This article was excerpted from the web site of the Historical
Society of Southern California. http://www.socalhistory.org/
Harris Newmark was my great great Grandfather
Harris Newmark
I believe Los Angeles is destined to become, in not many years, a world-center prominent in almost every field of endeavor. [Just] as nineteen hundred years ago the humblest Roman . . . would glow with pride when he said, "I am a Roman!" so will the son of the metropolis on these shores . . . be proud to declare, "I AM A CITIZEN OF LOS ANGELES!"
-- Harris Newmark,
1913 “My Sixty Years of Southern California: 1853-1913”
Harris Newmark (1834-1916) arrived in Los Angeles from West
Prussia in 1853, learned Spanish before he learned English in order to run his
downtown merchandise and grocery business, and began collecting his impressions
of people and events in the cultural backwater that Los Angeles was at the
time. As one historian noted, Newmark "knew almost everyone and knew
almost everything that went on in town."
Following an older brother, Joseph, to California, Newmark made
the journey from Europe by ship, crossing the Isthmus of Nicaragua, arriving in
San Pedro on October 25, 1853. Here he was greeted heartily by another
Los Angeles pioneer, Phineas Banning, the father of the Port of Los
Angeles. Banning who was building a business as a Wagoner, hauling goods
in and out of San Pedro and Los Angeles, would eventually join in many business
enterprises with the new arrival.
After working in partnership with his brother, Newmark eventually
established his own wholesale grocery business, H. Newmark and Company, in
1865, with headquarters on Spring Street. He went on to invest in real
estate, holding large tracts in the San Gabriel Valley, and once winning a lot
in what was once the "wilderness" just west of the city for $2. He
later sold the same lot for $10,000 profit. In 1875 he sold eight
thousand acres of what was then the Santa Anita Rancho to rancher E.J.
"Lucky" Baldwin for $200,000. He had purchased it a few years
before for $85,000. Other Newmark properties became the foundations for the
town of Montebello.
He married a cousin, Sarah, in 1858. Her memorable comment
upon arriving in Los Angeles for the first time was: "Where's the
city?" The Newmarks were parents of eleven children; only seven of
which survived.
Newmark was a charter member of the Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce, one of the organizers of the first Los Angeles Board of Trade, one of
the organizers of the Los Angeles Public Library, President of the Los Angeles
congregation of B'nai B'rith (now Wilshire Blvd.Temple). A founder of the
Jewish Orphan’s Home, now called Vista del Mar. He was instrumental in
the early years of the Southwest Museum and a charter member of the California
Club. Newmark’s business acumen and real estate holdings propelled
him into the front ranks of civic leadership in turn-of-the century Los
Angeles. As a patriarch of the city’s Jewish community, he endowed Jewish
charities and assisted the broader community by organizing a board of trade and
founding a public library.
Late in life, working with his sons Maurice and Marco and Pasadena
historian/researcher Perry Worden, Newmark assembled his recollections in a
landmark book, Sixty Years In Southern California: 1853-1913, a work described by
California historian and State Librarian Kevin Starr as "the single most
valuable memoir to deal with the rise of the Southland in the 19th
century,"" an informed, gossipy Pepys’s Diary of Southern
California," as Lawrence Clark Powell later described it, and, according
to another source, "one of the great autobiographies of the American
Jewish experience." A fourth edition revised and augmented with an
introduction and notes by W.W. Robinson was published by Dawson's Books in
1984.
Newmark's eldest son Maurice, born in 1859, was sent to Europe for
his education and eventually took over management of his father's commercial
interests and joined him in many of his civic activities. His youngest
surviving child, Marco, was a noted local historian, and served for a time as
president of the Historical Society of
Southern California.
--Contributed by Albert Greenstein, 1999
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