L.A.'s Many Moons: The Electrification of Los Angeles
Other Moons
A second moon rose over Los Angeles on New Year's Eve in 1882, tethered to the top of a sailing ship's mast. Suspended 150 feet above the southeast corner of Main and Arcadia streets, four carbon arc lamps spread a glow that mimicked the light of a full moon.
The Los Angeles Times had thundered in January, "Electric Light. Los Angeles Wants One and Must Have It." A year later, Los Angeles did. The Times' crusade wasn't moved only by rivalry with San Jose — where a 200-foot arc-light tower illuminated downtown —but more by the paper's unhappiness with the Los Angeles Gas Company's exclusive franchise to light city streets.
Within days, Charles Howland's Los Angeles Electric Company raised six more "moonlight towers" where an electric current produced an intensely bright arc in the gap between two carbon electrodes. Four of the towers were downtown, another in Lincoln Heights and one in Boyle Heights, all fed from a 30-kilowatt power house on Alameda near Jackson Street.
In response to the competition, local gas companies ran a disinformation campaign. According to an 1888 history of Los Angeles County, the detractors claimed that
[Arc lighting] soiled ladies' complexions, that it produced color-blindness, and besides had a bad effect on the eyes, that it magnified objects and caused optical illusions, that it was costly, that gas was good enough to light the city, that it kept the chickens awake all night, that it was a new thing and therefore an experiment and dangerous, that the wires attracted lightning, that the lights attracted bugs, and finally that it was a speculation and therefore a swindle.
The boys of Los Angeles saw the new lights differently. As Ervin King remembered in in 1948
"The [pole] at Figueroa and Alpine was a constant boy attraction, serving as their night rendezvous. The more daring of the clan had further thrills by climbing up to the midway platform, daily used by the man who let down the large globes and changed the carbons [electrodes]. These were collected by boys, as were many moths, attracted by the light, then trapped and killed in the globes."
By the end of 1883, Los Angeles became the first city in America to abandon gas for street lighting. Four years later, Los Angeles had 36 arc-light masts in the central business district and in the city's first suburbs. Soon, there were dozens more. Some of these lights would shed a moon's glow until 1922.
Electrified
The electricity that gave Los Angeles multiple moons also put the city into motion. In 1887, the streetcars of the Los Angeles Electric Railroad Company (also chartered by Charles Howland) began carrying passengers from the plaza to Pico Boulevard and westward to what is now Harvard Boulevard. True to the future of transit in Los Angeles, the city's first electric streetcar line was intended to sell building lots in the Pico Heights subdivision. The subdivision prospered; the railroad failed.
More of Los Angeles was sold in the years after 1887, the new subdivisions connected to downtown by horse drawn streetcars and, in hilly sections, by cable cars. Improved technology converted these to electric streetcars after 1890.
Multiple streetcar franchises, each small company having limited capital, drove waves of consolidation. Investors — principally real estate developer Moses Sherman — assembled a unified network of lines as the Los Angeles Railway in 1895.
The yellow streetcars of the Los Angeles Railway helped to keep the city of Los Angeles suburban (just as the red trolley cars of the Pacific Electric Railway would keep Los Angeles County suburban). The nickel fare was low enough so that houses as far as west as Hoover Boulevard and as far east as Soto Street were within commuting distance of the central business and industrial districts.
Electricity also was changing the houses of the first streetcar commuters. Gas lit homes gradually converted to cooler and safer electric lights, although they were almost as dim as gaslight and often unreliable. Some homeowners chose to straddle the energy question by installing "combination fixtures" that included gas mantels and electric lights in the same fixture.
Like the gas companies, electric utilities sought to increase demand. Branch offices were showrooms for electric irons, toasters, clothes washers, vacuums and hotplates. "Would you like a demonstration in your own home," asked one electric company ad. "A card or a call will bring a representative at once."
Metropolitan Entrepreneur
Control of electricity gave a few men in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles the power to build cities. Henry Huntington was one of them and remarkable for having participated in the consolidation of Southern California's electric and gas companies and both the city's intra-urban streetcars as well as the county's inter-urban trolleys. According to economic historian William B. Friedricks, "From 1898 to 1917, Henry Huntington was the foremost developer of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area."
Huntington did not found the city's electric and gas companies, but he participated in their early expansion as they became Southern California Edison and the Southern California Gas Company. He did the much same in expanding the streetcar system. His best remembered achievement is the Pacific Electric Railway which, true to form, was built to connect the urban centers of Los Angeles County to Huntington's real estate holdings.
For all its grand reach and despite its present nostalgia value, Pacific Electric was never very profitable. That hardly mattered, since Huntington's Pacific Light and Power Corporation could use the electricity that powered Huntington's trolleys to light the homes in Huntington's subdivisions, their stoves fueled by Huntington's manufactured gas.
Huntington's genius was in knowing how these economic sectors worked synergistically. His luck was inheriting wealth. Keeping utilities in private hands and unions out of his companies defined his politics. With Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis as their spokesman, Huntington combined with other corporate heads tosuppress union organizing in Los Angeles and weaken the Socialist and Progressive movements that called for public ownership of utilities.
Huntington gave up his share of the Pacific Electric Railway in 1910 to ensure his control of the Los Angeles Railway. He sold Pacific Light and Power in 1917 to Southern California Edison. The yellow cars of the Los Angeles Railway were sold to American City Lines in 1945, long after Huntington's death.
Public ownership of the city's electrical grid, after two decades of negotiation, was fully complete in 1937.
Sources
"An Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, California." Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1889.
Friedricks, William B. "Henry E. Huntington and Metropolitan Entrepreneurship in Southern California, 1898-1917," University of Illinois, Business and Economic History, Second Series, Volume Sixteen, 1987.
Garber, Megan. "Tower of Light: When Electricity Was New, People Used It to Mimic the Moon," The Atlantic, 06/04/2013.
Newmark, Harris. Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1916.
