Herman W Hellman (2 results)
More imagesPublished by Herman W. Hellman / Marco H. Hellman 1870
- Hardcover
Seller: Barry Lawrence Ruderman, La Jolla, CA, U.S.A.Barry Lawrence Ruderman
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used
US$ 45,000.00
US$ 14.50 shippingShips within U.S.A.Quantity: 1 available
Hardcover. The Hellmans and the Rise of Modern Los Angeles: an Important Archive of Family, Fortune, and Civic LifeIncluding Herman W. Hellman s 1893 - 1896 Letter Book: an Untapped Primary Source on Los Angeles Banking and Real Es. The Hellmans and the Rise of Modern Los Angeles: an Important Archive of Family, Fortune, and Civ…ic LifeIncluding Herman W. Hellman s 1893 - 1896 Letter Book: an Untapped Primary Source on Los Angeles Banking and Real Estate DevelopmentOver 1,000 Original Photographs Plus Scrapbooks, Artwork, Family Correspondence, and Ephemera Documenting the Social, Financial, and Domestic World of a Prominent Jewish Banking Family in Los Angeles During the Early 20th-centuryA rich and historically important archive spanning two generations of the Hellman family, the most prominent Jewish banking and real-estate dynasty in early California, and especially in Los Angeles. At its core is Herman W. Hellman s substantial letter book, preserving copies of over 800 outgoing letters (mostly to his brother Isaias) relating to real estate and banking in 1890s Los Angeles. There are also over 1000 original photographs, five original works of art, two scrapbooks, more than 90 letters and notes to Marco H. Hellman (Herman's son) and his family, two small handwritten diaries by Marco's wife Reta Laura Hellman (n e Levis), and over 30 additional printed and manuscript ephemera items. Taken together, the collection offers an unusually intimate and wide-ranging window on the financial, social, domestic, and philanthropic life of one of Los Angeles s formative families from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth.Herman W. Hellman immigrated from Germany in 1859 and rose from modest beginnings in Southern California to become one of the leading bankers and real-estate men of Los Angeles. He worked in his youth as a Wells Fargo express driver between Los Angeles and San Francisco, later entered business on his own, and in time became a major force in the city s commercial and financial development. With his brother Isaias W. Hellman, he helped build some of California s earliest and most consequential banking institutions, among them Farmers & Merchants Bank of Los Angeles. The Hellman brothers together played a central role in shaping the financial architecture of both Southern and Northern California. Herman s career also reflects the transformation of Los Angeles itself: from a small frontier town into a modern commercial city of banks, office buildings, investment capital, and expanding urban real estate. His great downtown Herman W. Hellman Building, completed in 1903 at a cost of nearly $1 million (at the time the most expensive building erected in Los Angeles) rose on the site of his former residence at Fourth and Spring Streets and stood as a monument to Herman's ascent.Upon Herman s death in 1906, his son Marco H. Hellman assumed a leading role in the Los Angeles branch of the family s business affairs. Educated in Los Angeles and at Stanford, where he was a contemporary of Herbert Hoover, Marco belonged to a younger generation of California financiers whose interests extended beyond banking into bonds, industry, agriculture, irrigation, horses, clubs, automobiles, and the rapidly modernizing social life of the city. He served as president of the Herman Hellman family line banking concerns (Merchants National Trust and Hellman Commercial Bank), became a director of numerous other banks and industrial companies, helped market bonds connected with the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and participated in financing the region s expanding economy, including its emergent film industry. The archive, which is especially rich for the years from the 1900s through the 1920s, presents Marco as an emblematic Los Angeles figure: cosmopolitan, civic-minded, sociable, extravagant, energetic, and deeply enmeshed . Book.
Seller: Globus Rare Books & Archives, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.Globus Rare Books & Archives
Contact seller5-star sellerNone. Condition: None. Herman W. Hellman (1843-1906) was a Jewish American banker and real estate investor. After immigrating from Germany in 1859, he spent his entire life in Los Angeles, starting as a longshoreman on the docks in Wilmington and advancing to become the largest individual taxpayer in the city. When he was 20 yea…rs old, he began working as a Wells Fargo Express driver between Los Angeles and San Francisco. During his employment, he once entered into a gunfight with the highwayman Tiburcio Vasquez. After a few years on the job, he settled in Los Angeles and started a loan business. He was active in providing smaller banks with loans, contributing to the financial development of the state, and helping charities, both Jewish and others. Together with his brother Isaias, they were responsible for opening some of the earliest Californian credit institutions, including Farmers & Merchants National Bank, United States National, Merchants National, and Hellman Commercial Trust & Savings. With his brother moving to San Francisco in the 1890s and making an impact on founding several institutions there, the two brothers can be credited with forming the architecture of California's financial system. By 1925, the estimated total assets controlled by the Hellman family in California amounted to $350 million. The Herman W. Hellman Building in Downtown Los Angeles, finished in 1903, became a landmark for his life, built on the site of the small frame cottage where he had lived since 1875. In 1874, he married Ida Heinman (1850-1923) from a Sicilian Jewish family. They had six children, including Marco H. Hellman (1878-1948). Marco H. Hellman (1878-1948), the heir to Herman W. Hellman's estate, took center stage in running the affairs of the Los Angeles part of the Hellman financial empire in 1906. After attending Los Angeles High School and studying at Stanford, where he was a classmate of Herbert Hoover, Marco worked alongside his father and uncle. Marco served as president of that bank and of the Hellman Commercial Trust & Savings, and in time became a director of 21 banks and nine industrial concerns. He was a principal seller of bonds for the Los Angeles Aqueduct and was willing to finance the expanding movie industry. He was married to Rita Laura Hellman (Levis) (1884-1920). The pair had two children, a boy and a girl. They resided at 3350 Wilshire Boulevard, a building now demolished but extensively represented in the photographic part of the archive. Marco sold his banking business to what became the Bank of America and, by the early 1930s, had been stripped of most of his wealth due to a series of bad investments and the ongoing crisis. Marco, as shown in this archive, which largely concentrates on his life in the 1900s-1920s, was a true son of his city: he was cosmopolitan (as he wrote in one of his letters from the archive, "I am a great believer in helping young men regardless of race, religion or creed"), generous (a contributor to the LAPD and a Democratic Party donor), extravagant (owner of a stable with show horses, an eager automobile rider in the 1900s, and a Shriner), social (with ties to the movie industry, an organizer of parties and masquerades, and a composer of humorous couplets), and environmentally minded for his time (a member of a reforestation association, a sponsor of irrigation, and an investor in lemon farming). A Los Angelean whose life was a roller coaster of success and misery, he should not be forgotten. The highlights of the collection include copies of letters from Herman W. Hellman to his brother Isaias W. Hellman (1840-1920), Los Angeles's first banker, one of the largest landowners in Southern California at the time, and the founder of USC, the letters to Isaias were sent several times a month for more than 3 years; more than 30 letters from Marco to his wife-to-be, sent from Los Angeles in 1908, giving vivid details of his life in the city at the time; large studio photographs of Herman and Ida; large photogra.
