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What did Victorian Los Angeles look like through the eyes of tourists discovering it for the first time?
A photo album from a trip to Los Angeles in the spring of 1894 shows us just that. The album, which was acquired and digitized by the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum in City of Industry, contains a few dozen cabinet card-sized photographs descriptions written in white ink. There are no names or identifying information, just the nascent city as they saw it, a handful of years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad lines had opened the floodgates to the west.
So, what was the city like in 1894, a year after the Bradbury Building opened downtown and five years before the first car would take to its streets? First, let's backtrack for a minute. In the decade prior, the "boom of the Eighties" had brought hordes of new people to Los Angeles to live and work, and tourism—which had been extremely limited before the mid-1880s—suddenly became an industry of its own. The city's population exploded during those ten years, soaring from 11,183 in 1880 to 50,395 in 1890. During 1887, the peak year of the boom, there were 120,000 visitors to Los Angeles.
Large waves roll through the pier and onto the beach at Long Beach as swimmers face the photographer in 1894. (Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)
The fledgling city was sold into being through real estate and railroad ads, which promised a paradise of health, beauty, and endless potential. After a local Board of Trade was founded in 1883, "page after page of advertising and descriptive matter was sent to eastern magazines, which were read all the world," as Joseph Netz explained in a 1915 Southern California Historical Society article. "This advertising and literature told in glowing colors the salubrity of our glorious climate, climate, climate, the variety of our productions, the fertility of our soil and the immense profits
to be made from the cultivation of Southern California semi-tropical fruits. Of course there were golden opportunities in the virgin soil of Southern California, but the promotors went wild and boosted conditions above the normal and helped to bring on a boom," he explained.
"The fields of green and the homes of flowers and fruits, the balmy air, the brilliant sunshine pouring down its invigorating warmth upon the body and vitalizing the blood, suggested to people the value of the land as a home, and many of them remained, while others returned as tourists the following year or became permanent reisdents of Los Angeles as soon as they could dispose of their eastern holdings," Netz continued.
In 1884, a novel written by an author named Helen Hunt Jackson became a runaway national sensation. Described as "the first novel about Southern California," Ramona was intended as a critique of the treatment of Native Americans under California's Franciscan Missions and Mexican rancho system, but the book also offered a sentimentalized, romantic view of California's Spanish past that would come to be defining. Rather than sparking indignation, "the novel inspired a myth that has indelibly marked the California landscape," as one literary historian explained.
"Instead of writing their congressmen, readers dreamed of sheep shearing and three-day fiestas. And then they booked train tickets west to see it for themselves," reports the L.A. Times. The Ramona myth was written and it soon painted the region in golden light, remaining "one of the essential elements by which Southern California identified itself" into the 1930s, according to historian Kevin Starr. Sites associated, both "mythically and factually," with California's Spanish and Mexican pasts became tourist attractions.
A group of people stand in front of a Los Angeles & Pasadena Railway Company parlor car at the Altadena station in 1894. The parlor car was designed exclusively for scenic excursions to Pasadena and Altadena. (Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)
By the 1890s, affluent easterners "began abandoning their European tours to see the wonders of the Far West," a journey that, although still cumbersome and lengthy, was newly viable via the transcontinental rail lines.
"It's a long trip by train. It would be several days from the midwest or East Coast. You had to have some money to do that kind of thing," Homestead Museum director Paul R. Spitzzeri said, speculating on the origins of the photo album's unnamed family who traveled here in 1894. "I can't say for sure that they weren't from California, but a lot of these tourists did come from back east."
The Los Angeles that this family arrived into was both beginning and end: the end of an epic journey and the end of the continent; the beginning of a city and a halcyon future, free from the confines of written history. Even their means of capturing it was new. According to Spitzzeri, the "first Kodak personal camera wasn't released until about 1890 or '91," and the technology was still uncommon and expensive. Before 1890, all souvenir photos would have had to have been purchased from professionals, meaning they were fixed images, stripped of the relationship of discovery between the viewer and the landscape they were confronting. The advent of personal photography changed all that.
Unpaved 2nd Street looking east from Hill Street in 1894. Utility poles and streetcar tracks face a mix of residential and commercial buildings. People relax on wide verandas in the Queen Anne Revival building on the northeast corner across from B. Sens & Son, merchant tailors, who advertise their "Entrance on Broadway." Pedestrians, deliveries and horse and buggy traffic make for a busy street. (Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)
The possession of a personal camera also tells us about the class of these tourists. According to Spitzzeri, "you probably had to be pretty well off [to have one]. And just looking at the clothing and the people in the picture, it looks to me like they were definitely middle or upper middle class people, or higher."
In 1894, depression was rippling across the country but it wouldn't—or hadn't yet—touched this elegantly-clad family. And so they saw the new city. A lot of the sights depicted in their pictures, like Mission San Gabriel and the Plaza church, "would have been typical destinations," according to Spitzzeri. "Some of them were the tourist attractions you'd go to, whether it's the mission or one of the new parks in town, and some of them were sort of 'exotic,' like the Mexican/Spanish elements of L.A., or Chinatown," he said.
The family was also drawn to the allure of what Joan Didion once called California's "talismanic fruit," and visited the local citrus orchards. "That was a very popular thing to do at the time, take a trip through the orange groves of the area," Spitzzeri explained.
The Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum is located at 15415 East Don Julian Road in City of Industry. Admission is free for public tours and most special events. (626) 968-8492
