Tag Archives: Southern Pacific Railroad

Van Nuys — a Viewing

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A new series applying history’s tire-iron to the rusty Hub of the Valley

*Millard Sheets, 1965. HSFC Bank on Van Nuys Boulevard, now Bof*A

PART ONE: ‘WHEN ALL THIS WAS FARMLAND’

In the photo below, the sun-baked middle ground is today’s Van Nuys. Van Nuys is unusual in America in that the historian can’t sanctimoniously intone in the opening paragraph “For time immemorial People of the Ancient Ways called this land home, at one with Nature’s Ways.” Nobody called Van Nuys “Home” until Isaac Newton Van Nuys. And for the Tongva, the Chumash and the Tataviam who lived in the surrounding hills, the way to be at one with Nature’s Ways was to hot-foot it across the Valley as fast as you can in the dry seasons; and avoid it completely during the dangerous wet times when it swamped and Tujunga or Pacoima Wash could rampage. Of the two pleasant spots where natural wells and pools spring up, and the Indians had mixed-tribe rancerias, neither of them is Van Nuys. One was Encino [Siutcanga]; the other of course was San Fernando [Achoicomenga], where the Mission was built. But Van Nuys belonged to the antelopes. When the Indians were almost gone and the Mission was secularized the Valley was heavily ranched. Gen. Andres Pico took his interest in San Fernando and the northern half of the Valley, and his brother Don Pio Pico, the last Californio governor who had signed the original grant in 1846, by the 1850s had somehow come to own the southern half himself — including the cattle-tramped hardpan we call Van Nuys, that nothing in the middle:

Mission San Fernando and the vast San Fernando plain.hoto 1875 by a railroad surveyor; taken from SF Pass looking toward Cahuenga.

Don Pio Pico, executing rights from a complicated chain-of-title victory from the Land Commission, sold his half of Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando to the Yankees because beef prices had collapsed. Around 1865, the 15-year Gold Rush boom waned, then busted. The days were bygone of Valley rancheros driving thousands of cattle up to San Francisco and Sacramento to be slaughtered for twenty-dollar beefsteaks. The problem of a sudden oversupply of lowing stock solved itself, when a searing drought gripped the Southland, leaving the Valley full of cattle bones by 1868. The land sale was pervaded with ironies; Col. Fremont had made the Mission the headquarters for his California Battalion, and across these very plains had ridden in triumph to receive the sword of capitulation from Gen. Andres Pico, who claimed the Mission and its lands for his own. In 1848, Pico capitulated to save the Californios’ ranchos. Now the Picos were selling theirs off to the Yankees. But Pio Pico was the wiliest California land-jobber of them all. Realizing a profit from the switch of allegiances to Norte America, even so land could be liquidated legally, was their triumph. Pio was was certainly shrewd enough to realize a Hotel on the Plaza would bring steadier returns, and more genteel social connections, than running stock on the hoof. It was a brilliant trade for Pico, one of his canniest bets, for it kept him in good credit. It was also a decisive investment in downtown Los Angeles; the first moment when the dusty pueblo earned any notice at all in the world. Pio Pico put the Merced Theatre in back of the Pico House, with a door to the lobby; and put Jules Harder in the hotel kitchen; and made LA a city on the map.

**1880s**: **the combine and twenty-mule team.**

And it was a great deal for Van Nuys, who was the partner responsible for actually running the farm operation. Lankershim had tried dry wheat farming for a couple of seasons but had busted. Van Nuys said he could do it, and he did; with true Yankee luck, the middle of 1870s when he experimented brought some good El Niño rains, and by the 1880s Van Nuys was harvesting boatloads of grain with Lankershim’s capital, and shipping it overseas at a branded premium. Thus it was a great return for the San Franicsco investors, too. Lankershim had found this land destroyed by heavy cattle ranching and failed to work it; it was Van Nuys who made it into a productive monocrop that brought other wheat farmers to make fortunes here too. He was one of the greatest farmers who ever lived.

The Home Ranch was the Van Nuys’ farmhouse, where he and Susannah (Lankershim) raised three kids and a million bushels of wheat.

