In 1889, the Southern Pacific Railroad completed a new terminal along Central Avenue opposite Fifth Street, The new depot replaced the “River Depot” that the railroad had built in 1876 on North Spring (subsequently renamed San Fernando Road) opposite Sotello Street. Two hotels flanked the main entrance to the depot.

To the south was the Arcade Hotel, a three story Victorian structure. On the north side of the depot’s entrance was the Palm House. Holly Charmaine Kane described the two hotels in her Master’s Thesis (USC, 2007):

Just outside the station entrance, on the “stub-end” of Fifth Street, stood the Arcade Hotel and the Palm House. Services offered at the Arcade Hotel include a drugstore, barber, billiard room and restaurant; the Palm House also offered a restaurant for those who chose not to eat at the station’s lunch counter or dining room.

Newspaper accounts show that the two hotels followed a downward trajectory that would become familiar in other Los Angeles neighborhoods in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The Arcade, owned originally by German immigrant and former mine operator Simon Reinhart, was described as “handsomely furnished” when it opened in 1889 [LAH, Apr 8, 1889, 8]. For years, prominent travelers, including members of Congress, would stay in its elegant rooms as they attended to business in downtown Los Angeles or waited to transfer to other Southern Pacific trains or those served by AT&SF’s La Grande station. But as the decades passed, newsworthy events at the hotel shifted from announcements of visits by prominent men to accounts of thefts or the death by tuberculosis or heart attack of long-term residents.

Across the walkway leading to the depot entrance stood the less pretentious Palm House. Named after a large palm tree that stood before the depot entrance, the Palm House offered 50 rooms to travelers and boarders at a dollar a day. The first proprietor appears to have been a Mrs. M K Karns. The tenants were mainly workers for the railroad or the electric trolley system. [LA City Directory, 1890-1893] During the 1890s, the hotel changed owners repeatedly at asking prices of $1,000.

In September 1895, the Palm House became the locus of one of the most infamous cases of the year. A fourteen-year-old girl named Stella Horton had accompanied her uncle, Willie Horton, on a visit to friends in Downey. The pair were waiting at the depot for the train that would return them to Ventura and their home in Fillmore. The girl’s uncle, declaring that he had some business to attend to in Los Angeles, had left Stella by herself in the station’s waiting room. A young man by the name of John Kingsbury, who was at the station as part of his employment as an expressman, approached Ella while she was talking to some other travelers in the waiting room. Taking her aside, he identified himself as a deputy sheriff and told her that her uncle had been arrested. The frightened girl then accompanied him to a local saloon, where the two drank two glasses of beer. Afterwards, Kingsbury took her to a room in the Palm House, where, threatening that she and her uncle would feel the full weight of the law if she did not comply with his wishes, he seduced her. Afterwards, Kingsbury, whom the Herald Express referred to as a “vile wretch,” [Los Angeles Evening Express, Sep 20, 1895, 1], put the young woman on a train to Redondo Beach, where her grandmother lived.

Stella told her tale to her grandmother, who contacted Willie Horton, who by then had returned to the station and was searching desperately for his niece. Upon learning of the assault, Horton contacted authorities, who arrested Kingsbury and delivered him to Redondo Beach to stand trial. The court held the young man to answer for the crime of rape. Unable to pay $3,000 for bail, he was sent to county jail to await trial.

Two months later, Kingsbury was tried in Superior Court for rape. The prosecution witnesses included persons who had overheard him posing as a detective and the landlady of the Palm House, Mrs. Duffy, who claimed that she overheard a scuffle in Kingsbury’s room and tried unsuccessfully to open the door. Stella Horton also testified in detail to the assault, but admitted that at some point she lapsed into unconscious and could not say for certain whether she had been violated.

The future seemed bleak for Kingsbury, whom the local newspapers attacked without mercy, demanding the “severest penalty that can be meted out to him by law.” [LA Times, Sep 21, 1895, 6]. However, while waiting one afternoon of the trial for a train to return her to Ventura with her father and uncle, Stella suddenly had an attack of conscience and rushed away to find Kingsbury. She confessed that she had perjured herself to incriminate him: he had done nothing to her in the room of the Palm House. Kingsbury had her taken before the District Attorney, who heard the girl’s confession that the real cause of her “delicate condition” (pregnancy) were the attentions of her uncle Willie a few nights before when they shared a hotel room in Downey.

(Kingsbury went free and promptly disappeared from Los Angeles. Stella Horton returned to Fillmore, but fate had more misery in store for the young girl whom the newspapers had described as “rustic in her manners, but not adverse to flirting and picking up . . . strange young men.” In April 1906, the Santa Barbara Independent reported that she had been rescued from a life of opium addiction and prostitution in the Chinese quarter of that city by Salvation Army. Returned to the care of her parents, who had been told that she had died four years before in a murder-suicide perpetrated by her Japanese lover, Stella quickly regained health. However, in October 1906, she killed herself by swallowing carbolic acid.)

The two hotels prime location at the entry of the station would soon prove to be their undoing. In 1902, E. H. Harriman, President of the Southern Pacific, resolved to build the “most commodious headquarters building possessed by the company anywhere on its system,” The railroad began secretly acquiring properties in front of the depot along Central Avenue. A dozen years passed before the two establishments were demolished. Forty other homes and boarding houses along Central were either torn down or hauled away to new locations.

The Southern Pacific Arcade Depot, Palm House and Arcade Hotel, at junction of Fifth Street and Central Avenues, 1909.