The Romance of Real Estate: Boom and Bust in Gladstone

The writer for the Los Angeles Herald knew his stuff. There was, he said, a favored place just 45 minutes by train from Los Angeles that comprises the finest land on the globe, with ample water rights and a water power equivalent to 250 horsepower. And that wasn't all, the Herald reported. A grand avenue, 88 feet wide, bordered with shade trees and containing two highways, extends from the Sierra Madre to the south side of the tract. In the center of this highway, ten electric masts are being erected so that the great highway that cuts the land into two royal domains will be lighted from (and after) tonight with the pure light borrowed from the sun by the permission of that luminary.

According to the Herald, Professor Warren, the electrician in charge of the manufacture of electric energy in Los Angeles, would provide the promised lighting. William Gladstone, briefly the Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1887, provided the townsite's name. Gladstone, the most beautiful land that the sun ever shone upon, would be the city of destiny for smart buyers who got in early. Business lots will double in value within a week after the day of sale, developer H. H. Boyce confidently predicted.

Called a paradise of fruits, ambrosial shades and flowers, Gladstone was a boomtime townsite in 1887. Its developers imagined Gladstone might outgrow Los Angeles, but Gladstone never grew much beyond its original 500 acres. Photograph courtesy of Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

A brass band and a free lunch on opening day in 1887 brought out buyers for an auction of ocean-view properties in Monrovia. Photograph courtesy of Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library

In 1887, not just Gladstone but all of Los Angeles was busy selling itself into existence. The ballyhoo for Gladstone was typical: A spate of breathless newspaper advertisements, a glowing report in the Los Angeles Herald, a band wagon with Gladstone banners parading Los Angeles streets, and an excursion on opening day to take anxious speculators out to the townsite, where, after a free lunch, the sale began.

In 1887, not just Gladstone but all of Los Angeles was busy selling itself into existence.

In a year when lots in Los Angeles that had sold for $500 an acre were now offered at $5,000 an acre, Boyce's promise of a 100-percent return in a week seemed modest. When Azusa was subdivided, J. M. Guinn told the members of the Historical Society of Southern California in 1889, Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of lots were sold the first day. Not one in a hundred of the purchasers had seen the townsite, and not one in a thousand expected to occupy the land. The L.A. property flipper had been born.

Had you seen Gladstone on its inaugural day in April 1887, you might have wondered what passion or desire could so completely obscure what little was actually there. Gladstone was a bit less or a bit more than 500 acres of pasture and orange grove next to the crossroads settlement of Centra (between what is now Azusa and Glendora). There were a few houses in the neighborhood and a blacksmith and a laundry. There was a post office in Centra. There was Captain H. Fullers Hinda Vista Hotel, although it was only his house made over for the purpose.

But there were plans, the advertisements said, for a bank, a streetcar line, and a grand hotel in Gladstone to be built in the best style of the boomtime: a florid, multi-story confection in millwork and bright paint that, like so many other hotels of that year, would eventually have burned to the ground, become a church-affiliated college, or been carted away to another speculative townsite to lure another wave of real estate romantics.

A rambling, wood-framed hotel - often the only building in sight - greeted eager buyers at nearly every boomtime subdivision. Opened in November 1886, the Garvanza Villa Hotel was located at Avenue 63 and York Boulevard. Photograph courtesy of Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

In some historical accounts in the aftermath of the boom, Gladstone doesn't get its hotel. In other accounts, the Hotel Brunjes is built, left vacant, cut up, and reassembled in Azusa.

The boomtime of 1887 had a fluid, phantasmagoric quality, as if scripted by Tim Burton.

The boomtime of 1887 had a fluid, phantasmagoric quality, as if scripted by Tim Burton. Maybe the hotel in Gladstone was there; maybe not, like the waterfall that would power the electric lights, like the quarry that would make stone cheaper than brick for building the new bank and the Santa Fe depot, like the bank and the depot, like Gladstone itself, which existed, if it existed at all, only in the advertisements in the Herald and on a subdivision map (surveyed by V. J. Rowan) of which, C. C. Baker later wrote, there is of record only one block.

Gladstone - The Richest Settlement in Natural Advantages in California - was, in the official record, just a block long and a block wide. But that was enough in the boomtime to stir unmet desires.

In the paper towns of Los Angeles County, 79,350 subdivided acres had been listed with the county assessor by the fall of 1888, yielding a minimum of 400,000 house lots. Guinn, using data he gathered from the Los Angeles County Recorder, estimated that the paper value of real estate transactions reached $200 million. He surmised that another $200 million in purchase contracts for property had traded hands in San Diego, San Bernardino, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties. Could we have kept the boom running for another year, he told the historical society members, we would have made enough to pay off the national debt.

The promoters of Gladstone did their part to convince prospective buyers that the boom would go on and on, propelled by the abundance of Southern Californ

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