the county sheriff. Hollywood graded Cahuenga Boulevard into the pass along with Highland Avenue.
Hollywood Citizen employees (l. to r.), unidentified, Mabel Lewis, William J. Palmer, Jane Bardeen, unidentified, Harlan Palmer.
The Jacob Stern residence at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street (demolished).
MORE MINOR MANSIONS
Distinguished and wealthy people continued buying property in Hollywood. In 1904, Mary Moll sold land in her Bonnie Brier Tract to a family named Bireley who eventually figured out what to do with the unmarketable Hollywood oranges; they crushed them up into soft drinks and created a soda industry with their name.
Large parcels of land went for summer homes for wealthy midwesterners like the Hershey family of the chocolate fortune. John Toberman, three-term mayor of Los Angeles, bought a lot west of the Hollywood Hotel in the Ocean View Tract. He built a handsome home and dabbled in local real estate. His nephew, Charles E. Toberman, after many trips back and forth from Los Angeles to his childhood home in Texas, decided to settle in Hollywood.
The younger Toberman built a house for himself and his wife not far from his uncle, on Orange Avenue north of Hollywood Boulevard. Looking for a permanent vocation, C.E. Toberman chose real estate. He bought a one-room real estate office at Hollywood and Highland and moved it to southwest Hollywood Boulevard and McCadden (then Dakota) Avenue. Initially, his business foundered, until his uncle bought a seventy-seven-foot parcel fronting Hollywood Boulevard between the Sackett Hotel and Dr. Palmer’s brick building. The commission saved Toberman’s career.
The Beveridges had made a huge land sale in 1901 to a Colonel Northram who bought the block of orange trees on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and Ivar. He built a Spanish-style house surrounded with date palms. A horse lover, Northram also acquired the land across Vine Street, south of Selma Avenue, for his trotting horses. Among the lemon trees that covered the site, Northam built a large horse barn. With his beautiful wife, horse handlers and house staff, the wealthy Colonel stayed for two years before deciding that trotting horses and Hollywood’s dirt streets did not mix. He put his estate up for sale and did not wait long for Jacob Stern to buy it.
German-born Stern had come to California in 1889, opening a small shop in Orange County that he had developed into California’s first chain store with five other outlets in the region. The original shop grew to almost an entire city block, selling everything from pins to threshing machines.
Real estate won Jacob Stern’s heart. He had spent the last few years rehabilitating neglected ranches of the Californio era, turning them into profitable farms and orchards. By 1904, his real estate activities were so extensive, he opened an office in Los Angeles while still president of Stern & Goodman Mercantile Company.
Hollywood Boulevard, looking west from the Hollywood Hotel.
Arthur Letts’s first Hollywood residence on Carmen Place north of Franklin Avenue (demolished) was later known as the Giroux Estate. It became a monastery in the late ‘30s.
Arthur Letts named his house and grounds at Franklin Avenue and Edgemont Street “Holmb” (demolished).
His good fortune continued with the purchase of Northram’s Hollywood and Vine property, where Stern planned to retire. Northram took an annuity for life as payment and promptly died. While Jacob Stern went into Hollywood folklore for renting Northram’s horse barn across the street to the future Paramount Pictures, he was no hick farmer. He spent his long retirement developing his Hollywood property.
Englishman Arthur Letts had rebuilt a sad little store in downtown Los Angeles into the Broadway Department Store. He celebrated his prosperity in 1904 by building a large house in Hollywood on Carmen Place west of Gower Street. He called it “Holmb” in honor of his birthplace in England. After living there for over a decade, Letts built a grander estate on forty acres near Franklin and Edgemont Avenues.
The new house stood on a small hill with a magnificent view. Also called Holmb, this house contained a library, music room, billiards room and a reception hall containing a large stained-glass Gothic window. Letts created a variety of gardens, celebrating the frostless belt. Besides an Italian garden with steps and balustrades, he planted cactus and tropical gardens.
