Plaza Progress

Something more recent for a change!

The regional indoor shopping mall known today as Plaza West Covina is a half-century old this year. Originally called West Covina Fashion Plaza, its grand opening took place September 25, 1975.¹

A couple weeks ago, I discovered a newly-available series of aerial photos on the UCSB Geospatial Collection website which appears to have been taken to document the yearly progress of the BKK landfill in the San Jose Hills. Far up near the top edges of these photos, however, were glimpses of the main West Covina shopping center which is the subject of this article, and they visually document in detail how the Plaza under its various names has evolved over time.

All photos courtesy of UCSB Geospatial Collection; captions and credits below. Click on the image above to view an enlargement.

1973: The last year of the original West Covina Plaza shopping center, which first opened in October, 1956.²

1974: Construction of the new indoor mall.³

1975: The completed West Covina Fashion Plaza.⁴ The west wing of the old Plaza was demolished, temporarily sparing the building formerly occupied by J. C. Penney.

1977, 1992: The east wing of the old Plaza was kept open for business until its demolition commenced in Fall, 1991.^5,6

1995: This configuration has remained relatively unchanged to the present day,⁷ except that the building formerly occupied by Tower Records and Desmond's before that was demolished in 2009.

More dates, photos and factoids below!

The Squatter Era

In 1859, long before the Badilla brothers or J. S. Phillips arrived on the scene, that northern section of Covina that today lies between San Bernardino Road and Arrow Highway began being settled by enterprising American and immigrant pioneers. Featured in this article is a recently discovered telling of those settlers' story that was written in 1887, when all the events described were still in the living memory of those who witnessed them.

The land that is the subject of this newfound contemporary account was originally part of Henry ("Don Enrique") Dalton's Rancho Azusa, which the Englishman had purchased from Don Luis Arenas in 1844. At that time, Dalton's ranch encompassed most of the territory east of the San Gabriel River and south from the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains to the old San Bernardino stage road.

Rancho Azusa de Dalton originally extended south to the northern boundary of Rancho La Puente. Alignments of selected section and quarter-section roads of today are labeled for reference.
Source: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records. (Click on the image to view an enlargement.)

As the article below will recount, in 1858 the U. S. Government ordered a new survey of Dalton's holdings, the result of which was the invalidation of Rancho Azusa's southern and eastern boundaries. Surveyor Henry Hancock drew a new southern line for Dalton's rancho (today's Gladstone Street), thus creating 2,428.25^* acres of new public land that thereupon became available for preemption, and later, homesteading.

While Pflueger (1964) gave an admirably thorough account of Covina's squatter era, this article from the January 23, 1887, edition of the Los Angeles Times^** tells the story from a unique perspective I hadn't seen in print before. So, without further ado...

Original Covina Landowners

While digging into old real estate records earlier this month, I decided to make a map showing the names of the first owners of every parcel in the Phillips Tract. Whenever I found an original title conveyance by trustee James F. Houghton, I made a note of the grantee and the date in the corresponding square on Eaton's survey.

Earliest owners of lots in the Phillips Tract. Click image to view an enlargement. A legend for the colors displayed can be found there.

Why would I go to the trouble of doing that, you might ask? Well, it was primarily to fact-check a similar cartographic record in the collection of the Covina Valley Historical Society, the accuracy of which I have since come to question.

The Tract, Trials and Tribulations of Joseph Phillips

J. Edward Hollenbeck and Joseph Phillips: the two men without whom Covina would not have existed.

These past six weeks I've been doing a deep dive into Covina founder Joseph Swift Phillips, and I've uncovered many surprising new facts. The subjects are fairly complicated and make for a long, dry read, however, so I thought I'd approach this article differently and start off with a list of my main points and then delve into the particulars afterwards.

I should perhaps note here at the outset that none of the following findings have been described in any previous published history of Covina. This is all new stuff here, especially the legal blockbuster near the end!

tl;dr summary:

• As I stated in a previous article, the real estate deal between Phillips and Hollenbeck for the tract of land which would become Covina took place in 1881, not 1882.

• The 1881 deal was only a contract for deed, not an outright sale, and Phillips may have used real estate instead of cash for his down payment.

• In 1885, Phillips had to borrow $40,000 to pay off Hollenbeck, and the loan was secured by a deed of trust that conveyed legal title from Hollenbeck directly to trustee James F. Houghton. Phillips himself never actually held marketable title to the tract which bore his name.

• Although Phillips was empowered to arrange and negotiate sales, all of the original land purchases and title conveyances in the Phillips Tract from 1885-1889 were brokered and closed by Houghton.

• Phillips ultimately failed to repay his 1885 loan, so in 1889, Houghton foreclosed and Phillips forfeited all of his Covina properties.

• Hollenbeck and Houghton both made big bank on the Phillips Tract, while Phillips himself lost everything.

