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Sixty Years in Southern California
Harris Newmark (1834-1916), son of a modest Prussian Jewish merchant, sailed to America in 1853 to join his older brother in Los Angeles. He made a fortune in real estate, the wholesale grocery business, and hides and wools, becoming a leader in the local Jewish community and the city at large. Sixty years in Southern California (1916) begins with his description of Los Angeles as he found it; judges and lawyers, merchants and shops, churches and other landmarks. In the chapters that follow, Newmark organizes his materials chronologically and outlines his various mercantile partnerships and traces changing patterns of social life in Los Angeles, political factions, railroad construction in southern California, crime and vigilantism, the Chinese Massacre of 1871, and real estate speculations. In a more personal vein, he chronicles Jewish family life and philanthropy.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
744 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1916
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 22, 2012
This was a leisurely 2-month read that I found entertaining and relaxing, great for unwinding in the evening with a cup of tea or glass of wine, surrounded by cross references: current maps, my treasured Robert Winter’s “Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide,” coffee table books “Los Angeles Then and Now” and “Landmarks of Los Angeles,””Front Page: A Collection of Headlines from the Los Angeles Times 1881-1989” and of course, Kevin Starr’s “Material Dreams.” This book is 651 pages, followed by another 33 pages of notes in appendices (most of which I also read). Yes, I’m afraid this is my idea of a good time.
Harris Newmark arrived in Los Angeles in 1853 at the age of 19 and spent 60 years here as a merchant and broker, chronicling his life and that of the community growing next to the Los Angeles River (before it was a big concrete ditch). These memoirs were first published in 1916; this was the 4th edition. Mr. Newmark’s observations are filled with minutiae about daily life in the dusty pueblo of Los Angeles and the people who were judges and shopkeepers, artisans and merchants, ranchers and entrepreneurs and others who got this city going, as well as local banditos, town drunks, and the occasional oddball neighbor. Historian Kevin Starr calls Newmark’s book “the single most valuable memoir to deal with the rise of Southern California in the nineteenth century” and reiterates Lawrence Clark Powell’s comparison of Newmark to Samuel Pepys, the famous 17th London diarist (“informed and gossipy“). Newmark’s writing style is causal and conversational, occasionally funny, relating stories about both people and institutions over the six-decade span. Clearly this must have been based on a detailed diary and is arranged chronologically, with one non sequitur after another: accounts of who was running what shops and developing what business enterprises and real estate, followed by a discussion of something going on in the distant State legislature, followed immediately by who married whom among the prominent families (Sepulvedas, Picos, Stearns, Banning, Temple), then by a tale of a shoot-out near the Plaza because someone looked at someone funny. Discussions about the influence of the railroads, the evolution of the water company and local newspapers, and the state of the street car system might be interspersed with descriptions of entertainment venues and their patrons (at theaters, beer gardens, fandangos and social clubs), or stories about the devastation brought on by severe droughts and floods (serious stuff in this cattle and sheep-raising country). He recounts vigilante justice, race riots, the founding of hospitals and schools.
I loved the stories about everyday life, such as how the two competing stage coach lines transporting people from ships at the harbor in San Pedro to L.A. would race to town. Wanting to be known as the fastest was apparently thought of as a good marketing strategy; however, their passengers would barely get there in one piece, their fillings almost rattled out of their mouths by the wild trip across unpaved, rutted roads. Or about the old 6’4” Indian named Polonia commonly seen around town, who had been “bereft of his sight, by his own people, because of his unnatural ferocity.” I got a kick out of reading about how so-and-so’s saddle shop was at Grand and 3rd, but was “too far out of town.” Downtown was full of vineyards and hotels would advertise their superiority with announcements such as “The unpleasant odor of gas has entirely disappeared since the building of the new sewer!”
