Descriptive Summary
Administration Information
History of the Del Amo Estate Company
Scope and Content
Indexing Terms
Bibliography
Related Material
Separated Materials
Descriptive Summary
Title: Del Amo Estate Company Collection,
Dates: 1908-1978
Bulk: 1926-1964
Collection Number: ["Consult repository."]
Creator:
Del Amo Estate Company
Extent:
119 boxes,
[51 linear feet]
Repository: California State University, Dominguez Hills
Archives and Special Collections
Archives & Special Collection
University Library, Room G-145
1000 E. Victoria Street
Carson, California 90747
Phone: (310) 243-3013
URL: http://archives.csudh.edu/
Abstract:
This collection includes ledgers, business and financial papers, correspondence,
photographs, maps, prints, newspaper clippings and other materials related to the incorporation, operations, and liquidation
of the Del Amo Estate Company. There are also some personal papers of the company’s founder, Gregorio del Amo.
The collection shows aspects of land use and development in Southern California, and is
particularly interesting in detailing the construction and development of the Del Amo Shopping Center,
at one time the largest shopping mall in the world.
Language: Collection material is in English
Administration Information
Access
There are no access restrictions on this collection.
Publication Rights
All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Director of Archives
and Special Collections. Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical
materials and not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.
Preferred Citation
[Title of item], Del Amo Estate Company Collection, Courtesy of the Department of Archives and Special Collections. University
Library. California State University, Dominguez Hills
Acquisition Information
Eugenio Cabrero, former Secretary and Director of the Del Amo Estate Company,
donated these materials to California State University, Dominguez Hills, in 1979.
Processing Information
In April 1984, records related to the Shopping Center and Board of Directors Meetings
were processed as part of the History 350, Archives and Record Management course, under
the direction of then-University Archivist Bruce Parham. Daniel Martinez processed
Minutes of the Board of Directors and Meetings of the Stockholders and Related Materials
Collection and Joyce Loranger processed the Del Amo Shopping Center Collection. These two
collections were absorbed into the current collection. The finding aids written by Daniel
Martinez and Joyce Loranger were used as reference in the writing of this finding aid.
Some papers from the Del Amo Estate Company were re-foldered in earlier processing, but
many materials remained unprocessed until 2005. Wherever possible, materials have been
kept in their original order and original folder titles have been retained.
Project Information
This finding aid was created as part of Early Los Angeles/Rancho San Pedro
Manuscript Cataloging Project, a CSU Dominguez Hills Library project funded by the National
Historical Publications and Records Commission. The project started in 2005. Project
Director was Greg Williams. Project Archivists were Thomas Philo and Jennifer Allan Goldman.
History of the Del Amo Estate Company
The Del Amo Estate Company was established 1926 by Susana Delfina Dominguez and
her husband, Dr. Gregorio del Amo. As an heir of Manuel Dominguez, Susana inherited
property in the Rancho San Pedro, one of the original Spanish land grants, located
in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County. While Gregorio helped oversee the
property personally for some years, the Del Amo Estate Company was formed as a way to
provide management of the land while also giving Gregorio and Susana del Amo the
means and time to pursue their philanthropic interests.
In the early years of personally overseeing the inheritance, Gregorio del Amo focused
on leasing small parcels of land to individual farmers. While agricultural leasing
would continue for many years, del Amo introduced commercial and industrial land use
in the 1920s. In 1921, Dr. del Amo founded the San Pedro Ranch Nursery, which soon
began to serve an international clientele. With the discovery of oil on del Amo land,
however, petroleum production immediately became central to the Gregorio and Susana
del Amo fortune. They signed the first oil lease in 1920, with the Chanslor-Canfield
Midway Oil Company, and Chanslor-Canfield started producing oil in 1922. In the years
leading up to incorporation, the del Amos signed additional leases with Texas Oil,
Marland Oil, United Oil, and other companies. While the del Amos overall followed
the Dominguez family practice of leasing land rather than selling it outright, on
October 5, 1926 they broke tradition by selling 332 acres to the Shell Oil Company,
who wanted to build an oil refinery in the area.
By the time of the refinery sale, the del Amos had already made the decision to
incorporate their interests, now totaling $7,000,000 in cash, land holdings, stocks,
and other assets. The articles of incorporation for the Del Amo Estate Company were
drawn up by prominent Los Angeles attorney Henry O’Melveny, and they were approved by
the state of California on October 22, 1926. The del Amos received permission to
sell stock in the company on November 13, 1926, and the Del Amo Estate Company opened
its offices at 706 Union Bank Building in downtown Los Angeles. To help him run the
company, Dr. del Amo turned to two men he had brought to California from his native
Spain: the doctor’s nephew, Francisco de la Riva, was made Vice-President, and Eugenio
Cabrero was appointed Secretary and Treasurer.
From its inception, the Del Amo Estate Company had several purposes. In addition
to managing the operations associated with the Rancho San Pedro properties, the company
existed to support the cultural and philanthropic interests of both Susana and
Gregorio del Amo. Susana Dominguez del Amo was a devoted patron of the Catholic Church,
and she used some of her wealth to build the Dominguez Memorial Seminary in 1927.
This Seminary, built near the Dominguez family adobe, provided classroom and dormitory
space for those in the Claretian order, with whom the Dominguez family had a long
relationship. When Susana died in 1931, Dr. del Amo maintained the Seminary,
including funding repairs when it suffered extensive damage in the Long Beach Earthquake
of 1933.
In addition to his wife’s work on behalf of the Church, Dr. del Amo pursued his own
wide-ranging interests. The San Pedro Ranch Nursery reflected his strong love of
horticulture, and throughout the 1920s, he hoped it would eventually provide an occupation
for his eldest adopted son, Carlos; that was not to be, however, as Carlos died in 1931.
In 1937, the nursery, now renamed as the Del Amo Nurseries, was merged into the estate
company’s operations. Dr. del Amo's largest undertaking was a plan he hoped would foster
greater cultural understanding between the two lands he considered home – California and Spain.
The Shell Oil refinery helped fund del Amo’s endowment of the Del Amo Educational
Trust, an educational exchange program between Spain and Southern California, and
del Amo established the Del Amo Foundation to administer the grants, scholarships, fellowships
given by the Foundation.
As President, Dr. del Amo was involved in major decisions and undertakings of the
Del Amo Estate Company; however, from the earliest days of incorporation, he left day-to-day
operations largely in the hands of others, including de la Riva, with a series of Executive
Vice-Presidents and Directors, and primarily with Eugenio Cabrero, who would remain as
Secretary through the company’s entire lifespan.
Freed from most of the everyday concerns of running the company that bore his name,
Dr. del Amo spent much of the remaining decade of his life traveling abroad and also
creating a hub for the Spanish population in Los Angeles. He entertained frequently,
and maintained ties with Spanish diplomats, politicians, entertainers, and other
members of Spanish culture. The del Amo estate at 1119 Westchester Place in Los Angeles
became a favorite site for local society as well, and Dr. del Amo often lent use of the house
or its gardens to social clubs and organizations for teas and receptions. During
World War II, the estate was lent to the Los Angeles chapter of the American Red Cross
for use as a production center.
Throughout the 1930s, the Del Amo Estate Company largely retained the character and
size that Gregorio del Amo had given it. With his death in 1941, however, the company
began a period of diversification and growth that would change the shape of the company
forever. Jaime del Amo, Dr. del Amo’s youngest adopted son, became President of the
company, but he lived most of the time abroad, leaving it largely to the Board of Directors
and other executives to shape the company’s future. Oil Operations became a discrete
department within the company, and assumed even more importance throughout the 1940s and
1950s. While the company continued to lease out property for small enterprises such
as farming or the sale of dirt and sand, the Directors began to envision even greater
industrial and commercial development as the key to the company’s growth.
The post-war land boom and the growth of Los Angeles’s freeway system combined to
make South Bay cities such as Compton, Torrance, Redondo Beach, and Lynwood accessible
and increasingly desirable for residents and businesses. The large tracts of land owned
by the Del Amo Estate Company became prime property for development. By the mid- to
late-1950s, the Del Amo Estate Company signed leases with developers such as
Kaufman & Wilson to build large residential developments, and with companies such as
Western Corrugated, Coleman Engineering, and the Hawthorne Medical Building to build
large facilities on Del Amo property.
The capstone of the move to commercial development began with the signing of a
tri-party agreement among the Del Amo Estate Company, Sears Roebuck, and Broadway-Hale
on March 11, 1957. In this agreement, brokered by Coldwell, Banker, the Del Amo Estate
Company agreed to sell parcels of land to Sears and Broadway in a common area, and
those two companies would build their own stores. The Del Amo Estate Company would
share in landscaping, parking, and easement costs. With those two major stores as
flagships, the Estate Company would lease adjoining parcels of land to other retail
tenants, thus creating a block of stores that would become the Del Amo Shopping Center.
