Charles Kohler (1830-1887) was a wine industry pioneer who barely lived in Los Angeles – if at all. Born in Grabow, Germany, Kohler reportedly immigrated to the U.S. in 1850 and eventually settled in San Francisco. A classical musician, for several years he played concerts up and down the state with fellow Teuton John Frohling. The two then got into viniculture and officially partnered as Kohler & Frohling in 1856, with Frohling operating vineyards here in L.A. and Kohler in the Bay Area. Soon they became the biggest wine merchants in the state and effectively put California wine on the map. Not content with that achievement, in 1857 they cofounded Anaheim with L.A. city surveyor George Hansen, an Austrian. But poor old Frohling didn’t get to enjoy his success for long: he dropped dead in 1862 at the tender age of 35. Kohler kept the company going, and although he remained in San Francisco, he and his sons oversaw the Kohler & Frohling vineyards where Kohler Street sits today. (Incredible as it may seem, this industrial neighborhood was once an ocean of grapes.) The original Kohler Street was where 9th Street now lies, between San Pedro and Alameda. The current roadway was named in 1887, months after Charles Kohler was felled by a stroke on a San Francisco cable car. He entrusted this land and his fortune to his widow Elise (1830-1915), another German. His will noted, poignantly: “Without her, I had been nothing; with her, I was all.”
Find it on the map:
