—it never got beyond the foundations, out at Tenth and Main. Perhaps the name was no worse than San Francisco’s Palace which has built about itself such a tradition that no one stops to consider the self-assumption of its designation.
During those boom years Los Angeles was having its first experience of rapid growth, and we were almost as proud and boastful then as we are now,—at least in quality if not in quantity. It seemed just as exciting to suddenly grow from ten to fifty thousand, as it does to aim at a million or two. We hadn’t invented the name realtor for our land sellers or established courses at college in realtoring, but there were already enterprising boosters. One of them displayed in his office window this hospitable biblical text: “I was a stranger and ye took me in.”
It was during that period that we boldly discarded gas as a means of lighting our streets and adopted electricity, the first city in the land to do it. How imposing were our six tall poles each carrying four arc lights, four substitute moons, protected by a little tin umbrella. What strange and beautiful blue light filtered through our windows, making on the walls black shadows of the swaying eucalyptus branches like Japanese silhouettes.
The summer that we first had these wonder lanterns the very sky put on a nightly pageant of color, most gorgeous sunsets to celebrate our progress, and incidentally to mark the fact that the upper air was full of a fine ash from a volcanic eruption in far away Java.