The Del Amo Estate Company engaged noted Los Angeles architectural firm of Welton
Becket & Associates to design the center, and the official groundbreaking ceremonies
took place in December 1957 on Torrance land bounded by Hawthorne Boulevard, Carson
Street, Sepulveda Boulevard, and Madrona Avenue. The Sears building opened for
business on September 30, 1959, followed by the Broadway and well-known retailers such
as Oltmans, J. C. Penney, Thrifty Drug Store, Woolworth’s, and dozens of others. Within
a few years the Del Amo Shopping Center was the largest shopping mall in the world.
In 1961, Jaime del Amo resigned from the Board of Directors to live full-time in
Geneva. The remaining and new members of the Board, particularly Jaime’s immediate
replacement, Thomas Ford, believed that the trend toward commercial and industrial
development in the area would only continue, but that the rising value of the land
would place huge tax burdens on the company and drain their reserves of cash. Instead,
Ford and the other Directors saw the value of selling off all Del Amo Estate Company
lands and liquidating the company. In August, 1963 the Board voted to begin the
process of liquidation. According to the Internal Revenue laws of that time, if a
company could complete liquidation of all assets within one year of initiating the
process, assets could pass directly to the stockholders without tax penalty. The Del
Amo Shopping Center was sold to the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, and by
August, 1964, when the company closed its longtime office in the Union Bank Building,
the assets of the company had been completely liquidated, with the company realizing
a profit of approximately $46,000,000.
Scope and Content
The Del Amo Estate Company Collection (1908-1978) comprises business, legal, and
financial records related to the Del Amo Estate Company, which was incorporated in
1926 and liquidated in 1964. In addition, there are business and personal papers
associated with the founder of the company, Dr. Gregorio del Amo y Gonzalez (known as
Gregorio del Amo), his family, and key employees of the Del Amo Estate Company. This
collection illustrates the way business evolved in Southern California through much of
the twentieth century, and also offers a vivid portrait of cultural life in Los Angeles
in the 1920s and 1930s. Materials in the collection include articles of incorporation,
minutes of meetings, ledgers, stock journals, reports, deeds, maps, blueprints, leases,
correspondence, newspaper clippings, photographs, financial and business records, tax
materials, invoices, and receipts.
The collection documents the company’s business operations, which were built
primarily on leasing its land for three major purposes: agriculture, oil operations,
and commercial development. The bulk of agricultural leases in the collection are
typically for small plots of land with individual farmers, though there are also leases
with ranches, orchards, and other large concerns. Some leases are accompanied by
quitclaims and correspondence related to lease renewal or cancellation, easements, rent
fees, legal disputes, and sanitation and nuisance complaints. The company leased land
to a number of Japanese and Chinese tenants; leases for these tenants are notable for
including copies of birth certificates, proofs of citizenship, and other documentation
needed for compliance with California’s Alien Land Act. With the advent of World
War II, some Del Amo tenants were evacuated to relocation centers. The collection
contains correspondence related to evacuation and relocation, including letters sent
from relocation camps.
Oil operations on Del Amo land directly mirror the growth of the petroleum industry
in the Los Angeles area. The collection comprises leases, quitclaims, maps, prints,
legal papers, and correspondence with a number of major oil producers, including Union
Oil of California, Mobil, Texaco, and General Petroleum. There are daily and monthly
reports detailing oil production, drilling, and oil settlement on Del Amo wells, but
there are gaps in most producer information. There are also representative production
and inventory reports submitted to Los Angeles County and the State of California. The
most extensive records are with the Chanslor-Canfield Midway Oil Company, who signed
the first oil lease on Del Amo land in 1920. Correspondence, reports, and legal papers
show their entire history with the Del Amo Estate Company, from the earliest negotiations
to final operations in 1941, when the companies parted in legal dispute.
The move to commercial and industrial land development in the 1950s is shown in records
related to a number of companies, including Kaufman & Wilson, Western Corrugated, Coleman
Engineering, and the Hawthorne Medical Building, all of whom built major developments on
Del Amo land. Papers related to the Del Amo Shopping Center are of special interest,
showing every facet of development in great detail, from initial plans, negotiations with
Sears Roebuck and Broadway-Hale, engaging Welton Becket & Associates to design the buildings
and oversee construction, and leases and correspondence with dozens of Shopping Center tenants.
The collection provides a comprehensive picture of factors going into the decision to
liquidate the Del Amo Estate Company in the early 1960s, offering documentation on tax and
legal issues, proffers from various suitors, land sales, stock purchases, disbursement of
dividends, and shareholder notifications.
