Excerpts from "Frenchtown! The Musical": Part 1

I am pleased - thrilled, really - to announce that I will be speaking at LAVA's monthly Sunday Salon on September 24. It's a free event, but space is limited. Get your tickets now!

There isn't really a musical about Frenchtown (unless I decide to write more...) - this just came to me.

(The curtain opens on a stage split between two different locations and two different years.

Stage Right, a marquee reads "Exposition Park, 1870". The scene is a bedroom in the Lachenais house. A Spanish guitar sits on the narrow single bed.

Stage Left, a marquee reads "Calabasas, 1880". The scene is the parlor in the grand Leonis adobe, complete with a piano. The window is wide open.

Serafina Lachenais enters, stage right. She sits on the bed and picks up the guitar.

Marcelina Leonis enters, stage left. She sits at the piano.

Both girls begin to play their instruments.)

Song: "My Daddy is a Monster"

Serafina: They say my daddy is a monster

I know that they are right

When I was eight he killed a man

And ran off into the night

Marcelina: They say my daddy is a monster

I know it must be true

He's greedy and self-serving

And trigger-happy too

Serafina: Some say I was lucky to be adopted

But this is rotten luck

My mom is dead, my dad's a psycho

And I feel so stuck

Marcelina: He hates my big half-brother

Won't let him in the house

Scares everyone who works for him

And gets judge and jury soused

Serafina: Wicked

Marcelina: Brutal

Serafina: Evil

Marcelina: Cruel

Serafina: Scary

Marcelina: Vicious

Serafina: Rotten

Marcelina: Malicious

Serafina: Mom was scared of Dad

Their relationship was grim

Everybody thinks he killed her

And I wouldn't put it past him

Marcelina: Daddy only loves three things

Money, booze, and me

He treats my mother like the help

And only married her for money

Serafina: Murdered Mr. Deleval

Blinded someone with a gunshot

Beat that Tongva man to death

(Spoken) Unfortunately, Daddy's all I've got

Marcelina: Daddy rules the western Valley

Fear's the biggest reason

No matter what the calendar says

(Spoken) In Calabasas, murder is in season

Serafina: Life is tough

Marcelina: It's quite restricting

Serafina: I feel so torn

Marcelina: It's so conflicting

Serafina and Marcelina (together): When your daddy is a monster.

Voice (offstage): Serafina! Serafina, come quickly! Your father's been arrested!

Serafina: Again?! What's he done now?

Voice: He shot the man next door!

Serafina (crying softly, defeated): Daddy. No.

(Serafina exits, stage right. Juan Menendez appears, stage left, and is visible through the open parlor window.)

Juan (through window): Hey, little sister. Are you feeling any better?

Marcelina: Hey, big brother. This headache just won't go away. And now my back hurts.

Juan: You're sweating.

Marcelina: That's odd. I'm freezing.

(Miguel Leonis enters, stage left, behind Juan. He is visible through the parlor window.)

Miguel: How many times do I have to tell you to stay off the damn porch?! (Threatens Juan with a revolver.)

Marcelina: Daddy, no! (Jumps to her feet, gets woozy, and collapses.)

(Curtain falls.)

We're Still Here, Part 3A: The Leonis Adobe Museum

In the old part of Calabasas, there is a surviving remnant of LA's Wild West past.

I don't mean all the cutesy, faux-Western storefronts. I mean the Leonis Adobe Museum.

When he took control of Rancho El Escorpion, Miguel Leonis found a dilapidated, long-abandoned adobe house on the grounds. He and his wife Espiritu restored and expanded the house, making it their home.

In 1962, the house - abandoned and left to rot all over again - was slated to be torn down. Why? To build a parking lot for a proposed supermarket. (Gee, can you tell paving paradise to put up ANOTHER $#@%^&* PARKING LOT is a pet peeve of mine?)

Thankfully, the Cultural Heritage Board made sure it didn't happen. The Leonis Adobe Museum is Los Angeles' Historic-Cultural Monument #1.

Photos of the house before it was restored (for the second time) in the 1960s.

Miguel dreamed of his own empire. To modern Angelenos, this may seem like a humble starter home for such an ambitious man, but it was a much simpler time.

The furnishings in the house, while period-appropriate, aren't original. But since Marcelina Leonis played the piano (and may well have played one like this), I'm including it here.

Proof that the Leonises were on speaking terms at one point. (Yes, the posing looks a bit forced. But it's impossible to say whether this is due to the nature of photography in the Victorian era or due to Miguel being a not-so-nice husband.)

There are mannequins throughout the house in period attire. These two, seen in the kitchen, strongly resemble Miguel and Espiritu.

If you're not looking at a huge (fake) side of beef, are you even in a historic ranch house pantry?

The house's staircase was originally outside, Miguel expanded the house to enclose it (but it's not hard to tell this was once an exterior feature). The picture above the table is of Espiritu in her later years.

I'm sorely tempted to call this style "cowboy Victorian".

Espiritu's red velvet canopy bed was re-created from contemporary accounts. The trunk seen here is the only original item in the house (it was one of a set of three owned by Espiritu).

Miguel added the second-story veranda.

I'm pretty sure every French Basque in the Valley raised sheep at one point. Yes, there are live farm animals at the museum! (Why not...it's Calabasas.)

Rear of the house, snapped from the chicken coops.

This angle on the house shows the expansions better.

The Plummer House, moved here from Hollywood, serves as the museum's visitor center. Fittingly, Espiritu was good friends with Maria Cecilia Plummer.

This is just a taste...I took over 80 pictures of the house and grounds! Whenever you're in Calabasas, check it out for yourself.

The Monster of Calabasas: Michel "Don Miguel" Leonis

Updated to add:

I want our stories told, for better or for worse.

That said, a rather unpleasant character has tried to fight me, in the comments of my own blog, on the subject of Miguel Leonis.

This individual rudely ignored several requests to identify themselves and provide citations for the "facts" they wished to provide. 

If I am incorrect, by all means email me (losfrangeles at gmail dot com). However, I will ask you to identify yourself, identify any credentials you cite, and cite exact sources so I can double-check them myself. 

I'm not stupid.

Michel "Don Miguel" Leonis, date unknown

I’m not going to mince words. Michel Leonis, a six-foot-four-inch, 220-pound French Basque dubbed “Don Miguel” out of fear rather than respect, was a human stain.

No one can say for sure why Leonis left France's Basque region for California. Some sources say that he was a smuggler wanted by both the French AND Spanish authorities. Others say that his penchant for illegal activity back in France shamed his powerful family so much that his father demanded he leave. We may never know the truth, but either way, he was not one of the good guys.

When he arrived in 1854, Leonis worked as a foreman on Rancho El Escorpion in the western San Fernando Valley. Some say that he was illiterate and only spoke Basque; others say he could manage limited amounts of Spanish and English. (His friendships with George Le Mesnager and Joseph Mascarel suggest that he could, at bare minimum, converse in French.) 

Interestingly, Woodland Hills' continuation school was formerly called Miguel Leonis High School (it closed in 2015). But regardless of how educated Don Miguel might have been, within a few years he’d bought out his employer’s half of the rancho.

The other half of the rancho belonged to a Chumash widow named Espiritu Chijulla Menendez. 

You know where this is going, right?

Espíritu Chijulla Leonis

Leonis married Espiritu in 1859, took over her half of the rancho, raised sheep on it…and added to his land holdings many times over through threats, violence, and nuisance lawsuits. He was dubbed the “King of Calabasas”, but he owned or controlled most of the western San Fernando Valley and part of Ventura County. He also had a house and orchard downtown (he may have kept a mistress there) - the Aliso Village apartments now stand on the site. He confided in the few people he was close to that he wanted to build his own empire that could last forever. 

This is the Leonis adobe. Humble home for a man who dreamed of an empire.

The house was old and abandoned when Leonis stumbled upon it one day. He fixed it up, enclosed the back staircase, added the veranda...and never, EVER allowed Juan Menendez, Espiritu's son from her first marriage, inside the house. Instead, Leonis relegated young Juan to the barn.

Leonis had more than 100 employees, including Chumash and Mexican vaqueros whose sole responsibility was to scare off homesteaders who got too close to his property. One dispute resulted in a two-week standoff and culminated in a murder. His own employees were terrified of him. 


At one point, Leonis even tried to force the Garnier brothers, who owned Rancho Los Encinos (modern-day Encino/Sherman Oaks), off of their property. Eugene Garnier testified in court that Leonis' vaqueros had burned their newly planted wheat fields and beaten their employees. He also stated that he was testifying against Leonis only because he was forced to do so. It's not a coincidence that Eugene moved back to France (but we'll get to that when I get to the Garnier brothers).

When intimidation didn’t work, Leonis used the court system. He was a plaintiff in at least thirty property disputes. Just to put that into perspective, fewer than 4,000 people lived in all of LA County - which still included Orange County - in 1860. Leonis managed to sue at least thirty of them. And he wasn’t above bribing judges and juries with food and alcohol.

Marcelina Leonis, date unknown

Leonis did have one Achilles' heel - his daughter Marcelina, born in 1860 and named after Espiritu's aunt. Curiously, in spite of marrying her mother out of convenience, Leonis doted on his daughter and always gave her the best of everything. Marcelina received a better education than either of her parents did, and loved to play the piano. The few available resources on Marcelina state that unlike her father, she adored her mother and her older half-brother. But Marcelina’s life was cut short by smallpox when she was only twenty. For three days after Marcelina’s death, Leonis drank heavily - well, more heavily than usual.

One story states that after losing Marcelina, Leonis attempted to hang himself from a tree behind the adobe, using his horse as a hanging platform. But the horse stubbornly refused to budge. Only when Leonis dismounted did the horse bolt. Leonis was so angry that he allegedly cut off the tree branch from which he'd tried to hang himself.

You’d think that suddenly losing his only child might have prompted Leonis to rethink some of his life choices. But it didn’t.

In September of 1889, Leonis won his first court case since Marcelina’s death. He celebrated his victory in the saloons downtown before heading back to Calabasas. And got himself into what must be the earliest drunk-driving accident in Southern California history.

Somewhere in the Cahuenga Pass, Leonis fell out of his wagon, and its heavy wheels ran right over his face and chest. He was taken to a (coincidentally French-owned) roadhouse on the Valley side of the pass. After three days of agony, the man who had terrorized the western Valley was dead. He was buried at Calvary Cemetery next to Marcelina.

The very next day, Juan finally moved into his mother's house.

You’d think that would be the end of it. But several years earlier, Leonis had hidden the nastiest trick of all up his sleeve.

Leonis married Espiritu for her family’s land, then proceeded to treat her like the help instead of his wife for the next thirty years. He was the third richest person in California when he died. Yet, he left Espiritu a pittance of $5,000, willing the rest of his money and land to his siblings. Adding insult to injury, he referred to Espiritu as his housekeeper, denied that they had ever been married, and left the money with the caveat that she would only get it if she didn’t contest the remainder of the will. 

Espiritu wasn’t well educated, but she wasn’t stupid. And she had suffered enough. She hired the best attorneys in town - Horace Bell and Stephen Mallory White, who had previously represented Miguel in some of his lawsuits.

For five weeks, the case dragged out in court. Witness after witness swore to the court that Leonis and Espiritu either were or weren't married. Espiritu's name was dragged through the mud again and again. One witness even claimed that she had never been married to her first husband and had lived with two other men (an extremely scandalous accusation for the time). Poor Marcelina's headstone was even submitted as evidence. The jury deliberated for less than a day before legally awarding Espiritu the widow’s share of her husband’s estate. 

The Los Angeles Times, which had gleefully covered Espiritu's court case in all of its ugly detail, published a (likely falsified) story of Espiritu marrying an 18-year-old man with some extremely salty commentary I won't repeat here.

Espiritu had to fight for her house in court again and again for the next 15 years (early LA had plenty of shady characters more than willing to swindle a two-time widow out of her own house), but she won her final case in 1906, and died a few months later. Juan and his family inherited the house (take THAT, Miguel). Espiritu is buried at Mission San Fernando (where she was born and educated). Should you wish to pay your respects, do note that she is interred under her first married name, Menendez.

Mere months before he died, Leonis wrote to his nephew, Jean Baptiste Leonis, asking him to come to California and eventually take over his estate. It didn’t quite work out that way, but by the time J.B. died, he’d established an empire of his own - in addition to one of California’s strangest cities. More on that in a future entry.

P.S. The aforementioned troll tried to convince me that Leonis was a good man, alleging that he was kind to children. First of all, there are many documented cases of black-hat individuals being kind to at least one child, so that's not enough to convince me. Second, the troll rudely refused my request to cite a source for this.

Good men DO NOT torch their neighbors' crops.

Good men DO NOT intimidate their neighbors or get their workers to beat up someone else's workers.

Good men DO NOT marry a widow just to gain control of her estate.

And good men most assuredly DO NOT disinherit their own widows, claiming they were never married.

I don't believe Leonis was a truly good person. If you want to convince me otherwise, show me REAL PROOF and give me an AIRTIGHT explanation for how he treated Espiritu - who owned half of Rancho El Escorpion in her own right before Miguel ever heard of Calabasas.

We're Still Here, Part 3: The San Fernando Valley

Continuing my series on surviving places linked to Southern California's forgotten French community, we come to a place that hits close to home.

Because it IS my home. I'm a genuine, authentic Valley girl (hang around me long enough and you just might detect bits of my old accent).

(Well, it was my childhood home, anyway. I've lived in various beach towns continuously since 2001.)

Let's start in Calabasas and work our way east...

