Things you didn’t know about Downey: Rural Saturday nights

This article came from the Southeast News dated Thursday, Oct. 4 1973, from its Downey Centennial Celebration series:

Rural “downtown” Downey was a Saturday night town

It requires an enormous leap of one’s imagination to look back in time to Downey’s beginnings and realize that for more than 50 years the entire mercantile effort of the surrounding area was concentrated in one three block strip of Downey Avenue between Firestone Boulevard and Third Street.

In those days, in fact, there was no Firestone Boulevard, only a small country lane called First Street, which went as far as College Road – now Paramount Boulevard – on the west, and became a meandering wagon road which led southeast rural to Corvallis (now the city of Norwalk) over the old Foster Bridge on the San Gabriel River.

At the beginning, the old road through town was named Anaheim Road, and it was this that renamed Crawford Street to honor the town’s leading citizen. The name stuck until land developers managed to have it named Downey Avenue about 1934-35, arguing it would make it easier for outsiders to find out about the town if the main street bore the same name.

Business in those early days was geared to rural farming economy, and essentially “downtown” Downey was a Saturday night town. Farmers would bring in their produce and dairy products to the local creamery and the railroad depot, then they’d tend to their needs for the coming week buying staples and hardware, livestock feed, field implements, and harnesses for their team of horses and mules.

If there was money enough, the family would linger to see the latest one-reelers at the silent movie house Rube Mathews ran on the east side of the street between First Street and the alley to the north.

The old town had its saloons as well. One of the first known was the “Depot” Saloon which was opened in 1875 by a Slavonian immigrant named John Mitrovitch, who started the community of southern refugees from the Civil War by single-handedly holding the town’s first 4th of July celebration that same year.

Mitrovitch’s brick building at the southeast corner of Second Street and Crawford (Downey Avenue) thrived as one of the more respectable watering spots until the town voted to go dry and shut down all the saloons in 1905. A few of the old saloons managed to survive for a time as gambling halls.

Among the most notorious of these was the “101,” now the location of a finance office at the northeast corner of Downey Avenue and Firestone. There was once a poker game which left a local sharpshooter dead in the street, and a hot-headed loser who took off for Alaska. After Mitrovitch’s saloon closed the building, it became the Los Nietos Valley bank, which continued operations there with W.C. Springer as president until it was acquired by Bank of America early in 1937. Now in use as Manley’s Beauty College, the building still looks like a bank, yet under its concrete façade is the original bricks of the old Depot saloon.

What today is occupied by the Downey Music Center, 11125 Downey Ave., is the site of what was Downey’s first “department” store and also the site of the first telephone exchange in town. Originally the site of the old Downey Hotel until it burned in 1893, the two-story brick building that replaced it was the Union Mercantile Building, which later was bought by David Strine and for almost 60 years was Strine Brothers Dept. Store. In 1905, Downey Home Telephone and Telegraph Co. set up the community’s first central switchboard there, operating until a permanent phone building was completed on Second Street in 1927.

Bert Douglass, who operated a next-door hardware store, bought the building and moved in 1952, operating his Downey Hardware Store there until he retired a few years ago. Douglass still owns the building.

The old “101” saloon was purchased by pioneer banker and developer Arthur Darby, who tore it down and built the First National Bank of Downey about 1910 on the northeast corner of Downey Avenue and Firestone Boulevard. He sold out to Bank of America in 1924. For many years during Downey’s later growth, the site was occupied by a tavern called the “Zoo Room” – today it is an outlet for waterbeds. The present location of General Telephone Company’s automatic switching station on the northeast corner of Second Street and Downey Avenue once was the site of Manning’s General Store built in 1889. A plaque placed there in 1967 by the Downey Historical Society commemorated it as the first two-story masonry building in town.

J.H. Wright ran a blacksmith shop on the southeast corner of Downey and Firestone – now the location of United California Bank. To the south was a livery stable and farther down next to the railroad tracks was the old Downey Co-op Creamery. Where Spire’s Restaurant now stands on the southwest corner of Downey and Firestone, Larry Price’s hay and feed store once catered to farmers.