In 1879, Alla Nazimova – future famous actress and founder of Hollywood’s Garden of Allah Hotel – was born in the ancient city of Yalta on the Black Sea’s Crimean Peninsula. That same year, 6,000 miles to the west, a dusty California pueblo called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula by its Spanish speaking natives – and known to its Anglo settlers simply as Los Angeles – was on the cusp of monumental changes. The transcontinental railroad would soon connect the isolated village to the rest of the United States, igniting an explosion in growth that would increase the population nearly fivefold in a decade, from 11,000 in 1880 to 55,000 by 1890 and 4 million today.
To cash in on the boom in new arrivals, land-poor ranchland owners were eager to parcel out their acreage to developers. Among them was Major Henry Hancock, a New Hampshire-born, Harvard-trained lawyer, who, in 1860, had acquired a 4,444-acre tract about six miles west of town called Rancho La Brea. The rancho’s distinctive feature was a swampy area filled with pitch situated near the southern border. Like the tar pits’ Spanish and Mexican owners before him, Hancock mined asphaltum, a black gooey substance that was used mainly for insulating roofs.
The northwestern border of the rancho followed a curving, storm-rutted path along a natural shelf at the foot of steep hills. Today they’re called the Hollywood Hills; back then, the Cahuenga Mountains. The Tongva people used the path to travel back and forth sixteen miles from Cahuenga, their village in the hills (near today’s Universal City) to the Pacific coast. Today’s Sunset Boulevard, including the Sunset Strip, follows the old Tongva path, more or less.
In the 1870s, newly arrived settlers bought ranchland parcels along the Tongva path. They planted bean fields, melon patches and groves of poinsettia and citrus trees on the gentle slopes and used the ancient path as a wagon road for trucking supplies and transporting produce to market. With the population surge after the trains came rapid expansion of residential development across the region. Developers began buying farms and ranches and subdividing them into communities.
In 1882, Andrew Hay, a wealthy Canadian émigré purchased a large section of Rancho La Brea from Major Henry Hancock. Born in London, Ontario, in 1846, Hay made a fortune in the lumber business in Michigan before moving to California and investing in land. In the northwest section of Hay’s parcel lay the future two-and-a-half acre site of the Garden of Allah Hotel.
Hay became a notorious figure in 1883 when, while picking up his mail at the Cahuenga post office, he was shot and wounded by Ella Barrow, a young woman who worked for his family as a nanny. She and her father had reported to authorities that Hay had drugged and raped her, but when no action was taken by law enforcement, Ella had taken matters into her own hands. Ella pleaded guilty to assault and was fined. Hay was tried on the rape charge four times before all-male juries, with each jury failing to reach a verdict. The charge was eventually dropped, and a few years later, he ran in a local election for judge – and won.
In the early eighteen-nineties, wealthy Angelenos built country estates along the farm road, the future Sunset Strip. North of Andrew Hay’s acreage was the estate of C.F. Harper, a Mississippi Confederate who moved west after the Civil War and made a fortune in the hardware business. His home was a three-story Queen Anne confection he called Cieola Vista. On his estate in the foothills north of the far road, he grew citrus and beans. In 1906, his son, Arthur Cyprian Harper, was elected mayor of Los Angeles. Three years later, A.C. Harper nearly became the first mayor in the United States to be unseated in a recall election. Facing accusations that he and others were running protection rackets on brothels and saloons, he resigned as mayor in 1909.
Around 1892, Victor Ponet, a Belgian émigré and financier bought 280 acres of open space in the hills a mile or so west of the Harpers’ Cieola Vista on the old Tongva path. There Ponet built a country estate with a grand house that cost $10,000 to build. In the rolling hills around the home, Ponet grew avocados, citrus and poinsettias. In the 1920s, Francis Montgomery, Ponet’s son-in-law, developed a section of the property that straddled the old path into Sunset Plaza, the upscale retail and restaurant district at the Sunset Strip’s historic core. The Montgomery family has owned and operated Sunset Plaza for over a century.