 |
|
|
|
|
A Town To Learn In (Page 2)
People of more modest means were drawn from the East to Los Angeles by incredibly low railway fares. In 1885, launching the first tourist/real estate boom, the newly constructed Santa Fe Railroad determined drastically to undercut existing transcontinental prices. For a brief time in its price war with the Southern Pacific line, the Santa Fe dropped the price of its one-way, third-class fare from Kansas City to Los Angeles to a single dollar.
Though this extreme loss-leader price endured but a few days, the Santa Fe offered a sustained one-way fare of only eight dollars. On competing Southern Pacific, the previous fare had been $125. Forced to comply to the laws of the marketplace, Southern Pacific deeply cut its own prices. Lured by the climate, available real estate, and a pervasive sense of possibility, many of the adventurous and curious pilgrims who made the grueling, four-day journey chose to stay.
Land was evidently plentiful, much of it already subdivided into forty-acre parcels. Yet the prices sought by main-chance speculators, such as the celebrated Nathaniel C. Carter or that amoral swindler, shameless promoter, and notorious libertine E. J. "Lucky" Baldwin, were not cheap. When one prospective buyer scoffed at the stiff price demanded by Baldwin, the quintessential Los Angeles land developer is reported to have taken offense. "Hell!" he shot back. "We're giving away the land. What we're selling is the climate."
The Santa Fe Railroad terminal, passenger-friendly La Grande Station, stood at the intersection of Second Street and Santa Fe Avenue. Cavernous Arcade Station, built by its competitor, Southern Pacific, rose in self-proclaimed splendor on Alameda Street between Fourth and Sixth Streets. Designed to challenge the South Coast predominance enjoyed by the Santa Fe line, Southern Pacific's imposing terminal rose to a height of ninety feet at its arch.
Nearby both railway stations were the rooming houses and transient hotels, those catering to a clientele of business travelers and new arrivals. In this area east of downtown, bounded loosely by Second on the north, Sixth on the south, Alameda to the east, and Hill Street to the west, diversions of the usual sorts were readily available in the more questionable hotels. And most of the saloons offered a "free" lunch along with the ten-cent beer.
At noon, young Ben Weingart frequented these taverns, if not for the usual reasons. His habit was to order a beer, then offer it to whomever happened to be standing next to him. The lunch he would eagerly consume, washed down with a glass of water. One patron, impressed by the young man's teetotaling discipline, offered Ben a job he already knew well - delivering laundry to downtown hotels. Chewing intently on a stale-bread sandwich, Ben nodded his agreement.
The next day, Ben Weingart went to work for the Diamond Laundry Company. Driving a horse-drawn wagon, he picked up and delivered laundry along a route that included most of the downtown hotels, from the middle- to lowerclass establishments near the railroad stations to such upscale establishments as the Westminster and the Nadeau, which offered relatively elegant lodgings for prices beginning at one dollar a day, American plan, two meals included.
Instinctively, Ben Weingart applied his intelligence to questions of efficiency, economy, and productivity. Character-istically, he rose earlier and worked longer than his competition. Above all, with fierce determination, he saved money. He saved his wages so assiduously that, when the owner of the laundry fell on hard times, Ben offered to invest in the business, thus gaining a piece of the action. Soon enough, saving even more now, reinvesting all his share of the profits, Ben bought out his benefactor and became the sole proprietor of the Diamond Laundry Company.
The Los Angeles in which Ben Weingart found his way to wealth was already prospering when he arrived. The city had mushroomed in population, increasing ten-fold in the twenty years between its first real-estate boom in 1886 and 1906, when Ben showed up. While it enjoyed a climate that Easterners and Midwesterners (not to mention the local chamber of commerce) likened to that of Paradise, Los Angeles had taken pains to construct itself in the physical image of a prosperous Midwestern city.
Downtown buildings were built of substantial stone and brick, much as they were "Back East." The only distinguishing difference was that the extensive awnings fronting Los Angeles' commercial establishments were designed to protect against intense sun, not inclement weather. An extensive inter-urban railway system, the brainchild of Henry Edwards Huntington, favored nephew of Collis P. Huntington and inheritor of half his uncle's fabulous wealth, ran from San Bernardino to Santa Monica, from Pasadena to San Pedro. Its central station was located at Main and Sixth streets, on the southeast fringe of downtown. In under an hour, Ben could ride to the beach for a nickel.
Roads were also extending in commercially viable directions. Once outside the central city, however, even major thoroughfares, though graded, remained unpaved and lightly traveled. Out beyond Hoover Street, El Camino Viejo, later renamed Wilshire Boulevard, was still a country road traversing "the sticks." The same rustic aspect was apparent along Hollywood Boulevard, about two miles to the north.
In 1892, thirty-six-year-old Ed Doheny, a pick-and-shovel prospector who had spent a dozen years digging for a fortune that seemed destined to elude him, leaving Doheny always closer to broke than to breaking even, decided he would try his hand at something new. Doheny and his partner, Charles Canfield, started digging a hole near the intersection of Lake Shore Terrace and Patton Street, just south of what came to be called Echo Park, to the northwest of downtown Los Angeles. They dug as deep as they could, timbering their vertical tunnel as they went. Some forty feet down, the walls of the shaft began to ooze petroleum. About 160 feet down, the oil began to puddle up around their boots.
|
|
|
|
|