The last remaining estate from this era to survive in Hollywood today, Wattles, provides an example of a City of Homes mini-mansion with splendid grounds. In 1905, Omaha financier Gurdon Wattles built himself a winter home here named Jualita. Originally, Wattles stayed at Jualita two months of the year. When in Omaha, he opened Jualita to tourists. He lived in Jualita year-round during his retirement, dying there in 1932.
The estate’s ninety acres once ran from Hollywood Boulevard into the hills. The gardens went from Italian to Japanese to tropical. Avocado trees near Hollywood Boulevard. are two blocks west from where Jacob Miller planted California’s first avocado.
In the brief years of the City of Homes, a tone of rural refinement prevailed. Lawn parties, the favorite entertainment, had Far East themes presided over by the likes of Mrs. Kimball who stood in oriental costume and called her guests with a gong.
Large homes on spacious lots stood along Hollywood Boulevard east of Edgemont Street. Arthur Letts’s “Holmb” is on the knoll at center left.
MRS. KIMBALL’S GONG
The Woman’s Club of Hollywood had formed in 1905 when Daeida Beveridge, Mrs. Jacob Stern, and Caroline Wakeman, among others, decided to uplift the community.
When the Beveridges returned home from one of their Asian travels, the Woman’s Club gave them a welcome-home reception in Wilcox Hall. Four hundred guests attended, with an orchestra providing dance music.
Besides the Order of Washington and Woodmen of the World, there were card clubs, tennis clubs and a current events club. Horseback riding was popular and every weekend the hiking club explored a dell in the hills.
The Wattles residence on Hollywood Boulevard and Curson.
The upper rooms of Wilcox Hall became the Hollywood Club. With a large dance floor, card rooms and a billiard room, the club offered bimonthly dances, educational programs, card parties, smokers, and Hollywood’s first theater with strictly amateur productions. The first presentation was a minstrel show. Businessmen stopped in for a card game before dinner; orchard growers played pool in the evening. Tuesday was always Ladies’ Day. The club built tennis courts, a rarity in Southern California, across the street on the northeast corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. Paul de Longpre served as the club’s first president and C.E. Toberman served as secretary.
Hollywood May Day Parade, Hollywood Boulevard, 1908.
Opposite middle right: Mary Moll and daughters decorated the family car for their May Day Parade entry.
Opposite middle left and bottom: Participants and spectators on Hollywood Boulevard for the May Day parade and tournament, 1908.
Hollywood’s first public library at northwest Hollywood Boulevard and Ivar Avenue (demolished).
Starting in 1907, the Hollywood Club sponsored a May Day celebration, decorating Hollywood Boulevard with flags and bunting. Spectators lined the street from Highland to Cahuenga to watch a parade of flower-decked horses and motor vehicles. A large grandstand stood on the Hollywood Club’s tennis courts for a tilting tournament, where contestants on horseback slipped rings from posts with fourteen-foot lances.
In 1909, the parade traveled four miles. Hollywood’s new fire engine, one of the first motorized fire trucks in Southern California, appeared decorated with flowers. It had been the sensation of the 1909 Pasadena Tournament of Roses. The May Queen, in an Empire gown embroidered with silver spangles and three yards of organdy train, stood on a chariot drawn by butterflies. Unfortunately,
heavy rain ruined attendance. The Hollywood Club never recovered from the financial loss. It was the last parade Hollywood staged as a city.
Hollywood got a library when steel magnate Andrew Carnegie began building public libraries in cities and towns willing to operate them. The Hollywood Woman’s Club, like women’s clubs across the country, raised the operating funds. Daeida and Philo Beveridge were overseas when the decision about the new library’s location arose. When Mary Moll offered her strawberry field at Hollywood and Highland, Palmer wired Mrs. Beveridge. She instructed him to offer the northwest corner of Hollywood and Ivar, the site of the fig barn. When the city board favored Highland, Palmer requested a week’s delay. He wired Daeida to increase the size of her donation. She did. The library went up at Hollywood and Ivar in 1907. The library basement proved an excellent meeting hall for the Woman’s Club.
The Story of Hollywood Page 6
