Feature: A History Of Fairfax

Written By Jason Rosencrantz

The Reserve store at 420 North Fairfax Avenue sits just below the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, on the northern edge of a large coastal plain that slopes gently south and west toward the Pacific Ocean. Although the Fairfax Addition did not become a political entity until 1924, the land underneath Canter’s Deli has a history stretching back to long before there was any such thing as a matzo ball.

Nine thousand years ago, the body of a young woman who had dental problems and a lethal head wound was placed in the asphalt pits that still bubble today just over a mile south of the intersection of Fairfax and Beverly. The woman is believed to have been a descendant of the hunter-gatherers who had spilled into the area at the end of the last Ice Age, and who had used their distinctive obsidian Clovis spearheads to hunt the megafauna then wandering the neighborhood -—mammoths, mastodons, short-faced bears and saber-toothed cats.

At the time of European contact in the 16th century, the megafauna had long been extinct, but the plain had become populated by about 5,000 Uto-Aztecan-speaking Tongva people living in small and semi-mobile communities. They had a lively oral tradition, hunted small game, processed corn meal and occasionally made trips to draw asphalt from the pits for use in caulking canoes and waterproofing baskets.

At the end of the 18th century, Spanish authorities were anxious to establish Alta California as a buffer state against incursions by the Russians or the English. In 1769 they sent a military expedition led by Captain Portolá, whose scouts came across ‘Los Bolcanes de Brea’ (the Geysers of Tar) in their march northward.

Spanish power in the region increased after the establishment in 1771 of a mission 15 miles to the east in the San Gabriel Valley. Only seven miles east the Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula was founded in 1781. The Tongva fared poorly under Spanish dominion, toiling for the missionaries and colonizers and dying from the new diseases brought over from Europe.

In 1821 Mexico won independence from Spain, and the alcalde (mayor) of Los Angeles awarded large swaths of land to his cronies. Rancho La Brea, which included the future Fairfax District, was granted to Antonio Rocha, who built an adobe house that still stands today, hidden among the trees on the grounds of The Grove shopping complex. The main source of income for the ranchos was raising cattle, which could be seen roaming freely throughout the area.

Mexico lost control of Los Angeles to the United States during the Mexican-American War, when General Andres Pico capitulated to Lieutenant Colonel John Fremont in a battle waged near the Cahuenga Pass a couple miles to the northeast. Major Henry Hancock gained control of Rancho La Brea and built a refinery to process the asphalt into tar for construction.

In the decades following California statehood in 1850, Catholic rancheros gave way to Protestant farmers throughout the L.A. Basin. In the 1880s Arthur Gilmore purchased the part of Rancho La Brea surrounding the adobe for use as a dairy farm. In 1903, while drilling for water, he struck oil instead – —and soon the area was covered with wooden oil derricks, processing plants and a shantytown of workers.

Meanwhile Moses Sherman bought the land north of what was to become Beverly Boulevard, establishing an industrial complex and rail station for the new railroad traveling along Santa Monica Boulevard from Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean. Over the following decades, passenger trolleys made frequent daily passes through what would become the intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica.

Sherman Town grew around its industrial core to include grain fields, a church, a general store and working-class residences. While Hollywood to the immediate east was annexed to the city of Los Angeles in 1909, Sherman Town remained an unincorporated region of the county and therefore outside of the jurisdiction of the LAPD. This allowed a loosely regulated environment conducive to taverns, gambling houses and brothels. In 1916 a number of mostly Jewish filmmakers began to use the open spaces around Sherman Town because it was beyond the reach of the patent lawyers seeking to sue them for illegal use of Edison’’s movie cameras. Agriculture was slowly abandoned and replaced by housing and businesses supporting the emergent film industry.

In the 1920s Sunset Boulevard became a high-end strip of nightclubs and luxurious residence hotels catering to an emerging showbiz elite. Both the Chateau Marmont and the gay-friendly Garden of Allah were built just west of Fairfax and Sunset and outside the reach of the LAPD. Sherman residents, with their tolerant attitudes towards gays and Jews, began to refer to their town as West Hollywood. The railway along Santa Monica Boulevard formed a light industrial corridor of welders, mechanics and dry cleaners, with taverns such as Barney’’s Beanery catering to the working-class clientele.

In 1924 14 residents of the bean fields and dairy farms south of West Hollywood and north of the Gilmore Company’’s oil operations voted unanimously to be incorporated into the city of Los Angeles as the “’Fairfax Addition’.” That same year Fairfax High School was built and offered courses in architecture, forestry and agronomy. Students of the new school could walk south past the Gilmore Company to the intersection of Fairfax and Wilshire, where they could buy a ride on a World War I warplane at the airfield owned by Charlie Chaplain’’s brother Syd.

Over the next decade, Chaplain”s airfield gave way to A.W. Ross’’ “Miracle Mile” commercial development, which catered to automobiles. By the 1930s Wilshire would grow from a dirt road into a grand six-lane thoroughfare with the first timed traffic lights and dedicated left-turn lanes.

With the financial and creative successes of Jewish people in West Hollywood film production and design, and along Miracle Mile, the Fairfax area served as a beacon to the long-established Jewish communities near downtown in Boyle Heights and City Terrace as well as to some creative minds among European Jews seeking to escape the rise of Fascism and Nazism. In 1939 the Fairfax Temple reached out to refugees by holding services in German. The Jewish immigrant population in the Fairfax district only increased after World War II, and the highly politicized group formed a wide variety of religious, educational and political organizations. The rise of Fairfax as the center of Jewish culture in Los Angeles can be seen in the opening of Canter’’s Deli in 1948 and then the million-dollar Jewish Cultural Center in 1954.

Meanwhile the Gilmore Company had grown into the largest independent oil marketer in the western United States, and its oil fields were slowly replaced by a shopping and entertainment center, beginning in 1934 with the Farmers Market at Fairfax and 3rd. That same year saw the construction of the 30,000-capacity Gilmore Stadium at Fairfax and Beverly, where locals would come to watch midget auto racing, rodeos, wrestling and the city’’s first pro-football team, the Bulldogs. Over the next few years the Gilmore entertainment complex grew to include the streamline-styled Pan Pacific Auditorium as well as Gilmore Field, home to the fabled baseball team the Hollywood Stars.

The Stars, or the ‘Twinks’” as they were known to the press, were a powerful force in California baseball back when ‘“Major League’” meant “’East Coast’.” The team grew into notoriety after being purchased by Brown Derby restaurant owner Robert Cobb, namesake of the well-known salad, along with a group of partners that made up a who’s who list of Hollywood personalities: Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, George Burns, Cecil B. DeMille . . . the list goes on. Gilmore Field became a place to see and be seen— – a place where Milton Berle rubbed sholders with mobster Bugsy Siegel, where Jayne Mansfield served as mascot, where a teenaged Elizabeth Taylor served as bat girl and where the greatest professional baseball fight of all time occurred in 1953, when the Stars traded blows with the Angels for 30 minutes until the police intervened.

The Twinks ceased to sparkle at the end of the 1950s after CBS bought and razed Gilmore Field and Stadium in order to build the television production studios occupying the space today.

In the 1960s, music venues blossomed along the Sunset Strip, breeding seminal rock bands such as the Doors, the Byrds and the Velvet Underground. The aging Jewish population began to notice their changing neighborhood as hippies and rockers spilled down Fairfax Avenue from the Strip, and as the cheap rents and proximity to television and movie production attracted young actors. Nevertheless, the ‘’70s and ‘’80s saw a new wave of Jewish immigrants arrive from the turbulent Middle East and a crumbling Soviet Union.

These decades also brought a rise in land value and housing costs, putting pressure on the young and the old. As residents in an unincorporated area of the county, West Hollywood tenants had no protections against fast-rising rents. In response to this and other local concerns, a coalition of mostly young gay and elderly Jewish renters voted in 1984 to incorporate West Hollywood, including Fairfax Avenue north of Willoughby, as an independent city. Fairfax south of Willoughby is now considered to be a part of the Mid-City West district of the city of Los Angeles.

By the year 2000, the local Jewish center of gravity had shifted south to Pico and Robertson and east to Beverly and La Brea, just as hip fashion boutiques crept around Fairfax High, replacing the Jewish mom-and-pop shops along Fairfax Avenue. But no need for sentimentality or nostalgia – —this is but the latest in a long history of local transformation.