Street, but whose secrets were wide open to the sky. Once our whole back yard and the top of our chicken house and barn were black with men strangely eager to look down upon a fellow man whom we, the public, were hanging high upon a gallows within that old stockade. We children were shut in the house and did not see, but the next day my small brother and another tiny boy were found trying to hang each other.
The jail was in the rear of the city buildings, a row of low adobes on Spring Street, opposite the old court house, the one built by John Temple. Nearby, the post-office occupied the first floor of the new I. O. O. F. building, a little too far south to be sure,—nearly to First Street,—but perhaps the spaciousness and freshness compensated for its distance from the business center to the north. Across the way from it there stood a small white cottage, with a hedge of cypress and a lawn. My first school was around the corner in a similar white house, and on my way home I was permitted to stop and get our mail from our box at the post-office.
The shopping district ran from this “civic center” up to the plaza, the very region that is now being retrieved for the heart of the public life of Los Angeles city and county.
Not long ago I discovered, stranded high on the front wall of an old brick building, the abandoned sign of “The Queen,” the store from which came my “pebble-goat” school shoes, the store itself long ago having followed the shoes “to the bone yard.”
