All About the Amars

Le Guide Français claims that Edouard Amar's name "was once synonymous with San Pedro". I suspect this is a slight exaggeration, although I can confirm that he played a significant role in its history.

Like so many other French immigrants in Southern California, Edouard was a sheep rancher, raising tens of thousands of sheep on Rancho Alamitos while building some of San Pedro's earliest bungalows and developing Pacific Avenue's commercial district. In fact, a residential street in northeastern San Pedro still bears the name Amar Street and the San Pedro News Pilot dubbed him "the Father of Pacific Street".

Amar was well-liked; he was the Grand Marshal of the annual Bastille Day celebration in 1889, the one hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. In 1889, San Pedro was relatively remote, much smaller than it is now, and technically not part of the City of Los Angeles (which didn't absorb San Pedro until 1909). 

Amar's accomplishments sadly didn't shield him from tragedies. His first wife Marie Garineaux died at the young age of 32 in 1887, leaving Edouard to raise their two-year-old daughter Irma.

Edouar remarried the following year, this time to Josephine Boisserand, who hailed from his Alpine hometown of St. Bonnet. 

By 1895, the Amars had lost three babies to croup - Edouard at one year, Emmanuel at one month, and Henri at nine months. Leon and Eloi survived infancy.

Leon was a bright, promising student who played cornet in the Angel Gate youth band, served as president of the Fifteenth Street School's literary society (Fifteenth Street School, which is now an elementary school, also housed San Pedro High School at the time), and began attending Santa Clara College in San Jose at seventeen. 

Unfortunately, Leon was also diabetic, and diabetes was much harder to treat in the early twentieth century than it is now. His health took a turn for the worse in 1912, and in September of 1913, his worsening condition resulted in being taken to Sisters' Hospital (aka St. Vincent's), then located in Echo Park.

Leon's surviving siblings were summoned. Irma, by this time married and living in San Francisco, could not get to Los Angeles in time to say goodbye to her youngest brother. Eloi, who was in Imperial County at the time (Edouard owned a ranch in Brawley), was also unable to get to the hospital quickly enough. Leon's remains were handled by Godeau & Martinoni, with a funeral at the Plaza Church and interment at Calvary Cemetery. Six of his schoolmates served as pallbearers. 

1938 press photo of Eloi Amar

Eloi was a football star at St. Vincent's College (Loyola Marymount University), spent a year studying in Europe (picking up French, Spanish, Italian, and even Basque), raised sheep with his father and cattle on Catalina Island (of which he was general manager under the Bannings and the Wrigleys), got into the mercantile business, and was organizer and president of the San Pedro Golf and Country Club. He was a very popular man about town in San Pedro; hardly any organization didn't boast Eloi or his wife Bessie as a member.

Eloi eventually became president of the Harbor Commission. It would prove to be his downfall - at least temporarily. 

Dr. Geraldine Knatz has a great write-up on Eloi's alleged misdeeds, so I won't rehash it here. TL;DR: gambling.

But don't feel too bad for Eloi. While he was found guilty, he soon landed a job as General Manager of the Long Beach Harbor Department and got his revenge on Los Angeles by shifting as much business as possible to Long Beach, which was flush with oil money at the time.

The Masselins and the Miracle Mile

Northern California's gold fields attracted prospectors from around the world, including France. Some unsuccessful Frenchmen left for Los Angeles, which still boasted an ample supply of cheap land and already had a growing French community that could help them raise money to return home - or to find work, buy land, and settle permanently.

Joseph Masselin was one of them. Hailing from Haute-Normandie, Masselin was seventeen when gold was found halfway around the world at Sutter's Mill.

Sources disagree on whether the Masselin family stayed in Northern California until 1859 or until 1870, which was more than 20 years after the gold rush began. Masselin was married to Aquitaine native Marie Sehabiague, and they had six children: John Baptiste, Jennie, Joseph, Zellie, Julia, and Cornelia.

In 1870, Los Angeles was expanding east (really). Unable to afford ranch lands on the Eastside, Masselin bought 120 acres of much-cheaper farmland on what was then the Westside. 

Specifically, the farm fronted what is now Wilshire Boulevard.

A family member's obituary states that the farm was bounded by Wilshire, Rimpau, Olympic, and "what is now La Brea". I checked this claim against an acreage calculator and found it to be about 148 acres, not 120. Since there are multiple references to the farm fronting Wilshire, I'm certain of that boundary, but I can't be 100 percent sure that the others are accurate. Masselin bought land throughout his life, so it's certainly possible he expanded the farm at a later date.

Masselin also began buying land on the old Rancho La Cienega and in the Beaudry Tract within a decade of his arrival. He was later known as a major landowner in the Cahuenga Valley (southeastern Hollywood).

Like so many Frenchmen before and after him, Masselin raised sheep, partnering with Rock Sarrail on the Verdugo ranch. Although other Frenchmen were ruined when the price of wool suddenly dropped, Masselin and Sarrail survived the crash, and did well enough to expand to Bolsa Grande (Garden Grove), Bolsa Chica (Huntington Beach), and San Diego County.

Masselin also became a city councilman, often served on the Bastille Day committee, and championed civic improvements as an early planning commissioner.

Masselin partnered with T.J. Molle in a store, selling coal, hay, wood, grain, and such on Eighth Street between Main and Spring. Molle left in 1891, leaving Masselin to fill orders alone. 

Masselin passed away in 1898 at age 68, and is interred in Calvary Cemetery with his wife and their children (in eight adjoining mausoleum vaults). But this story doesn't end with him.

Much of what we now call Wilshire Boulevard was initially a path used by the Tongva people, and for nearly all of Masselin's lifetime it was known as Calle de los Indios. Wilshire Boulevard as we know it today was born closer to downtown, in 1895, and slowly expanded both east and west. 

Henry Gaylord Wilshire initially planned for Wilshire Boulevard to be 15 blocks long and 60 feet wide, with 35-foot sidewalks, and to be paired with a hotel. He soon applied to build an electric railroad that would run through Westlake and on the proposed Boulevard.

The "Wilshire Boulevard Ordinance", proposed in 1899 and later upheld by the city, sought to protect the stylish new thoroughfare from "heavy teaming, particularly the hauling of oil." (This is somewhat ironic, given that Wilshire Boulevard's predecessor Calle de los Indios was used by the Tongva to collect tar from the La Brea Tar Pits and haul it to the coast, where they would use it to fill the cracks in their wooden plank canoes.) Oil vendors took the matter to court a year later and won. 

Wilshire Boulevard was intended for "boulevard and park purposes" rather than business purposes, although it's certainly much busier now than Wilshire and the interested property owners could ever have imagined. The issue of banning heavy vehicles from the Boulevard came up over and over, and the ordinance was deemed valid again and again. 

1908 news blurb on "boulevardizing" Wilshire Boulevard

1909 blurb on a court hearing for the Wilshire Boulevard ordinance. Joseph Masselin (II) was present at the final hearing.

The farm's end came in 1922, when the Masselin family sold their last 73 acres to the developers of the Wilshire Vista tract. 

1922 clipping on the sale of the Masselin farm's last 73 acres to the Wilshire Vista tract

The Masselin farm may be long gone, but Masselin Avenue still bears their name, just eight short blocks from the farm's western boundary. Masselin Avenue runs north-south, intersecting with Wilshire Boulevard.