But who was Isaac Newton Van Nuys? He wasn’t the founder of Van Nuys, but it was named for him when he sold in 1909. (The town was founded in 1911). Speculative towns are usually named after the developer’s signature on the front of the check, not the farmer’s name on the back. Significantly, also, the name ‘Van Nuys’ is practically the only one of the developers’ original town names not to have changed; meaning, Van Nuys never actively voted to change its identity, as did social-climbing Toluca to Lankershim to North Hollywood, or Zelzah to Northridge, or Marian to Reseda, or Owensmouth to (the equally unappealing) Canoga Park. In the next part we’ll take the man, and his name, and his Life, in View, to glean what civics lessons we can.

Grist For The Mill, Part Three — Capital? Milling? Capitol Milling!

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From 1883 to 1998, Capitol Milling ground away. In 1939, Chinatown was moved up to the bluffs around the mill.

THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
THE DOWNTOWN BEAT

RIDE A PAINTED PONY, LET THE SPINNING WHEEL SPIN

El Pueblo. The strip of light green bluffs northeast of town is today’s Chinatown and Elysian Park and Dodgers’ Stadium (the white road curving up the high hill is Chavez Ravine). LA was founded there, when those bluffs cradled a slow bend of the LA River. A high-water event soon afterwards cut away the bluffs and ate a piece of the Plaza; they abandoned the bluffs and moved to this present site, closer to the ford at Yangna, in the late 18th century.

The pobladores, I’ve read, awoke at dawn’s first light singing the Alabado: the first riser, singing out to the sky, would wake the others who joined in. The whole pueblo was up and singing by the end, praising God for the day just beginning. Then, a shot of aguardiente for the short walk from their casa to their allotments across the river. These were happy farmers; and at least one of their fields was put into wheat or barley. Patient Reader, close your eyes and hear the Alabado, courtesy of the monks of St. Anthony’s Seminary.

In 1825 an earthquake shifted the course of the LA River south, away from the cradle of the bluffs. It was a gift from San Gabriel of the Temblors to the Queen of Angels. LA was safer from flooding and had all this fat wet arable bottomland with southern exposure a sombrero’s toss away from the farmers’ corredores. With the river gone south, the Zanja Madre was re-engineered. The exposed wetlands were ditched and dredged and channeled, and by the 1830s the citizen-farmers filled this bottomland with vineyards, fruit orchards, the staple grains, and corn and bean and squash fields. The zanja had a big wheel upstream, relentlessly hauling the water up to the high point of the bluff. From there, it flowed downhill along the line of bluffs to the Plaza.

(The Ord Survey realigned and renamed streets)

Looking north from Capitol Milling. Alameda Street now runs over the old watercourse, along the curve of bluffs. Chavez Ravine begins its climb uphill, left.

The first commercial grist mill in the Pueblo de Los Angeles was set up on North Spring Street sometime in the 1830s; it was traditionally known as “Stearns’ Mill.” Its power came from the flowing water of the Zanja Madre, and its name came from the power and wealth of Don Abel Stearns. Long tradition holds the mill was one of his ventures. He had arrived from Boston in 1831, with excellent credit connections in Monterey, to start a career as a mercantile tycoon, land baron, and Anglo-Mexican powerbroker. Eventually in 1839 he became a naturalized Mexican citizen, no longer just a resident foreign concessionaire. Which meant he could own land and businesses, and be eligible for land grants if they came up (they did). AND, he could marry 14-year-old Arcadia Bandini, the most vivacious and brilliant of the hijas del pais, who had huge…tracts of land. They became the richest folks in town; their adobe casa was dubbed “El Palacio;” it had a hundred-foot ballroom! The “de Stearnses” were social doyennes the city long remembered.

Dona Arcadia Bandini de Stearns (Baker) — Don Abel Stearns

But Abel Stearns was not a miller, or a hydro-engineer. On the other hand, there WAS a local who knew all of this, so today historians believe the millwright was the famous…

Don Jose Juan Chapman, with his beautiful Dona Guadelupe. They gave many generations of progeny to California.

Don Jose must actually have been the one who built and ran the mill, and probably owned half of it. He was California’s most famous millwright, well-married, resident in LA for a few years already, Mexican by naturalization, well connected and trusted. In the 1830s, Chapman is growing Mission grapes right down in the river bed there already. Almost certainly, he dressed his vines while figuring in his head how the Zanja, if they put it up there on those bluffs, could be harnessed for irrigation and power. It could have been only he, who could have engineered the mill run from the Zanja, and set up the machinery. “Chapman’s Mill” — as we might call it — was an entrepreneurial idea he probably nursed for years. But it remained “a project” while there was no capital in Los Angeles, only cow-hides. Capital and international credit only arrived in LA with Horse-Face (as the Californios dubbed Stearns, Cara de Caballo.)