• In 1894, Phillips sued almost everyone who had been involved with his past land dealings in a last ditch effort to recoup his financial losses.

• In sum, litigation expense was likely a significant contributor to Phillips's financial downfall.

Details and references below.

On AI

Given the pace of change in our electronic world, I'd like to state for the record that I have never used "artificial intelligence" in the production of this blog, and I never will. Every article you read here is the output of my native human intelligence applied to researching a particular topic, or an account drawn from personal experience.

To me, this is not merely a matter of principle or credibility. This blog is all about discovering new facts about Covina history, and AI in its present state is not able to generate novel ideas. It may be able to tell you things that you never knew before, but it cannot create entirely new knowledge on its own. Not yet, anyway. So for my purposes here, AI doesn't have any practical usefulness.

Granted, my reliance on human intelligence also means mistakes will be made, but at least any errors of fact you might find here are not the result of "hallucinations" of the sort that is currently endemic to AI. (Which is to say, I never just "make shit up" like the LLMs sometimes do.) ;-)

All that said, I've been amused the couple of times that someone has quoted a chatbot to me on some aspect of Covina history, and I note that it's lifted virtually verbatim from my blog. So although I have few followers in the realm of organic life, it's at least nice to know the machines are reading my blog and learning things from it. :-)

 

Badillo Mystery Solved?

There's been all kinds of speculation in recent years about the name of Badillo Street in Covina and why it differs from the pioneer family's hereditary Spanish name, Badilla.

Covina's main east/west street was named "Badillo" on the original Phillips Tract survey map in 1884.
Courtesy Covina Valley Historical Society.

I briefly mentioned my own ideas about this controversy at the end of the article about Hollenbeck and the Badillas that I posted back in 2021. I noted that the family themselves appeared to use a terminal –o in their surname on occasion, and theorized that the street was named "Badillo" because that was the name the farming brothers were best known by.

I didn't have direct evidence for either claim until just yesterday, though, when I found this letter published in a newspaper in 1877¹ that was signed, "J. Julian Badillo." This was the first time I'd seen one of the famous coffee-growing brothers apparently using the Badillo spelling himself (and the first I've seen the name of their coffee plantation was "San Isidro Ranch.")

Santa Barbara Daily Press, February 7, 1877.

With that revelation, I then thought about examining the idea of name familiarity, so I did more specific searches on the newspaper archive website to manually tally the number of times the two surname spellings were used, and in which contexts they appeared.

This is what I found:

Book Report

I just read a new novel called "Gone in Time" by F. K. Matthews. It's a story about a young man who mysteriously finds himself transported to Covina in 1960. Quite an enjoyable time travel story, especially if you grew up on the "west side" of town, and particularly so if you were a "gearhead" who loved working on vintage cars. :) The descriptions of places and life in Covina in the Sixties are pretty much spot-on, the characters are very relatable, and it has a unique twist-ending, too. I was really captivated by it, myself. Couldn't put it down! In fact, I can't recall finishing a book of that length in one day before. Definitely recommended! ^_^

Available on Amazon

 

The Issei Fathers of West Covina

Relatively few valley residents today are aware that people of Japanese ancestry played a significant role in the early history of West Covina. During the first two decades of the 20th century, dozens of farmers emigrated from Japan to settle here, owning and working the land, raising families and becoming productive members of the local community.

And what a community it was! Early West Covina was a remarkable assemblage of nationalities. No previous author has stated this specifically, but unlike the parent city,¹ there was no racial separation to speak of in pre-war West Covina. Americans, Europeans, and first-generation immigrants from Japan (termed "Issei") all lived, farmed and participated in society with full freedom of association. There's perhaps no better visual evidence of this societal integration than this photo of Grades 1-3 at West Covina School in 1938. Look at all those happy faces!

Teacher Frances Maxson Sanchez (1900-1999) was the daughter of West Covina's first mayor, Benjamin Franklin Maxson, Jr., and her husband, Juan C. Sanchez, was a great-grandson of founding pioneer John Rowland.²

Tags

Some readers may have noticed that I recently added subject tags to my postings. This is to help people directly access articles related to specific topics. Might be worth bookmarking this page for future reference. (I have!)

Particular attention is called to the New History tag. There you will find facts about Covina history that have appeared nowhere else before. Covina Past exclusives, you might say!

Below are all the tagged subjects, with clickable links for your convenience.

Post-War Postcard

Time for another episode of vintage Covina photo sleuthing! Got ahold of another uncommon postcard of Citrus Avenue recently for which I hoped to pinpoint a date.

Post-war view north on Citrus Avenue from its intersection with Center Street.
Click on image for a larger view.

It's unused, so there's no postmark to give us a ballpark estimate. Just eyeballing the cars, though, I could tell it was from the Forties, but when, exactly?

When Was Covina Founded?

