Banty the Rooster and a Menagerie in Lincoln Heights, Cal.

This post begins at a Lincoln Heights house built in 1912 and now preserved by Paul Greenstein.  Shared here are some fragments of past life there - one of the characters is a fireman, another a rooster.  This post will segue to involve the East Los Angeles alligators, a camel, ostriches and a whale that all made their way to these parts.

A dog's chew toy at the house provides the spirit of Banty

Paul is meticulously restoring the interior back to the time period.  He uncovered layers of flooring, stripped away coat after coat of white wall paint, and analyzed the traces of floor markings to detect the original layout.  He also learned about the original owners who constructed the house:  Arthur and Mabel Bilderrain.

In the photo above, Paul pedals the pedals of the 1912 Metrograde piano and fills the room with a very happy tune.  Gary Leonard is seen in the background.

There would not be stories to tell had Paul not saved this house.  To his advantage was the protection afforded to this house in 2004 when the city established an historic preservation overlay zone around it.  A potential buyer who wanted to build four units on the lot got discouraged, so Paul landed the property along with the hundred-years-old plumbing.

Fireman at Engine Company 4

Arthur Bilderrain was appointed fireman in 1900.  He married Mabel Davis in 1910.  In 1913 he retired from the fire department - one year after completing the house.  The couple may have gotten into the restaurant/catering trade later.

A portrait of Arthur on upper left
From the 1908 Album, Los Angeles Fire Department Collection
Courtesy of the Seaver Center for Western History Research,
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

A Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles

Arthur was born not long after the most lawless episode in city history – the Chinese Massacre in October of 1871.  His father, Jesus Bilderrain, was a cop working that evening when fighting erupted in Chinatown, and he was injured in the melee.  

Mexico-born Jesus moved to Los Angeles around the time when the city was on the cusp of transitioning from a Mexican ciudad to an American city - the peace Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 led the way for the change in government.

Every account of the Massacre invariably includes Jesus.  He passed away in 1901, but he seemed to have achieved immortality in contrast to the nameless Chinese victims.  Last year the Asian American community commemorated the 150th anniversary amidst a current climate of anti-Asian racism.

Banty the Rooster

In 1935 Arthur and Mabel’s rooster had its day in court.  Young and boisterous, Banty's early morning unceasing crowing impelled neighbors to file a lawsuit of $1,000 in damages.  The Bilderrains seemed to fan the flames as they were quoted as saying “they would gladly part with Banty if Banty were not so adept at bothering Mrs. Struck and her tenants.”  Judge Ambrose visited Banty’s habitat at his home before ruling in his favor.

Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1935
Courtesy of ProQuest

According to the city directories by 1940 Arthur and Mabel were living in a multi-family unit in the Ambassador Heights tract of Los Angeles (at the vicinity of the 1921 built Ambassador Hotel).  Subsequent residents of the Lincoln Heights house happened to be Chinese, from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and perhaps later as well.

The East Los Angeles Animal Farms

When the area was still called East Los Angeles, animal farms took root along Mission Road by Eastlake Park (today's Lincoln Park).  The Los Angeles Ostrich Farm started about 1907, and the California Alligator Farm opened about that time as well.

A star gator was Pontchartrain Bill, promoted as weighing 220 pounds, at 80 years old and captured in 1907 by Frank Earnest out of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana.  Frank's granddaughter Marjorie remembered Billy as extremely docile, allowing tourists to have their pictures taken while sitting on his back.

The Earnest family eventually took over the ostrich farm.  The alligator farm stayed put until 1953 when it pulled out and headed to Buena Park.  Read more about the history here from an article I put together.

Marjorie Eade riding atop Pontchartrain Bill
Image courtesy of the Seaver Center

Topsy the Camel at the Selig Zoo

Early film producer William Selig established a zoo on Mission Road in 1915 about a block north of the animal farms.  From Kat Halsey's wonderful article chronicling Topsy, a female, bactrian (two-humped) camel, it is likely that Topsy stayed for a time at the Selig Zoo.  

Topsy is believed to have been one of the more than 30 original camels collected from various Middle East cities to form the U.S. Army Camel Corps.  Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War in 1855, organized the importation, and some historians argue that these work animals were part of his plan to expand slavery through the Southwest.

Kat Halsey summed it up in her article that Topsy "was one hundred years old. She was the last survivor of the Camel Corps. She had traveled across oceans, served in the military, worked in mines, been hit by a train, and entertained the masses in the circus, on the silver screen, and finally at the Griffith Park Zoo where she was loved by her keepers and the public alike."

Since her death in 1934 she continues to serve for public good as she has been a specimen for nearly 90 years at the Natural History Museum and used for education and research.

Could this have been Topsy?
Photo taken at Selig Zoo
Courtesy of the Seaver Center

Selig Zoo, circa 1915
Courtesy of the Seaver Center

A side street offers a remnant of the past

Lincoln Heights Whale or Mixocetus elysius

The oldest animal to visit Lincoln Heights, that I am aware, is the 10 to 11 million year-old creature that swam when Los Angeles was ocean.

