Retailing in Old LA: Dripping Tar, Imaginary Coins, Whiskey, and Horse Blankets

Stores in 1850s Los Angeles were small, half-lighted from the crookedness of the town’s street plan, with a Colt’s revolver under the sales counter against the town’s terrible violence. When night fell, stores were shuttered against theft and riot with stout panels of cast iron. Shopping in old Los Angeles was not easy, pleasant, or cheap.

Laura Eversten King, writing in 1900, described the town’s shopping district as “two or three streets whose business centered in a few tiendas, or stores, decorated with strings of chilis or jerked beef. The one window of each tienda was barred with iron, the tiendero sitting in the doorway to protect his wares, or to watch for customers. Sidewalks were unknown. Pedestrians marched single file in the middle of the street, in winter to enjoy the sunshine, in summer to escape the trickling tears of brea [tar] which, dropping from the roofs, branded their linen or clogged their footsteps.”

Tar, mostly from seeps west of the plaza, provided weatherproofing over the clay and reed wattle that made up the roofs of Los Angeles. Only the plaza church and the town jail had the tile roof that would become an icon of Southern California in the 20th century. (Split wood shingles arrived in the 1860s.)

Post-colonial Los Angeles barely reached one story along streets that would remain unpaved for another thirty years. There were, wrote H. D. Barrows, only three or four two-story buildings. The town’s flat-roofed, rectangular structures clung to the adobe soil from which they were made. They looked, said one unimpressed observer “like so many brick kilns ready for the burning.”

“The old pueblo was homely almost to ugliness,” wrote historian James Guinn. “The clay-colored fronts of the houses that marked the lines of the irregular streets were gloomy and uninviting. There was no glass in the windows; no lawns in front; no sidewalks, and no shade trees.” There was almost no lighting after dark, except for the few shop owners who hung a lantern by their door until 8:00 p.m., the usual closing time.

Daytime business was necessarily conducted half inside and half outside the doorways of these cramped, dim establishments (that doubled as living quarters for the shop owner or his assistant). Indoor lighting would have been a brace or two of tallow candles or a lamp burning refined turpentine. Window glass was such a novelty that the Morris and Brothers clothing store celebrated the installation of its show window in a lengthy advertisement in the Los Angeles Star in 1857. The extravagant “crystal show case” included, oddly, a railroad train etched in the glass.

Among the merchants of Los Angeles in the 1850s were names that would shape the city’s future: the Hellman brothers, Benjamin Wilson, John Temple, Abel Stearns, Harris Newmark, Francis and Henry Mellus, brothers Juan and Mateo Lanfranco, Orzo. W. Childs, Charles Ducommon, John Downey, and William Workman. With few exceptions, most of these businessmen sold general merchandise. General, in Laura Eversten King’s recollection, “meant anything from a plow to a box of sardines, or from a needle to an anchor. Some merchants sold sugar and silks, others brogans and barrels of flour.”

Charles Ducommon, a watchmaker who had walked to Los Angeles from Arkansas, sold “the best goods, although at enormous prices,” according to King. Ducommun's first store was, according to memoirist Harris Newmark, “about 16 by 30 feet in size, but it contained an astonishing assortment of merchandise, such as hardware, stationery and jewelry.

Wheeler and Johnson, having set up shop in part of the large building on the plaza that had been Abel Stearns’ palacio, advised customers that they had for sale:

To which James Guinn added, “When we recall the fact that all of this vast assortment was stored in one room and sold over the same counter we must admire the dexterity of the salesman who could keep bacon and lard from mixing with the silks and satins, or the paints and oils from leaving their impress on the broadcloths and velvets.” The sale might also have included a glass of beer or a shot of raw whiskey. John Schumacher, like many other merchants, combined a retail business and a bar in his one-room store.

Harris Newmark, who had come to Los Angeles in 1853, lived in the back of this brother’s general store and covered himself on cold nights with blankets taken from stock, which he refolded and put back on the shelves each morning. When it grew very cold, he piled on five or six blankets. “Common horse blankets,” Newmark complained 60 years later, “and thin.”

General stores were the norm, but some specialty businesses also sought customers. Workman made saddles. Childs began as a tin smith who became a wholesale grocer by 1857 and a hardware dealer by 1861. Brothers Herman and Isaias Hellman sold books, stationary, and tobacco along with cutlery, candy, and toys. John Downey was a druggist (and became California’s governor).”

The quantity of the goods sold in Los Angeles was erratic and depended on shipments from the eastern states that went around tip of South America to California, often taking more than three or four months. Los Angeles was at the extreme edge of American expansion in the 1850s, further away in terms of contact with the wider world than even San Francisco. Nothing of significance was made here. Everything the shops of old Los Angeles sold, except baking flour and grape alcohol (called aguardiente) came from somewhere else.

Steamships arrived about twice a month at San Pedro, where cargo had to be transferred to barges and off loaded at Phineas Banning’s landing to be hauled to Los Angeles, 27 miles away, by Banning’s teamsters. Transportation and handling ($20-25 a ton from San Francisco to San Pedro; another $20 a ton from San Pedro to Los Angeles) tripled wholesale prices. Retailers added their own markup. At a time when common laborers in Los Angeles made between one and two dollars a day, John Goller, the city’s leading blacksmith, charged $16 to shoe a horse.

Guinn, addressing the Historical Society of Southern California in 1898, explained how an odd form of arbitrage complicated retail sales in the 1850s:

Emile Bordenave at the Louisiana Coffee Saloon in 1860 offered diners a “bit a plate” deal. Better quality saloons were considered “two bit” houses.

The accumulating dimes and quarters in commercial Los Angeles were themselves a problem. There was no bank, although (noted Newmark), John Downey and one or two larger retailers had some kind of a safe. Shopkeepers hoarded their coins in deep, narrow buckskin bags, hiding it behind the merchandise on store shelves until a steamer could carry the cash for deposit in a San Francisco bank. Or the cash could be turned into vouchers that were negotiable as a kind of informal currency.

Los Angeles had a minor gold rush of its own in 1855 when streams in the canyons of the San Gabriel Mountains were first prospected. Miners from the San Gabriels paid for goods in gold in Los Angeles and, noted Laura Eversten King, one of the odder sights was the shop kept by Abel Stearns “wherein common candy jars filled with gold, from the finest dust to chispas or nuggets, could be seen from the street adorning the shelves.”

The business of buying and selling in Los Angeles was risky in the economic drought that followed the local gold rush. The despondent owner of the failing Los Angeles Star wrote:

And when business was slow, businessmen occupied their time as best they could. According to Newmark:

Alternately sleepy and violent, Los Angeles in the 1850s made do with the rough materials – mud and tar, whiskey and beer, cow hides and bonnets – from which the city took its form, its pleasures, and its habits of buying and selling.