How Ice First Came to Frost-Free Los Angeles

Ice first became commercially available in Los Angeles around 1857. This advertisement appeared in the May 23, 1857, edition of the Los Angeles Star, courtesy of the Huntington Library and the USC Digital Library.

The Ice Age was something of a misnomer in Pleistocene Los Angeles. As glaciers sculpted Yosemite's granite cliffs and the mile-thick Laurentide ice sheet entombed Manhattan, Southern California was a land of coast redwoods and Monterey cypresses -- hardly the frostbitten landscape that "Ice Age" brings to mind.

Now, after millennia of warming, even the chilliest of L.A. nights rarely forces the mercury below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. An Angeleno could live her entire life without negotiating an icy sidewalk or pouring antifreeze into her car's radiator.

And for millennia, Southern Californians made do without ice. Native Gabrielino (Tong-va) Indians had one word for both snow and ice, yow-aht, and for them frozen water must have been something exotic, glimpsed during the first springtime trek through the mountains, when cascades stood frozen and icicles dripped from tree branches.

But an Ice Age of sorts did eventually visit Los Angeles, ushered in not by climate change but by the thirsty Angelenos who crowded the town's saloons.

For as long as alcoholic beverages had flowed in frostless Southern California, they had been drunk at room temperature. Ice, if it could somehow be procured, promised an intoxicating menu of possibilities: lager beer, whiskey on the rocks, even cocktails.

In 1857 or '58 (accounts vary), a Wells Fargo express freight wagon arrived from San Francisco, laden with bricks of ice wrapped in thick woolen blankets. An Italian saloon owner named Manuel Ravenna had purchased the ice -- probably originally shipped to California from Boston -- at great expense, and though much of it melted during the long trip south, the frozen novelty allowed his bar to do brisk business.

Around the same time, a rival saloon discovered a more local supply. Led by Victor Beaudry and Damien Marchessault, a train of mules entered a remote canyon in the eastern San Gabriels. When the mules returned to town, they bore hundred-pound ice blocks. Beaudry and Marchessault served the ice in their Main Street saloon and restaurant, but with it they also opened Los Angeles' first ice house. On the first floor, the pair sold ice to the public. On the second, in a separate, family-friendly saloon, they served a previously unheard-of treat: ice cream.

Over the next decade, ice remained an expensive luxury, its supply inconsistent at best.

It became a year-round commodity in 1868, when steamships at San Pedro began regular shipments of the Boca Ice & Mill Company's signature product: blocks cut from the frozen ponds of the Truckee River Valley.

Two years later, George Millikan and his Los Angeles Ice Company pioneered the manufacture of ice in Los Angeles. Millikan's factory, powered by a water wheel in one of the town's zanja irrigation canals, piped pressurized aqua ammonia through vats of water. After several cycles, the water froze.

Thus did frost-free Los Angeles enter its artificial Ice Age, one that -- despite blistering summers and a warming planet -- shows no sign of thaw.

A member of the 52 Club rides a block of ice along Venice Beach in this undated photo, courtesy of the Photo Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

Local ice concerns like the Los Angeles Ice Company eventually merged to form a monopoly, the Union Ice Company.Circa 1920s phoot courtesy of the California History Room Photo Collection - California State Library.

An example of L.A.'s fondness for programmatic architecture, the Igloo on Pico Boulevard sold ice cream, naturally. Courtesy of the USC Libraries' California Historical Society Collection.

A beneficiary of L.A.'s artificial Ice Age: the Los Angeles Kings' Wayne Gretzky.1988 photograph courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.