While offering a history of the Del Amo Estate Company, the collection also paints a
vivid portrait of its founder, Gregorio del Amo, documenting his travels, cultural interests,
and his position in Los Angeles and Spanish culture. There are itineraries for his frequent
travels to Europe, as well as letters and telegrams exchanged with company Vice-President
Francisco de la Riva or Secretary Eugenio Cabrero regarding Del Amo business. His prominence
in the cultures of his two countries is evident in the breadth of his correspondence files,
which contain letters from major figures in Los Angeles business, such as oil magnate Edward
Doheny (box 66, folder 3) and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler (box 96, folder 10 and
others), and with Spanish diplomats, business figures, and entertainers such as guitarist Andres
Segovia (box 101, folder 10). His philanthropic ventures are reflected in projects as large-scale
as the construction of the Dominguez Memorial Seminary and its 1933 repair (box 59, folder 1-2),
or as small as individual donations to local, national, or international organizations. While
some correspondence, especially from the early years of the company, is in del Amo’s own hand,
the majority is handwritten or typed by others, particularly Eugenio Cabrero. Roughly two-thirds
of this material is written in Spanish. Throughout his life, Gregorio del Amo was plagued by ill
health. Health matters are referred to often in del Amo’s own correspondence, but also illustrated
through medical and nursing records, and travel records for a 1937 trip to the Mayo Clinic (box 72,
folder 1, 4).
With the closing of the company’s Union Bank Building office in August 1964, the official
lifespan of the Del Amo Estate Company ended, though correspondence regarding taxes, liquidation,
and the Del Amo Trust (administered largely by Cabrero and others also associated with the Estate
Company) continued into the 1970s, and is included in the collection. In 1979, Eugenio Cabrero
donated the company records to California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), a university
built on land that was formerly part of the Rancho San Pedro.
Arrangement
Arranged in 9 series:
-
Series I. Administrative Papers, 1911-1964
-
Series II. Board of Directors, 1926-1964
-
Series III. Financial Records, 1919-1978
-
Series IV. Oil Operations, 1921-1964
-
Series V. Shopping Center, 1955-1964
-
Series VI. Dominguez Memorial Seminary, 1924-1967
-
Series VII. Correspondence, 1908-1978
-
Series VIII. Photographs, 1931-1962
-
Series IX. Artifacts, 1927-1960, n.d
Indexing Terms
Subjects
Family-owned business enterprises
Japanese American evacuation and resettlement
Japanese American farmers--Los Angeles
Land use--California, Southern
Oil and gas leases--California, Southern
Oil fields--Valuation
Oil inspection
Oil wells--California--Los Angeles
Oil wells--Maintenance and repair
Petroleum industry and trade--California
Real estate business--California--Los Angeles
Real estate development--California--Los Angeles
Real property--Valuation
Shopping centers
Shopping malls
Shopping malls design
Personal Names
Del Amo, Gregorio
Del Amo, Jaime
Cabrero, Eugenio
Corporate Names
Chanslor-Western Oil & Development Company
Claretian Missionaries
Del Amo Foundation
Del Amo Estate Company
Del Amo Nurseries
O'Melveny & Myers
San Pedro Ranch Nursery
Shell Oil Company
Standard Oil Company of California
Union Oil Company of California
Welton Becket and Associates
Geographic Terms
California--History
Compton (Calif.)
Long Beach (Calif.)
Los Angeles (Calif.)--History
Redondo Beach (Calif.)
Torrance (Calif.)
Genres and Forms of Materials
Blueprints
Maps
Photographs, original
Photographic prints
Bibliography
The following works were used in the creation of this finding aid:
Gillingham, Robert Cameron,
The Rancho San Pedro: the story of a famous Rancho
in Los Angeles County and of its owners the Dominguez family
. Los Angeles: Cole-Holmquist,
1961.
Grenier, Judson,
California legacy : the James Alexander Watson—Maria Dolores
Dominguez de Watson family 1820-1980
. Los Angeles: Watson Land Company, 1987.
Related Material
The following related collections are located in Archives & Special Collections, California
State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH).
- Del Amo Foundation Collection
- Del Amo Nursery Collection
- Rancho San Pedro Collection
Separated Materials
During the 2005-2006 processing, duplicate, redundant, or nonessential materials
were removed from the collection, along with items not directly related to the
Del Amo Estate Company. Newspaper clippings were photocopied and discarded.