The Zanja Madre in Los Angeles in 1868 (Moore’s survey map). Stearns’ mill buildings are well marked; there are a couple of other mills by now.

Records are scanty, but it seems likely that Stearns must have been the backer of the mill, and Chapman probably the owner; it was a year before Stearns would even have the legal right, yet, to undertake a civic venture. I haven’t yet found any record that Stearns and Chapman were associated in business, but they were both successful Angelenos transplanted from Boston and married into important Californio families. It seems likely in fact, that a friendship with Chapman must have eased Stearns’s introductions to, and success with, the Californians from his first arrival in 1831. Dona Guadelupe was charming and popular and social; she would have been quick to host a newly-arrived fellow Bostonian.

The dam was about where the bridge is; the water wheel was about where that ugly apartment building sits. The train tracks mark the Zanja. From here water flowed back down the bluffs, and Dodgers’ Stadium (woo hoo! Go Dodger Blue!!), past Chinatown…

...and Chavez Ravine — past Elysian Park

Chinatown station now sits next to the mill

In 1835 under Gov. Pio Pico, Los Angeles emerged as the provincial capital, and officially La Ciudad de Los Angeles, the City of the Angels. It was a power shift away from Monterey; political activities and commercial prospects were enhanced in LA. Pico was intent on breaking the economic power of the Missions and secularizing their assets. It was the new civic regime, I hazard, that gave Stearns and Chapman the approvals to re-jigger the zanja and set up the mill in town. We know it was finished and operating in 1838. By then, San Gabriel Mission was already in serious decline anyway, and a new mill in town must have been a huge capital improvement. It seems like a tiny step, but it firmly and, forever, sealed LA’s role as the economic and industrial and distributional center of Southern California.

LA in 1850, looking northeast. The two buildings of Stearns’s Mill — having just been renamed “Eagle Mills” — marked in gold. This shot isn’t from a balloon, as it is sometimes described; it’s of a scale model made of the city as it was at Statehood, based on the Col. Ed. Ord Survey of 1849-50. The diagonal road to the lower right corner is Alameda, leading to San Pedro.=

Today the strip of bottomland under the bluffs is Los Angeles State Historic Park, which preserved as open space the Chinatown Rail Yards, aka “the Cornfield.” The mill, among other industries, brought the railroads to crowd into the strip north of Alameda Street. Here Collis Huntington built the Southern Pacific’s River Station and Depot, and behind it, right on top of the Zanja, the River Station Hotel.

To ease shipping of goods, including flour from the mill, Stearns invested capital in building a road to the port at San Pedro. This is today the Alameda Corridor — and Alameda Street just happens to run right next to the mill. Stearns established stores — shops — LA’s first — one in town and one at the port, with a horse-drawn wagon haulage service in between to meet the Boston ships. (No more sluggish ox-drawn caretas.) Don Abel thus established LA’s future policy of exploiting San Pedro as the only deep-water port it had access to.

Chapman died in 1848, soon after the U.S. conquest. I conjecture here that Stearns, surviving partner, or possibly acting on behalf of Guadelupe, arranged, In 1850, the sale of the mill on the Zanja to Americans who named it “Eagle Mills.” During the half-century the mill ground flour under the Eagle emblem, Los Angeles blossomed as America’s most productive, most industrially advanced, farm town, with among other crops, a massive wheat industry. The mill was sold again in 1883 to Jacob Loew, who re-launched the complex as “Capitol Milling.” This is when most of the complex was built, surrounding, absorbing, and superseding the structures built in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s and 1860s.

During this time, the railroads moved into the old river bed to get access to LA’s produce at the source. This was a cash cow for the lucky mill owners, but it became a grim example of the Machine In The Garden, a cautionary tale about extracting so much “value” from productive land, that we destroy it. More on the railroads, in the next and last part; but here’s what that gentle bend of bluffs and wet bottomland looked like by the dawn of the 20th Century:

The Loew family ran and grew the business for 110 years, only finally closing it in 1998 when the Southern Pacific closed the adjacent railyards that were, partly, built to serve it. It sat derelict while the Cornfield site was developed into the park and the re-development of the area began.

The View heartily endorses the Riboli family’s efforts downtown.

