Covenants & Lost Neighborhoods
I recently visited the San Diego History Center to view the San Diego’s Lost Neighborhoods exhibition, which examines the local history of African-American communities displaced by redlining, freeway construction, and other discriminatory policies. One of those lost neighborhoods was in La Jolla, which was the setting for my historical novel The Esmeralda Goodbye.
This may come as a surprise to anyone visiting La Jolla today, but at one time a significant black population considered it home. As you’ll see in this map from the exhibition, black residents represented more than ten percent of La Jolla residents in the 1950s, the highest percentage of any community in San Diego at the time.
The map confirmed something I’d felt when I was writing The Esmeralda Goodbye. As a kid who grew up in La Jolla in the late fifties and sixties, I remembered a small but thriving black community you won’t find there today. It was one of the things I wanted to capture in some small way in my novel. The characters of Mabel and Willie Denton, Charlie Buchanon and Mr. Bell as well as Mr. Parker’s Little Pig BBQ were all inspired by memories of people and places from that time.
There were a number of reasons for the decline of the African-American population in La Jolla, but the most heinous and deliberate were the restrictive property covenants. Black residents were allowed to live in the homes of their employers but were otherwise confined to specific and less desirable parts of the town if they wanted to own their own home. As you’ll see from below, the covenants were used to keep anyone who wasn’t White or Caucasian from purchasing, renting or leasing residential properties. This restriction was intended to exclude Jewish owners as well.
As hinted at in my novel, the pending arrival of the University of California in the 1960s brought political pressure that resulted in the covenants being overturned. But the black community of La Jolla had already started to move on. As of 2023 the black population of La Jolla hovered around 1%.
In Search of Old San Francisco
It’s been a long time since I visited San Francisco. Back in my younger days it seemed like I went up there every couple of years. The Left Coast Crime Conference was held in San Francisco this year and it gave my wife and I an opportunity to make a return visit. After the conference was over, we spent a couple of days revisiting the city.
One of the things we like to do when we travel is to seek out the old stuff—restaurants, bookstores, parks and buildings that act as cultural repositories for the city’s soul, its living history.
With that in mind, one of the first places we visited was the City Lights Bookstore, leftover from a time when bookstores played a major role in the cultural life of our cities, a place where readers, writers, artists, intellectuals, and other movers and shakers would meet. City Lights is best known for its role in San Francisco’s social and political movements in the second half of the twentieth century. First opened by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 the store, and its publishing arm, became ground zero for the Beat movement after publishing Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, the first volume in its ongoing Pocket Poets Series.
Best of all, City Lights is still in the same location and still going strong. And it’s still a place where you can “participate in that ‘great conversation’ between authors of all ages, ancient and modern.” (Ferlinghetti)
The weather was nice so we spent a few hours at the San Francisco Botanical Garden and the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.
For dinner we went to Tadich Grill, the oldest continuously run restaurant in California (third oldest in the United States). Established in 1849 by Croation immigrants, it’s a European-style bistro featuring a long wooden bar, white-linen service and an old-fashioned, but still delicious, grill menu. It manages to be both classy and a lot of fun. You rarely find places like this anymore (especially in California).
Not all of our adventures were historical. We got a glimpse of the future when we rode in a Waymo self-driving taxi.
Here’s sixteen seconds of our journey from inside the taxi. The future is here. We’ll have to get used to it.
And last, but not least, we made a visit to the Musée Mécanique, with its wondrous machines from the past, including this Mighty Wurlitzer player piano.
Reuben the Guide
He perceived the foolishness of men as keenly as anyone I ever knew, and without malice.
The Deadly Stingaree, Chapter 5
While researching the historical veracity of The Deadly Stingaree I came upon the photograph at the left. It’s of a man known as Reuben the Guide who, according to the caption, led wagon tours to the Pt. Loma Light House and Tijuana in the late 1800s. It wasn’t much to go on but it did confirm the existence of this historical San Diegan, a man who could certainly have been friends with the story’s hero, Johnny Cong.
And that was all I knew about Reuben. Until now. Recently, while catching up on episodes of Ken Kramer’s great KPBS show, About San Diego, I saw a familiar photo flash on screen. It was Reuben!
As it turns out, local genealogist and historian Yvette Porter-Moore has done a great deal of research on Reuben. His real name was Reuben Williams and he was something of a local, state and even national legend. Obituaries appeared in newspapers as far as Washington state when he died.
An article entitled Just Over the Line in an 1894 Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle describes a trip to Tia Juana with Reuben as guide. It’s a long article, which you can read by clicking on the thumbnail of the page on the left. Here’s what it has to say about Reuben:
“The interesting character of Tia Juana is Reuben, the guide. His other name is Williams, but he does not consider it a nice name and has dropped it. He likes to be considered a Mexican, but he is really a full-blooded African. Forewarned tourists address him as a Mexican and then Reuben cannot do enough for them. He is the most picturesquely dressed individual in town. He, and he alone, wears a sombrero, and two months ago married an Indian woman. His comments on the passing landscape are very humorous as he stands on the steps of the bus and rolls his eyes. Reuben alone is worth the price of the trip, for one who has compressed sixty years of life into thirty, for one can live fast even in Tia Juana.”
In his manner and style the Reuben who appears in The Deadly Stingaree bears a strong resemblance to the man described in the Chronicle article. One interesting item from the article above is that he “married an Indian woman.” As readers of The Deadly Stingaree may remember, Reuben swears off marriage in his conversations with Johnny Cong. The Chronicle article appeared three years after the events depicted in the book so perhaps Reuben had a change of heart!
For more information and stories about Reuben, read Yvette’s article here.
California’s First Female Lawyer
“I am Mrs. Clara Foltz, the owner and editor of the San Diego Daily Bee. I must have access to your wagon.”
The Deadly Stingaree, Chapter 7, The Bank Mob
So begins the introduction of Johnny Cong, the protagonist of The Deadly Stingaree, to a remarkable and important figure in California’s history. Clara Shortridge Foltz (July 16, 1849 – September 2, 1934) was a crusading journalist and the first female lawyer on the West Coast of the United States. She pioneered of the idea of a public defender’s office.
Abandoned by her husband and raising five children, Mrs. Foltz moved to San Diego during the land rush of the late 1880s. Here in San Diego she worked as an attorney and political orator. She founded, published and wrote for one of the city’s leading newspapers, the San Diego Daily Bee.
Her time in San Diego was short-lived, but her later life in California included many historic firsts:
- first female clerk for the State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee
- first woman appointed to the State Board of Corrections
- first woman named director of a major bank
- first woman to run for Governor of California
I first learned about Mrs. Foltz and her achievements when I started my research for The Deadly Stingaree. I knew from the start she would play a key part in the book.
Foltz first proposed the idea of a public defender system during a speech at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. She wrote a number of articles on why the costs should be shouldered by the government and felt that the public defender should act as a mirror to the public prosecutor, with a similar selection process and salary. Her efforts paid off in 1913 when the state of California established the first public defender’s office in Los Angeles.
For the conviction of the accused every weapon is provided and used, even those poisoned by wrong and injustice. But what machinery is provided for the defense of the innocent? None, absolutely none.
Clara Shortridge Foltz, from her speech at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
In honor of her important contributions to the justice system, The Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles is now known as the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center.
Christmas Music 2025
I’m trying to write a new Christmas/Holiday song every year. My alternative to sending cards. Here’s this year’s edition, an instrumental bit of holiday musical cheer I’m calling Santa’s Workshop.
Here’s a music-only version without all those distracting visuals 🙂
In the Christmas spirit yet? Check out some of my earlier seasonal musical compositions: