Myer J. Newmark

Myer Joseph Newmark (1838–1911) was the youngest city attorney in the history of Los Angeles, California, and was active in the affairs of that city in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Newmark was born in 1838 in New York City, the son of Joseph Newmark of Germany and Rosa Levy Newmark of England. The second of six children, Myer Newmark received his primary education first in New York and then in England, where he lived with his mother's parents. He returned to New York at age 13. He attended Columbia College in New York, and he also spent 18 months in a lawyer's office, studying law.

In December 1852, the family of two adults and six children followed the Gold Rush of 1849 by way of Cape Horn to California and arrived there in April 1853. The Newmarks moved to Los Angeles in 1857, but young Myer, at age 16, returned to San Francisco until he was 19, when he went back to Los Angeles.

He and Sophie Cahen, a "recent French emigrant," were married on June 7, 1874, in the San Francisco residence of the bride's parents. The ceremony was "conducted by Joseph Newmark. Esq., father of the groom, assisted by the Rev. Dr. Eckman." The couple had three children, the first being a daughter, Sophie, born in Los Angeles in 1879 and married on September 11, 1902, to Alfred Sutro, nephew of Adolph Sutro of San Francisco. They also had a son, Henry M. Newmark.

For three years, he and his family lived in Nice, France.

Newmark died in San Francisco on May 10, 1911, after an illness of two days.

A Los Angeles Herald reporter wrote in 1900 that Newmark at the age of 62 was "under medium height," with "clear, gray eyes," who "betrays nervous energy in every movement. He is a restless being—one of those high-strung men who must ever be on the move. Five minutes of actual repose would be actual punishment to him. . . . That he ever managed to hold himself down to the plodding drudgery of his books long enough to master the dry details of law is a mystery . . . ."

As a young adult in San Francisco, Newmark "embarked, in a boyish way, in mercantile pursuits," then sold his business for enough cash to enable him to study law independently in Los Angeles. He was admitted to practice in the local courts when he was 21 and to the California Supreme Court at age 22.

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