Our Names Are On The Street Grid, For Crying Out Loud

 After 7.5 years of mapping about 500 Forgotten French LA sites, I think I have a pretty good idea of what was located where.

Most of what we had has been lost over the years. As a result, most people have NO idea about the city's French history. Out of sight, out of mind. But we did not, in fact, vanish "without a trace" as another historian has claimed. There's plenty of evidence if you know where to look.

Frenchtown is long gone - lost to redevelopment by about 1940 (except for the original Taix restaurant, which remained until eminent domain took it away in 1964). The El Aliso/Sainsevain Brothers vineyard was buried by the Civic Center, Little Tokyo, and the north end of the Arts District. The 101 Freeway wiped out the Jennette Block and half of the Garnier Building. Ducommun Yard is now a bus parking lot. Many, many properties became parking lots.

What we do still have, though, are French street names. 

It's unusual for street names to change. We did lose a few, but we still have most of our French street names.

Let's take a ride.

Plaza/Union Station

Chinatown

Civic Center

Boyle Heights

The Valley

Griffith Park area

The Hollywoods

(Normandie, one of the longest streets in LA County, runs through Koreatown and South LA, but it's included here because it begins in Hollywood. Also, the street may have gotten its name due to Mayor Joseph Mascarel, a retired sea captain who owned a farm in Hollywood.)

The Westside

Koreatown

Downtown

Beaudry Avenue and Victor Street. Not pictured because I can never find anywhere to park and I know better than to take a picture while driving. Also, honesty compels me to admit I'm not sure whether I should call this area "downtown" or refer to the older name of Temple-Beaudry (since Temple-Beaudry was razed for the 10).

Mid-City

Nadeau Drive. Not pictured because I'm never in Mid-City.

Mid-Wilshire

Masselin Avenue. Not pictured because I haven't been to Mid-Wilshire in years.

South Los Angeles

(To clarify: these are pre-1946 street signs from my personal collection. Nadeau Street is in South LA. Leonis Street no longer exists. If you want an antique LA street sign, hit up VintageStreetSigns on Etsy.)

Whittier

City of Industry

Not pictured: Amar Road. 

Vernon

Commerce

San Pedro

Lost to renaming:

Dupuy Street in Temple City ("too hard to pronounce", allegedly...come on, it's "doo-pwee"). It became Primrose Avenue, but there is still a short residential cul-de-sac called Dupuy Circle.

Sentous Street downtown. The Sentous tract was redeveloped into (what else...) a parking lot for the Convention Center, and Sentous Street was renamed LA Live Way.

Henriot Street in Cypress Park. The name changed to Dayton Street, or Dayton Avenue, in 1896. Dayton later changed to North Figueroa Street.

Lost to redevelopment: 

Leonis Street downtown - not the same as the Leonis Street in Commerce or Leonis Boulevard in Vernon. Miguel Leonis named the street during his lifetime. Commerce and Vernon would not exist for many years.

Prudent Street, lost sometime between 1888 and 1894 due to redevelopment east of Alameda Street.

Marchesseault Street just below Olvera Street, which was likely obliterated because it ran into the Vice District. But it's coming back (sort of)! 

The Most Trusted Citizen in 1850s LA was a Jewish Frenchman

Don Solomon Lazard

Imagine, for a moment, that it's the 1850s and you've just arrived in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles has only been part of the United States for a few years (and some would argue it's part of the US in name only). Theft and murder are common. There are no banks (yet). You're carrying a few pieces of jewelry and just enough money to rent a room and start a small business. The ship to San Pedro and the long ride into town weren't cheap, and you can't afford to get robbed.

Who can you trust?

If you asked law-abiding locals who they would trust with cash and valuables, the answer would probably be "Don Solomon".

Solomon Lazard was from Lorraine. After stints in New Orleans and San Francisco working for his cousins' business, Lazard Frères (which was a dry goods company at the time), he decided to open his own dry goods business in San Diego. Unfortunately, sleepy little San Diego was too small of a town to support even a modest shop. Following the advice of a well-traveled sailor, Lazard decided to move his store to Los Angeles.

By 1853, Lazard and his cousin Maurice Kremer had set up shop in Mellus' Row, near the western corner of Los Angeles and Aliso Streets. Aliso Street was a very active business district in the 1850s, and the two cousins also benefitted from residents of San Gabriel, El Monte, and San Bernardino taking Aliso Street into town.

