Once a no-man's-land, the couple square miles separating Beverly Hills
and Los Angeles has become in the 21st century a veritable every-man's-land—the City of West Hollywood.
An 1850 surveyor called the future home of Los Angeles County's newest city "so desolate not even jackrabbits want to live there."
Fast forward to 200[4] and we find the one-time company town of Sherman sits at the rollicking center of Los Angeles night life. It is now Los Angeles' true creative core and is a mecca for progressive-minded and oppressed people from around the world. And, though the city is one of the most densely and diversely populated
sections of the vast Los Angeles megalopolis, still nary a jackrabbit resides there
to this day...
Santa Monica Boulevard and Fairax Avenue in 1900. |
[T]oo many times other historians [and reporters have] conflated
unincorporated West Hollywood and Los Angeles's Hollywood [district] into one
overarching idea of Super-Hollywood, and in the doing had co-opted, even stolen
away, West Hollywood's singular story. This book is a humble attempt to begin
setting that trend aright, but it is only just a beginning. [Here is the story] of how
West Hollywood came to be a world-class entertainment and design center, not
to mention a bastion of progressive politics...
After the United States took California from Mexico in the Mexican-
American War the lands [surrounding and including West Hollywood] were
surveyed by a Maj. Henry Hancock [for the old Spanish land grant holders of
Rancho La Brea.]
However, [a] legal battle left the ranchero broke and eager to
hand over the rancho to Hancock to pay the bills for his consultancy. Hancock
began to make commercial use of the tar fields [la breas in Spanish], building a
refinery in the 1850 to sell tar and asphalt to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The
Hancock family controlled most of the Rancho through the oil boom of the 1880s
and 1890s.
Oil discovered and pumped from the areas of West Hollywood and La
Brea made the Hancocks one of the wealthiest of California families...
George Caralambo, a Turk of Greek descent who later [officially] changed
his name to “Greek George,” was selected by the United States' Camel Corps to
lead "a pack of camels hauling supplies to build the Butterfield Overland Stage
Route from St. Louis" to Los Angeles in 1855. Hancock, who met him as part of
their mutual military service, built a stable and house for Greek George and his
camels [near Kings Rd. and Santa Monica Blvd] on a bet that the [old] stage route
[running there ] could be used as a dromedary mail run.
Up from the ground bubbled the Hancock's wealth in then valuable asphalt and, later, oil. |
The route died without
active support of the military, and Greek George was forced to 'liberate' his
animals, some of which wandered the neighborhood for 30 years after. Greek
George, who was quite a musician and bon vivant, stayed on at the stables [above
the marsh] to care for Hancock's cattle and horses, becoming a naturalized
American citizen in 1867...
Tiburcio Vasquez, a two-time federal prisoner and feared highwayman,
had since 1870 raided and sacked several whole towns, leaving three dead in one.
A $15,000 bounty was placed on his head in 1874 by the state legislature. William
R. Rowland, sheriff of Los Angeles County, plotted long to capture Vasquez [who
was]... holed up in the hills at Kings Road and Santa Monica with Greek George.
Greek George was downtown supposedly seeking information on the sheriffs’
doings...[while]... Vasquez was captured in a shoot-out and promptly arrested...
Greek George took the reward money and moved away...
[In the decades following,] West Hollywood [became] known as Sherman,
a rough and tumble company town that grew up around a railroad yard and car
barn...
Moses Sherman... and his brother-in-law, Eli P. dark, dominated the Los
Angeles street railroad scene for two decades, the last of the 19th and the first of
the 20th centuries. The pair would later partner with Henry Huntington in the
creation of a railroad system that would tie the disparate pieces of the Los
Angeles basin into a whole.
Sherman chose the spot midway between downtown
and the beach for his rail yard and station on the famous "Balloon Route" that carried passengers from downtown to Santa Monica and then to Redondo Beach
and back downtown again.
On the way to the beach in 1902. This shot was taken at the Soldiers’ Home, in what is now the Westwood area of Los Angeles. |
Up around the yards grew a small village of shop
workers, supervisors, and conductors that Sherman named for himself...
The citizens of the area were working-class immigrants, only a few with
families, bringing a different approach to life than did their more temperate
neighbors to the east in Hollywood. These men frequented bars, gambling halls,
and brothels... Later, in the early days of Hollywood, West Hollywood sat at the
center of the primarily Jewish movie industry...
The ruling county government barely noticed Sherman's existence, let
alone that it was [from about 1920] being called West Hollywood, and the lack of
oversight, law enforcement and building codes fostered the Wild West mentality
of the town. It would remain a bohemian outpost well past Hollywood's hey-day,
with speakeasies, gambling haunts, prostitution and massage parlors, bars and
nightclubs, and drug joints supplying their services in an adult urban
environment...
While rampant among the Hollywood stars, little of this seedy adult
activity was in any way visible on the Strip above the tracks. Rather, glamour with
a capital 'G' reigned on the Sunset Strip. As actors and writers continued flocking
to the West Hollywood Hills, their beloved "Strip" would be playground, office,
and shopping destination.
Still, the split personality of the town could be seen by
looking down the hill, to Santa Monica Boulevard, where the rail yards still
functioned and the tracks sang with freight trains and working class dreams...
The Whiskey a Go Go - a cultural institution. |
Two cultural phenomena, rock and roll and television, came to town in a
big way in the 1960s and 1970s, with studios just inside and outside the city
cranking out the dramatic fare and music that filled the nation's radio and the
television airwaves. The cheap rents made the area an important destination for
the aspiring singers/actors/writers trying to make it onto a soap opera or break
into the club scene. During this time, because Los Angeles County sheriffs
deputies didn't harass gays as badly as did Los Angeles police officers, the
unincorporated area of West Hollywood drew gays and lesbians to live there...
Upon gaining city status in 1984, West Hollywood attained its very own
place in the sun as a municipality with an unlikely coalition of renters, seniors,
Jews, and gays... who took control of their civic destinies. The shock waves that
greeted incorporation reached around the world and resonate to this day, with
rent control laws still being debated in the courts, and with gay rights issues
holding sway in the culture wars that waft across the country and the Western
world...
The new "Gay Camelot" titillated the world when twenty gay people chased
five city council seats in 1984, with many asking if gays could run a city. However,
history has a way of asking different questions, and the more pertinent question
seems to be: Has city government improved municipal governance?
The place that started so desolate a jackrabbit might consider better digs,
the way station that once acted as a thoroughfare for trains and actor's careers,
stands at the dawn of the 21st century as one of the most forward-looking and
progressive cities on earth... [Does that answer the question?]
Ryan Gierach’s history of the city, Images of America: West Hollywood,
can be found at most bookstores in and around West Hollywood, or by clicking on the image.
Anyone
wishing a copy inscribed and signed by the author (at no additional charge,
and with 20% of the proceeds going to the Friends of the West Hollywood Library)
can contact Ryan by calling 323) 650-2879 or by E mailing him at
Ryan.G@Journalist.com.
Published by Arcadia Publishing. Text and photos reprinted with the permission of the author.
FROM AMERICA'S LEADING PUBLISHER
OF LOCAL AND REGIONAL HISTORY.
128 PAGES 200 PHOTOS - ORDER Now! $19.99
"For readers with a more localized interest in history . . . Images of America books are an invaluable resource." New
York Times
Printer-friendly
E-mail to friend