Currently on exhibit at the Natural History Museum in a
special exhibition "L.A. Under Water"

Unearthed was an 8-foot long fossil skull and jaws of a mature Miocene baleen whale that had an above-average body size of approximately 32 feet long.  An article in the museum's 1984 publication, Terra (v.22 n.4), explained that when "our Mixocetus elysius fossil was a living whale, the Santa Monica Mountains, the Palos Verdes Hills, the San Jose Hills, and many other hilly regions in the Los Angeles area were flat sea bottom. The shoreline ran through locations as far inland as Newhall, Sunland-Tujunga, San Dimas, and Chino."

Mr. Maley was the plumber who discovered the bones while digging a trench for orchard irrigation on the Happy Valley property of Mrs. Blevins near Lincoln Park Boulevard.  The museum was notified immediately, and everything was collected within a couple of weeks from the time of the discovery on January 22, 1931.

L.A.'s Chinese Pioneers: A Look at Their Lives Through Photographs

A total of two Chinese men were first documented as residing in Los Angeles in the 1850 census.  Chinese came overseas from villages in the southern province, Guangdong -- today a global manufacturing region.  Their drive was in part fueled by the Gold Rush. In 1870, the local Chinese population numbered at 179, an increase since the 1860 census, which had a count of 14 men and 2 women.

The earliest Chinese quarter was along Calle de los Negros, not far from today's Union Station.  As their population increased, the establishments of general stores, laundries and fraternal societies defined the area of Old Chinatown.  Dilapidated, seedy abode, prostituted female brethren and hard-working willingness to perform the lowliest jobs were characteristics that colored the public perception.

The late historian Alexander Saxton's study of Chinese labor in the U.S., aptly-titled The Indispensable Enemy, summed up the American disdain.  Massacres of Chinese camps occurred throughout the country, including the one in L.A.'s Old Chinatown that took eighteen men and boys in 1871. 

Curious men, outsiders of the Chinatowns of L.A. and San Francisco, took street photos, often surreptitiously with a hidden camera on the body (Arnold Genthe of San Francisco's pre-earthquake Chinatown), or photographed from behind the subject, or openly (Frank Washburn) but the resulting image often included the hand shielding the face.  Louis Stellman followed Genthe's with his own photographic study of San Francisco Chinatown (ca. 1917).  The Los Angeles La Fiesta parade provided opportunity to photograph the Chinese (C.C. Pierce, Frank Washburn).  Below is an example of Washburn's efforts (ca. 1902-1905 when he was out in the field as an inspector for the gas and electric company):



P-007-W2038 (Courtesy of Seaver Center for Western History Research)

19th century studio portraits taken of Los Angeles Chinese pioneers are relatively rare.  Possibly earlier photographs (carte de visites or tintypes might exist in private American family albums, or perhaps most photos were carried back to their Chinese village homes and given to wives and parents.)  Today, according to Oakland newspaper journalist and author William Wong, "Wuyi University is one of the main places that studies the Overseas Chinese experience (meaning, the migration of Chinese from the 8 counties of Guangdong Province west of the Pearl River Delta)."  The academic resource could be tapped by historians of Los Angeles history.

The following studio portraits are dated mid-1890s to 1920; they show the upwardly-mobile prosperity of the generations that followed the two lone men of 1850.  The photographs were deeded to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County as a portion of a larger family photograph collection of the Upham's, originally of Massachusetts.  George Washington Upham and his wife Eliza raised their daughter Golden, who was born in 1898 on dairy farm land later converted to manufacturing by the Firestone Tire Company.  The Uphams were members of the First Baptist Church.

Could the Uphams have befriended the Chinese through their church activities?  "The First Baptist Church of Los Angeles became the primary agent of American Protestant activity in the 1880s" according to Gregory H. Singleton's Religion in the City of the Angels.  And Eliza Upham sponsored a student from Canton (about 1907) as indicated from the back of a photo in the collection.

Below is a cabinet card by the North Spring St. Studio, Los Angeles.  The furniture and the backdrop have Oriental designs, which raises a question whether Ko Chow had the photo taken in China or San Francisco, and subsequently had it mounted on card stock in L.A.

P-028-5-377 J (Courtesy of the Seaver Center)

P-028-5-377 K (Courtesy of the Seaver Center)

The above portrait is about 1894-1896, of a young man named Quon Fong.  J.B. Blanchard operated the studio between those years.

P-028-5-377 M (Courtesy of the Seaver Center)

The cabinet card above was noted on the backside as Mrs. Soo Hoo Mon Sing, Christmas, 1908.  The cabinet card appears to be top-of-the-line, with the unusual satin, finely-ribbed card stock.  She may have been born in Canton, about 1861 and lived to about 1924 in L.A.  She bore ten children.  She may have claimed U.S. citizenship (when the vital records were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906) because the 1930 census record for her daughter Carrie listed the mother as California-born.  The photographer, Michael A. Wesner, operated a studio at 120 North Spring between 1893 and 1909.

P-028-5-377 H (Courtesy of the Seaver Center)

Above was one of Mrs. Sing's daughters, Laura, about 10 years old, circa 1908.  Older sister (not pictured) Carrie (b. 1895) married into the Woo family; the census record listed her husband as the proprietor of a grocery retail store; they owned a house.

P-028-5-377 C (Courtesy of the Seaver Center)

Taken in 1920, Mrs. Sing's grandson above, Winslow Woo, appears fashionably dressed in a Western-style baby outfit.  He was Carrie's second-born son.