For people born in centuries past, it was not uncommon to not know one's precise birthday, and the same applies to historical places, even Covina!

Covina's founder, Joseph Swift Phillips (1840-1905).

Various sources have claimed with authority that Covina's origin date was 1882, 1884, 1885 and 1886. So, which of these is correct? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer is... complicated.

The City Motto

In January, 1922,¹ the Covina Chamber of Commerce held a contest for a slogan to represent the city to the broader world. Two months and dozens of submissions later, it was announced that a Mrs. F. E. Wolfarth won the $20 prize with her entry, "One Mile Square And All There."² The official motto as subsequently adopted by the CCoC would change the "One" to an "A,"^3,4 however, thus becoming the saying that a lot of us young latter-day Covinans were taught in school: "A Mile Square And All There."

But let's pause a moment for a fact check. Was Covina actually "a mile square?" Turns out not quite.

Commenting

Blogger for some reason made a recent change in the way the site handles cookies, the result being that readers can now only post comments here using the Google Chrome web browser.

It also appears that replies to comments are no longer supported. So, from this point on, if you have a question about something in one of my posts, please use the Contact Form in the sidebar, then I can reply to you by email.

This thing at the bottom of each page.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but so many things we encounter online are simply beyond our control. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

"Dear Covina."

Received a surprise gift recently. "Words of Gold from Covina" is a little book of favorite quotations by a Who's Who of Covinans of the day. I've since learned that it was published in December, 1910, by the Covina Presbyterian Church,¹ and was printed by the Argus Press.

But inside I found an even bigger surprise: a "lost" poem penned specially for Words of Gold² by Covina's original diva: "Lark" Ellen Beach Yaw (1869-1947).

Coffee Ranch Days

When I first read Donald Pflueger's "Covina" at age 12, I thought the most interesting parts were the author's descriptions of the valley before and during its settlement. One statement in particular captivated me: how, in the early 1880s, when the Methodist Church in the foothills at the top of Citrus Avenue rang its bell on Sunday mornings, "its clear notes could be heard all over the valley."¹ That same valley when I first knew it was already home to a quarter-million people, so a stillness of that sort was almost incomprehensible to me. Like another world, it seemed... and indeed it was...

Perhaps the best-known settlers from those early times were the families of José Julián and Pedro Antonio Badilla (aka Badillo), who emigrated from Costa Rica to America in 1876. The brothers had high ambitions. They wanted a coffee plantation big enough to supply the whole United States!² So what was their new land like when they arrived here?

Wheat harvest on Baldwin land in Rancho La Puente. Although best known for their coffee venture, the Badillas were famously successful raising wheat in 1878.³
Photo courtesy Covina Valley Historical Society and Powell Camera Shop.

A Dedication

Occasionally someone asks how my interest in Covina history originated. I had an abiding fascination with "old things" in general as far back as I can remember, but the specific seeds of curiosity about my home town's past were actually planted by teachers at Barranca School: in particular, Mr. Miller in 3rd grade (1962-1963), and Mrs. Shipley in 6th (1965-1966).

Subscribing

I see I haven't posted anything here yet this year. Sorry to say, I am so far behind with everything in my life, I don't know how I'm ever going to catch up.

But for now, I might as well start with the question I've been asked the most recently, and that is, "How can I subscribe to this blog?"

The short answer is: you can't, at least not in the most logical way, which would be to get a notification email when I post a new article here. Unfortunately, Google/Blogger ended that functionality a couple of years ago. (Thanks a bunch, Google!)

So currently, the only way to subscribe is by "following," and that can only be done if you have a Blogger account. If you do, you can go to your Blogger Dashboard, select "Reading List" in the sidebar, click "Manage," then click "Add," then copy/paste the URL for this blog where it says, "Add Blogs to Follow."

Trouble is, you have to visit the Blogger Dashboard every time you want to check for new posts, so unless you follow several blogs, it's easier just to come check the Covina Past page directly, say, on the 1st of each month. (I've rarely posted here more than once monthly, anyway.)

I've also created an account on X/Twitter that you can follow for announcements of new posts. Here is the URL:

https://x.com/covinapast

Regarding Covina history, I've actually been working on several articles simultaneously for a while now, but in each case, I've run into a roadblock where I'm unable to find some critical piece of information that would allow me to tell the complete story properly, which is very frustrating as you might imagine. One article in particular is a "magnum opus" of sorts on an important subject that's never been chronicled in its entirety, but it now looks like I'm going to have to go to Covina in person to find the material I need to finish it, and I hope to do that next month.

In the meantime, I'll see what I can do about wrapping up some of the other drafts I've put on the back burner. Some will probably do with just a bit of touching up, and not require the usual perfectionism I impose on myself for considering a project to be ready for prime time as it were. Anyway, my apologies for my long silence, and thanks for everyone's patience. I will try my best to get back on my feet here as soon as I can.