Jacob Stern arrived in Southern California with the kind of ambition that didn’t bother to introduce itself—it simply started buying the future. Born on September 20, 1859, in Saxony, Germany, to Marcus and Rosetta (Goodman) Stern, he spent his early years in the workmanlike world of family labor, helping on the farm and learning young, that land was never just dirt. Land was leverage. In 1884 he crossed the Atlantic, landing first in New York before moving on to Cleveland, where he worked for a wholesale clothing firm—practical employment that taught him the rhythms of commerce, supply, demand, and the quiet power of being the person who could provide what other people needed.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
In 1889, Stern headed west again, this time to the newly formed town of Fullerton. He didn’t come alone; he came with his cousin Joseph Goodman, and together they opened Stern & Goodman, a general store at the southeast corner of Spadra (now Harbor) and Commonwealth. It was the sort of early-California enterprise that sold a little of everything because the town needed everything—clothing, furniture, farm equipment, wagons, carriages, livestock. The store expanded beyond Fullerton into a chain of outlets in places like Olinda, Yorba Linda, Placentia, and Brea, becoming one of the state’s early chain operations, and it did more than sell goods. In an agricultural county where cashflow rose and fell with weather and harvests, Stern & Goodman functioned like a lifeline—extending credit and supplies to farmers with the understanding that accounts would be settled when the crops came in. In good years, it was commerce. In bad years, it was survival.
In 1891, Stern married Sarah Laventhal in Los Angeles, linking his fortunes with one of the region’s pioneer Jewish families. They had four children—Harold, Elza, Helen, and Eugene—and as Stern’s ambitions grew, the family’s center of gravity shifted. By 1904, he had opened a real estate office in Los Angeles’ Pacific Electric Building, a move that reads, in retrospect, like destiny. Southern California was beginning its transformation from scattered towns and ranches into a metropolis, and Stern understood that the real money wasn’t in selling the tools of growth—it was in owning the ground growth required.
That same year, the Sterns bought Colonel Northam’s home at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard (then Prospect) and Vine Street—a “show place” in its day, and an astonishingly prescient purchase given what that intersection would become. The family’s residence, remembered by the romantic name Casa de Las Palmas, sat amid gardens and citrus, a private estate at a time when Hollywood was still more village than symbol. But Jacob Stern wasn’t merely living at Hollywood and Vine. He was positioning himself there—staking out a claim on the direction the city would run.
Then came the moment that quietly altered film history. On Stern’s property stood a barn—ordinary in appearance, monumental in consequence. In 1913, he leased part of his land at Vine and Selma, including that barn, to the Lasky Feature Play Company. Inside that humble building and on that acreage, Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky and others nudged motion pictures toward something greater than shorts and nickelodeons. The barn would someday be recalled as the birthplace of Hollywood’s first feature-era boom, one of those improbable locations where the industry didn’t start with a palace but with a sensible investment property and a man open to renting space to a dangerous new enterprise.
Stern’s life in real estate was never confined to one neighborhood or one county. He became, by contemporary accounts, one of the region’s major landowners, with holdings that reached across Southern California and beyond. In Orange County, he bought large acreage in 1907 from the Yorba family—land that later formed a central core of what became Yorba Linda—using it for agriculture and grazing before it passed into the subdividing machinery that turned open land into mapped streets and marketed plots. This was Stern’s era: the age when Southern California’s landscape was being converted, acre by acre, into tract lines and town dreams. He wasn’t the only one doing it—but he was one of the men doing it early, doing it big, and doing it with an instinct for where the next “there” would be.
Hollywood itself eventually demanded a different kind of landmark from him. In 1925, with the region growing rapidly and Hollywood’s profile rising with it, Stern built the Hollywood Plaza Hotel on his property—an amenity designed for a district turning into an international destination. Hotels are statements as much as businesses, and the Plaza’s very existence signaled Stern’s sense that Hollywood’s future would be permanent enough to require housing not just for tourists, but for the transient royalty of the entertainment world—people who needed a place to live between productions, broadcasts, parties, and premieres.
And yet, for all his public footprint, Stern remained a figure who operated in the way many powerful developers do: largely behind the scenes, shaping the city’s outline while others took the spotlight. His “scandals,” such as they were, belonged less to courthouse melodrama than to the unavoidable friction of rapid growth—credit, land consolidation, subdivision, and the quiet resentment that follows men who profit from transformation.
Aerial view of Hollywood and Vine area circa early 1920s. Center is the Stern residence. Upper right is future site of the Broadway Building. Bottom center is Vine Street and Selma Avenue, the site of the Lasky-DeMille Barn.
In early Southern California, development was never universally loved. It changed livelihoods, displaced the familiar, rewrote maps, and turned farms into neighborhoods. Stern’s story sits inside that larger, complicated truth: the city’s rise was fueled by opportunity, but also by relentless conversion.
Jacob Stern's cremation niche at Home of Peace Cemetery, Mausoleum, Columbarium of Adoration, Niche 1107.
In 1930, Stern vacated his residence at Hollywood and Vine for Holmby Hills. It would be his final move westward, as money continued to pour into Los Angeles and beyond. He passed away on September 3, 1934, only around a year after his wife Sarah had died. Stern was inurned at Home of Peace Memorial Park. As in life, he was never too far from the city he built: his legacy would be carried on not just through family and his business empire, but by place names all over Southern California — streets, cities, tracts of land. And always, the steady bustle of Hollywood and Vine, where Stern's mansion once anchored a block and where Hollywood learned to be Hollywood.
If Los Angeles is a city that remakes itself every generation, Jacob Stern was one of many men who helped make it possible: by owning the earth beneath it, by betting on a future other people hadn’t yet imagined, and by turning property into prophecy at the exact moment Hollywood decided what it would become.
Editor’s note:
In the early 20th century, Hollywood pioneer Jacob Stern’s elegant residence on the northeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street was then a semi-residential stretch just beginning its transformation into the city’s commercial spine. After Stern sold the property, the site entered a new phase aligned with Hollywood’s explosive growth. By the mid-1920s, the residence was demolished to make way for the Dyas Building—a year later it became the Broadway Hollywood Building, a flagship department store anchoring the corner at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard. Opening in 1928, the building signaled Hollywood’s arrival as a fully modern retail and entertainment district. Nearly a century later, the Broadway Hollywood still stands—its Art Deco massing and corner presence a reminder that beneath one of Hollywood’s most enduring commercial landmarks once stood the private home of one of its earliest builders.
The Dyas / Broadway Building under construction 1927
Please take a moment to leave a comment, rate the post, and share it with fellow lovers of Hollywood history to help keep these stories alive.
Add comment
Comments