The derelict mill-site was bought by the Riboli family, the good people of San Antonio Winery, founded in 1917. They are the last vintner left in the once-vineyard-laced, then once-railroad-laced, bottomland where Jose Chapman founded the wine industry, and set up LA’s first mill.

It’s amazing and heartening that a family food business is investing in a sensitive and imaginative downtown historical redevelopment in downtown LA. This series on milling came about because I was so delighted by the way the architects, Workshop Design Collective out of So. Pasadena, handled the renovations of this complex and I wanted to know more about the old building.

The main feature is supposed to be a great food hall, with mixed office and retail and dining. Unfortunately, of course, the building was to have opened in the spring this year, but that was just when Covid-19 was rearing its coughing head. For now, the building sits in suspended animation, beautiful and empty and waiting, like all of us, for its next phase of life.

NEXT PART: “The Los Angeles Farming and Milling Co.”

The Other Huntington Gardens — Brookgreen, S.C.

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The SFV was put on the map by the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Southern Pacific was put on the map by Collis P. Huntington.

Collis’s nephew and heir, Henry Huntington, who put the Pacific Electric on the map of Southern California, also put Southern California on the map of the art world, with his fabulous Huntington Library, Museum and Gardens in San Marino.

But Collis had another heir: his stepson, who was also his natural son, Archer. (Because Collis’s wife, Arabella, was previously his mistress). When Collis died, much of his fortune, the wealth of his exploitation of California, went to Archer, who used it to create, with his wife Anna, the world’s largest outdoor figural art gallery. (Widow Arabella, on the other hand, went as wife to Henry: in other words, he married his aunt, his dead uncle’s former mistress. Thus Henry became his cousin Archer’s step-father. Oy gevalt, the rich.)

Think of this Long View as a cultural audit of the SPRR, on behalf of the SFV.

Archer was not a railroad tycoon. He was a Spanish scholar of distinction; he translated Cervantes and el Cid and the other Iberian classics. He was a poet of somewhat lesser distinction, and he sponsored a League in the twenties which was meant to purge poetry from the Red Menace (I think he meant Modernism; but sic.)

Archer was also a lover, principally of his wife Anna Hyatt Huntington, the talented New England sculptor, but also of his dog, Hugo. The public has them to thank for turning an abandoned old South Carolina rice plantation into Brookgreen Sculpture Gardens. (They also donated fourteen museums, and deeded 800 acres in Redding to the State of Connecticut for the Collis P. Huntington State Park.)

The rice paddies were fed by the hydrostatic push of fresh water from the Waccamaw River, which also pushes against the salt water heading up Winyah Bay.

Unlike the formal grandeur of Henry’s San Marino estate, Anna’s and especially Archer’s taste was a bit more sentimental, more dramatic, more middle-brow. For instance, Archer sprinkled the grounds with poems inscribed on tablets; they don’t run much farther afield than Whitman or Kipling. Archer contributed a sweet ode of his own, to good old Hugo.

Their humanistic, traditionalist, aspirational garden aesthetic is essentially Art Deco; which also seems to be the core of their taste in sculpture. The Maxfield Parrish gardens set off, and complement, but don’t upstage, the knockout statues.

BELOW: Time and Fates of Man, Manship. NY World’s Fair, 1938 (Fair 1939-40).

The tickets are good for a week. I came back for a second visit to take the River Launch tour of the rice fields, and to explore the grounds more deeply. I spent a half hour puzzling out this macabre, beguiling bronze.

They have fascinating indoor galleries too. One pavilion showcased recent prize winners from their student competitions.

The Old Santa Susana Pass Stagecoach Road

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The View, intrepid and intent upon historical discovery, finally found the damn trailhead at the bottom, tucked away on a side-street in Chatsworth. So let’s hike up and down LA’s first two-lane highway, opened in 1861.

The SPRR tunnel (1873), right, made this road obsolete. The View across, is to the butte I hiked before. The Stagecoach Road eventually winds around there to cross the mountains into Simi Valley.

I think this portion must be the “Devil’s Slide.” It beggars belief that horses and carriages undertook this road, in any state of repair, either to go up or down. But they did, making thousands and thousands of trips.

Climax achieved; now the anti-climax. But as anti-climaxes go, this one’s a doozy. Appreciate now the downhill aspect of the “Devil’s Slide” down into Chatsworth:

But life isn’t all trailheads and climaxes. There is the passing scene, and on this road, it evokes wonder, from the rocks to the mosses to the lichens to the grasses to the oaks and sky.