Five Special Events in Old Los Angeles

1910-1912

By 1910, Los Angeles was a rapidly growing, semi-rural boomtown transitioning from an agricultural community to a major urban center. Its population had tripled over the previous decade, reaching 319,000 and fueling a sense of optimism and possibility. While much of the city’s social life remained concentrated downtown, nearby communities such as Pasadena were already well established as resort destinations. Five banquet menus dating from 1910 to 1912 offer a window into this transitional period, just before automobile culture and the emerging film industry began to reshape the city and its dining culture. 

California Club 

In March 1910, 75-year-old philanthropist Andrew Carnegie visited Los Angeles as part of a tour of Southern California's growing scientific and cultural institutions. He met with prominent figures, including naturalist John Muir, and toured the Mount Wilson Observatory, which he had helped fund. In the photograph below, Carnegie poses with astronomer George Ellery Hale beside the observatory’s 60-inch telescope. 

During his visit, Carnegie was honored by the Chamber of Commerce with a banquet at the California Club, then located at Fifth and Hill Streets. The menu featured a few regional touches, including Toke Point oysters—a premium native variety harvested in Pacific County, Washington. Among the wines served was Tipo Chianti, a brand launched in 1906 by Sonoma County’s Italian Swiss Colony winery and served in a traditional straw-covered bottle. 

Busch’s Sunken Gardens 

Busch’s Sunken Gardens was located in Pasadena, approximately ten miles from downtown Los Angeles. The distant glow of the city can be seen in this historic nighttime photograph taken from the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1908. 

More than 2,000 physicians gathered in Pasadena in June 1911 for the annual session of the American Medical Association. As a highlight of the festivities, wealthy brewing magnate Adolphus Busch hosted an elaborate social gala at his renowned Sunken Gardens, a 38-acre botanical park adjoining his estate.1 Titled “La Fiesta de los Médicos,” the foldout below served as both a menu and program for the event, which featured Mexican-inspired cuisine and musical performances staged at various points throughout the landscaped grounds.

The Maryland Hotel was one of Pasadena’s grand winter resorts during the city’s golden era of tourism. Opened in 1903, it attracted wealthy patrons from across the nation. The repertoire of its resident orchestra reflected the musical tastes of the early 20th-century elite—a refined style of hotel salon music that would soon fall out of fashion.

Musicians were also brought in from farther afield, reflecting the region’s emerging tourist infrastructure. Santa Catalina—a scenic island 22 miles off the coast—had become a popular resort destination by the turn of the twentieth century. Porter’s Catalina Island Band played a central role in the island’s nightlife, performing early-evening open-air concerts at the Greek Amphitheatre (later known as the Avalon Bowl), followed by performances at the Dance Pavilion. 

The Venetian Troubadours (also known as the Italian gondoliers) were central to the romantic atmosphere developer Abbot Kinney envisioned for his “Venice of America.” Opened in 1905 just south of Santa Monica, the coastal resort town featured Venetian architecture, a 1,200-foot pier, and miles of winding canals navigated by imported Italian singers. 

Beverly Hills Hotel 

When the Beverly Hills Hotel opened in 1912, the luxury resort stood virtually alone in the undeveloped landscape. Yet urbanization was advancing rapidly.  Only five miles down the dusty road lay Hollywood, a town of about 8,000 residents that had been annexed by Los Angeles two years prior. 

In October of that year, the brand-new hotel hosted a Halloween party. The themed menu featured fried Catalina sand dabs—a tiny flatfish native to the Pacific Ocean—alongside spooky items like “banshee’s broth with broomsticks.”

The partygoers are shown below in their Halloween costumes.2 The photograph provides a rare glimpse of one of the hotel’s earliest social events—long before it became a bustling center of Hollywood glamour.

Alexandria Hotel 

Opened in 1906, the eight-story Alexandria Hotel was the city’s first luxury hotel, boasting Italian marble columns, plush furnishings, and a formal dining room that reflected the hotel’s elegant Beaux-Arts design.

Two unique banquet menus from special events at the hotel in 1910 take the form of 3¼ x 5¾ inch suitcases, cleverly reflecting the underlying themes of both occasions. They were hand-crafted by Brock & Feagans, a prominent local jeweler.3 The menu below, from February of that year, comes from a farewell banquet for guests who were about to embark on a trip abroad. The miniature suitcase features genuine leather, complete with functional leather straps and brass hardware.

Inside is a small booklet with a watercolor illustration on the cover. Its bill of fare features an “alligator pear” salad—using the early term for an avocado.

At the time, traveling from Los Angeles to Western Europe required 9 to 14 days of continuous travel by cross-country rail and transatlantic steamship. But change was already in the air. A month before this dinner, Los Angeles had hosted the nation’s first International Air Meet in January 1910—just six years after the Wright brothers' historic flight at Kitty Hawk.

The other event was the annual meeting of the Hotel Men’s Mutual Benefit Association in April. Hoteliers from across the country participated in this busman’s holiday—a massive, multi-city rail tour showcasing California’s hotels and rapidly expanding tourism infrastructure. At the time, the hospitality industry served as a vital engine for the region’s economy.4 Naturally, Los Angeles’s finest hotel was chosen to host the group’s grand banquet. A photograph of the dinner guests appeared the following year in a book documenting their Pacific Coast tour. 

As the 250 hotel men entered the dining room, they were presented with a small rattan suitcase as a souvenir. Modeled after wicker luggage of the era, the little cases were crafted from woven plant fibers and finished with leather trim, brass hardware, and fabric linings.

Opening a suitcase revealed a silk frontispiece printed with a poem and an illustrative scene about the hospitality industry. This artwork contrasted the proprietor of an old wayside inn against a hotel of the period, complete with a busy bellhop and an automobile outside. The suitcase also contained the program and the bill of fare. 

The Alexandria remained the city’s premier hotel throughout the decade. In 1919, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith chose it to announce the founding of United Artists studio. However, its dominance ended on New Year’s Day in 1921 when the Ambassador Hotel opened on Wilshire Boulevard, ushering in the modern era.

Notes 

1. Adolphus Busch, co-founder of Anheuser-Busch, opened the gardens to the public in 1906. With its rolling terraces, broad lawns, winding paths, ponds, fountains, rockwork, and lush plantings, it became one of Southern California’s most celebrated early tourist attractions. The gardens were part of Busch’s winter estate along a section of Pasadena’s Orange Grove Boulevard known as “Millionaire’s Row.” Other industrialists who built homes there included chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., whose Italian Renaissance–style mansion now serves as the headquarters of the Tournament of Roses, and David Gamble of Procter & Gamble, whose celebrated residence remains a masterpiece of the American Arts and Crafts movement. Busch Gardens later served as a filming location for numerous Hollywood productions, including Gone with the Wind, before closing in 1937. 

2. Halloween was celebrated as much by adults as by children in the years before mass-produced costumes and trick-or-treating became widespread customs in the 1930s. 

3. Advertised as “The Finest Jewelry Store in the West,” Brock & Feagans operated at Broadway and 4th Street from 1903 to 1911. Its stunning showroom was a featured stop on electric trolley car tours that showed tourists the sights of Los Angeles. 

4. The hotel industry once ranked high as an important component of the U.S. economy. In his 1934 novel Work of Art, Sinclair Lewis tells the story of an ambitious hotelier striving to climb the ranks of the American lodging industry, in the process creating a "composite picture" of the early twentieth-century hotel landscape.