Hinchman, for fourteen thousand dollars, also disposed of the site of the present Bullard Block, whereon Temple had erected a large brick building, the lower part of which was used as a market while the upper part was a theater. The terms in each of these three transactions were a thousand dollars per annum, with interest at ten per cent. He sold to the Bixbys the Cerritos _rancho_, containing twenty-six thousand acres, for twenty thousand dollars. Besides these, there were eighteen lots, each one hundred and twenty by three hundred and thirty feet, located on Fort Street (now Broadway), some of which ran through to Spring and others to Hill, which were bought by J. F. Burns and William Buffum for one thousand and fifty dollars, or fifty dollars each for the twelve inside and seventy-five dollars each for the six corner lots.
Returning to the Fort Street lots, it may be interesting to know that the property would be worth to-day--at an average price of four thousand dollars per foot--about nine million dollars. Eugene Meyer purchased one of the lots (on the west side of Fort Street, running through to Hill, one hundred and twenty by three hundred and thirty feet in size), for the sum of one thousand dollars; and I paid him a thousand dollars for sixty feet and the same depth. In 1874 I built on this site the home occupied by me for about twelve years, after which I improved both fronts for F. L. Blanchard. These two blocks are still in my possession; the Broadway building is known as Blanchard Hall. Blanchard, by the way, a comer of 1886, started his Los Angeles career in A. G. Bartlett's music store, and has since always been closely identified with art movements. He organized the system of cluster street-lights in use here and was an early promoter of good roads.
[Illustration: Pio Pico From an oil portrait]
Charles L. Ducommun was here in business in 1853, he and John G. Downey having arrived together, three years before. According to the story still current, Ducommun, with his kit and stock as a watchmaker, and Downey, with his outfit as a druggist, hired a _carreta_ together, to transport their belongings from San Pedro to Los Angeles; but the _carreta_ broke down, and the two pilgrims to the City of the Angels had to finish their journey afoot. Ducommun's first store, located on Commercial Street between Main and Los Angeles, was about sixteen by thirty feet in size, but it contained an astonishing assortment of merchandise, such as hardware, stationery and jewelry. Perhaps the fact that Ducommun came from Switzerland, then even more than now the chief home of watchmaking, explains his early venture in the making and selling of watches; however that may be, it was to Charlie Ducommun's that the bankrupt merchant Moreno--later sentenced to fourteen or fifteen years in the penitentiary for robbing a Frenchman--came to sell the Frenchman's gold watch. Moreno confessed that he had organized a gang of robbers, after his failure in business, and had murdered even his own lieutenants. Ducommun, pretending to go into a rear room for the money, slipped out of the back door and gave the alarm. Ducommun's store was a sort of curiosity-shop containing many articles not obtainable elsewhere; and he was clever enough, when asked for any rarity, to charge all that the traffic would bear. I wonder what Charlie Ducommun would say if he could return to life and see his sons conducting a large, modern wholesale hardware establishment on an avenue never thought of in his day and where once stretched acres of fruit and vine lands! Ducommun Street commemorates this pioneer.