“Picture This!” will be an occasional series featuring (hopefully) interesting and enlightening photographs from the Homestead Museum Collection.
This inaugural post concerns an image of the Pico House hotel, Merced Theater, and Masonic Lodge, taken around 1870 by William M. Godfrey. This detail from a stereoscopic photograph is one of the earliest published views of the hotel and theater.

Detail of a stereoscopic photograph showing the Pico House hotel, Merced Theater, and Masonic Lodge, taken from Fort Moore Hill by William M. Godfrey, ca. 1870. From the Homestead Museum Collection.
The Pico House, at center, was built by Pío Pico (1801-1894), the last governor of Mexican-era California, who sold his land holdings encompassing much of the San Fernando Valley to build this structure. Engaging Ezra F. Kysor, the first professional architect to practice in Los Angeles, Pico sought to build a modern brick structure that would keep the Spanish-era Plaza viable in the face of businesses migrating south on Main and Spring streets. The 33-room hotel, the first three-story structure erected in town, was built between September 1869 and June 1870 and opened to great fanfare. Unfortunately, the Plaza area continued to grow isolated, and the hotel struggled. A severe economic downturn after 1875 led Pico to lose the hotel by 1880. Although it continued to operate as a hotel and boarding house, the structure became rundown and was threatened with demolition. Saved as part of today’s El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, the building has had intermittent, but never completed, restoration and remains empty most of the time, excepting occasional exhibits and functions.
To the right of the Pico House is the Merced Theater, also designed by Kysor. Built by William Abbott and named for his wife, Maria Merced Garciaalso, the theater was completed in December 1870 and began performances in early 1871. It had the distinction of being the tallest structure in Los Angeles, besting its neighbor by four feet because of the design of the façade. The 400-seat auditorium was on the second floor and had a connecting entry from the neighboring hotel. The Abbott family occupied the third floor and the ground level was rented out as commercial space. As was the case with the Pico House, the theater failed to maintain a long presence. By 1876, competition from other venues led to a decline in theater patronage and the Merced closed two years later. The building continued to be used for commercial purposes.
To the right of the Merced Theater is the building that housed Lodge 42 of the Free and Accepted Masons (F & AM), the first Freemasonry lodge in town. Completed in 1858, the structure’s second floor remained lodge headquarters until 1868 when Lodge 42 relocated south to a building built by prominent mason F. P. F. Temple. Over the years, the building was used for commercial purposes as a boarding house and, perhaps, a brothel. After its preservation, the structure was, for some time, used as a masonic museum until earthquake safety issues ended that use. For now, the structure remains empty and awaits retrofitting and, hopefully, a viable future.
Other notable aspects of this photograph include a portion of the Plaza at the far left; several long, one-story adobe houses, most visible on the left side of the photograph; New High Street running along the base of Fort Moore Hill; a modern frame house on the hillside at the far right; and the wooden tanks of the Los Angeles Gas Works, from which pipes crossed under Main Street to the Pico House and its neighbors for lighting and other uses. The number 19 etched into the original negative appears to be an identification number used by the photographer.
About the photographer:
William Moloch Godfrey was born in New York in 1825 and moved with his family to Michigan in the 1840s, working as a dentist and dabbling in photography. In 1850, he took a wagon train to California and tried gold digging. Failing at this, as most did, he bought a dauguerreotype camera from another miner and tried his hand at making a living as a photographer. By 1860, Godfrey settled in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, where he was identified in the census as a painter.
In 1870, he was in San Bernardino as a photographer, but lived for a time in Los Angeles and owned the Sunbeam Gallery. He took many photographs of the wider southern California region, including the earliest known photo of the Workman House. In 1872, Godfrey sold the gallery to Valentine Wolfenstein and had a short-lived partnership with David Flanders. He eventually went back to San Bernardino to practice photography, run a newspaper, and work occasionally as a dentist. By 1880, the stagnant economy seems to have led him to other non-entrepreneurial occupations, notably as a janitor and stagecoach driver. In 1900, at age 74, Godfrey died in San Bernardino leaving a widow and two children.
Views of the Pico House and Plaza area from the hill were many in the 19th-century, but Godfrey’s is among the earliest published.