I especially enjoyed the stories of the several real estate booms and the rampant speculation that often left people broke and in debt when the bubble burst. Regarding such a time in 1905 in one beach town, he relates “And they bought. They bought corners and they bought in the middle of the blocks; they bought heaps of sand and holes in the ground; they bought in one breath and sold in the next; they bought blindly and sold blindly. Redondo had become a huge, unregulated stock exchange, lots instead of stocks for five days becoming the will-o’-the-wisps of the fated bidders, until the boom collapsed leaving hundreds with lots they had never seen and which, for the time being, they could not sell at any price.” Thank goodness that sort of thing could never happen in a more enlightened age! [And they wrote offers on the hoods of their cars. ca. 2003]
The last two pages are a 19th-century style flood of over-the-top city boosterism and optimism that I found rather sweet, extolling the progress of the once “sleepy, ambitionless adobe village” that Newmark had come to in 1853. As of 1913, great things have come to pass, due to that “one asset, intangible it is true, but as invaluable as it was intangible –the spirit popularly called ‘Western’.” Although I’m sure in his wildest imagination he could never have conjured up the complex, intriguing, multicultural, glamorous and gritty, naturally beautiful, but over-developed, messy, and totally fascinating place into which it evolved, his final paragraph goes on to predict that Los Angeles
“is destined to become, in not many years, a world-center, prominent in almost every field of human endeavor; and that, as nineteen hundred years ago, the humblest Roman, wherever he might find himself, would glow with pride when he said,” I am a Roman!” so, in the years to come, will the son of the metropolis on these shores, wheresoever his travels may take him, be proud to declare,
“I AM A CITIZEN OF LOS ANGELES”
Harris Newmark arrived in Los Angeles in 1853 at the age of 19 and spent 60 years here as a merchant and broker, chronicling his life and that of the community growing next to the Los Angeles River (before it was a big concrete ditch). These memoirs were first published in 1916; this was the 4th edition. Mr. Newmark’s observations are filled with minutiae about daily life in the dusty pueblo of Los Angeles and the people who were judges and shopkeepers, artisans and merchants, ranchers and entrepreneurs and others who got this city going, as well as local banditos, town drunks, and the occasional oddball neighbor. Historian Kevin Starr calls Newmark’s book “the single most valuable memoir to deal with the rise of Southern California in the nineteenth century” and reiterates Lawrence Clark Powell’s comparison of Newmark to Samuel Pepys, the famous 17th London diarist (“informed and gossipy“). Newmark’s writing style is causal and conversational, occasionally funny, relating stories about both people and institutions over the six-decade span. Clearly this must have been based on a detailed diary and is arranged chronologically, with one non sequitur after another: accounts of who was running what shops and developing what business enterprises and real estate, followed by a discussion of something going on in the distant State legislature, followed immediately by who married whom among the prominent families (Sepulvedas, Picos, Stearns, Banning, Temple), then by a tale of a shoot-out near the Plaza because someone looked at someone funny. Discussions about the influence of the railroads, the evolution of the water company and local newspapers, and the state of the street car system might be interspersed with descriptions of entertainment venues and their patrons (at theaters, beer gardens, fandangos and social clubs), or stories about the devastation brought on by severe droughts and floods (serious stuff in this cattle and sheep-raising country). He recounts vigilante justice, race riots, the founding of hospitals and schools.
I loved the stories about everyday life, such as how the two competing stage coach lines transporting people from ships at the harbor in San Pedro to L.A. would race to town. Wanting to be known as the fastest was apparently thought of as a good marketing strategy; however, their passengers would barely get there in one piece, their fillings almost rattled out of their mouths by the wild trip across unpaved, rutted roads. Or about the old 6’4” Indian named Polonia commonly seen around town, who had been “bereft of his sight, by his own people, because of his unnatural ferocity.” I got a kick out of reading about how so-and-so’s saddle shop was at Grand and 3rd, but was “too far out of town.” Downtown was full of vineyards and hotels would advertise their superiority with announcements such as “The unpleasant odor of gas has entirely disappeared since the building of the new sewer!”
I especially enjoyed the stories of the several real estate booms and the rampant speculation that often left people broke and in debt when the bubble burst. Regarding such a time in 1905 in one beach town, he relates “And they bought. They bought corners and they bought in the middle of the blocks; they bought heaps of sand and holes in the ground; they bought in one breath and sold in the next; they bought blindly and sold blindly. Redondo had become a huge, unregulated stock exchange, lots instead of stocks for five days becoming the will-o’-the-wisps of the fated bidders, until the boom collapsed leaving hundreds with lots they had never seen and which, for the time being, they could not sell at any price.” Thank goodness that sort of thing could never happen in a more enlightened age! [And they wrote offers on the hoods of their cars. ca. 2003]
The last two pages are a 19th-century style flood of over-the-top city boosterism and optimism that I found rather sweet, extolling the progress of the once “sleepy, ambitionless adobe village” that Newmark had come to in 1853. As of 1913, great things have come to pass, due to that “one asset, intangible it is true, but as invaluable as it was intangible –the spirit popularly called ‘Western’.” Although I’m sure in his wildest imagination he could never have conjured up the complex, intriguing, multicultural, glamorous and gritty, naturally beautiful, but over-developed, messy, and totally fascinating place into which it evolved, his final paragraph goes on to predict that Los Angeles
“is destined to become, in not many years, a world-center, prominent in almost every field of human endeavor; and that, as nineteen hundred years ago, the humblest Roman, wherever he might find himself, would glow with pride when he said,” I am a Roman!” so, in the years to come, will the son of the metropolis on these shores, wheresoever his travels may take him, be proud to declare,
“I AM A CITIZEN OF LOS ANGELES”
Want to Read
January 2, 2021As I'm using it for research, I'll read what I need when I need it, and eventually finish the whole thing. Quite a wonderful book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews