A NEW KIND OF WOMAN: GENDER AND CIVIC IMAGINATION IN LOS ANGELES ______
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
California State University, Fullerton ______
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
History ______
By
Jeena Trexler
Thesis Committee Approval:
Professor Benjamin Cawthra, Chair Professor Allison Varzally, Department of History Professor Elaine Lewinnek, Department of American Studies
Fall, 2015
ABSTRACT
The first half of the 20th century marked a period of rapid growth in Los Angeles.
Across the United States professional city planners attempted to transform major cities.
Los Angeles experimented with several plans but many women came to the city armed with their own plans and civic imaginations. By examining the gendered nature of city planning and the way that it collided with the new woman of the 20th century, we are able to understand the various ways that women pursued power through civic participation.
Aline Barnsdall, oil heiress and patron of the arts, commissioned Frank Lloyd
Wright’s first Southern California design for her home, Hollyhock House. Barnsdall’s tumultuous relationship with Wright and her conflict with city leaders like Harry
Chandler of the Los Angeles Times , reveal the limits of women’s power in a conservative environment. Christine Sterling utilized traditional methods of female power as she worked as a historical housekeeper in her preservation of Olvera Street. By courting powerful leaders and utilizing booster images of Los Angeles’s mythic, Spanish Fantasy past, Sterling gained power and transformed the landscape of downtown. Alice
Constance Austin worked as an architect for the socialist community of Llano del Rio.
The independent, experimental nature of the communal project allowed Austin the freedom to design a city from scratch and to express her feminist beliefs.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... ii
LIST OF FIGURES ...... iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Chapter 1. HISTORICAL HOUSEKEEPING: CHRISTINE STERLING AND THE MYTHICAL PAST...... 11
2. A PARLOR BOLSHEVIK: BARNSDALL, WRIGHT AND THE LIMITS OF PUBLIC ART ...... 30
3. THE CITY OF THE FUTURE: ALICE CONSTANCE AUSTIN AND THE SOCIALIST CITY ...... 56
CONCLUSION ...... 69
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 78
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Ramona Themed Citrus Crate...... 27
2. Bombing of Los Angeles Times Building ...... 28
3. Harry Chandler Birthday Celebration ...... 28
4. Completed American Tropical ...... 29
5. Hollyhock House, exterior view ...... 54
6. Barnsdall with daughter ...... 55
7. Cover of Western Comrade ...... 68
8. Llano del Rio Design ...... 68
9. Aurora Vargas ...... 77
10. The Great Wall of Los Angeles ...... 77
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my committee chair, Benjamin Cawthra, for your advice and enthusiasm. Thank you to my children, Elliott and Olive, for being patient with me as I wrote and revised and for encouraging me with your words and smiles. Finally, thank you
Sam for your endless support and love.
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1
INTRODUCTION
On December 19, 1946, The Los Angeles Times reported the death of Aline
Barnsdall, oil heiress. The death notice remarked, “She was a recluse, living alone in her home adjacent to Barnsdall Park at Sunset Blvd. and Vermont Ave.” 1 Barnsdall’s life in
Los Angeles began very differently nearly 30 years earlier. She spearheaded the development of a theater company, a successful production, and the purchase of a vast section of land upon which she determined to build a colony for artists, a public park space, a school for children, and an outdoor theater. In her decades as a Los Angeles resident, she helped fund projects such as the building of the Hollywood Bowl, she engaged with important members of the arts and entertainment community, and she donated large portions of her private property, named Hollyhock House, to the city for public use.
The story of how Barnsdall transformed from an outspoken proponent of art and politics to a recluse living alone explains the difficulty that women, particularly radical women, faced as they battled for civic power in the often conservative, controlled city of
Los Angeles. The stories, successes, and failures of Barnsdall, preservationist Christine
Sterling and architect Alice Constance Austin, reveal the way that women looked to the past, present, and future in order to gain access to power and contribute to the
1 “Aline Barnsdall, Oil Heiress, Found Dead,” Los Angeles Times , December 19, 1946, accessed September 22, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/159697186?accountid=9840.
2 development of civic authority in the first half of the twentieth century. City planning and home design remained a highly gendered arena in the first half of the 20th century and these three women respectively rebelled against gendered notions of separate spheres, utilized idealized images of female purity, or disengaged from the system altogether.
Attorney and activist, Carey McWilliams complained that Los Angeles was a strange city, lacking form, with no center and no community. 2 By 1929, Los Angeles saw a massive influx of migrants and a huge expansion of populated areas that pushed away from a centralized downtown and into a sprawl of communities. McWilliams described the resulting metropolitan area as “a gigantic improvisation.” 3 Los Angeles grew rapidly, without a centralized city plan at a time when urban planning reached its apex in other major cities across the United States. Among the burgeoning populace dwelt audacious newcomers bearing bold and modern ideas regarding civic identity and organization.
Although men made up the majority of city planners, female designers, reformers, and philanthropists pronounced their own ideas for future city developments. In Southern
California, Barnsdall, Christine Sterling, and Alice Constance Austin embarked on individual plans for marking their place in the emerging landscape of civic planning and civic art. The three women utilized vastly different methods, yet each reveals the gendered nature of the contest for civic power
Los Angeles grew without an overarching development plan but it was not for lack of trying. Many Progressive city plans emerged or were solicited in the first half of the 20th century, but none took hold. The first significant movement in planning
2 Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1973), x. Carey McWilliams, The Education of Carey McWillams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 45. 3 McWilliams, Southern California , 13.
3 developed out of the Progressive Era City Beautiful movement. Cities ranging from
Washington D.C., Chicago, St. Louis, and Brisbane developed City Beautiful plans. An emphasis on moral uplift, organization, cleanliness, and decongestion characterized the movement. Born out of the progressivism of the 1890s, the movement for city reform called for no less than a total social transformation. Condemning contemporary metropolitan areas for their slums, disorder, and social disconnection, progressive reformers like the Reverend Dana Bartlett called for righteousness and morality in the structure of the city, which would lead to the uplifting of its residents. Los Angeles city officials called on urban planner, Charles Mulford Robinson, to prepare a plan for the redevelopment of the city’s civic center. Supported by Bartlett’s exhortation for Los
Angeles to “concentrate thought upon the ethical ideal,” so that it might be known for its
“righteousness, its morality, its social virtue, its artistic life as for its material resources,”
Robinson compiled a report to the Los Angeles Municipal Art Commission. 4 Calling for a new railroad station to anchor the civic center, Robinson promoted the centralization of civic government and the development of a cultural nexus for citizens of the growing city. 5 The commission embraced and promoted some portion of Robinson’s recommendations, but the city failed to commit entirely to the plan.
While this specific reform agenda neglected to take root in Los Angeles, proponents of progressive city reform made their mark in other urban areas at the turn of the 20th century. As city planning commissions rose in popularity, women engaged in
4 Dana W. Bartlett, The Better City: A Sociological Study of a Modern City (Los Angeles: Neuner Company Press, 1907), Preface. 5 Charles Mulford Robinson, Los Angeles, California: The City Beautiful (Los Angeles: William J. Porter, 1909).
4 civic reform in a variety of ways. Progressivism and later, the emergence of the new woman, empowered women to engage in public life through new avenues of social reform, historic preservation, and the promotion of green spaces. At a time when women were still fighting for voting rights, it became increasingly difficult for political and civic leaders to ignore the role of women in public life. Seen most clearly in settlement houses, the National Congress of Mothers, and the Children’s Bureau, reformers like Jane
Addams fought for funding and legislation to empower and protect women and children from the hardships of poverty and urban blight. 6 Women functioned in the “growth machine” of California cities through private ownership, women’s clubs, city government, and civic expression. 7 While many view city planning as a field largely controlled by professional men, the gendered nature of the process is far more complex.
In California, reformers like Laura Lyon White organized committees of like-minded men and women to promote the building of municipal parks and the preservation of historic and natural monuments. While White worked within the confines of gender roles to some degree, she also worked for women’s suffrage and fought against the ills of industrialization. 8 Generally speaking, gendered behavioral norms limited roles for women in city planning. With the exception of political activists like White, the controversial birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, or anarchist and public speaker
Emma Goldman, many female reformers limited their work to avenues of traditional
6 Jean Matthews argues that the years 1880-1920 marked a transformation of women’s roles in public life in The Rise of the New Woman (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003). 7 Lee M. A. Simpson, Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 51. 8 For an in-depth analysis of White’s activism in Northern California see Cameron Binkley, “A Cult of Beauty: The Public Life and Civic Work of Laura Lyon White,” California History 83, no. 2 (2005): 40-61, accessed August 2, 2015, http://jstor.org/stable/25161804.
5 femininity: activism related to domesticity and motherhood. This approach, while conservative, had powerful results as women worked in the background of civic projects, making the implementation of plans reliant on the support of influential women. 9 The three women in this study emerged or grew out of these gendered notions of civic identity and rebelled against or lived them out in the landscape of Southern California.
After Robinson’s report to the Municipal Art Commission, city officials continued to solicit ideas for a unified city plan or a civic center. Famed urban planner
Fredrick Law Olmsted Jr. and Harland Bartholomew presented a plan for the region’s recreational development to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in 1930. Though the publications spanned nearly 30 years, the Olmsted-Bartholomew plan reinforced Dana
Bartlett’s opinion on the deficiency of public space in Los Angeles. Bartlett argued for “a comprehensive plan for a metropolitan park system.”10 Indeed, the Olmsted-
Bartholomew report concluded that the region lagged far behind comparable cities in the area of park space and found this deficiency “positively reprehensible,” stating that rapid population growth and a highly speculative real estate market contributed to the lack of impetus for a park system.” 11 Los Angeles’ problematic relationship with parks would play a major role in Barnsdall’s conflicts with the City and contributed to the failure of the Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan.
9 Simpson, 109. 10 Bartlett, 44. 11 Citizens’ Committee on Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches, “Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region”, Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew, Los Angeles, 1930, 4-5. Greg Hise and William Deverell examine the report as a lost possibility for Los Angeles in Eden by Design : The 1930 Olmsted- Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
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Modern architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, his son, and Rudolph Schindler also proposed imaginative solutions for the city’s most pressing problems: the housing shortage, the lack of a civic center, and a deficiency of public space. Ultimately, none of these plans came to fruition. However, examined alongside the work of Sterling,
Barnsdall, and Austin, they reveal the limits of experimental civic development in the conservative climate of Southern California. Indeed, both Barnsdall and Wright in his later work, prove the rule that Los Angeles welcomed private experimentation but neglected city planning. Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell lament and examine design plans for the city that never became a reality, claiming that “The gap between Los Angeles’s genius for design and its public output reveals a reluctant city whose institutions, citizens, politics, and infrastructure, not to mention its sheer size, have often undermined inspired urban schemes.” 12 Additionally, the experiences of these three women provide an opportunity to analyze the gendered nature of city planning and civic identity. Their efforts prove that women contributed to the development of the region in the first half of the twentieth-century along with men like William Mulholland, Harry Chandler, and
Edward Doheny.
The development of Los Angeles as a modern metropolis vacillated between projections of a mythical past, a present-minded emphasis on solutions, and a desire to become a thoroughly modern, futuristic city. Chapter 1 explores Christine Sterling’s reach back to the past with her Olvera Street project and its reliance on a mythic
California history of Spanish fantasy and Mexican romance. Sterling engaged in her struggle for civic power by acceding to and courting the support of the dominant, male
12 Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, Never Built Los Angeles (New York: Metropolis Books, 2013), 20.
7 power structure. Sterling made deep in-roads to the cultural development of Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s by navigating the intertwining worlds of boosters, developers, and the press. In doing so, she successfully augmented an important civic space and left a mark on the landscape of Los Angeles by appealing to those who wanted to romanticize
California’s complicated history and utilize the city’s ethnic population for the purpose of tourism. In doing so, she contributed to the process of depoliticizing ethnic spaces in the city, a useful service for Los Angeles’s notorious Los Angeles Police Department’s red squads and its conservative business leaders. Sterling utilized the region’s mythic past in order to gain access to power. Although Sterling’s work in Los Angeles came after
Austin and Barnsdall, her approach relied on the past to promote growth; a strategy that others utilized before her to attract tourists and investors to the region.
Chapter 2 explores the life of Aline Barnsdall, oil heiress and patron of the arts, and her journey from the Midwest to Los Angeles with a single-minded purpose. Rooted deeply in present day concepts of bohemianism, feminism, and experimental design,
Barnsdall sought to bring those contemporary concepts to Los Angeles’ art scene and visual landscape through a domestic space designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Her experience working as a producer at the experimental Little Theater in Chicago inspired her to bring modern theater to Los Angeles in 1916. However, Barnsdall was no average woman and Los Angeles was no average town. The men and women engaging in the growth of the rapidly developing metropolis engaged in conflicts over land use, politics, art, and civic power. The question of just what Los Angeles should be and how space should be used remained unsettled. Barnsdall arrived in Los Angeles at a time of radical change in a city with clearly defined concepts of art and a strong stance on radical
8 politics. Her attempts to navigate the world of art and boosters in Los Angeles were fraught with discord and contributed to an image of her as a difficult woman. Hollyhock
House, Barnsdall’s physical legacy in Los Angeles, while a disappointment from her earlier plans, is still significant. Yet, her name is little known. As Dolores Hayden asks,
“Why are so few moments in women’s history remembered as part of preservation?” 13 If the home (along with the body and streets) is an arena of conflict for women, as Hayden argues, than analyzing Barnsdall, Hollyhock House, and Los Angeles as “political territories” can help us discern the limits of women’s power within the emerging metropolis. 14 Los Angeles was in the later stages of its conversion from sleepy cattle town to a modern metropolis. That process was distinguished by a highly controlled, capitalist, conservative approach to industry and a booster-oriented approach to art and culture. Barnsdall said, to designer and friend Norman Bel Geddes, that she could not accomplish what she hoped in a town like New York; she needed the “freedom of thought and action” that she assumed she would find in Los Angeles. 15 Barnsdall approached civic power in a decidedly modern way. Utilizing her role as an independent, bohemian woman, she failed to understand the contest for power in her adopted city.
In Chapter 3, Alice Constance Austin provides a useful counter-narrative to both
Barnsdall and Sterling as she looked to the future, imagining and designing a utopian space for workers, especially women. Although Austin’s work in Southern California began before the other women in this study, her markedly utopian vision relied on a forward thinking philosophy of experimental living. Southern California, with its open
13 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 7. 14 Ibid., 22-23. 15 Norman Bel Geddes, Miracle in the Evening (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 156.
9 space and frontier reputation, provided homes for many experimental communities, some rooted in religion and others inspired by socialism or utopianism. In each case the communities sought out the opportunity to plan idealized communities and to imagine what a future world might look like. Austin, a feminist architect, assisted in the design and building of the socialist commune known as Llano del Rio. Located in Los Angeles
County, in the Antelope Valley, Llano del Rio’s development began through the recognition by its founder, Job Harriman that the socialist model for the civic ideal could only exist outside of the current power structure. Alice Constance Austin utilized her design to illustrate what she imagined a city ought to look like. Primarily, it should be expertly designed, cooperative, and feminist in its construction. While Llano del Rio scarcely lasted four years, Austin’s experiment in city planning revealed another option for civic power far removed from the financially motivated city planning in Los Angeles and reflected the region’s relationship with experimental communes. Austin looked forward, attempting to make a future where she and other women might access power through their own means.
While the structure of this study deviates from the historical chronology, the examination of how the three women utilized the past, present, and future mirrors some of the ebbs and flows of Southern California’s development. The examination of Sterling illuminates the way that boosters manipulated the public imagination in regard to Los
Angeles’ ethnic history. Barnsdall’s modernism stands alongside the work of modern artists and designers who emerged from the postwar period and began their alteration of art and design in Southern California with a new, invigorated style that permanently marked the region. Austin’s Llano del Rio project reflects the possibility that many saw
10 in Southern California; the chance that it could hold the city of the future. Alongside the three subjects of the study I will point to other Californians whose experiences contribute to our understanding of civic imagination in the region and the way that the past, present, and future impacted its development
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CHAPTER 1
HISTORICAL HOUSEKEEPING: CHRISTINE STERLING AND THE MYTHICAL PAST
Christine Sterling moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco in the 1920s, looking for the romantic Spanish vision advertised by boosters, writing that “the attractive literature which Los Angeles sends out, enticing people to Southern California drew me as it has thousands of others.” Instead she found the Los Angeles Plaza, the original center of the Mexican pueblo, now languishing in the shadow of the newly built
City Hall building “forsaken and forgotten.” 16 Recently separated from her husband and headed for bankruptcy, Sterling’s plan for the space saved her as much as she claimed to be saving it. Sterling envisioned a revival of the space, a vision that included stereotypical images of an ideal world before the Americans came complete with women in silk and men on horses. Sterling’s first move was to court the Chamber of Commerce by appealing to their commercial interests. She would remake the dirty old alley into a tourist destination. She wrote in her journal before embarking on the project that “the old landmarks and missions are a commercial asset to Los Angeles and can be reckoned in dollars and cents.”17 Before the dollars and cents could start flowing in, she needed to garner public support. Sterling’s method for drawing attention involved a very large sign.
16 Christine Sterling. Olvera Street: Its History and Restoration , (Los Angeles: Adobe Studios, 1930), 7-8. 17 Christine Sterling, Journal Entry reprinted in Olvera Street: Its History and Preservation , 7.
12
As Southern California grew from a small cattle town to a heavily populated metropolis, interested parties created and promoted an idealistic image rooted in hegemonic Anglo power that limited the creation of art and “whitewashed” and romanticized California’s long cultural and ethnic history. 18 California historian Kevin
Starr refers to the financial and political leaders in early Los Angeles as the “controlling oligarchy” and argues that there was a “deliberately fashioned identity” being asserted on the city. 19 The embodiment of that identity was the Anglo, English speaker and not the ethnic minority. A large number of American citizens from other parts of the country added to Los Angeles’s growth between 1920 and 1930. 20 While cities like Chicago,
Boston, and New York grew with the addition of waves of European immigrants, the leaders of Los Angeles defined themselves against the long ethnic history of the area. The early decades of the city’s development contributed to what Eric Avila calls “the
Midwestern myth of Los Angeles,” wherein ethnic history that deviates from that new ethos is hidden, destroyed, or remarketed. 21 In 1907, Joseph Widney, University of
Southern California president, wrote that Los Angeles was destined to become a capital for white supremacy, and later, Los Angeles Times’ writer Harry Carr posited in 1935 that the migration of people to Los Angeles was “one of the most significant in the long saga of the Aryan race.” 22 Avila sets forth a compelling argument that Los Angeles
18 For a detailed analysis and definition of white-washing as it relates to Los Angeles see William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). 19 Kevin Starr, Material Dreams (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), viii. 20 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 . Population Volume I (Washington 1931), pp. 18-19. 21 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 22. 22 Joseph Widney, Race Life of the Aryan Peoples (Funk and Wagnall’s Company, 1907), accessed November 17, 2013, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=okNDAAAAIAAJ&rdid=book- okNDAAAAIAAJ&rdot=1. Harry Carr, Los Angeles: City of Dreams (New York, NY: D. Appleton- Century Company, 1935), 5.
13 progressives sought racial and ethnic homogeneity within the city, reinforced by the physical, man-made landscape. Dana Bartlett argued that Los Angeles could set itself apart from other metropolitan areas via a civic obligation to eliminate “slums” and crowded conditions and employ sympathetic businessmen to encourage beauty and space in municipal life. He argued that a city of homes would improve domestic life making for happier families. Under the surface of his writing is a rejection of ethnic diversity in city life. 23 Los Angeles civic leaders and progressive activists embraced and reinforced an image of classless racial homogeneity. In 1922, the Los Angeles Examiner proclaimed,
“There are no poor in Los Angeles.” 24
Along with a culturally conservative attitude toward race, class, and family, the oligarchy also enforced a strong anti-union attitude in business. Carey McWilliams asserted that “California is like the rest of the country, only more so.” 25 If this is true, Los
Angeles’s aggressive stance against labor fits perfectly. Because the city was not geographically ideal for the large-scale manufacturing investors hoped to draw, they had to find other ways to make the city appealing. One of the most significant was the city’s open shop policy, which did not require union membership as a requirement for employment. The implementation of that policy made Los Angeles more attractive to business, particularly in the 1920s as labor unrest spread across the nation, notably in
Northern California cities like San Francisco. Protecting this ethos meant that the business elite, including Los Angeles Times’ publisher Harry Chandler and his father-in-
23 Dana Bartlett, The Better Country (Boston, MA: The C.M. Clark Publishing Company, 1911). 24 Tom Ingersoll, “Los Angeles, Typical American City,” Los Angeles Examiner , December 1922. 25 Carey McWilliams, The California Revolution (New York, NY: Grossman Publishers, 1968), 5
14 law Harrison Gray Otis before him, exhibited open hostility toward labor unions. This attitude led to arrests, surveillance, and violence in the city. 26
Sarah Schrank asserts that Los Angeles is “a city with an enormous historical investment in controlling its visual memory,” and argues that art “played a significant role in how civic leaders imagined their city.”27 Anglo boosters utilized art as a tool to attract tourists, industrial business, and to remove or distort images of ethnic diversity that contradicted the romantic, “white-washed” picture they painted. The Municipal Art
Commission formed in 1903. Alongside the Chamber of Commerce, the Los Angeles
Times , and other business interests, the Commission linked art to promotion. Most notably in Sunkist’s citrus crate ads seen in figure 1, boosters promoted an image of
California inspired by Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona . Jackson inadvertently added to the fantasy narrative of Southern California’s Spanish past. Encouraged by proponents of the City Beautiful idea, boosters emphasized art as primarily utilitarian or as Charles
Mulford Robinson stated, “civic first, art second.”28 Not only were politics and art not enemies, but one encouraged the other, Robinson argued, “for where political life is ardent, the civic consciousness is strong; the impulse toward creative representation is fervent; and state, government, the ideals of parties, are no longer abstractions, but are concrete things to be loved or hated, worked for, and done visible homage to. The strain
26 Frank Donner argues that repressive police tactics inhibited radical organizations in urban centers, including Los Angeles with its infamous Red Squads. Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 27 Sarah Schrank , Art in the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 4. 28 Charles Mulford Robinson, Modern Civic Art or, the City Made Beautiful (New York: NY: Arno Press, 1970), 27.
15 and stress of city politics to-day are not, then, a factor essentially antagonistic to civic art.” 29
The Municipal Art Commission, working from that framework, contributed to the connection between artistic output and civic pride. In a true collusion of boosters and art,
Harrison Gray Otis funded his own institution, the Otis Art Institute, in 1921. The goal, according to Otis, was promoting fine art in Los Angeles and creating a popular destination spot for art exhibits. 30 Interest in art by the 1920s seemed to relate to promotional images or fine art with a lack of regard for modern art. Private collectors and art clubs held most of the power and showed little interest in exposing the larger populace to art. While the City Beautiful movement encouraged the inclusion of parks and leisure centers for working class residents, they relegated art to the civic sphere. Art for art’s sake meant little compared to art for money’s sake. As historian Victoria Dailey argues,
Los Angeles might have housed an eclectic group of faddists, radicals, and eccentrics, it was also made up of a conservative base that divided art in the city between both sides. 31
Traditional artists such as William Wendt, who also served as a president of the
California Art Club, mostly created landscape paintings that were popular with tourists and represented Southern California favorably, accommodating the goals of the Chamber of Commerce. Modern artists, particularly those who worked in the abstract form, faced criticism or ambivalence from conservative art critics and the general public, while art that challenged the dominant power structure might face suppression or destruction.
29 Ibid., 12. 30 Schrank, 20-21. 31 Victoria Dailey et al., LA’s Early Moderns: Art, Architecture, Photography (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 2003), 25.
16
In regard to theater, one of the most popular productions from this time was
Mission Play by John McGroarty, which opened in 1912. The Times proclaimed that the script had “almost” literally drawn from the history of California. 32 McGroarty had himself written said history. In his book California: Its History and Romance , McGroarty painted an image of California as a place of dreams and fulfilled desires claiming she
(California) “has never had a faithless lover. Whoever has fallen under the spell of her beauty seeks no other mistress.” 33 Regarding the mission system, which formed the basis of his play, he wrote:
It should be necessary only to state the plain, concrete fact of history that the result of this splendid adventure was to snatch from the darkness and ignorance of heathenism a whole savage race, lifting it into the light and intelligence of civilization and Christianity. The story is all the more wonderful because of the fact that the Indians of California, when found by the Franciscans in the year 1769, were little above the level of the most degraded physical beings and the most mentally slothful human creatures on the face of the earth. A more hopeless task was never attempted by the agencies of religion and civilization, yet the results accomplished were as astounding as any that have ever been accomplished under the most auspicious circumstances and with the most susceptible and noble of savage races to work upon. 34
From that framework, McGroarty built the Mission Play , based around Father Junipero
Serra, founder of the mission system. The play opened adjacent to the San Gabriel
Mission on the El Camino Real. William Deverell argues that the play’s success relied on a suspension of disbelief and an effort to deny the darkness of recent city history.35 In
California, the play broke records for attendance and continued to run through the 1920s.
When the play started to falter in its success, the Chamber of Commerce formed a
32 "Franciscan Glory Story," Los Angeles Times, Apr 28, 1912, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/159697186?accountid=9840. 33 John McGroarty, California: Its History and Romance (Los Angeles, CA: Grafton Publishing Company, 1911), 7. 34 Ibid., 55. 35 Deverell, 217.
17 committee to analyze the cause. Businessmen and civic leaders supported theatrical productions that contributed to the romantic images of Southern California and drew in crowds.
Sterling understood the necessity of this support and her cooperation with Harry
Chandler, along with her use of financial incentives and booster style fundraising, illustrate a conservative approach to the city’s physical landscape. However, Sterling’s influence on the city and her ability to engage in masculine, public spaces position her as a new kind of woman. In her campaign to restore the Avila Adobe and create Olvera
Street, Sterling courted the support of local leaders like Chandler, promoted the financial incentives of her cause, and contributed to the redefinition of California’s ethnic past. In doing so, she successfully navigated the city’s hegemonic power structure and forged a path to success.
When the city slated the Avila Adobe, one of the last remaining Spanish adobes, for condemnation, Sterling erected a large sign chastising Angelinos for their neglect of history. She wrote, “If this old landmark is not worthy of preservation, then there is no sentiment, no patriotism, no country, no flag. Los Angeles will be forever marked a transient, orphan city, if she allows her roots to rot in a soil impoverished by neglect.” 36
As Phoebe Kropp argues, Sterling employed a preservationist script, “effectively combining narratives of Anglos’ patriotic duty, imminent doom, female historical housekeeping, and civic altruism in order to amplify her cause.” 37 One of Sterling’s
36 "Appeal made to Save Historic Building of City," Los Angeles Times, Dec 12, 1928, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/162146458?accountid=9840. 37 Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 215. Gloria Ricci Lothrop astutely argues that women’s philanthropic and social clubs played a significant role in Southern California in her article ‘Strength Made Stronger: The Role of Women in Southern California Philanthropy,” Southern California Quarterly 71, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 1989): 143-194.
18 major coups was enlisting Harry Chandler in her mission. He helped form a for-profit corporation dedicated to the development of Olvera Street and connected properties. He brought major investors to the project, including himself, continuing the “winning recipe” of combining private and public interests. Her book on the restoration project is dedicated to Chandler first, among others. Chandler not only supported Sterling’s campaign for the potential financial success; he also seemed to share her romanticized notions of the past.
Chandler came to Los Angeles in 1883 with scant resources and no job. As memorialized in a laudatory biography by Ed Ainsworth, Chandler possessed “a Yankee shrewdness for making money, modified by one strong factor. Money, as such, meant little to him. He received just as much satisfaction, or possibly more, from seeing his money bring benefits to his community or to his friends as he did from sharing in it himself.” 38 After saving money from fruit-picking, he got a job as a clerk in the circulation department of the Los Angeles Times , eventually rising through the business and marrying Otis’ daughter. Chandler quickly became a powerful force in the Southern
California real estate market. Taking over the newspaper after the death of his father-in- law, Chandler declared that “ The Times will continue to be The Times -The Times of
General Otis, The Times that he made. Men may die, but influences do not.” 39 That meant a commitment to the open shop and an opposition to radical political causes. Since its founding, the Times vehemently fought organized labor, preventing major outbreaks of unrest like those seen in San Francisco. They did this through a support network of the press, politicians and the police. That opposition under Otis, and continuing with
38 Ed Ainsworth, Memories in the City of Dreams: A Tribute to Harry Chandler (Los Angeles, 1959), 11. 39 "What the Course of the Times Shall Be,” Los Angeles Times , Aug 05, 1917, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/160436881?accountid=9840.
19
Chandler led directly to the high profile bombing of the Times building in 1910 by three men connected to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers
Union seen in figure 2.
After learning that San Francisco unionists planned to provoke a push against the open shop policy in Los Angeles, the paper rose up in protest, calling them “a foreign foe” and asserting Los Angeles as a “community which will not tolerate picketing or interference by outsiders with the business of any man.” 40 With the help of the mayor and the city prosecutor, anti-unionists criminalized picketing and even carrying signs.
This led to increased animosity from organized labor and eventually to the bombing, resulting in the deaths of 21 employees. This criminalization of union activity also contributed to an increase in anti-union sentiment, cementing Otis as a hero of the open shop and affirming his belief that organized labor posed a threat to public safety. The
Times’ history with the perceived dangers of radicalism made the concept of a controlled space an attractive proposition. Sterling’s appeal and distinctly feminine approach made it even more compelling.
One way Sterling garnered support was by working in a traditionally female oriented field. Women long participated in various forms of municipal housekeeping, particularly in the Progressive Era, but modern women were taking this a step further as they applied feminism and socialism to their public health work. Dolores Hayden examines these efforts in her book, The Grand Domestic Revolution, arguing that the
Progressive Era led to the work of material feminists like Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, and Alice Constance Austin who questioned the ideas of women’s spheres and
40 "The Common Peril, " Los Angeles Times , June 22, 1910, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/159510743?accountid=9840.
20 experimented with constructions of domestic spaces.41 Many of these material feminists sought solutions to the problems of the working class and ethnic minorities in urban areas, hoping to create efficiency and cleanliness in domestic spaces. These women illustrated the roles available for women in social work and emphasized the moral assistance they provided to the urban environ. Sterling utilized this role of municipal housekeeper while benefiting from these expanding opportunities for women to exercise their voices in a public way. She did both of these things while applying them to the distinct social landscape of Los Angeles. While many naturally connect municipal housekeeping to the eastern United States, Sterling added her voice to many western women who sought civic power through traditionally feminine means, including Laura
Lyon White and Bertha Knight Landes.
As previously discussed, White participated in municipal politics in Northern
California fighting to preserve historical landmarks and to conserve and create green space for city residents and those who wished to escape to a natural setting. Historian
Richard Walker bemoans the lack of credit modern environmentalist history gives to
White in spite of her successes. After participating in the fight for woman’s suffrage,
White campaigned for women’s formal participation in civic positions, as well as fighting against racial discrimination in women’s clubs, and promoting green spaces and city beautification projects. Like Sterling’s projects, many of these fell within the realm of acceptable activism for women. Additionally, White’s ability to access power and create change provides another example of the way that municipal housekeeping allowed women to wield public power. White successfully saved the first redwood trees in
41 Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982).
21
Northern California after a nearly century long process of industrial destruction. By accessing new power available after California women received voting rights in 1896 and utilizing traditionally feminine ideals such as beauty and preservation, White suppressed the exceedingly “western” process of growth and expansion in favor of conservation. 42
Meanwhile, Bertha Knight Landes drew on Western ideas of masculinity while twisting them up with arguments for the intrinsic goodness of womanhood as she found her way to power in Seattle.
In 1926, Seattle voters elected Landes as mayor, marking her start as the first female mayor of a large American city. Like White, Landes participated in several women’s groups including the League of Women Voters. After the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, women like Landes sought political positions on city commissions, councils, and ultimately the mayor’s seat. Landes played the role of municipal housekeeper while serving as mayor, embarking on a law and order campaign to rid the city of vice. Women like Landes, White, and Sterling gained civic power by appealing to the commonly held notion that women served as a purifying force, able to look past commerce, greed, and pleasure in order to improve society. In analyzing
Landes’ autobiographical writing, Tiffany Lewis argues that Landes drew on womanhood arguments while also drawing on contemporary Western sensibilities regarding political power. 43 Sterling applied the municipal housekeeping philosophy to Olvera Street claiming that the transformation would clean up the area, rid it of unsavory elements, and
42 See Binkley, “A Cult of Beauty”. Also, Richard Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area , (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 43 Tiffany Lewis, “Municipal Housekeeping in the American West: Bertha Knight Landes’s Entrance into Politics,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 465-491.
22 create an outdoor space for public enjoyment. Additionally, Sterling played on Southern
California’s specific ethnic conflicts.
Sterling continued to appeal to the Anglo vision of Los Angeles by arguing that the current alleyway (populated by actual Mexicans) was filthy and disease-ridden, pointing to a recent outbreak of pneumonic plague. She also argued that the alleyway’s filth and disease would lead to criminality. Sterling’s argument aligned with proponents of the early City Beautiful philosophy by promoting the elimination of slums in favor of progressive (i.e. Anglo) images of cleanliness. Dana Bartlett urged municipal leaders to create public spaces for recreation and to establish a civic center in order to promote morality and social virtue. Additionally, Bartlett and others realized the importance of preserving the past; he argued “It matters not how large this city may grow, it will never be allowed to forget the past. We are reminded of the past too, as we see riding by, the smiling senoritas, native daughters of the golden west, and know that it was such as these that made this the land of poetry and romance.” 44 Sterling’s plan would (in theory) eliminate the infested alleyway, promote moral uplift, and preserve the romance of the city’s past, proving Deverell’s assertion that the city grew, in part, by ignoring disturbing parts of its history. 45
Throughout the process of fundraising and coalition building, Chandler used the
Times to influence public opinion. During an early legal battle, the Times lamented that a judge’s decision would revert the area back to an “unsightly alley” and “force 250 now self-supporting Mexican families on the county charity rolls.” 46 Chandler utilized the
44 Bartlett, 15-16. 45 Deverell, 7. 46 "A Blow to Los Angeles," Los Angeles Times, Nov 23, 1934, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/163305285?accountid=9840.
23 skills of a writer known for his ability to promote romantic images of Southern
California’s ethnic history, John McGroarty. He believed that McGroarty’s skilled writing could “stir up sentiment,” and “appeal to a large number of people.” 47 McGroarty pleaded with Times ’ readers not to forsake their “last heritage from Old Spain,” and encouraged them to trust Sterling’s ability to handle “the Mexican problem,” while also understanding that “romance can live only if it can be made to pay.” 48 The major catalyst for Sterling’s success in saving the Avila Adobe was her posting of that sign containing a handwritten entreaty to stop an order of condemnation by the City Council. In it she linked Anglo residents to the history of Los Angeles and beseeched the city to recognize their responsibility to “preserve” the adobe so that it may be “passed on to future generations.” By linking it with Independence Hall, Plymouth Rock, and Bunker Hill, she essentially Americanized the space and called on the “sentiment,” and “patriotism,” of
Los Angeles’s Anglo residents. 49
Sterling’s vision of a charming Mexican village where Anglo visitors could enjoy music, eat traditional foods, and delight in the image of Mexican culture was self-curated.
Her desire to create this space certainly derived from a real affection for the Mexican culture she saw around her, but it also contributed to a remaking of history; the
“whitewashing” explained by Deverell. Carey McWilliams argued that it commodified and diminished the political power of the Mexican population. Sterling’s vision also created a set of guidelines for Mexican culture, one that fit neatly with Chandler’s
47 Letter from Harry Chandler to John S. McGroarty, August 18, 1926, reprinted in Ainsworth, Memories in the City of Dreams . 48 McGroarty, “Shall Our City Forfeit its Last Heritage from Old Spain?” Los Angeles Times , September 12, 1926. 49 Sterling, 14.
24 business interests and sentimentality. Ed Ainsworth speaks emotionally about Chandler’s first experience in the Plaza area after arriving in the city with little money and few prospects, recounting that Chandler “was impressed from the start by the leisure, the courtesy, the kindliness of the people of Mexican ancestry. The soft flow of the Spanish tongue intrigued him. Oddities in food and drink caught his attention.” 50 These romanticized and limiting descriptions made up a large portion of the Olvera Street concept, and Chandler clung to them until his death as shown by his yearly birthday celebrations with the merchants and children of Olvera Street seen in figure 3.
Tourists and residents alike immersed themselves in a constructed version of a
Mexican village, spending money as they did so, emerging with a specific vision of
Mexican identity. That identity failed to include the lengthy political and social conflicts that ethnic minorities and political activists engaged in via the Plaza before the construction of Olvera Street. Historian William David Estrada argues that Olvera Street functioned as a racialized tourist attraction that presented an idealized vision of Mexico and limited political activity at the Plaza.”51 Chandler frequently visited Olvera Street, chatting with merchants, eating, and buying huaraches, according to his son. Ainsworth described him as the “Gran Benefactor” of the street and claimed that upon Chandler’s death in 1944, “nowhere was there greater sadness than Olvera Street.” 52
Sterling’s commitment to the merchants and artisans working on the street appeared to emerge from a place of helpfulness and idealism. Sterling wrote, “Mexican men and women sell attractive wares from under little canopies and whisper to the
50 Ainsworth, 7. 51 William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 192-193. 52 Ainsworth, 36-37.
25 sunlight: ‘ Gracias a Dios. Ha vuelto a nosotros un palmito de nuestra tierra!’ (Thanks to
God. A little piece of our land is ours again).”53 Sterling saw the financial potential for the project, but she also worked as a holdover to Progressive Era politics toward ethnic minorities.
In spite of their seemingly genuine emotional connection to the Mexican workers of Olvera Street, Sterling and Chandler still maintained a set of paternalistic guidelines for the street and its employees based on a specific, controlled vision of Mexican identity and limited access to free speech or dissent. During the political tumult of the Depression,
Chandler discovered that a group from the radical John Reed Society held meetings in a building on Olvera Street. Admonishing Sterling to recognize the dangers of such gatherings, they quickly worked to remove radical groups from the area altogether. 54
Police and immigration raids of the Plaza and wider city led to thousands of deportations of Mexican citizens during the Great Depression. 55 Sterling and Chandler’s vision collided with further opposition when the Plaza Art Center commissioned a mural by
David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1932. The mural was meant to reflect the docile nature of
Mexicans on Olvera Street and draw positive attention to Los Angeles’ art scene. 56
Instead Siqueiros made an anti-imperialist statement with his mural América Tropical seen in figure 4, whose interpretations varied from concerns over American imperialism and the historical subjugation of Indian civilizations, to a very contemporary critique of
53 Sterling, 20. 54 William Deverell, “Plague in Los Angeles, 1924: Ethnicity and Typicality,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West , ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 188. 55 Kropp, “Citizens of the Past?: Olvera Street and the Construction of Race and Memory in 1930s Los Angeles,” Radical History Review 81 (2001): 35. 56 Schrank, 48.
26 exploitative labor practices toward Mexicans in Southern California.”57 Siqueiros consulted modernist architect Richard Neutra among others as he conceived the project. 58
He also acknowledged the influence of the indiscriminate deportation of Mexicans from
Los Angeles at the time of his work. 59 Sterling was appalled and had the portion of the mural that was visible from Olvera Street whitewashed. She would not allow an artist to tarnish the “safe” space she had worked to create. As Estrada argues, the image of oppression that Siqueiros created did not fit comfortably to the image of Mexicans from the Olvera Street postcards and magazine advertisements. 60
Sterling’s romantic vision of an ideal Mexican village, free from political turmoil, worked in conjunction with the financial and social goals of boosters like Chandler.
Sterling understood that there was a system of power in Los Angeles and chose to work within it. She also worked in a space long considered an acceptable sphere for women: historical preservation. She worked in this traditional space while living a less-than- traditional life as a recently remarried divorcée. Harry Chandler supported Sterling’s
Olvera Street project, and later her China City construction, because she understood that accommodating the powerful was an effective way to gain power. Southern California already had a history of commercializing its history and Sterling played to that by employing romantic ideas of the region’s Mexican past. Additionally, Sterling fell close to the adherents of the City Beautiful philosophy with its emphasis on municipal housekeeping and civic centers. The Olvera Street project helped consolidate power for
57 Kropp, 255. 58 Shifra M. Goldman, “Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles,” Art Journal 33, no. 4 (Summer 1974): 323. 59 Estrada, 209-210. 60 Ibid., 212.
27 the Union Station project location and helped eliminate the unsightly and politically turbulent area surrounding the Plaza. Sterling de-radicalized the ethnic population to some degree and engaged them as partners in her business plan. By playing the role of historical housekeeper, her vision for a cultural space was realized. In contrast,
Barnsdall’s failures in Los Angeles reflect an unwillingness to work within or an ambivalence toward Los Angeles’ power structure. Rooted firmly in the present,
Barnsdall’s political radicalism, feminism, and support for modern and public art placed her in contrast with the more conservative elements of the Los Angeles citizenry. When
Barnsdall’s plans for civic expression moved from private experimentation to public projects, the face of the city’s political elite emerged.
Figure 1. Ramona themed citrus crate. Source: Los Angeles Public Library .
28
Figure 2. Bombing of the Los Angeles Times ’ building. Source: Los Angeles Times.
Figure 3. Harry Chandler celebrates his birthday with children on Olvera Street. Source: Harry Quillen Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
29
Figure 4. Assistant to Siqueiros in front of completed America Tropical . Source: Getty Conservation Institute.
30
CHAPTER 2
A PARLOR BOLSHEVIK: BARNSDALL, WRIGHT, AND THE LIMITS OF PUBLIC ART
The academic literature surrounding Barnsdall’s life is limited in scope and focuses primarily on one area: her working relationship with the architect Frank Lloyd
Wright and their tumultuous interactions. Barnsdall commissioned Wright to design a private residence and theater on a parcel of land above Los Feliz. Known generally as
Olive Hill for the olive groves planted by a previous owner, the area took up ten acres of prime land above Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. Barnsdall, considering
Wright to be the best architect she could find, explained that she wanted not only a home, but also a theater and public space for residents of the city to enjoy. Barnsdall’s vision for marrying public and private space pushed against Los Angeles’s reputation for a lack of enthusiasm in the area of civic funding and urban planning. Indeed, both Barnsdall and
Wright in his later work prove the rule that Los Angeles welcomed private experimentation but neglected city planning.
When reflecting on his memories of her, Wright recalled that “They said in
Hollywood, Aline Barnsdall was a Bolshevik—a ‘parlor Bolshevik,’ said some.” 61 The phrase “parlor Bolshevik” most notably refers to her views on organized labor and gender roles. A supporter of famous radicals such as Tom Mooney, Emma Goldman, and Upton
Sinclair, Barnsdall’s beliefs did not align with Los Angeles’s broad and powerful array of
61 Frank Lloyd Wright, Collected Writings , vol. 2 1930-1932 (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1992), 275.
31 boosters, investors, and speculators. In many ways Barnsdall challenged this power structure, specifically in the area of art and physical space. While the home she commissioned, seen in figure 5, still stands in Los Angeles as a testament to her life’s passions and symbolizes a counter argument to the booster image of city design, negative characterizations of her personality have deteriorated her legacy and made it all but impossible for her to bring her vision of a public space to life.
As noted above, the most significant written record from Aline Barnsdall’s life revolves around her relationship with friend and collaborator Frank Lloyd Wright. Their project served as Wright’s first commission in Southern California. Together, they created a space that celebrated her passion for theater, reflected her radical approach to ideas of femininity and domesticity, and challenged gender norms regarding public and private space. Hollyhock House and its related buildings represented the unique personality of Barnsdall via Wright’s artistic approach. Ultimately, business and personality conflicts negatively influenced Wright’s opinion of Barnsdall and affected his writing about their relationship. In spite of this difficulty, Barnsdall, working with
Wright, contributed to an emerging modernist approach to architecture in Los Angeles.
Individually, she illustrated the limits of women’s roles in civic planning and civic art.
Wright and Barnsdall met in Chicago where she worked as a producer at the Little
Theater. Wright describes her “very large, wide open eyes,” which “gave her a disingenuous expression not connected with the theater and her extremely small hands and feet somehow seemed not connected with such ambition as hers.” 62 That ambition merged with what several associates described as a difficult personality and a streak of
62 Wright, 267.
32 rebellion. Margaret Anderson, an important figure in the Chicago literary scene described her as “an erratic rich woman with a high temper.” 63 Theatrical designer and associate
Norman Bel Geddes deemed her “erratic, unpredictable, contrary, stubborn, generous, and a dozen other things as anyone [he had] ever known, only more so.” 64 When discussing her political beliefs, Bel Geddes opined that Barnsdall’s rebellious nature led her to support radical causes, stating that “she had a violent passion against convention; was one hundred percent rebel.” 65 Bel Geddes believed that Barnsdall compensated for a lack of personal creativity by selecting the best talent she could find for the specific task.
She certainly succeeded by selecting Wright. However, Bel Geddes also portrayed her as a passionate woman envisioning collaboration with Wright rather than a one-man show.
From his recollection, she stated that her theater should serve as “a place to work that is also an architectural masterpiece [and] would be an inspiration to everyone. It would also have an element of permanency which would bring confidence from the community and even the country.” 66
Barnsdall’s philosophy regarding art, theater, and social issues emerged from the bohemian and modernist movements of the early twentieth-century. Particularly in eastern American cities like New York and Chicago, new patterns of thought arose to combine the reformist zeal of the Progressive movement with a rejection of Victorian ideas of success and morality. Christine Stansell writes that the first generation of
American moderns employed their new energy toward “free speech, free love, free expression,” in order to enrich and politicize arenas such as theater, art, literature, and sex
63 Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years War (New York, NY: Horizon Press, 1969), 107. 64 Bel Geddes, 140. 65 Ibid., 140. 66 Ibid., 155.
33 roles.” 67 Feminism, modernism, and radical politics coalesced for women like Barnsdall,
Margaret Anderson, Emma Goldman, and Alice Constance Austin. 68 Barnsdall exhibited these movements in her sexual and romantic choices, her approach to art and architecture, and her strong position on labor politics. Each, to varying degrees, made her dealings in
Los Angeles more challenging. Fortunately, Wright emerged from a similar background as Barnsdall, understood her goals, and applied his modernist approach to architecture into his Southern California designs.
The Wright commission began with plans for a theater and a home on her recently purchased land, Olive Hill, but Barnsdall’s priorities shifted after giving birth to her daughter Aline Elizabeth, seen with her mother in figure 6, in 1917. The plan for a residence took on greater significance and their focus shifted to the design of a home to sit atop Olive Hill. In spite of that shift, Wright incorporated Barnsdall’s passion for theater and communal art into the final design. Alice Friedman describes the way Wright centered the entire design on the location of a planned open-air theater. She writes, “Like the hearth and chimney in one of his prairie houses, the semicircle at the core of the theater acts in these designs as a pivot around which the Olive Hill complex is organized.” 69 Wright described the design as “poetic” and “romantic” and “suited to
Miss Barnsdall’s purpose.” That purpose was not that of “an ordinary woman,” but one
67 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 7. 68 In The Secret History of Wonder Woman , Jill Lepore deftly uses William Marston’s Wonder Woman comic series to explore the growth of the women’s movement including its male allies. Marston himself said that Wonder Woman was a “New Woman” and credits the First World War with “increasing the strength of women.” “Women definitely emerged from a false, harem like protection and began taking over men’s work. Greatly to their own surprise they discovered that they were potentially as strong as men, in some ways stronger.” Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman , (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 232-233. 69 Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1998), 50.
34 who rejected traditional notions of domesticity and cherished artistic expression and personal freedom above all else. 70 One cannot understate the significance of those choices at a time when many women of Barnsdall’s social status remained in the safe confines of traditional gender roles. Barnsdall’s status provided her with the luxury of choice. She expressed that freedom of choice through single motherhood, frequent travels, and the commission of a home that represented her as an individual.
If one utilizes the idea of space as a framework for analyzing the dichotomy of gender, Hollyhock House stands as an outlier due to its public nature. Leslie Kanes
Weisman argues “the personal, ‘feminine’ enclosure of the private house stands in metaphorical contrast to the anonymous, ‘masculine’ upward thrust of our public towers.” 71 The labeling of separate spheres as they relate to gender roles creates a conflict in the analysis of Barnsdall’s private home. 72 Her nontraditional approach to domesticity provides a counter-narrative for feminist architectural historians. Perhaps unknowingly, she created a monument both in style and longevity, setting Hollyhock House apart from traditional home design. Wright responded, in that design, to Barnsdall’s feminist perspective, which informed her beliefs about marriage and motherhood. After her romance with co-director Richard Ordynski ended, Barnsdall chose to move ahead with her resulting pregnancy as an unmarried mother.
As a supporter and friend of Emma Goldman, Barnsdall would have likely agreed with Goldman’s view that “marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, and
70 Wright, 270. 71 Leslie Kanes Weisman, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press), 17-19. 72 Marion Roberts also analyzes architecture from a feminist perspective in her book, Living in a Man-made World: Gender Assumptions in Modern Housing Design (London: Routledge, 1991). Leslie Kanes Weisman also co-edited a collection of essays related to gender based notions of public and private space entitled The Sex of Architecture (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams Inc.).
35 insurance pact,” that a woman pays for with “her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, ‘until death doth part’.” 73 Of motherhood, Goldman said, “I know women who became mothers in freedom by the men they loved. Few children in wedlock enjoy the care, the protection, the devotion free motherhood is capable of bestowing.” 74 Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s utopian novel Herland also supported the notion of voluntary motherhood as an ideal arrangement in a world where men and women are equal and women control their own reproductive processes. Gilman idealizes cooperative systems of childcare and work while challenging the dominance of the male characters in the book. As the men search for the mysterious land of women, they are warned by their guide that “woman country” is dangerous and “no place for men.” 75 Gilman uses humor in Herland to take on the rigid definitions of gender roles proscribed in the early years of the twentieth-century and to endorse women’s right to control their bodies. Goldman, in agreement with Perkins on this point at least, knowledgeably asserts that Barnsdall shared her beliefs on motherhood, marriage, and labor, and her controversial lifestyle choices confirm her commitment. Barnsdall forged a similar path to her associate Margaret
Anderson in making free-spirited decisions and carving out expanded opportunities for women in American society.
It is ironic that Anderson derides Barnsdall in her biography, given that some accused Anderson of lacking seriousness and intellectual stamina. 76 Anderson moved to
Chicago from a small Indiana town and started a literary magazine called The Little
73 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1969), 228. 74 Ibid., 237. 75 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland , (New York: Dover Publication, 1998), accessed June 18, 2015, www.gutenberg.org/files/32/32-h/320h.htm. 76 Stansell, 198.
36
Review , publishing work by modernist writers and living as a lesbian with her partner,
Jane Heap. Although she had less financial security than Barnsdall, Anderson lived independently, asserting the power of personal freedom and art in making social change.
Like Barnsdall, Anderson found inspiration in Emma Goldman’s activism and credited
Goldman with making her “increasingly anarchistic,” calling it “the ideal expression for my ideas of freedom and justice.” 77
Barnsdall’s politics contributed to her domestic style as seen in her omnipresent intention to make portions of her private domicile available for public use. Its later incarnations as a school, park, and arts club made it a private (feminine) space combined with a public (masculine) facility. Alice Friedman argues that independent female clients worked with experimental designers in order to create homes that mirrored their new way of living, and these designs altered the definition of domesticity in the area of spatial politics. 78 In Barnsdall’s case, her enthusiasm for theater and her non-traditional approach to domesticity and motherhood influenced her vision.
One of these most obvious inspirations for Wright’s design was the Hollyhock itself. He wrote that Barnsdall’s sentimental attachment to the flower inspired her to prename the private residence and he then utilized it as a motif throughout the design. 79
He viewed her as a pioneer and proclaimed that Barnsdall ought to live in a house built solely for her and suited to her lifestyle:
But, why should all Usonian houses, so called, when they are anything but Usonian, be of so called domestic mode, when all Usonian people are not so? 80
77 Anderson, 74. 78 Friedman, 16. 79 Wright, 269. 80 Usonian style represented a series of single-level family homes that Wright designed as well as his adopted word for American. A more detailed explanation is found in Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture (New York, NY: Grosset and Dunlap, 1941).
37
Why should Aline Barnsdall live in a house like Mrs. Alderman Schmutzkopf, or even like Mrs. Reggie Plasterbuilt’s pseudo-Hacienda on the Boulevard-Wilshire. Individuality is the most precious thing in life, after all–isn’t it? In any expression of the human spirit it is principle manifest as character that alone endures. And individuality is the true property of such character. No…not one house that possessed genuine character in this sense but stands, safe, outside the performance of the passing show. Hollyhock House is such a house. 81
Wright’s decidedly modernist approach to design inspired Barnsdall’s confidence in him and made itself known across Southern California as Wright’s style ran up against the Spanish revival style so popular in home design at the time. This interest in the mythical past exhibited itself in homes design, literature, and as mentioned in chapter one, in historical preservation projects like Sterling’s Olvera Street. Like Barnsdall’s approach to womanhood, Wright’s approach to design challenged the status quo and did not reflect that revivalist sensibility. 82 Carey McWilliams explained that the Spanish
Colonial home emerged from the San Diego-Panama-Californian Exhibition and that its
“walls of white stucco and roof of red tile was a model easily imitated by commercial contractors.” Furthermore, McWilliams argues, “it had the merit of looking a little more like the environment than the models they had been using for so many years,” and “it was called Spanish and could be related, therefore, to the Mission background.” 83 Wright saw the Spanish Colonial style as part of “the eclectic procession to and fro in the rag-tag and cast-off of the ages,” and remarked that “the same thought, or lack of thought, was to be seen everywhere.” 84 In spite of Wright’s renown as an architect, his work along with the work of other modern architects received scant praise in a city known for its disinterest in
81 Wright, 274-275. Note Wright’s intentional humor in the names Schmutzkopf and Plasterbuilt. He often utilized humor and a poetic approach to his writing. 82 Dailey et al., 13. 83 McWilliams, Southern California, 358. 84 Ibid., 359.
38 modern art. However, Wright’s embracing of pre-industrial, “native” inspiration in his design influenced those who worked with him, including his son Lloyd Wright, Rudolph
Schindler, and Richard Neutra. The pyramid shaped shell designed by Lloyd Wright for the Hollywood Bowl in 1927 provides a useful example of the legacy of his father’s style.
These architects rejected the popular home design of the period and created a local building style based on the natural environment as Los Angeles-based modernists tended to do. 85 Schindler proclaimed that the region’s climate and character combined with the experimental designs of these architects would “make Southern California the cradle of a new architectural expression.” 86 Wright’s work with these architects contributed to a lasting tradition of modernist architectural design in the region.
However, the city’s complicated relationship to modern art and design made it difficult for Barnsdall to engage in the power structure of Los Angeles. She supported public arts projects like the construction of the Hollywood Bowl, collected and loaned an enormous collection of modern art, and funded experimental filmmaking by directors like Sergei Eisenstein. Frustratingly, she arrived in Los Angeles at a time of radical change in a city with clearly defined concepts of art and a strong stance on radical politics. Her attempts to navigate the world of art and boosters in Los Angeles were fraught with discord and contributed to an image of her as a difficult woman. As the Great Depression hit the nation, and political protest grew, Los Angeles cracked down on radicalism at the same time that Barnsdall attempted to engage with the city’s power structure.
While Barnsdall supported Wright’s aesthetic and supported modern art of all kinds, this did not immunize the two of them from conflict, as illustrated in Wright’s recollections of Barnsdall. Wright occasionally exuded an effusive tone in his praise for
Barnsdall’s notable personality, but his temperament combined with her demands as a client often led to strife between the two. They argued over finances, time, and input from
85 See the work of Paul Landacre, Elise, or Henrietta Shore, among others. 86 Rudolph Schindler. Lecture at University of Southern California School of Architecture, October 10, 1949, Rudolph Schindler Papers.
39 other people related to the design and building. His perception of her as a difficult client, combined with Bel Geddes portrayal of her as a weak woman being taken advantage of by a controlling artist, create a sense that she was not in command of the work.
Barnsdall’s professional and social letters and her interviews with the local press portray a client with vision and motivation albeit, one who responded to the sway of outside opinion. Ultimately, her distance as well as Wright’s division of jobs at the time contributed to the failures of design and execution on Olive Hill.
The design and building of a theater remained important to Barnsdall. Wright’s frequent trips to Japan for his work on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo caused very long delays in his work for her. In 1916, she wrote to Wright imploring him to put his all into the design of her home and theater. She said, “This is the psychological moment and if I do not grip it and build a theater within the next six months somebody else will.” She continued, “Can you give me a rough idea of cost and what is expected of me and when?
It must not be a large theater not over a thousand but exquisitely perfect in detail.” 87
Their correspondence suggests that she gave him space for his vision but her impatience steadily grew.
In 1918, Wright finally presented a set of plans, but the death of Barnsdall’s father created delays with her estate. Wright accused her of not being serious about the building, to which she replied, “You say, ‘if you are in earnest.’ I think I’ve proven that by holding onto the idea for so long.” 88 By the summer of 1919, Barnsdall selected a site for the home and surrounding buildings. With no complete designs from Wright and his absence
87 Aline Barnsdall to Frank Lloyd Wright, July 27. 1916. Quoted in Kathryn Smith, Hollyhock House and Olive Hill: Buildings and Projects for Aline Barnsdall (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1992), 22. 88 Aline Barnsdall to Frank Lloyd Wright, May 30, 1918. Quoted in Smith, 34.
40 in Tokyo, Barnsdall explained her own vision to the Los Angeles Examiner . She stated that the house would sit at the crown of the hill and described the design as “modernized
Aztec style, as near as it can be described.” Speaking of Wright’s plans for the rest of the buildings, she said, “Mr. Wright believes that a California house should be half house and half garden and I am strongly of the same opinion. I, therefore, require much room for my own home, but I propose to keep my gardens always open to the public that this sightly spot may be available to the lovers of the beautiful who wish to come here to view sunsets, dawn on the mountains, and other spectacles of nature, visible in few other places in the heart of the city.” 89
Even after construction began, Wright’s delays and absence continued to exasperate Barnsdall. She had very specific ideas about the timeline and interior design of the home, but Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. supervised the project in his father’s absence and would not move ahead without his explicit approval. This increased tensions as Barnsdall retained very specific ideas regarding the timeline and design. In fact, she offered Wright an opportunity to quit early in 1920 and again attempted to elicit a timeline from him later in the year writing, “Now I am willing to wait, but the building cannot start until everything is put into a form that I can visualize and my businessman can understand and handle. Will you give it up? Take a year or two to complete it in detail? Or have it ready by spring,—beginning everything at once,—after we have had an intelligent, workable understanding?” 90
On several occasions, she expressed to Wright that she felt as though he was not fully committed to her project. After stating the specific details for the interior of the
89 Florence Lawrence, “Eminence to Be Made Rare Beauty Spot,” Los Angeles Examiner , July 6, 1919. 90 Barnsdall to Wright, May 30, 1920. Quoted in Smith, 83.
41 main home, she was disappointed in Wright’s response. She wrote, “Now please do as wonderful a thing with the inside of my house as [you] have with the outside. The designs Lloyd gave me from your specifications looked as tho [sic] you had thought very little about them—the[y] lacked the ingenuity and care of the outside building.” 91 Her consistent dissatisfaction with his work and with his effort contributed to the lengthy span of the project’s development. Additionally, it led to budget increases and financial conflict that created even more complications between Barnsdall and her architect.
Barnsdall stated in the Express article that the budget for the design was
$375,000. In the end she paid $990,000 on the construction of her home. She wrote to
Wright in 1920 and responded to complaints from him about a previous letter:
Don’t you think it is time that we forgot our personal feelings and began to work? The theater is going to be built—the group not costing over $310,000 as planned, and no work is to begin until it has been so completely finished in drawn plans that complete specifications can be given to contractors—I won’t turn one shovelful of earth until I know the cost to the whole—even to equipment. You can see that we have a lot of work before us. Don’t talk about my treating you badly. You know that I like and admire you as an individual almost more than anyone I know—as an architect too or I wouldn’t have chosen you—but—as a creator you would spend my whole fortune to create a perfect thing. It is the nature of creation. Why combat it and pretend something else—and I as the general director of an enterprise can only spend a certain amount and will [illegible] your beautiful creation not because I don’t understand it but because I don’t intend to have it end there or be destroyed like the Midway Gardens—We are going to be enemies on those points, but let’s be reasonable enemies and good friends between times. 92
Barnsdall surely expressed her discontent with friends, and Bel Geddes writes very defensively on her behalf in his autobiography. However, that defensiveness and critique of Wright created a false sense of weakness in Barnsdall’s personality based on
Bel Geddes’ personal opinion. He felt that Wright lacked the ability to accept criticism.
91 Ibid., 83. 92 Ibid., 84.
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When questioned about his knowledge of theatrical design, Wright sharply replied, “If you are unable to leave me alone, I will not waste my time going any further with it.” 93
Bel Geddes believed that Wright manipulated Barnsdall and took advantage of her admiration for the architect. Regarding the incessant delays in the design of a theater, he said, “She was as eager for her theater to proceed as for her house, but both dragged on and on. She knew he [Wright] was wrong, and once, at least, told him so. In that instance, he ignored her for months. At last she refused to approve the plans for construction, and the relationship became increasingly difficult.” 94
Prior to the beginning of construction, Bel Geddes wrote a letter to Wright, rebuking him for his lack of humility. He said, “Your lack of flexibility in refusing to fuse with your own the viewpoint of your client, and the viewpoints of others who intend devoting their lives to working in the creative theater, is a great shock to me.” 95 Bel
Geddes blamed Wright almost entirely for the failure of the theater and for Barnsdall’s dissatisfaction in general. When he writes about Barnsdall’s personal relationship with
Ordynski, he casts her as a victim as well, claiming that Ordynski took advantage of
Barnsdall’s wealth via romantic affection. In both cases, he denies her a sense of agency and suggests that she was powerless to control these two men and their impact on her life.
This portrayal ignores her strength, in much the same way that his portrayal of her political beliefs as an act of her rebellious nature ignored her strongly held convictions.
Her previous letter to Wright shows a woman who spoke firmly while stroking necessary egos, not a woman without agency. It is possible that Bel Geddes defends her in this way
93 Bel Geddes, 163. 94 Ibid., 163. 95 Ibid., 269.
43 out of a sense of guilt for abandoning his work with her in Los Angeles to remain and work in New York. Their friendship ended acrimoniously prior to 1920 and according to
Bel Geddes, they never spoke again. Over the course of her friendship and after,
Barnsdall’s self-reliance and independence never waned. She travelled extensively and eventually settled down in Los Angeles, defending herself and supporting progressive artists and politicians.
Wright blamed his conflict with Barnsdall on her reliance on the opinions of others and her fickle temperament. A year after her letter exhorting him to maintain a reasonable level of disagreement, he wrote to her that the increases in cost stemmed from tension and disputes between various employees, himself, and Barnsdall. He argues that her choice of workmen and contractors added to the costs rather than his absence from the projects. He places blame on her for not sufficiently believing in him, shouting
“COST!—EXTRAS! They loomed over your horizon like some spetre [sic] of defeat.
You took every measure to defend yourself, but you threw away the only one that could have protected you—and that one was the cooperation of your architect. Do you now remember waving me aside when I pleaded with you for your confidence? You said that you had no confidence in any artist.” 96 Wright found Barnsdall’s reliance on the opinions of other people unbearably annoying. She had already told him that she would “not be a slave to anybody’s ideas.” 97 Barnsdall surrounded herself with intelligent and creative people. She also questioned herself constantly, as well as others. Her ongoing conflict with Wright contributed to the failure of her theater plan. In addition, their disagreement may have influenced her decision to give up large portions of her property and eventually
96 Wright to Barnsdall, June 27, 1921. Reprinted in Smith, 211. 97 Smith, 84.
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Hollyhock House itself. She said, “My heart was not in it. I never felt well on Olive Hill and I was still on my quest for Arcadia in the U.S.A.” 98 Wright chalked up her donation of Olive Hill to the passing mood of a wealthy woman living above the city in
“aristocratic seclusion.” Significantly, he did praise her decision to offer Olive Hill to the
“artists of California,” declaring that her “spirit is manifest in it, to all.” 99 Wright’s documentation of his relationship with Barnsdall reveals a strong, complicated woman working with a willful, artistic architect and that writing colors the historical record. The only personal writings from her are short interviews and letters to her friends and associates, meaning that she rarely took the opportunity to speak for herself in the way that Wright did with his careful autobiographical writing. In the end, Wright’s voice echoes more loudly than Barnsdall’s forcing us to listen carefully to the words she left behind when we try to understand the limits of her legacy.
Aline Barnsdall felt that Los Angeles was ripe for an explosion of theater and culture. Inspired by her journeys along the California coast, she believed that the area was well-suited to her dream of an open-air theater and hoped to create a community of working artists centered on theatrical productions.100 Barnsdall wanted to bring her avant- garde approach to Los Angeles as new styles of theater emphasized the social responsibility possible in the dramatic arts.101 Additionally, she believed that art should
98 Ibid., 161. For a deeper analysis of notions of Utopia and Arcadia in Southern California at the turn of the twentieth century see William Alexander McClung’s Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). McClung argues that the notion of Arcadia (a found natural paradise) shaped the body of material culture in Los Angeles since the latter half of the nineteenth century. 99 Wright, 276. 100 Alice T. Friedman, “A House is Not a Home: Hollyhock House as ‘Art-Theater Garden’,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51, no. 3 (September, 1992): pp. 239-260. 101 She was particularly influenced by Emma Goldman’s writings and lectures on the need for modern dramatic arts. See Emma Goldman, The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (Boston, MA: Richard G. Badger, 1914).Michael Hurewitz examines the role of public expression in the lives of early twentieth
45 be easily accessible to all and should inspire and promote social change above all.
Unfortunately, the city’s vision of the role of art did not conjoin with her ideas.
Barnsdall, at her core, believed in the power of art as a transformative force. She embraced the avant-garde in theater, filmmaking, and the visual arts. She loaned pieces from her personal collection of paintings to various exhibitions over the years, provided financing to filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein, and argued that all people were entitled to beauty. 102 In 1927, after her building donation was accepted, she wrote to the California
Art Club that she wanted a place for people to “work and play” and to contribute a
“background for their dreams and memories.” She concluded “no country can be great until the least of its citizens has been touched by beauty, truth, and freedom; unless all three radiate from this little hill it is as nothing.” 103 Her belief that Los Angeles, indeed,
California, could benefit from her financial and artistic contributions was true. However, she underestimated the power of the controlling oligarchy and the restrictive views on art and radical politics espoused by those forces. Her efforts to donate land and buildings to the City led to a decade of conflict and a decrease in positive coverage of her in the local press, most significantly, the Los Angeles Times . Her radical politics and views on art placed her in direct opposition to Chandler, boosters, and civic leaders. The resulting conflicts contributed to a written newspaper record that ultimately diminishes her accomplishments and minimizes her deeply held beliefs. Chandler’s personal views on
century artists in Los Angeles through his study of Edendale in Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. He argues that the influence of identity politics led to an increased push for public expressions of inner life. 102 Presumably, Barnsdall helped finance Eisenstein’s projects in Mexico in the 1903s along with Upton Sinclair and his wife. Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography , (New York: A.A. Wyn, 1952), 188. For a photograph of Barnsdall and Eisenstein see “A Portfolio of Upton Sinclair Photos,” Southern California Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Winter 1974). 103 Aline Barnsdall, California Art Club Bulletin , XI, no. 8, August, 1927. Reprinted in Friedman, “A House is Not a Home.”
46 labor and his financial investment in the city play a key role in the way that Times writers portrayed her.
Times ’ writers mention Barnsdall in a handful of articles prior to 1923. One article, written in 1919, briefly describes her plans for an elaborate art-theater. The next discusses her plans in 1921 for the addition of a row of retail shops along the edge of her property resting on Hollywood Boulevard. Finally, her plans for a children’s school devoted to the arts as well as academia received some attention in 1923. 104 Each of these articles is generally positive, emphasizing her hopes for the property, many of which failed to come to fruition. In 1923, Barnsdall decided to donate a portion of the Olive Hill property, including Hollyhock House, to the City for use as a library and a park. Initially, her offer garnered praise and graciousness. In December of 1923, soon after her announcement, the Times quoted Barnsdall as saying “I am giving the property away as a library because I think the community deserves and needs one.” She went on to explain that she rejected offers from investors seeking to turn the land and home into a hotel because she saw that as a “vulgarity.” 105
Barnsdall received a commendation from the mayor for her generosity and gained praise as an example to other wealthy residents of the city. However, the City dragged its feet on receiving the donation for several years before finally accepting her offer in 1926.
The park department faced difficulty in acquiescing to some of Barnsdall’s land-use
104 “Plans Unique Art Theater,” Los Angeles Times , July 06, 1919, accessed November 1, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/160738586?accountid=9840. “New Residence Tract Opening,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1921, accessed November 1, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/160873954?accountid=9840. “Culture for Children,” Los Angeles Times , Sep 23, 1923, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/161476127?accountid=9840. 105 “Offers Home for Library,” Los Angeles Times, Dec 07, 1923, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/161471912?accountid=9840.
47 restrictions, a problem subtly hinted at in her refusal to comment on those restrictions to the Times back in 1923. Barnsdall requested a ban on land changes for fifteen years and stated that no war memorials be built on the land at any time. According to the Times , the
Public Welfare Committee of the City Council formally requested that the city decline
Barnsdall’s offer because of the difficult nature of her requests and restrictions. 106 When the city finally accepted her offer in 1926, it was at the behest of the California Arts Club, which arranged with Barnsdall the use of Hollyhock House as a public space for art exhibition with the rest of the donated land set aside for a park for children. This “million dollar Christmas gift,” from the “lover of children and art,” earned her a formal thank you from the Times, which editorialized that her gift was not only “of great and lasting value to our city, but to civilization in general.” 107 Barnsdall’s desire to bring culture to the citizens of the city appealed to the Chamber of Commerce and connected her vision of the land with the progress of the city.
Indeed, the California Art Club appealed to Barnsdall from the same level years later when requesting an expansion of their stake in the property. Member Alice Vreeland wrote:
One of these days Los Angeles is going to be the ‘world-beating metropolis,’ according to our enthusiastic boosters. When that time comes, the perfume of our garden flowers and orange blossoms will have given way to the permeating stench of decomposing garbage, and the thousand and one ungodly odors that, even in this day of modern sanitation, are characteristic of every spot in the world upon which mankind swarms in millions, When that time comes what a priceless thing will be a bit of God’s reality.…Therefore, in the name of civic pride, in the cause
106 “Committee Asks Council Decline Proffer of Park,” Los Angeles Times , March 27, 1924, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/161671908?accountid=9840. 107 “A Laudable Act,” Los Angeles Times , December 30, 1926, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/161947059?accountid=9840.
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of a city beautiful let us have parks and recreation centers in the midst of our ‘world-beating metropolis.’ 108
While Barnsdall certainly aimed to improve the cultural lives of the citizens of Los
Angeles, primarily for women and children, she was no booster or follower of the City
Beautiful movement. Art, not industry, motivated Barnsdall, and the roots of her devotion to Los Angeles grew in a shallow bed due to her frequent travels. These issues, as well as and even more significantly her support for radical labor causes, created conflict between her and the City, which the Times’ coverage reflects.
In 1927, the Times declared Los Angeles as “indebted to Miss Barnsdall for the example she has set in the truest form of public giving.” 109 Realistically, her relationship with the City was far less positive. Frank Lloyd Wright recalled “that resistance to her donations amazed her. It was just more than she could understand. But she was the daughter of a free-swinging oilman, and was sure she could overcome objections.” 110 One of the primary reasons for her inability to overcome the objections was her lack of interest in courting the city’s controlling oligarchy. Harry Chandler acted as one of its most powerful members. Barnsdall’s radical reputation as a pro-labor benefactress ran counter to the conservative beliefs of men like Chandler.
Barnsdall’s support for Emma Goldman at the time of Goldman’s threatened deportation, in the form of friendship and a check for five thousand dollars, led to the temporary revocation of Barnsdall’s passport. Her proposed ban on war memorials drew
108 Francis William Vreeland, “City Should Acquire All of Olive Hill,” California Graphic, March 31, 1928. 109 “A Public Benefactor,” Los Angeles Times , August 06, 1927, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/162038164?accountid=9840. 110 Henry Sutherland, "Strange Saga of Barnsdall Park," Los Angeles Times , March 15, 1970, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/156419268?accountid=9840.
49 forth the ire of the American Legion, which launched a campaign against her donation.
However, Barnsdall’s support for labor activist Tom Mooney and politician Upton
Sinclair provoked the most animosity from Chandler and the Times. In 1916, Mooney stood trial and received a guilty verdict for a labor-related bombing in San Francisco.
According to Goldman, Barnsdall was one of the first well-known people to take up his cause. Early on she supported his legal case and in 1930, just as her tension with the City reached a head, she attempted to rejuvenate interest in his case by donating money and by posting large signs of support on the outskirts of her Olive Hill property. The Times called Mooney’s defense a “plot” and a “conspiracy” to save the life of a man responsible for “strewing the streets of San Francisco with the bloody debris of women and children.” 111 The 1910 bombing and the militant anti-union position guaranteed that
Barnsdall’s public support of Mooney would deteriorate any goodwill from the paper toward her.
In 1934, Barnsdall publicly and financially supported Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial bid in California. She also used those infamous signs to urge people to
“Vote the EPIC PLAN for humanity and the future. Have courage to stir this stagnant pool.” 112 Sinclair’s plan to “End Poverty in California” called for State control over unused factories and farms and the establishment of communes or colonies with small- scale exchange systems. Because of the economic difficulties so many citizens faced during the Depression, Sinclair’s ideas began to grow in popularity. The Times maintained a history of influencing regional campaigns and they struck out against
111 "Mooney in Politics," Los Angeles Times, Oct 2, 1917, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/160471843?accountid=9840. 112 Harry Quillen, “Campaign Sign for Upton Sinclair” Los Angeles Public Library Collection.
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Sinclair with the assistance of the Chamber of Commerce and local businesses (Sinclair called them the “black hand”).113 Writers cautioned that Sinclair’s plan would lead to a mass migration of transients to California. 114 Of course, this migration happened without the help of a Sinclair victory as the Depression and Dust Bowl pushed and pulled desperate Americans to the hope of employment and good weather in California.
Loaning out one of their political writers, the paper collaborated with the Motion
Picture Producers Association to create “newsreels” with a roving reporter asking various citizens for whom they planned to vote. Of course, those voting for Sinclair appeared shady and untrustworthy while those voting for his opponent Governor Merriam seemed upstanding. 115 Editorials written just before Election Day warned that a Sinclair victory would lead to massive unemployment, wage stagnation, and a new red takeover. 116
Chandler knew that Sinclair’s campaign posed a danger to the carefully controlled economic system of Los Angeles, and he understood that his socialist message would appeal to people devastated by the Depression. To that end, Chandler used the paper to spread negative messages and to spark fear among voters. In the end, Barnsdall and
Sinclair failed. Her “pugnacious signs,” as Carey McWilliams called them, did provoke a reaction from locals but not one of passionate consensus. 117
As unemployment rose precipitously in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, political activists from the Communist Party and labor unions began to agitate for
113 Upton Sinclair, The Goslings (Pasadena, CA: Published by the author, 1924). 114 "Heavy Rush of Idle Seen by Sinclair," Los Angeles Times, September 27, 1934, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/163256284?accountid=9840. 115 These political ads are available on King Vidor, Our Daily Bread and Other Films of the Great Depression . DVD. Image Entertainment, 1999. 116 Chapin Hall, "Economic Chaos Should Sinclair Be Elected," Los Angeles Times, Oct 12, 1934, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/163264789?accountid=9840. 117 McWilliams, Southern California .
51 change. On March 6, 1930, and again on May 1, 1930, thousands of protesters gathered in the Plaza area on behalf of an Organize the Unemployed movement. The May protest turned violent as police officers clubbed and arrested marchers. 118 “Bum blockades,” created by the Los Angeles Police Department under Chief James Davis, in collusion with the Chamber of Commerce, established systems of control to keep out the rising tide of migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl and seeking work and fair weather in Southern
California. This system included blocking entrance at state border lines and identifying and arresting transients in Los Angeles. 119 Barnsdall’s politics fell even farther in popularity among the boosters and municipal leaders as the Depression continued. Her wealth and status provided her with a measure of freedom not given to those whose class or ethnic identity further endangered their political activity. Barnsdall’s ability to escape the era without arrest or deep persecution, while she engaged publicly in radical causes, reveals the limits of power for those with less financial standing. 120
Barnsdall’s political signs created an uproar from those who felt that she was using public land to promote political causes. Technically, she posted the signs on private land and broke no laws in the process. Initially Barnsdall used these signs to protest her conflicts with the City over her land offer. After the initial acceptance of her offer, City officials rejected subsequent acreage donations over concerns about potentially large maintenance costs. Their reluctance likely had some relationship to what McClung refers
118 Estrada, 165-66. 119 Leonard Leader, Los Angeles and the Great Depression (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1991). 120 See Estrada’s treatment of activists Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black. The interracial couple fled to Seattle after police targeted Yoneda for his participation in demonstrations and his membership in the Los Angeles Japanese Workers Association and the American Communist Party. Estrada, 161-167.
52 to as Los Angeles’s discomfort with its parks. The City sorely lacked public park space and showed reluctance toward expanding and maintaining them. In spite of the growing need for public space as the city grew, Barnsdall faced difficulty even giving it away.
Barnsdall’s distant relationship to Los Angeles society due to her traveling hindered what public support she might have utilized in her efforts. In what McClung refers to as Los Angeles’s “self-fashioning aristocracy” made up of the “glamorous and publicized,” the clout of an oil heiress was less significant. 121 By 1930, her conflict with the City peaked over a dispute in the lease terms of her expanded donation. She pleaded with the Park Board to postpone a decision until she returned from a trip to Europe. Her plea turned more threatening when she asked that the objecting groups show a willingness to compromise before she did something even more damaging to the land by
“trying to form a radical center by giving land to radical groups in the city whom [she] had long been trying to help.” 122
Barnsdall’s growing frustration with the City and locals increased her level of aggression. She responded by digging in her heels and fighting. Through lawyers, lawsuits, and those pugnacious signs, she contributed to the conflict between herself and the City Park Board. Her radicalism stood in opposition to that of local powers like
Chandler, which meant she lacked support in the public sphere for her land donation. By the 1940s, the Times’ coverage of her shifted from praising her munificence and generosity to emphasizing petty squabbles and portraying her as an eccentric recluse. The paper gave particular attention to a dispute between Barnsdall and the City over her
121 McClung, 178. 122 "Park Compromise Asked," Los Angeles Times, Jul 23, 1931, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/162444808?accountid=9840.
53 violation of a dog leash ordinance. They reverted to calling her an “oil heiress” in most every headline rather than a patron or philanthropist. Upon her death, their coverage of her focused on her varied disputes with the City with scarcely a mention of her work with
Frank Lloyd Wright or her support for the arts in Los Angeles. 123 Instead, they focused on a story about a directive in her will that allotted a portion of her estate to the care and maintenance of her dogs. 124 Because of her reputation as a radical, her tumultuous relationship with the City, and her unwillingness to court the support of men like
Chandler or groups like the Chamber of Commerce, Aline Barnsdall’s hopes for establishing a truly open cultural center in Los Angeles failed to develop. It was possible for a woman to successfully contribute to the civic culture of Los Angeles at this time, but it required a relationship with the controlling oligarchy, an understanding that art and culture in Los Angeles needed to serve a practical purpose, and a traditionally feminine approach to preservation as Christine Sterling’s successful projects prove.
Aline Barnsdall’s Los Angeles story reveals the limits of modernism and access to civic power in the growing metropolis. Barnsdall’s civic imagination called for openness and a merging of public and private space. Although she did not willfully court opposition to her project and subsequent donations, she failed to understand the rules of the contest for power and subsequently abandoned her loftiest goals. Although Alice
Constance Austin engaged in city planning earlier than both Barnsdall and Sterling, her vision looked toward the future. Sharing much in common with Barnsdall, Austin rejected traditional forms of city planning and civic imagination. Her approach to design
123 "Aline Barnsdall, Oil Heiress, Found Dead," Los Angeles Times, Dec 19, 1946, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/165698287?accountid=9840. 124 "Miss Barnsdall Leaves $5000 For Her 22 Dogs," Los Angeles Times, January 03, 1947, accessed November 16, 2013, http://search.proquest.com/docview/165746226?accountid=9840
54 required starting from scratch and rejecting the capitalist, individualistic, gendered trappings of life in a metropolis. Like Barnsdall, Austin embraced a style of design connected to the new woman, attempting to break free from the burden of traditional domesticity. Like Sterling, Austin stood firmly in her philosophical approach and seemed to understand the contest she faced.
Figure 5. Exterior view of Hollyhock House. Source: Los Angeles Public Library.
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Figure 6. Barnsdall with daughter Aline Elizabeth. Source: Los Angeles Public Library.
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CHAPTER 3
THE CITY OF THE FUTURE: ALICE CONSTANCE AUSTIN AND THE SOCIALIST CITY
It’s no surprise that Mike Davis’ examination of Southern California in his seminal book City of Quartz begins in the experimental socialist city of Llano del Rio, as the colony works in near perfect juxtaposition to the authoritarian open shop city that
Davis explores through much of his book.”125 In spite of its seemingly conservative base,
Southern California was no stranger to experimental communal living projects by the time Job Harriman embarked on his quest to develop a model socialist city outside the confines of Los Angeles. In spite of its seemingly conservative base, Southern California was no stranger to experimental communal living projects by the time Job Harriman embarked on his quest to develop a model socialist city outside the confines of Los
Angeles. 126 Historian Robert Hines observed the early desire for experimental, communal living as being an extension of the optimism of the Progressive Era and the desire for social reform. Others argue that utopian and experimental communities flourished in the
United States as a response to the disorientating effect of industrial growth and free labor
125 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Random House, 1992), 3. 126 Robert V. Hine’s California’s Utopian Colonies (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1953), remains a valuable text for examining experimental communities in California from 1875 and into the twentieth-century. However, the contemporary approach of the 1950s limited Hine’s perspective. For example, he fails to mention Austin a single time in his chapter on Llano del Rio and focuses on Harriman and the economic and political challenges the community faced.
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capitalism. 127 Beginning in the early 19th century, thousands of Americans joined experimental communities such as the Shakers, the Owenites, and the Oneida community in New York. 128 Southern California’s experimental communities relied on a diverse set of philosophies both religious and secular.
Several of the dominant political and social concepts espoused by members of these utopian communities connect closely to Barnsdall’s beliefs and they also overlap with the bohemianism of the late 19th and early 20th century. California’s appeal led to massive population growth and experimental communities grew, their colonists attracted to the mild climate, rich soil, and the promises of boosters and investors. 129 The communities of Fountain Grove, Icaria Speranza, and the Kaweah Cooperative
Commonwealth provide three examples of how communistic communities grew in
Southern California. 130 However, the Theosophical colony at Point Loma most effectively expands our understanding of bohemian lifestyles at the turn of the 20th century, especially for California women and provide connections to Barnsdall and the colonists of Llano del Rio. Point Loma’s antagonistic relationship with the Los Angeles
Times reinforces the experiences of Barnsdall, Job Harriman, and the Llano community.
Katherine Tingley adhered to the doctrines of Theosophy, a mystical belief system centered on occult practices and connections between the inner world of the self and the physical world, established in this incarnation in New York in 1875 by Helena
127 Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 5. 128 The essays compiled in America’s Communal Utopias work in concert to draw connections between the seemingly disjointed movements of American communal living. Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1997. 129 Hine, 10-11. 130 Hines explores each of these communities in California’s Utopian Colonies .
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Blavatsky. Tingley moved her group away from a focus on the occult and spirituality and toward the aim of brotherhood and humanitarianism as she relocated to San Diego. In
1900 she called upon her fellow adherents to build a space in Point Loma, California and for 29 years they developed over 300 acres of land, constructed three community structures, a Greek style theater, and many individual dwellings. 131 Like Barnsdall,
Tingley tussled with the Los Angeles Times . Then editor, Harrison Gray Otis, disapproved of cults like the Theosophists at Point Loma and used newspaper stories to raise public concern over their practices and beliefs. One such story resulted in a libel case by Tingley against Otis. Shortly after the community embarked on their work in
Point Loma, Otis published a series of explosive articles accusing Tingley of working residents like “convicts,” and “forcibly separating,” husbands and wives. 132 Referring to the community as a “spookery,” Otis went on to condemn Tingley for her hypnotic powers over her members and claimed that she starved children for their own spiritual betterment. Tingley brought a libel suit against the paper and the jury awarded her damages in 1903. This award provoked a furious response from the Times which claimed that the jury and the judge limited the rights of the press to expose, “vice, corruption, and indecency.” 133 While Tingley operated her community successfully, she grappled with conservative leaders like Otis. Llano del Rio’s founder, Job Harriman, fought the same fight as he navigated civic power in Southern California and revealed the depth of the battle between labor and Southern California’s open shop doctrine.
131 Ibid., 42-43. 132 “Outrage at Point Loma,” Los Angeles Times , October 28, 1901, accessed October 9, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/164092347?accountid=9840. 133 "Tingley and ‘Spot”," Los Angeles Times (1886-1922) , Jan 22, 1903, accessed October 9, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/164136216?accountid=9840.
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Harriman’s run as a Socialist candidate for mayor of Los Angeles in 1911 ended in defeat. Ultimately, Harriman’s work as a defense attorney for the accused bombers of the Los Angeles Times ’ building ended his burgeoning campaign. After the accused
McNamara brothers eventually confessed to the crime, discrediting Harriman’s stance on their innocence. The attack confirmed people’s fear of labor unrest and unionism and provided fodder for business leaders who fought to maintain the region’s open shop policy. The Times warned its readers that a Harriman win “would result in an orgy of evil, in a season of stagnation, in businesses, in the curtailment of building, in the withdrawal of capital, in hunger in the homes and rioting in the highways.” 134 In his run, he promised to end anti-picketing ordinances, to convert city utilities to public ownership, and to build public facilities like libraries, pools, and community centers. 135 Harriman’s political career ended with his loss in 1913. The defeat pushed him to the realization that socialism needed an economic base and not just a political one given his belief that
“people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bad, capitalistic or otherwise, until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living.” 136 Additionally, Harriman concluded that he had to create his own socialist city as a revolution seemed impossible in Los Angeles. 137
134 “Eliminate the Socialist Ticket,” Los Angeles Times , October 31, 1922, accessed November 6, 2015, http://search.proquest.com/docview/159617056?accountid=9840. 135 Paul Greenstein, et al., Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles (Los Angeles: California Classics Books, 1992), 64-65. Bread and Hyacinths derives its title from a moment during Harriman’s run for mayor when he quoted the Koran, saying, “If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a hyacinth to feed your soul.” Greenstein and his fellow authors place Harriman in direct conflict with Otis and the Times and take a markedly sympathetic view toward Llano del Rio. Their myopic focus on Harriman contributes to a neglect of other players, particularly Austin. 136 Harriman quoted in Hine, 117. 137 Greenstein, 85.
