munity they had chosen for their home, and their names occur frequently in all accounts of early Los Angeles affairs.
They both owned city property. Stearns’s home, El Palacio, was on the site of the Baker Block, near the plaza. In 1859 he built at the rear, facing Los Angeles Street and looking down Aliso the Arcadia Block, named for his wife Arcadia de Bandini. For this building he used bricks from the first local kiln. In order to complete it he borrowed twenty thousand dollars from Michael Reese on a mortgage on the Rancho Los Alamitos, and because of his great losses of cattle during the great drouth of the sixties he was unable to repay the loan and so lost the ranch.
John Temple’s general merchandise store stood where the post office does today. In 1859, the same year that marked the building of the Arcadia Block, he built at a cost of forty thousand dollars and delivered to the city a market house surmounted by a town clock with a bell “fine toned and sonorous.” This was the court house of my childhood and its clock ordered our days. It stood where the new Los Angeles City Hall is now rising. He, with his brother, F. P. A. Temple built the fine block that marked the northern junction of Spring and Main Streets and has stood until this day of rerouting of Spring Street. By the way, the cutting out of the diagonal part of this street marks the final disappearance of the last bit of the oldest road in town, that which followed the base of the hills out to the brea pits which were the source of their roofing material. Temple Street was originally
