A Garden Spot in Dusty Old L.A.

Almost a century before the 1930s vogue for visually euphonic architecture dotted Los Angeles with oversized ice cream cones, doughnuts, pickles and hot dogs, crowds gathered at the city’s first commercial exercise in structural advertisement--the Garden of Paradise.

In 1858, Los Angeles was hardly paradisaic. It was a tough, brawling frontier town of 5,000 people whose daily lives included gambling, prostitution and armed vigilantes. There were several murders a week, and occasional lynchings.

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It was at that point that a German immigrant named George Lehman--a baker, land speculator and master storyteller--decided there was money to be made in offering his fellow Angelenos a twofold escape: cold beer in a kind of prototypal theme park modeled after the original Eden.

Lehman cut quite a figure in frontier Los Angeles. He always dressed immaculately, carried a crooked cane from one arm and held a lemon on which he nibbled. He owned a bakery at 6th and Spring streets and much of the surrounding land.

He also was a passionate and generous horticulturist. Almost a decade before a five-acre parcel was set aside for a public park--now known as Pershing Square--Lehman planted shrubs and small cypresses around the city-owned tract. The Zanja Madre, as the city’s water system was then known, ran through the park, helping to irrigate the greenery and orchards farther south.

In the late 1850s, Lehman began to envision an outdoor beer garden, a showplace that would be famed not only for its brew but also for its distinctive landscaping. As a site for the new venture, Lehman bought one-third of the block bounded by Main, Spring, 3rd and 4th streets. At purchase, the property was bare except for a huge cactus and a round adobe house, inspired by the travels of its original owner, Ramon Alexander, an eccentric French sailor who had built the home in the 1840s after seeing a similar one on the coast of Africa.

Lehman added trees and flowers to the property. He cut a living archway through the gigantic cactus to create an entrance on Spring Street and added wooden siding to Alexander’s adobe, transforming it into a 13-sided, two-story “Round House.”

To complete his paradise theme, Lehman embellished the grounds with towering, whitewashed statues of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel--all standing beneath the spreading branches of the Tree of Knowledge. A swing of “flying horses” delighted children, while their parents nursed their beers and enjoyed spirited music from a German brass band that played from the balcony.

Awash in music, beer and high spirits, the outdoor beer garden was soon a popular gathering spot for L.A.’s social events and, particularly, the city’s German immigrants. In the daytime it doubled as a German-language school. By night, it soon became a hotbed for trail-hardened, beer-drinking Southerners, some of whom settled disputes with knives and guns and most of whom favored secession from the Union. The German immigrants, who wanted no mistakes made about their loyalty to the nation, responded by erecting their own “Liberty Pole,” a red-and-white striped symbol of patriotism dating to Revolutionary times.

On July 4, 1876, 2,600 Angelenos braved blistering temperatures to pack the Round House in observance of the nation’s centennial.

By 1880, Los Angeles had experienced a spectacular growth and Lehman thought he envisioned still another opportunity: a music center at the northeast corner of 5th and Olive Streets. But before his dream could take form, the man who helped bring cold beer, horticulture and sauerbraten to the dry frontier finally went broke. Two years later, he died penniless.

Before the Round House was torn down in 1887, it served as Los Angeles’ first kindergarten. Appropriately enough, its first teacher was Kate Douglas Wiggin, who first would become famous for writing “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and, then infamous for her letter to “America’s Sweetheart”--silent movie actress Mary Pickford--whom Wiggin accused of “spoiling the story.”

The site’s association with show business continues to this day. Where once revelers toasted one another through heads of beer, there now stands a federal office building named in honor of a former head of state--onetime actor Ronald Reagan.