[Los Angeles - Manuscripts & Archives] Extensive Collection of Photographs, Letters, Albums, Ephemera, Relating to the Lives and Careers of Marco H. Hellman and his father Herman W. Hellman, of the prominent California Jewish family of financiers.. Este artículo no está disponible.[Los Angeles - Manuscripts & Archives] Extensive Collection of Photographs, Letters, Albums, Ephemera, Relating to the Lives and Careers of Marco H. Hellman and his father Herman W. Hellman, of the prominent California Jewish family of financiers.

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 Civic 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 .…