Michel Leonis, nicknamed "Don Miguel" out of fear rather than respect, discovered a dilapidated adobe house on the grounds of Rancho El Escorpion (huge naming opportunity missed here: Rancho El Escorpion sounds so much more badass than Calabasas - Spanish for "squashes"). He and his Chumash wife, Espiritu Chijulla, fixed it up (enclosing the rear staircase and adding the balcony), moved in, and lived here until their respective deaths.

The house - long empty and once again severely neglected - was nearly torn down in 1962 for - you guessed it - a supermarket parking lot. Thankfully, it's still with us today.

(I will devote separate entries to Leonis and to the Leonis Adobe Museum.)

Moving east, we find...

Running north-south from Ventura Boulevard to Granada Hills (okay, fine, it's interrupted in a couple of places), Amestoy Avenue was named for another French Basque ranching family - the Amestoys.

(The Amestoys will get their own entry.)

Just a few blocks east of Amestoy Avenue is one of their former homes - Rancho Los Encinos.

Four French and French Basque families - Garnier, Oxarat, Gless, and Amestoy - owned the rancho in turn. The original adobe is on the right. The two-story house on the left was built by the four Garnier brothers to house the rancho's employees, and is said to be a copy of the family home in France.

Although slightly beyond the scope of this entry, but worth noting, is the fact that Eugene Garnier once testified against Michel Leonis in court. Leonis, a brutal and terrifying thug who added to his vast land holdings through harassment and intimidation, burned the Garniers' newly planted wheat field and beat their employees. Eugene stated in court that he was testifying only because he was forced to do so, and later returned to France. His brother Philippe Garnier, bloody but unbowed, went on to build the Garnier Building and lease it to Chinese tenants.

I include this photo as proof that culture and beauty do, in fact, exist in the Valley if you know where to look. The Garnier brothers were legendary for their hospitality - so much so that Pio Pico's brother Andrés used to bring very special guests all the way to Rancho Los Encinos (from what is now downtown) - ON HORSEBACK. For BREAKFAST.

And those very special guests dined in the Garniers' grand salon, which boasted the most striking faux marbre walls in the history of Los Angeles. (I hope someone else takes the time to notice that the plastic food on the table is French in theme - grapes, brie, asparagus, and crusty-looking bread.)

At some point, an incredibly foolish individual elected to plaster over the faux marbre. The adobe was severely damaged in the Northridge earthquake of 1994, but with one silver lining - much of the plaster covering the salon's elaborately painted walls fell off. (Portions of the offending plaster remain. This is a very delicate old house, and that paint is well over 100 years old. Some things are best left well enough alone.)

(All four families merit, and will get, their own entries. Ditto Los Encinos State Historic Park, where the adobe and the ranch hands' quarters are located.)

The Amestoy family - the last French owners of the rancho - held onto much of the land (including these buildings) until 1944. After World War II, Rancho Los Encinos was subdivided into (what else) Encino and (my neck of the woods) Sherman Oaks.

On a personal note, my mother was completely shocked to learn that the Los Encinos adobe was a) still standing, b), continuously French-owned for much of its existence, c) right above Ventura Boulevard (a thoroughfare my family knows pretty well), and d) less than six miles from our old house in Sherman Oaks. She's said that if she had ANY idea, she would have taken me there when I was a child (in addition to Olvera Street, Chinatown, etc.).

Moving further east...

A street in Mission Hills was named for onetime mayor Joseph Mascarel. I suspect he owned land in the area (he owned significant amounts of land in FOUR counties). Today, he is so little-known that whoever made this sign didn't bother to check the spelling.

Heading further east...

Solomon Lazard was both French and Jewish, and was so popular with Angelenos of all ethnicities that he was nicknamed "Don Solomon" and often acted as floor manager for fandangos. He was the first President of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, co-founded the City Water Company (later LADWP) with Prudent Beaudry and Dr. Griffin, founded the City of Paris department store (which he later sold to his cousins, Eugene and Constant Meyer), and was active in the Golden Rule Lodge and the Hebrew Benevolent Society. Today, he's been reduced to a street sign on a cul-de-sac in San Fernando. (There was a different Lazard Street long ago, and Mayor Mascarel lived there until his death. It was renamed Ducommun Street. I'll explain why when I get to Charles Ducommun.)

Heading even further east, we reach our final stop in the furthest reaches of Glendale...

You know who Georges Le Mesnager was. This stone barn was built for his vineyard, located in what is now Deukmejian Wilderness Park. When it was damaged in a fire, his son converted it into a farmhouse - which the family lived in until the 1960s.

The barn has been undergoing a remodel/conversion into an interpretive center.

I knew nothing about any of these places until I began to research LA's forgotten French history - and one of them was just a few miles from my house. Small wonder that most Angelenos have NO idea about Frenchtown.