Bella Union Hotel

The Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles, California, constructed in 1835, is California Historical Landmark No. 656,^[1] It was effectively the last capitol building of Mexican California under Governor Pio Pico in 1845–47 and was a center of social and political life for decades. Situated on the east side of Commercial Street, one block east of Main Street, it was later known as the Clarendon Hotel and then as the St. Charles.^[2][3][4][5]

Description

The one-story adobe structure was built in 1835 by "three American trappers" — William Wolfskill, Joseph Paulding and Richard Laughlin — as a home for Isaac Williams, a New England merchant who had arrived in Los Angeles in 1832.^[2][4][6]

In 1851, when Horace Bell, the author of the seminal historical work Reminiscences of a Ranger, first came to Los Angeles, the hotel was owned by James Brown Winston, a medical doctor, and Alpheus P. Hodges, the city's mayor. Bell's book, published in 1881, recounted how the hotel looked when he had stayed there thirty years before:^[7][8]

The house was a one-story flat-roofed adobe, with a corral in the rear, extending to Los Angeles street, with the usual great Spanish portal, near which stood a little frame house, one room above and one below. The lower room had the sign "Imprenta" over the door fronting on Los Angeles street, which meant that the Star was published therein. The room upstairs was used as a dormitory for the printers and editors.
. . . On the north side . . . were numerous pigeon-holes, or dog-kennels. These were the rooms for the guests of the Bella Union. In rainy weather the primitive earthen floor was sometimes, and generally, rendered quite muddy the percolations from the roof above. . . . The rooms were not over 6x9 [feet] in size. Such were the ordinary dormitories of the hotel advertised as being the "best hotel south of San Francisco." If a very aristocratic guest came along, a great sacrifice was made in his favor, and he was permitted to sleep on the little billiard table. [In the bar] during that time were the most bandit, cut-throat looking set [of people] that the writer had ever set his youthful eyes upon. . . . all . . . had slung to their rear the never-failing pair of Colt's, generally with the accompaniment of the bowie knife.^[7][9]

A second floor was added to the hotel in 1851, and a third in 1869.^[2]

Louis Roeder, later a member of the Los Angeles Common Council, who stayed at the Bella Union in 1856, recalled in 1903 that the Bella Union had been

a one-story building, with a dining-room at the rear of the bar, roofed with canvas. Adjoining was a drug store, kept by Dr. [John Strother] Griffin and Dr. Miller. Then came the private residence of Mr. [Abel] Stearns, of the Stearns ranchos, a large adobe building, between which and the Plaza were a lot of shacks, occupied by Mexicans.^[10]

Notable occasions

• When Pio Pico was confirmed by the Mexican government as the governor of California in 1845, he moved the territory's capital from Monterey, California, to Los Angeles, "as he always desired," setting up his headquarters in the Isaac Williams house. Later, the Bella Union was built upon this site.^[3]
• After the conquest of California by American forces in 1847, the building was used by Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, who commanded the U.S. troops.^[3] After they left, it became a saloon.^[2]
• By early 1850 the building was operating as the Bella Union Hotel, and on June 24 of that year it became the county's first courthouse, until October 1851 or until 1852.^[11][12][13]
• In 1850–51, when Alpheus P. Hodges was mayor and also the co-owner of the Bella Union:

a funny thing happened. Some leaders perpetrated a hoax on his honor. They raided the hotel[,] where Hodges gave them free whiskey. That night they carried on sham attacks till morning against a supposed foe. They men had made their plans carefully and carried them out so realistically that, according to Horace Bell, they completely hoodwinked the mayor, who actually thought the pueblo was being attacked by a mob of rebels.^[8]

• In 1853 Obed Macy was owner of the hotel,^[14] and he was assisted by his son, Oscar Macy, later a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.^[15]
• On October 7, 1858, the first Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach from the East, arrived twenty-one days after leaving St. Louis, Missouri. "Warren Hall was the driver, and Waterman Ormsby, a reporter, the only through passenger. In that era it was the region's transportation hub: Wells, Fargo & Co. and Phineas Banning's coaches to and from Wilmington and San Bernardino had offices there."^[2][4]
• The hotel hosted a champagne celebration marking the first telegraph transmission between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1860.^[4]
• At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the Bella Union had become such a rendezvous for supporters of the Southern Confederacy that Union soldiers, primarily volunteers in training at the Drum Barracks in San Pedro, were forbidden to enter" it.^[12]
• On April 28, 1861, Albert Sidney Johnston, just resigned from the U.S. Army as commander of the Department of the Pacific, arrived at the Bella Union from San Francisco on his way to join the Confederate forces. ^[16][17]
• Henry Hammel was proprietor of the Bella Union In 1862 or 1863.^[18] In 1864 Hammel sold his interest in the hotel and went to Kern County, where there was a gold rush. He and Andrew H. Denker located in Havilah in that county and built a hotel there, naming it, again, the Bella Union.^[19]
• On July 5, 1865, a fashionable wedding party was held at the hotel to honor merchant Solomon Lazard and his bride, Caroline Newmark, the daughter of Joseph Newmark, who established the Los Angeles Hebrew Benevolent Society and the city's first Jewish cemetery. At the party, Robert Carlisle, owner of the 46,000-acre Chino Ranch, became engaged in a quarrel with Undersheriff Andrew King: Carlisle slashed the lawman across a hand and his stomach with a Bowie knife. He also threatened to kill "any and all" of King's brothers. The next day, two of the brothers entered the hotel in search of Carlisle, a gunfight ensued and at the end Carlisle was fatally wounded and one of the King brothers, Frank, was dead. Carlisle's funeral was held in the Bella Union. Another King brother, Houston, was charged with murdering Carlisle; he was acquitted in 1866.^[20][21][22] It was, a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote many years later, "the most spectacular shooting affray in the history of Los Angeles."^[23]
• In 1868 the hotel became the home of Robert Maclay Widney, known as the "father of the University of Southern California," and his bride until their new residence was built. One day, Widney, who was a teetotaller, showed his marksmanship to a pair of drunks by putting three bullets from his Colt revolver through a knot of wood on the wall that the others had been unable to hit.^[24]
• Learning that the hotel was to be remodeled and the "last of the adobe" to be removed, some eighty "prominent citizens gathered for a farewell banquet on June 30, 1870." At that time John King was the proprietor; he died in 1871.^[6]
• The improvements were done in 1873, and the hotel's name was changed to the Clarendon.^[2]
• Finally, in 1875, the hotel became the St. Charles, a "low price lodging house, serving an increasingly poorer and diverse population."^[2]
• The first talk over a telephone wire in Los Angeles took place in April 1877 when a U.S. Signal Corps lieutenant strung 200 feet of wire from the St. Charles across the street to the Lafayette Hotel. A local newspaper said of the event;

The talking-machine demonstration over Main St. yesterday was a success. The contraption is quite a toy and very interesting. It is a question yet with the most conservative thinking whether it can ever be put to practical use.^[25]

• The structure was demolished in 1940 and the site turned into a parking lot.^[2][6][13]

References and notes

External links

• Modern photo of the Los Angeles Mall, where the Bella Union once stood.
• Steve Harvey,"L.A. Then and Now: A Raceway for Stagecoaches; A Street in Little Tokyo was 'the Homestretch' for Dueling Drivers in the 1850s," Los Angeles Times, September 6, 2009, page A-36
• Photos: The Bella Union, L.A.'s First Hotel