Odd Alliance and Many Moves Created College

The city’s first high school and college, St. Vincent’s College, which became Loyola Marymount University, has hopscotched around Los Angeles, occupying six sites in 130 years.

It may have been the city’s first glimmer of its ecumenical future: The wife of a rabbi raised money for a Catholic college in an age when relations between the two creeds were chilly.

The post-Civil War era saw widespread religious prejudice in America. But rough-and-tumble Los Angeles enjoyed a unique cooperation among its religious communities, which shared an interest in civic boosterism and the desire to attract newcomers--and their money--to the city.

In 1865, when Angelenos decided that their booming city needed its own high school and college, they put sectarian interests aside to build the city’s first institution of higher education, St. Vincent’s College. Though it was run by Roman Catholics as a Catholic institution, Rosa Newmark, wife of the city’s first acting rabbi, organized its first fund-raising events.

Two years later, St. Vincent’s College and its students, numbering fewer than 50, moved from the city’s original plaza to the south side of 6th Street, between Broadway and Olive. The tree-covered property was donated by a horticulturist named Ozro W. Childs, a Protestant.

(Catholic education was not the only beneficiary of the era’s ecumenical largess. More than a decade later, the Protestant Childs; Isaias Hellman, a Jewish banker, and John G. Downey, a Catholic and former governor of California, jointly donated the land for Southern California’s Methodist college--which became USC.)

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St. Vincent’s students received instruction from Vincentian fathers, and played baseball and football on vacant land adjoining the campus--a tract now known as Pershing Square. Within 20 years, however, encroaching development had deprived the 10-acre campus of the tranquillity requisite for scholastic contemplation.

So, in 1887, like a good Angeleno, the school just picked up and moved to yet another home--this time on the northwest corner of Grand Avenue and Washington Boulevard.

(The site on 6th Street became an Army post, and then, in 1907, the first Bullock’s store. Almost 80 years later--in one of history’s minor ironies--the site that was once home to a college named for a saint who worked among the destitute became the St. Vincent Jewelry Center.)

For almost four decades at Grand and Washington, St. Vincent’s High School and College, with its chapel and dormitory, its Victorian church steeple and mansard roofs, dominated the skyline on the edge of the Adams district. The four-story red sandstone institution, with a smidgen of Gothic architecture, was also home to one of L.A.’s most feared football teams. St. Vincent’s mighty linemen were known to pick up their opponents and throw them out of bounds rather than tackle them.

But the campus met its end in 1911, when Bishop Thomas J. Conaty decided the Vincentians wasn’t the order he wanted running his diocese’s only college.

The imperious Irish-born prelate and educator decided to bring the Jesuits--famed for their orthodoxy and intellectual rigor--to Los Angeles. The three Jesuits who arrived in 1911 scouted out a new school site. A large piece of property in Leimert Park was their first choice. But the wary Jesuits decided against it because St. Mary’s Academy, a girls school, was only three miles away, and they “feared dangerous contacts by adolescent youth,” said one of the three Jesuits.

Finally, a temporary site was chosen on Avenue 52 in Highland Park. For six years, three small buildings would house 149 students and the school they still called St. Vincent’s.

In 1917, the school moved again, to a then-peaceful oasis on Venice Boulevard between Normandie and Vermont avenues--and it changed its name to Loyola. For a dozen years, the high school and college coexisted until, in 1929, the college was offered a real estate deal it couldn’t refuse and left the high school behind.

Developer Harry Culver--Culver City’s namesake--offered 100 acres to any private school that would erect a permanent building within one year and maintain the land for 50 years. Loyola accepted the challenge. But Culver upped the ante and said the university must put up two buildings within two years.

And so it did. Loyola’s campus on Manchester Boulevard, surrounded by sewer ditches, a dump and bean fields, opened in September, 1929, one month before the stock market crash. (The high school remained on Venice Boulevard, where the Jesuits still operate it.)

Even the Crash could not derail the Jesuits’ efforts. Cash may have been low, but academic standards remained high. (So, perhaps, did the school’s cholesterol: During the Depression, one young man’s family paid his tuition with a steady supply of eggs.)

And by 1973, after the campus expanded its buildings in the bean fields, girls were finally admitted to the school by the merger of Loyola University with Marymount College.

Today, more than 3,500 students attend Loyola Marymount University in the hills of Westchester.

Relive L.A. History

* Times on Demand takes you back in time with “The Southland Then and Now,” a booklet containing 16 stories and photos from the “Then and Now” column. Or, you can still see “Things That Aren’t Here Anymore,” the hour-long KCET video. To order, call 800-440-3441. Select option 3. For the booklet, order No. 5531, $9.50. For the videotape, No. 5533, $25. Or get both for $28.50, No. 5534.