Picture This! is an occasional series featuring (hopefully) interesting and enlightening photographs from the Homestead Museum Collection.
This past weekend, the Homestead hosted its biennial Victorian Fair, during which approximately 3,500 people visited the museum over two days. About a third of those people visited the Workman House to see exhibits of Victorian-era artifacts, including rare photographs of the Los Angeles region like the one featured in this entry.
Alexander C. Varela, "No. 48, View of Los Angeles, Cal.," circa 1878. From the Homestead Museum Collection.
Taken around 1878, this photograph was taken from the east side of Main Street near 2nd Street and may well have been from the top of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral. Of the many notable and interesting details, a few are highlighted here.
City Growth
The growth of the town from its historic Spanish- and Mexican-era roots at the Plaza (out of view at the top) to the south (where the photographer stood) is shown in the photo. In this “newer” part of town, the structures all appear to be wood frame or brick, whereas in the “older” section, most of the buildings were made of adobe. Did the photographer wish to show “progress” and keep the “old” pueblo hidden by shooting from where he did?
The southward expansion of the city is evident when looking at First Street, a small portion of which is to the left of the thick stand of trees in the photo. The majority of the buildings toward the northern portion of the street appear to be for commercial use, whereas the units toward the south seem to be of mixed (commercial and residential) uses. Meanwhile, new houses of wood frame with “premium view lots” of the growing community are perched atop Fort Moore and adjacent hills in the distance.
Buildings
At the upper left corner is Los Angeles High School, completed in 1872 on Fort Moore Hill and next to the old city cemetery. Having a high school was obviously a great source of community pride; the structure’s placement in full view of much of the town was hardly an accident.
The white clock tower on the upper right is the Court House, which also contained city and county administrative offices. The building was erected by Jonathan Temple (1796-1866) in 1859, the second American or European to live in Los Angeles, as a commercial market house, similar in concept and design to Faneuil Hall in Boston. The Market House, as it was known, also featured the first theater in Los Angeles, where musical performances, plays, and readings were held. Because the local economy was in the doldrums, however, the commercial aspect languished until the city and county leased the building for the courts and administrative offices. The structure was used this way until a new city hall and court house were built in the 1880s. The Market House was razed the following decade.
To the right of the Court House were four structures known collectively as the Temple Block. The first building was commissioned by Jonathan Temple in 1857. After his death, Temple’s half-brother, Francis P. F., purchased the parcel and added three structures between 1868 and 1871 as Los Angeles entered its first significant growth boom. In the last addition, which faced the intersection of Main, Spring, and Temple Streets, F. P. F. Temple housed the private bank he owned with his father-in-law, William Workman. The Temple Block stood until 1925, when it was bulldozed for the construction of today’s City Hall.
About the Photographer
Alexander C. Varela worked for a very short time in Los Angeles but took beautifully clear and well-composed images. Varela was born in Spain in 1839 and emigrated to the United States at age eighteen. He married Catherine Margaret Sousa, older sister of John Philip Sousa, and was a clerk in Washington, D. C., for the Department of the Interior before pursuing the highly-competitive and difficult career of photography. His stay in Los Angeles seems to have been toward the last few years of the 1870s. (The 1880 census shows that he was living and working in San Jose in northern California.) Later, however, he returned to government service in Washington and died there in 1915.
Varela’s photographic career may have been short-lived, especially in Los Angeles, but his view of downtown is quite interesting, showing a community in transition from a small, isolated town to a growing city and hub of the American Southwest.
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