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Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles in 1895 looked something like a young American city, but its soul still belonged to the past. Horses trotted through the dirt streets, pulling buckboards and tally-hos past slower-moving electrified trolley cars. Automobiles had yet to make an appearance. Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California who could often be glimpsed sunning his ursine bones on the Old Plaza at the center of the former pueblo, had only died a year earlier. Just 100,000 people lived within the town limits. Most of them stayed close to the fickle stream that Pico knew as el Rio Porciuncula, which dripped out just enough water during the scorching summers to sustain a run of steelhead trout and keep the future of Los Angeles from evaporating away. On maps, the dusty outer edge of town lay three miles west of the river, beyond the baked brown crest of Crown Hill, a rise covered in foxtails, oil wells and jackrabbit holes. Another fourteen miles further toward the sunset, the cool blue Pacific Ocean beckoned. Escaping Los Angeles’ desert heat for a pleasant afternoon at the beach required a wagon or steam train ride across a gently sloping plain cut by willow-lined creeks, past crumbling adobes and ranchos with romantic Spanish names like Rodeo de las Aguas and San Jose de Buenos Ayres. “From Spring Street, west and as far as the coast, there was one huge field,” 19th century merchant Harris Newmark observed in his memoir. A rutted wagon trail dipped and bent through the wheat and barley stalks, snaking between rancho boundaries as far as the fuming tar pits where locals had collected sticky brea for longer than a century. El Camino Viejo, or the Old Road, had been carved by native Tongva feet and Spanish oxen hooves. It didn’t look like much, but it was in the right place, pointing west toward the future. Near the spot where the camino crossed the town limits, a flirtatious young rabble-rouser named Henry Gaylord Wilshire began in 1895 to clear a flat swath through his thirty-five acre barley field. Wilshire had come to California in the 1880s like so many other Ohioans, determined to find a better life. His life in Cincinnati had been sheltered by family wealth, and he grew up across the street from future president William Howard Taft. California, though, offered cheap land and unimagined possibilities. Gay Wilshire dated society daughters and pursued numerous careers — grapefruit grower, gold miner, billboard mogul, inventor, publisher, ostrich farmer. His friends included socialist writers such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Upton Sinclair, who once described Gay as “a small man with a black beard and a moustache trimmed to sharp points, and twinkling mischievous eyes — for all the world the incarnation of Mephistopheles.” Wilshire’s idea of entertainment was to stand up in a Broadway theater and heckle an actor who disrespected the socialist cause, or to pontificate in Pershing Square until the police hauled him away. Wilshire may be the only Los Angeles historical figure to have run for elected office in three countries, always under the Socialist Party banner, always in defeat. On Dec. 21, 1995, Wilshire and his brother William filed subdivision papers announcing their plans to carve a magnificent wide boulevard into the packed earth beside Westlake Park, then a blooming refuge of lakeside gardens and strolling paths. The term boulevard was pure affectation. The Wilshire brothers’ creation would travel just twelve hundred feet then expire in the brush. No one had any reason to suspect the boulevard, if that’s what crazy Gay Wilshire chose to call it, would someday connect with El Camino Viejo and other fragments of road to form Los Angeles’ escape route out of the horse-drawn era. That is just what happened, of course. Wilshire’s boulevard became the defining Automobile Age thoroughfare in the country, world-famous as a symbol of the expansionist longings of 20th century Los Angeles. For 15.8 miles it swoops through the sprawl, tying downtown to the Pacific Ocean along a promenade that, like the city itself, is an accidental creation of civic ambition and personal hubris. It’s not the oldest, longest or most beautiful drive to spill across Los Angeles, but Wilshire is “an insinuating piece of the landscape that no one can escape,” in the words of the late architecture critic Harriette von Breton. Wilshire grew from a dirt scratch in the treeless terrain into the unofficial Main Street and long, thin ad-hoc downtown for the city that has no true center. Angelenos who appreciate Wilshire Boulevard’s importance never feel lost within sight of the mismatched skyline of Art Deco spires, multi-flavored office towers, million-dollar penthouses and soaring monuments splashed with Jazz Age neon. Natives and tourists alike have been known to answer the call to explore the whole thing, like a peak that must be climbed. One way to go is by convertible with the top down. Artist David Hockney pedaled his bicycle the entire length on his second day in town; when he was mayor, Richard Riordan used to lead rides from end to end. Hardier pilgrims make the journey on foot, devoting a long day to the hike up and down more dips and inclines than passengers on four wheels realize. Most who try the trek begin downtown, where the boulevard appears, seemingly random, between palm trees planted in front of the thirty-story One Wilshire building. Despite the catchy name, One Wilshire actually has a Grand Avenue address. This was not the original starting point, but Grand Avenue has been the eastern terminus since 1930, when the boulevard finally reached downtown. Walkers who make it all the way greet the Pacific between more palm trees, in front of a Depression-era statue of St. Monica on cliffs that soar above the beach. En route they traverse the hearts of three cities, cross a trio of telephone area codes, stroll above one interstate freeway and beneath another, and pass unaware over buried creeks and swimming holes. The western passage encounters 206 cross streets that slice the boulevard into manageable corners and blocks, decorated with street art and architectural flourishes. Pedestrians notice urban phenomena that drivers miss — prehistoric goop oozing through the sidewalks near the La Brea Tar Pits, law students studying in the windows of the majestic Bullock’s Wilshire building, feral cats roaming the abandoned Ambassador Hotel grounds. National Geographic magazine observed once that “virtually everything that has happened in Los Angeles has happened or is represented on Wilshire,” and it’s true that the boulevard serves as a living museum. The oldest surviving structure served as a chapel for aging Civil War volunteers, already there when President William McKinley came for a visit in 1901. Eleven buildings — including the soldiers’ chapel — are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Among them are the elegant Art Deco Bullock’s Wilshire, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple and the refined Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, built on the site of a 1920s auto racetrack. “Los Angeles looks like a city when you walk Wilshire,” urban critic Art Seidenbaum wrote in the Los Angeles Times after one of his many crossings. If you go, take a sweater. You can leave Grand Avenue in a summer heat wave and arrive at the ocean shivering in thick fog.
Adapted with permission from Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles, by Kevin Roderick with research by J. Eric Lynxwiler, published in 2005 by Angel City Press. The writer: Kevin Roderick, an Angeleno by birth, is the author of two books about Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard and The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb (Los Angeles Times Books, 2001). He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, as a staff writer and senior editor at the Los Angeles Times, bureau chief for The Industry Standard newsweekly and most recently as Contributing Writer at Los Angeles magazine. Kevin also founded and is the editor and publisher of LA Observed, an award-winning website devoted to daily coverage of Los Angeles media, news, books and sense of place. |
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