Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1901

SPECTACULAR WIND-UP IN WESTLAKE PARK.

LAKE A DREAM OF BEAUTY UNDER GORGEOUS LIGHTS.
Acres and Acres of People and Enough Idiots to Go Around — Fireworks, Band Concert and Boating End the Celebration.

 “This is the last time,” said the street-car conductor, savagely jamming his punch through a bundle of green transfers, “that we will have Fourth of July this year — thank the Lord.”

It wasn’t that he had no artistic soul for the appreciation of high-priced fireworks on the water. He had been up and on duty since 5 a.m., and it was within an hour of midnight.

He had been carrying loads of people out to Westlake Park [now MacArthur Park] all evening. The cars were crowded as early as 7 o’clock, and the lawns were black with acres of people at early dark.

By some special providence there were idiots enough to go round. Fourth of July night and the circus are the two occasions when the idiot is an indispensable adjunct.

Over on the west lawns, quite a bunch of them had drifted together and clung. They were so flat you couldn’t help laughing.

They first made their presence felt in the little hush that comes when something is going to happen.

A squeaky treble shrilled out, “Maggie, Mag-gie, hold the horse; they’re going to shoot a firecracker.”

Maggie had plenty of calls. The voice shrieked again, “Mag-gie, Oh Maggie, don’t look that horse in the face; he’s got gold teeth.”

   Once a flash of red light on the lake shore showed various interesting tableauxs [sic]   on the lawns, and the voice screeched again, “Mag-gie, put your head on the other shoulder; this one’s all powder.”

And when the crowd began to giggle and say to each other, “Listen to those chumps,” the voice called out again, “Mag-gie, I don’t believe there’s one of them sober or else they wouldn’t be listening to me.”

There was a slight variation in the “Oh-Ah” chorus. A little boy with no visible parents stumbled over the reclining crowd, shouting at the top of his voice, “Beautiful, beautiful.”
Postcard View of Westlake ParkWestlake Park at the turn of the century.

Well, it was.

The rockets were about the same old rockets and the set pieces beginning with the Stars and Stripes and winding up with “Home, Sweet Home” in one of the periods when there is a hot time in progress, were about the same story. Also the pin wheels and the spark falls. But it was pretty.

It was the lights on the lake shore that turned it into an artist’s dream of beauty. No transformation scene at a theater could be one-half so beautiful.

The heavy blackness of the night would fade and melt away as though it were a rising curtain, and the trees by the water’s edge would stand out weird in a ghostly luminance with the black Rembrandtish shadows circling as though to strangle and devour them.

It seemed like the fairy camps, or any other political old thing according to your state of sobriety and digestion.

When the fireworks had gone out, hundreds of people gathered in front of the band stand to hear the music. Every boat on the lake was taken.

Two great barges were filled with Japs, who ripped around the lake as though it were a ’varsity boat race with a penalty imposed if any two rowers took a stroke together. [See Note, below.]

Every time they ran into anybody, they said, “ ’Scuse me,” with great politeness.

And the light came dancing in a ribbon of silver across the dark mysterious waters.
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Notes on Westlake Park

According to Jane Gilman, publisher of the Larchmont Chronicle, Henry Gaylord Wilshire bought 35 acres in the area for $52,000, including land that had been a city dump and in the late 1880s was made over into Westlake Park. Click here to read more about the Wilshire Corridor.

By the 1890s, says the Web site Sculptural Works in MacArthur Park, it “was a vacation destination, surrounded by wealthy hotels,” and “In the early part of the 20th century, [it] became known as the Champs-Elysees of Los Angeles.”

“The park was designed in 1890,” it adds, “with the aid of a group of citizens organized by Mayor Workman, in a former low-lying swamp having little commercial value at the time.”

Just the next year, says the Los Angeles in 1891 site, Angelinos could board a Seventh Street electric car and ride out to the park. It quotes an article from the Los Angeles Times dated December 4, 1891:

“Westlake Park, on the western city limits, is a pretty, breezy spot. It will gain much in beauty after the trees shall have attained a larger growth. The lake is well provided with boats, which are liberally patronized, and a band plays once a week. A climb of a few minutes up one of the surrounding hills will reward you with some expansive views of the country between Los Angeles and the ocean.”

Sadly, the historic Westlake Park was renamed MacArthur Park (in honor of General Douglas MacArthur) in 1942.

Links to the Japanese in Los Angeles

The History of Japanese Immigration: “Japanese laborers were not allowed to leave their country legally until after 1884 when an agreement was signed between their government and Hawaiian sugar plantations. From Hawaii, many Japanese moved to the U.S. mainland. By 1890, 2,038 Japanese resided in the United States. . . . ”

California History Online: “Japanese immigration to California steadily increased in the early twentieth century. As the number of immigrants grew, so too did anti-Japanese sentiment. In 1905 San Francisco labor leaders formed an Asiatic Exclusion League to demand public policies against the new immigrants.”

Japanese-American Network: A chronology of Japanese-American history.
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For a personal look at Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s, click for a new book by George Garrigues
He Usually Lived With a Female: The Life of a California Newspaperman