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Ben Weingart & Weingart Foundation
by John Farrell |
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In 2000, the Weingart Foundation Board of Directors commissioned the writing of a book documenting the life of Ben Weingart and the creation of the Weingart Foundation. This book was completed and published in 2002.
Below is a chapter from this book. A different chapter will be provided on a regular basis or you can download the entire book.
A Town To Learn In
Ben Weingart made it to Los Angeles in the year 1906. He was not quite eighteen years old.
To those today familiar with the city Weingart helped to build, Los Angeles at the turn of the twentieth century can only be imagined. At the time, the city was home to 120,000 officially tabulated souls. Fifteen years before, in 1885, only 12,000 people had lived in Los Angeles.
The city had already experienced its first flush of prosperity, the Boom of the Eighties, along with the resulting bust, the recession of the mid-1890s. By the time of Ben's arrival in 1906, the city was about to launch itself forward again, as ever, based on speculation in land, as well as a newly discovered asset: oil.
Apart from open land, however, Los Angeles had little to offer except sunshine. The town had never had much water, even when it had been no more than a Mexican pueblo. What water it did have, via the Los Angeles River, was both unreliable and insufficient for a growing population. City fathers - which is to say whoever might combine money, vision, and power of will - would soon enough (though just barely) remedy the lack of water. But no one could do much of anything about the earthquakes, floods, and wildfires to which the city was naturally vulnerable.
Situated in semi-arid terrain, locked between mountains to the north, desert to the east, Mexico to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west, Southern California in general seemed to have little to offer. And Los Angeles even less. Though close enough to the Pacific, only some fifteen miles inland, the city had no natural harbor. In this regard, it was far outstripped by both San Francisco and San Diego.
Yet by the time that Ben Weingart arrived, the dredging of an artificial harbor at San Pedro had already been underway for seven years. In 1906, the year Ben came to town, Los Angeles officially annexed the harbor area, along with a sixteen-mile-long, half-mile-wide strip of land - sufficiently wide to provide for rail transit and associated commercial activity - that connected the city to the sea.
Compared to its dimensions today, the city itself was miniscule - a scant forty-five square miles. Ever since 1870, when Yankee-led civic institutions came to prevail over those of the old Californios, urban development had tended to move south and slightly west of the original pueblo centered near Olvera Street.
Essential to this development was the providence of law and order, all too evidently absent in the race riot of October, 1871, which had claimed the lives of nineteen Chinese and left scores of others beaten and crippled. Civic leaders were determined to establish and maintain a sense of urbane civility sufficient to attract well-bred and moneyed Easterners, as well as Midwestern farmers and European immigrants.
The imposing county courthouse, crowned by an impressive red sandstone clock tower, was constructed in 1891, only to be irredeemably damaged in an earthquake forty-two years later. The courthouse stood on Temple, in the block also bordered by Grand, Hill, and First Streets, as good a location as any to call the center of Los Angeles at the time.
Spring Street, between Fourth and Seventh was the financial center, soon to be known as the "Wall Street of the West." Streets were paved and lit by gas-lamps. Electric trolleys ran along main thoroughfares such as Spring.
The principal form of transportation, however, was still horse and buggy. Bicycles were popular among the middle class. By 1906, Angelenos were no longer startled to see the occasional horseless carriage.
To the southwest of the courthouse rose the thriving, graceful residential area of Bunker Hill, home to uppermiddle class professionals and prosperous merchants. Truly wealthy residents tended to build their homes somewhat south of downtown, along Figueroa, then west along Adams. Working-class, single men and women, as well as families, found affordable housing east of the river, primarily in Boyle Heights.
A suburb of sorts already existed, some eleven miles to the north, in Pasadena, another locale favored by the wealthy, as well as the infirm. Home to 4,000 fortunate inhabitants, linked to Los Angeles by a light rail line, Pasadena already had developed a national reputation for its salubrious climate.
Eager to attract moneyed Easterners pursuing the fashionable exploration of the Western provinces from the plush comfort of Pullman coaches, Pasadena offered resort hotels such as the "Castle Greene," built by G.G. Greene with the profits from a lucrative patent medicine business. The city promoted the healthful effects of its benign winter climate with an annual Rose Parade, initiated in 1895, some ten years before Ben's arrival. Nearby Glendale boasted a world-class sanitarium providing expensive "rest cures" for those who suffered from respiratory diseases and rheumatism.
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