Soon enough, Lazard was elected to the City Council. He was a Third Lieutenant in the Los Angeles Guards (a volunteer militia - Los Angeles didn't have a military base yet). Lazard served on the Committee on Police, Committee on Streets, Committee on Lands, the Library Association, and the Chamber of Commerce. In 1856, he served on the Grand Jury. Two years later, he was appointed to supervise the local election.

Lazard was active in the Hebrew Benevolent Society, heading the Society's Committee on Charity and eventually serving as its President. (The Hebrew Benevolent Society is now known as Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles.) When a deadly smallpox outbreak swept through Los Angeles in 1863 - disproportionately affecting Mexican and Native American Angelenos - the Committee on Charity, under Lazard's leadership, donated $150 (about $2900 today) and collected additional funds to help care for indigent patients.

Early LA didn't really have banks. The town was too lawless to appeal to most bankers, even when business was booming. But locals needed safe places to store money and valuables.

Lazard and Kremer were merchants, not bankers. But they had spotless reputations and a large safe. It didn't take long for their customers to ask if they could leave their gold and silver with Lazard and Kremer for safekeeping. Lazard later partnered with Timothy Wolfskill in a general store. A few years later, Solomon's brother Abraham came to Los Angeles and joined the family business.

Harris Newmark relates a story about Lazard's professional ethics: Austrian immigrant Mathias "Mateo" Sabichi had left $30,000 with Lazard. No one had heard from Sabichi in so long that Lazard's employees thought he would never come for it. But Sabichi eventually returned to town, and upon presenting the certificate of deposit, was able to claim every cent.

It's hardly surprising that Lazard was known as "Don Solomon". He was such a popular local figure that he often floor-managed balls and fandangos and served as pallbearer for at least one local industrialist's funeral.

Towards the end of 1860, Lazard was arrested in his native France. He had returned home to visit his mother, and, as French law dictated, had registered with the local police. Young French men were legally required to complete a term of military service, and Lazard had left home at age seventeen without having done so. In spite of the fact that he was now a U.S. citizen, Lazard was court-martialed and sentenced to a stint in prison.

Lazard was in luck, however: the newly-appointed American minister to France, Charles J. Faulkner, worked to secure his release, and Emperor Napoleon III intervened. (Ironically, Faulkner - a Southerner who was arrested in early 1861 for trying to secure weapons for the Confederacy - was the author of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.) Lazard did have to pay a fine, but he was able to return to Los Angeles in early 1861.

A street in the heart of Frenchtown was named Lazard Street. It was later changed to Ducommun Street (Ducommun Yard, home base for Ducommun Industries, was bordered by the street on one side - the site is now a Little Tokyo bus depot). A different Lazard Street exists today - it's a short residential cul-de-sac in San Fernando. (Side note: I was pleasantly surprised to see Cinderella Ranch houses on Lazard Street. I am obsessed with them.) Mayor Joseph Mascarel lived at 99 Lazard Street (the old one downtown) during the last years of his life.

Lazard Street sign in San Fernando

As for Lazard himself, home was 657 Westlake Avenue in Echo Park. He and his wife Caroline (née Newmark; cousin of Harris Newmark) had three daughters and three sons.

Lazard's store - which sold French, English, and American-made dry goods, boots, shoes, clothing, and groceries (boasting in an 1852 newspaper advertisement that they would always sell goods at the lowest market prices for cash and pay the highest price for gold dust) - prospered to the point of becoming LA's earliest department store. City of Paris was a fixture of downtown Los Angeles and the city's French community for years.

As time marched on, LA got bigger, and water management got to be a bigger problem. Marchesseault and Sainsevain weren't successful, but the Los Angeles City Water Company - founded by Prudent Beaudry, Solomon Lazard, and Dr. John S. Griffin - prevailed. Although Beaudry is known for his work as a developer and his successful efforts to bring water to his hilltop properties, he didn't helm the City Water Company. It was Solomon Lazard who held the office of President. When the Company's 30-year lease expired, the city bought the City Water Company - now the Department of Water and Power - for $2 million. (That's about $60 million today.) The water contract specified, among other points, that the Company would replace all the wooden pipes with twelve miles of iron pipes, erect an ornamental fountain in the Plaza (replacing the ugly old reservoir tank that stood on the site), place a fire hydrant at each intersection, and provide water free of charge to public schools, city hospitals, and jails.

