Harris Newmark High School: Where the generations meet

On a recent sunny midmorning in the Westlake district, an area west of downtown Los Angeles that has been home to Jews since the turn of the 20th century, the student body and staff of Harris Newmark High School — a continuation school — gathered for a celebration. Also present were some descendants of the pioneering Los Angeles Jewish businessman for whom the school was named, the civic leader and chronicler Harris Newmark (1834-1916), as well as some Los Angeles Unified School District leaders. They were there to mark the school’s recent achievement, as Principal Justin Lauer told the audience, that Newmark High, in the state’s program of recognizing achievement in continuation high schools, was “the only school in LAUSD to get model school this year in the state of California.”

It was a day of connection. Almost 100 years after his death, Newmark remains a figure of considerable magnetism. On this day, his legacy linked him to the students, the Newmark family to the school and also created a bond for his descendants to each other.

Once known as Belmont Continuation School, the small campus whose motto is “Reclaiming Futures, Restoring Hope, Rebuilding Dreams” changed its name in 1975. Dwarfed by Belmont High School and its approximately 1,000 students across the street, Newmark’s enrollment is only 130 by day and 40 by night — students who school counselor Kenneth Suto described as “second-chance kids.”

At the outdoor ceremony, the students listened politely as a succession of speakers came forward to the microphone.

In an attempt to help the school’s primarily Latino students identify with the Prussian Newmark — the unstated theme of the morning — Dr. Harris Newmark III, a great-grandson, told the story of the family’s history.

He began by pointing out that his great-grandfather came to the United States from Lobau, West Prussia (today, eastern Germany), where he was born. At 19, after sailing to New York in 1853, and then to San Francisco via the Nicaragua Isthmus, he settled in Los Angeles. He worked first as a clerk for his older brother, Joseph Phillip (J.P.) Newmark, in Joseph’s dry goods business, where he earned $30 a month. “Ten months later, he bought out his brother and started building a wholesale empire,” Newmark III said. “Between 1870 and 1900, he was considered one of the leading wholesale merchants. With relatives and various business acquaintances, he was involved with selling everything from clothing, groceries and hardware, to hides and wool,” Newmark III said.

In fact, the list of the historical Newmark’s numerous friends and business associates reads like a gazetteer of Southern California greats (or current landmarks) — including Pio Pico, Phineas Banning, Isaac Lankershim and Isaac Van Nuys.

Newmark also became involved with real estate. At one point, said the descendant, his great-grandfather owned around 8,000 acres of the area that is now Santa Anita Race Track and the L.A. County Arboretum & Botanic Garden. Newmark and his associates also were the original subdividers of what would eventually become Montebello.

In 1885, Newmark, along with Kaspar Cohn, John Bicknell, Stephen M. White, and Isaias Hellman, bought a large tract of property for $60,000 that included the parcel that would become Montebello. “It was out of the Newmark and Cohn shares of the purchase, consisting of 1,200 acres, that Montebello had its beginning in May 1899,” the City of Montebello website states. Originally given the name of “Newmark,” after being subdivided and adding a water system in 1900, it was incorporated as the Montebello Land and Water Co. In 1920, the area officially changed names to Montebello upon incorporation.

Newmark also “was instrumental in bringing the Southern Pacific Railroad to Los Angeles,” the great-grandson said; since his own father’s death, Newmark III has been researching his family’s history.

A builder of area institutions, Harris Newmark was one of the founders of the Los Angeles Board of Trade and the Southwest Museum, as well as the Los Angeles Public Library. He served as president of Congregation B’nai B’rith (now Wilshire Boulevard Temple), supported the Jewish Orphans Society and was a founder of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, whose “principal [objectives] were to care for the sick, to pay proper respect, according to Jewish ritual, to the dead, and to look after the Jewish cemetery,” Harris Newmark wrote in his book “Sixty Years in Southern California,” an invaluable and often cited personal account of the development of Los Angeles from the years 1853-1913.

Newmark was buried in Home of Peace, which is also mentioned in his book and was originally organized in 1891 by the Hebrew Ladies of Los Angeles.

“He rose from poverty and immigrated to Los Angeles,” said his great-grandson and namesake, who is a Los Angeles physician and board-certified diagnostic radiologist. “He achieved great success” and “he was also concerned about the less fortunate, and did much to help them.”

“Harris Newmark would be proud of this school,” Newmark III told the group, after which he presented the school with a copy of his great-grandfather’s book and a framed reproduction of individual portraits of his great grandparents, originally given to the Los Angeles Natural History Museum by his grandfather, Marco Newmark. 

The next speaker was Caprice Young, a former LAUSD school board president, who is also descended from Harris and Sarah Newmark.

Holding up her own copy of the Newmark book, Young described it as celebrating “the immigrant heritage of Los Angeles,” filled with “all the amazing stories of the people who came here in the 1800s from around the world.”

Of particular interest, Young told the students, is Newmark’s “trip across the Nicaragua Isthmus.”

“Picture me,” Newmark wrote, “none too short and very lank, astride a mule, a big demijohn [of brandy] in one hand, and a spreading green umbrella in the other.”

“Immigrants coming to Los Angeles 150 years ago were enduring the same kind of crazy hardships that immigrants now are enduring as they come to Los Angeles,” Young said.

“I am very thrilled to be part of the family for whom this school was named, and, of course, we want to be here for you now and in the future,” she added.

Roberto Martinez, superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District Educational Service Center-East, drew a language parallel between some of the students and Newmark, whose native language was German. “If he came today, he would be called an English-language learner, an E.L. student,” Martinez said of Newmark, who learned Spanish before English so he could run his business.

After two students told their personal stories of the hard journeys and lessons that brought them to the continuation school, Monica Garcia, LAUSD school board member and a past board president, challenged all the students to draw upon Newmark’s example, as well as their own experience, to “create the world not yet.”

In helping to create that world, Harris and Sarah Newmark must have had their own hard times — according to the Braun Research Library of the Autry National Center, only “five of their 11 children survived infancy.”

After the speeches, cake was served, and members of the Newmark family gathered under a canopy to greet each other. Phone numbers were also exchanged, as Caprice’s mother, Nancy Young, a great-great-granddaughter of Harris and Sarah Newmark, and Newmark III had never met. And just like at family gatherings everywhere, Warren Scharff, another of Newmark’s great-grandsons, brought out some family photos to see if anyone could identify who is in them.

The latest generation was represented by Warren’s nephew, Michael Scharff, and Newmark III’s children: daughter Jacqui and son Harris Kent Newmark IV.

“The great thing about today is a lot of the students had no idea who Harris Newmark was,” said Heather Sandoval, school coordinator, after the assembly. Soon that will change, as Sandoval plans to institute an elective course on Harris Newmark, she said.

“Whether you shared Harris Newmark’s background as an immigrant,” Garcia said in her remarks, or as a person of humble beginnings or if you shared his adventurous spirit, “there is a piece of Mr. Newmark in all of you.”

Have an idea for a Los Angeles Jewish history story? Contact Edmon Rodman at edmonjace@gmail.com.