Municipal electric railways helped transform the state’s two leading cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, into modern metropolises in the decades preceding and following 1900. Though San Francisco served as the Pacific West’s financial powerhouse and leading city, Los Angeles made great strides as an urban center, driving much of the Southland’s robust growth.
The home of the world’s first cable car system, late nineteenth-century San Francisco blazed the path toward modernization for cities in the Far West. Andrew S. Hallidie, a rope wire maker in San Francisco, invented the electricity-powered light rail system in 1873. Cable cars were so called because they were pulled up and down steel rails by underground wire cables. The first such rail line ran on Clay Street. The system was adopted throughout much of the developed world at that time until the invention of the overhead trolley in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. Thereafter, San Francisco installed its own trolley system while retaining a scaled-down version of its old cable car network that is still in operation to the delight of its citizenry and tourists alike.
Francis Marion “Borax” Smith provided the entrepreneurial drive and capital, from his mining enterprise, to build interurban street rail lines for the East Bay area. The so-called Key System resulted. Thought by some to resemble a skeleton key shape, the mass transit system founded in 1903 was originally designated the San Francisco, Oakland & San Jose Railway. Smith’s primary aim was to sell East Bay real estate, and the best way to do that was to provide convenient rail access into San Francisco from outlying communities, including Berkeley and Piedmont, which formed the loops of the key. Ferry ships constituted the “teeth” of the key; these bay-crossing vessels transported passengers from a 17,000-foot-long pier in Oakland to San Francisco.
Southern California was equally blessed with the entrepreneurial prowess necessary to develop a light rail transit system - one of several components (the others including the already discussed citrus industry and oil drilling) essential to the region’s economic growth. Henry E. Huntington, nephew of Collis P. Huntington, had such talent.
Having no son of his own, Collis groomed Henry for leadership of the Southern Pacific’s railroad empire. Though serving as vice president of the corporation, Henry’s presidential prospects were dashed when in 1900 Edward H. Harriman, then president of the Union Pacific, gained control of the Southern Pacific as well. The resulting blocked promotion benefited southern California, for thereafter Henry invested his fortune and abilities in developing a trolley system that would eventually serve much of the Los Angeles Basin. Like “Borax” Smith, Huntington was keenly interested in selling suburban real estate and to do so he had to provide accessible transit into and out of central Los Angeles. Consequently, Huntington founded the Pacific Electric Railway Company (PE). The Los Angeles-based PE interurban rail system, featuring the signature “Red Cars,” embraced 42 surrounding cities.
In addition to rails and real estate, Henry Huntington spurred Southland economic growth through his venture into electric power generation and distribution. On his uncle Collis’s advice, in 1902 Huntington and a group of investors incorporated the Pacific Light and Power Company (PL&P). The company was formed to supply electricity to the trolley system and provide power to segments of Los Angeles County. PL&P’s major project was the building of a hydroelectric power station on the Kern River in the Sierra Nevada range. Construction was slowed by legal wrangling between PL&P and two competing water firms, Miller & Lux and the Kern River Land Company. A costly settlement cleared the path for completion of a power-generation station and a concrete canal conveying river water to the hydroelectric plant. In 1905 PL&P began supplying parts of Los Angeles with electricity.
With a booming economy for most of the two decades following 1868, southern California’s population grew rapidly, largely through the arrival of newcomers. In addition to those looking for affordable land and other economic opportunities, many came for the climate. Sunset magazine acknowledged that southern California had no gold but “eastern prospectors discovered an inexhaustible supply of twenty-two carat climate.” The climate was especially valuable, said the many advertisers and publicists, because of its supposed health benefits. Uprooting herself from New England, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an internationally known feminist and health-seeker, settled in Pasadena, where she enjoyed “heavenly” days that she contrasted with the East Coast’s “sickly winters.” Journalist Charles Nordhoff (see Chapter 6, Pacific Profile) wrote that Santa Barbara, San Diego, and San Bernardino had especially healthful climates. “In each of these places I have met men and women who have been restored to health and strength by residence there. . . .” By 1900 medical practitioners had disputed many of the sweeping claims that had brought thousands of health-seekers into southern California. Still, the health myth - symbolized by depictions of oranges on the doors of rail cars - had taken on a life of its own that would extend well into the twentieth century.
In addition to climate and health, some boosters stressed the richness of the region’s Hispanic culture. Charles Fletcher Lummis, for example, was variously an influential Los
Angeles Times reporter, poet, Indian advocate, amateur anthropologist, and flamboyant magazine editor, who frequently dressed in southwestern garb. He enticed many out-ofstate readers with his tales of the Franciscan missions and the glories of Spain’s legacy in the Southland. A Harvard dropout in his senior year, Lummis walked from Ohio to California, via a route that took him 3,500 miles, arriving in Los Angeles in 1885. A love of the Southwest and all things Spanish and Indian resulted from his trek. Lummis himself built his stone-walled, hybrid mission-Indian pueblo-styled home, named El Alisal (now the headquarters of the Historical Society of Southern California) on the west bank of the Arroyo Seco in Highland Park. Some historians credit him for launching the Spanish mission revival/preservationist movement in Los Angeles and spreading it to Santa Barbara in the early 1900s. Lummis claimed that the Ramona myth alone, drawn from Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona (1884) and romanticizing an unhurried Hispanic lifestyle in southern California in the 1850s, netted the region $50 million from tourism.
Their imaginations aroused, Americans took advantage of the rate war between the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads and took the train to southern California. For a brief period in 1885, the price of a ticket from Kansas City to Los Angeles dropped to $1. Such a bargain provided an additional incentive, if any were needed, to get on board.
Available land, advertising, and low railroad fares touched off real-estate booms in southern parts of the state. Land sales there had shown an appreciable increase going back to the 1860s, when ranching declined due largely to prolonged drought. The downturn in ranching resulted in huge tracts of former grazing areas being put on the market for eventual subdivision into town sites, farms, and home lots. The combination of modest-priced land parcels, effective promotion, and affordable rail tickets sparked the real-estate boom of the 1880s, which marked the highpoint of Southland economic development in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Most of the region’s development occurred in Los Angeles and San Diego. Los Angeles’ growth peaked in 1887, a year when tens of thousands of mostly white tourists and immigrants arrived. The city’s population was estimated to have increased from 11,000 in 1880 to 80,000 by 1887 (though official records put the latter figure in the 50,000s). The 1887 boom attained its height during the months of June, July, and August, when some $38 million in real-estate transactions occurred. In San Diego the boom began with the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1885. Electric lighting was installed the following year, and the first electric streetcar line began operations in 1887. The city’s population leapt from 2,637 in 1880 to 30,000 in 1887, thereafter trailing off and not surpassing the latter figure until 1910. John D. Spreckels, sugar refiner and steamship magnate as well as a son of Claus Spreckels, developed much of the city, including high-end Coronado properties. Built largely by Chinese immigrants and sited at the edge of the Pacific, the palatial Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888. The resort attests to the robust economy and rising stature of both San Diego and southern California in the late nineteenth century.
San Diego’s real-estate boom extended south of the border into Mexico in the 1880s. A flurry of construction, including road building, took place in Tijuana, whose hot springs were touted as being among the best anywhere. Farther south down the Baja peninsula an 18,000,000 acre tract of land owned by the International Company of Mexico was subdivided into parcels for homes and farms. Los Angeles and San Diego newspapers advertised
The opportunities awaiting the “man of small means.” In the Mexican state of Sinaloa a cooperative colony known as Credit Foncier attracted a number of Southlanders. The southern California boom mentality even reached to Mexico City, where land subdivisions began taking place. Greater California’s influence in Mexico and especially Baja, through real-estate transactions and tourism, has increased fairly steadily ever since the late 1800s.
World History