Don Solomon, described as an "old pioneer" when he passed away in 1916 at the ripe old age of 89, was survived by his wife and four of their six children. He is buried at Home of Peace Memorial Park in East Los Angeles.

As for his extended family's dry-goods firm, Lazard Frères got into banking after Solomon left. The company is now a publicly-traded investment bank known simply as Lazard (NYSE: LAZ). Some sources (including my copy of Le Guide Francais) credit Solomon with founding Lazard Frères; however, Lazard states that their Los Angeles branch didn't open until 2003. Oddly, a 1987 Los Angeles Times article points to a planned LA office opening soon, claiming it would be the firm's first office in California since the San Francisco branch closed in 1906.

(Edited to add: I originally planned to write about J.B. Leonis this week. In light of the fact that 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll was brutally murdered in her apartment in Paris recently, I put J.B. on the back burner. LA's French community was not a monoculture, and this Franco-American blogger values the Lazards, Kremers, Meyers, Loebs etc. just as much as the Beaudrys, Pellissiers, Brousseaus, Mesmers, etc. Although I am not Jewish, I am from a heavily Jewish neighborhood, and bigotry of any kind really. pisses. me. off.

Rant over. I'm going to bed.)

Joseph Mascarel and the Lazard Street Poltergeist

Despite his gruff, no-nonsense demeanor, former Mayor Joseph Mascarel was not immune to odd occurrences. The September 6, 1889 edition of the Los Angeles Daily Herald details a bizarre three-night incident at the Mascarel residence. At that point, the former mayor lived at 99 Lazard Street (incidentally, Lazard Street was named after another prosperous French businessman - Solomon Lazard, who we will meet again later).

One night around 9pm, after Mascarel and his common-law second wife, Maria, had gone to bed, three loud raps were heard on the rear door of their house. He later described it as sounding like the back door had been slammed violently three times in rapid succession. However, the back door, and the screen door in front of it, were closed and locked.

Mascarel called out "Who is there?" (the article didn't specify whether he spoke in French or Spanish) and checked the back porch. Finding no one there (and it was a brightly moonlit night), he went back to bed. The raps promptly repeated - this time louder and more distinct, and the raps continued for longer. The last rap rattled the windows and woke everyone in the house. Again, no one was on the back porch.

Mascarel tried leaving the inside back door open, hoping to catch the culprit. Ten to fifteen minutes later, the rapping began again. This time Mascarel stepped onto the back porch before the rapping ended - and again, no one was there.

The following morning, Maria and the couple's children insisted the strange noises must have been the work of spirits, intending to warn him or deliver a message. Mascarel had never encountered a ghost in his 73 years on Earth and wasn't about to start believing in them.

That night, the mysterious rapping noises resumed. This time they were loud enough to wake several neighbors - some of whom went inside the house to see for themselves. Nothing happened when anyone stood close to the door, but as soon as the coast was clear, the loud banging resumed.

The following day, Mascarel told this strange story to an acquaintance on the police force. (One of his daughters from his first marriage just so happened to be the wife of a police officer.) Two officers were dispatched to watch the house that night.

Meanwhile, some members of Mascarel's family insisted he consult a medium (which he was certainly not going to do). However, a neighbor took it upon herself to do so. The medium reported that the elderly former mayor could be near the end of his life, and that he should write his will as soon as possible. (Given what we know about Mascarel's unconventional domestic situation and his adult children's nasty squabbles over his large estate, I think it's safe to say that psychic was paid off.) Mascarel declined to speak with her directly.

That night, with two LAPD officers hiding in the bushes behind the house, the rapping began again. The officers ran for the porch, and a tall man dressed in black with white whiskers made a run for it. They nearly caught the man, who cursed and shouted something in French before escaping. The strange raps never happened again.

The next day, the "ghost" was all anyone in the neighborhood could talk about. Many neighbors speculated that it had all been a ruse by Mascarel's children to frighten him into changing his will (why am I not surprised?).

I wouldn't be surprised if it was also intended to scare him into finally legally marrying Maria (Mascarel's first wife, Serilda, had died in 1887).

Unfortunately, the tough, 73-year-old ex-mayor proved impossible to scare.