60
He concocted a new plan and began the decidedly capitalist process of financing his new venture.
Harriman secured a large land holding in the Antelope Valley from the Mescal
Water and Land Company with the backing of five families. By May of 1914, new members relocated to the colony and eventually numbered approximately 900 residents. 138 At its peak, the colony received more than two thousand outside visitors, and the Department of Labor deemed it worthy of “thoughtful attention,” even as it remained in a “pioneer stage.” 139 Members of the community lived primarily in tents with a few homes made of adobe brick to ward off the desert heat. For the time being, they waited for permanent housing conducive to their environment and political philosophies. Harriman and his fellow believers recorded much of their progress in
Western Comrade , a self-published magazine seen in figure 7, with detailed descriptions of life in the colony, socialist musings, literature, and poetry.
Feminist architect Alice Constance Austin designed the layout, landscape, and domiciles of the community. At the time of her commission, Austin’s only design was a single family home in Santa Barbara. 140 In spite of her inexperience Austin’s concepts merged with Harriman’s socialist philosophy. Dolores Hayden asserts that Austin’s designs were both feminine and distinctly regional as Austin created spaces centered on domestic solutions and the interweaving of nature and construction and private and public
138 Hugh S. Hannah, “The Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony,” Monthly Review of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2 no. 1 (December 1916), 19-23, accessed August 5, 2015, http://jstor.org/stable/41823863. 139 Hine, 128. Hannah, 19. 140 Greenstein, 106.
61 life. 141 The communal city concept appealed to socialist and feminist experimenters due to the communitarian belief that a utopian community had the power to change the world, functioning as a microcosm of the larger society. 142 Drawing from similar feminist philosophies as Barnsdall, Austin’s role as an architect empowered her to design her own space, based on regional inspiration, like other modernist architects like Wright, Lloyd
Wright, Schindler, and Neutra. In spite of what appear as radical breaks with society,
Austin was, in fact, acting in accordance with some Progressive Era politics. However, she merged them with her feminist and socialist approach to design. Unlike Sterling or
Barnsdall, Austin engaged with the landscape on her terms and asserted her power by disengaging from the political and civic machinations of urban planning in Los Angeles.
Austin espoused her beliefs regarding city planning in The Next Step , a book where she criticizes what she sees as the failures of city planning. The contemporary City
Beautiful movement certainly influenced Austin with its focus on efficiency, the necessity of green space, and organization. Austin also drew from the growth of communal households in the urban centers of bohemia, and from modernist shifts in architecture. Finally, the lingering Progressive Era emphasis on order and efficiency also reveals itself in Austin’s design of Llano del Rio. Austin promoted the idea that efficiency in design could eliminate poverty and the constant toil of labor. Arguing that too often “cities just happened, rather than being planned,” she set out to design a community of “convenience and comfort.” 143
141 Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 1979), 289-290. 142 Hayden, “Two Utopian Feminists and Their Campaigns for Kitchenless Houses” Signs 4 no.2 (Winter 1978) 276, accessed August 2, 2015, http://jstor.org/stable/3173026. 143 Alice Constance Austin, The Next Step (Los Angeles: E. Norman Johnson, 1935), 3.
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In Austin’s estimation, communal homes, central kitchens, and efficient organization defined the “City of the Future.” 144 Progressive reformers like Gilman and
Addams experimented with communal forms of domesticity in the east as part of an effort to free women from housework and to expand their opportunities for work outside of the home. Gilman’s book, Women and Economics , called for kitchenless houses (like
Austin’s design) and daycare centers. 145 In general, though, these feminist philosophies never became reality and the disparity between the genders in the division of domestic labor remained vast. 146 At Llano de Rio, Austin’s plans for cooperative housing included communal kitchens and laundry as women shared in the outside work of the community.
Austin maintained that the traditional house functioned as a trap, through which “each feminine personality must be made to conform by whatever maiming or fatal spiritual or intellectual oppression.” 147 One female colonist wrote, “I believed from the first that the women in this community have the opportunity to live closer to their ideals than in any other place in the world. I still believe it. The community ideals are a great help and there is no reason why we women cannot begin here and now to develop ourselves and our children as we have always dreamed of doing.” 148 Austin’s designs and models contributed to the sense of possibility as she sought to minimize time spent on housework and domestic duties. The row houses seen in the design in figure 8 expressed the
“solidarity of the community,” with equal access to housing. 149 According to Austin’s model, underground tunnels connected each house to a central kitchen where food would
144 Ibid., 2. 145 Gilman, Women and Economics (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 242-43. 146 Stansell, 258-260. 147 Austin, 63. 148 Mildred G. Buxton, “A Pioneer Woman’s View,” Western Comrade vol. 5, (May, 1917), 25. 149 Austin, “Building a Socialist City,” Western Comrade vol. 4, (October, 1916), 17.
63 be prepared and then delivered to each home via electric railway cars with the intention of eliminating as much traffic as possible from the city center. 150
In keeping with modernist approaches to home design in Southern California,
Austin’s model for the homes in Llano del Rio incorporated the outdoors via private courtyards and large gardens; her civic center, made almost entirely of glass, would maintain an open connection with the natural world not unlike the glass walkways and central courtyard gardens in Hollyhock House. In a nod to the growing metropolis’ fixation on automobile culture, Austin’s design included an automobile for each household. 151 It was an egalitarian plan that took into consideration the specific landscape and values of Southern California.
In keeping with the socialist model, the community encouraged its members to free themselves from the drudgery of work through education and recreation. Members all received access to childcare, night classes, access to a large reading library, and orchestral performances. Additionally, they grew 90 percent of their own food, started a
“print shop, a shoe-repair shop, a warehouse, a rug-making shop, a swimming pool, an art studio, and a rabbit farm.” 152 In spite of the success of Llano del Rio’s crop production and attempt at self-sufficiency, water woes plagued the community, mirroring the development of much of Southern California. A survey completed in 1917 revealed that the water supply would not be enough to meet the community’s needs, so Harriman quickly moved the colony to Louisiana. Negative press coverage by the Los Angeles
Times plagued the community from the start. Referring to Harriman as “Czar,” and
150 Ibid., 14. 151 Davis, 10. 152 McWilliams, Southern California , 285-286.
64 derisively referring to the community as “Red Utopia,” the Times closely covered the financial woes of Llano del Rio. 153 Between 1913 and 1918, the paper wrote multiple articles indicting Harriman and his board on accusations of “czarism, grafting, and mismanagement,” and mocking the colony as the “antics of a skindicate.” 154 Certainly,
Harriman’s leftist politics and support for the perpetrators of the Times bombing created tension between his enterprise and positive press.
After the dissolution of Llano del Rio in 1918, Austin remained in Los Angeles and opened an architectural and design firm in the hopes of “reworking her Llano designs to appeal to other potential clients.” 155 The models for Llano del Rio remained her best known project. In spite of the failure of the socialist community, Austin’s work enhances our understanding of the feminist perspective on domestic design and city planning. Her commission by Harriman allowed Austin to experiment with civic planning and home construction. While she was a radical in regard to her feminist and socialist perspective,
Austin shared much in common with City Beautiful philosophers who espoused efficiency, order, comfort, and natural beauty. Her philosophical ties to bohemianism and radicalism deviate from the city planning of the Progressive Era however, and set her apart from other prolific female architects like Julia Morgan.
Born in Northern California in 1872, Julia Morgan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and then studied at the École des Beaux Arts. Over the course of
153 “Try to Depose Czar Harriman,” Los Angeles Times , October 23, 1916, accessed August 2, 2015, http://search.proquest.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/docview/160374892?accountid=9840 154 “Blistering Report on Job Harriman Utopia,” Los Angeles Times , January 9, 1916, accessed August 2, 2015, http://search.proquest.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/docview/160114660?accountid=9840. “Antics of a Socialist Syndicate,” Los Angeles Times , October 3, 1915, accessed August 2, 2015, http://search.proquest.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/docview/160142306?accountid=9840. 155 Hayden, “Two Utopian Feminists and their Campaigns for Kitchenless Houses,” Signs 4, no. 2 (Winter, 1978): 274-290.
65 her career, Morgan designed hundreds of buildings in California. Although she is best known for her work with William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon, Morgan also worked with hospitals, colleges, newspapers and women’s organizations like the YWCA. 156
Though Morgan’s influence and mark on the physical landscape of California far surpasses Austin’s, her feminist and utopian designs provide an example of radicalism in
Southern California and a way of accessing city planning that entirely sidestepped civic leaders and authority. Additionally, Austin’s designs pointed to a futuristic approach to home design based on efficiency, order, and accessibility seen in the modernist turn in
California design. Austin’s approach to design complemented other contemporary modernist architects whose work in Los Angeles reflected the unique personality of the landscape.
While Austin’s designs never came to fruition, the foresight of her ideas were later reflected in the Arts and Architecture “Case Study House Program” of the 1940s.
The magazine editors commissioned eight renowned architects with modernist sensibilities to design and build single family homes that might solve the problem of postwar housing shortages in an inexpensive but creative way. Each home needed to follow basic building codes and be “capable of duplication,” with solutions to design problems that would provide “practical assistance to the average American in search of a home in which he can afford to live.” 157 Like Austin’s challenge to design and build housing quickly for an emerging community, the case study architects attempted to
156 Sara Holmes Boutelle, Julia Morgan Architect (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995). See also Karen McNeill, “Julia Morgan: Gender, Architecture, and Professional Style,” Pacific Historical Review 76 no. 2 (May 2007), 229-268. McNeill successfully examines the work and style of Morgan through an analysis of her wardrobe and physical appearance. 157 “Announcement: The Case Study House Program,” Arts and Architecture, January, 1945.
66 address housing for the rapidly growing population of Southern California as the region transformed once again. The editors exhorted the architects and their readers not to “cling long to the symbol of a house as [they] had known it,” but to “realize that in accommodating themselves to a new world the most important step in avoiding retrogression to the old, was a willingness to understand and to accept contemporary ideas in the creation of an environment that is responsible for shaping the largest part of our living and thinking.” 158 As Austin sought practical solutions for her utopian ideas, so too did case study architects like Neutra, J.R. Davidson, and William Wurster. Austin’s concepts are reflected in the attempts at practical construction methods such as steel and concrete, a connection between outdoor and indoor space as seen in the glass walls of
Charles Eames’ home design, and an attempt to make private space available to individuals while maintaining a sense of equity and affordability. 159 While Austin’s sought pragmatic design solutions, she also planned gardens and park areas in Llano del
Rio. An emphasis on landscape architecture merged into the case study homes, which included courtyard gardens and entry gardens. Many believed that average homeowners would recoil at the modernist sensibilities of the case study architects. In fact, the architectural designs, home décor, and landscaping found in the homes trickled down into the homes of millions of Americans who rejected traditional style and favored modern, futuristic concepts as they moved out of the war years. 160
In the end, Austin’s futuristic and utopian leanings came too early. Traditional design concepts prohibited her career as an architect and a feminist approach to home
158 Ibid. 159 Esther McCoy, “Arts and Architecture Case Study Houses,” Perspecta 15, (1975): 54-73. 160 McCoy, 55.
67 design failed to take root. However, Austin benefited from the nature of her circumstances given that her commission came from a man, Harriman, who shared her beliefs regarding communal living and feminism. Unfettered by the workings of city planners or park commissions, she dreamed up the ideal community for adherents to
Llano del Rio’s philosophy. Unlike Barnsdall or Sterling, Austin never struggled with the actual development of her idea, since the community disbanded and moved before raising enough capital to begin building the bulk of the city’s structure. In Austin’s estimation, city planning as it existed failed in design, execution, and in prioritizing the needs of the community. The Llano del Rio experiment provided Austin with the opportunity to express her own civic imagination and to access power in a space distinctly her own.
While Llano del Rio struggled with finances and critical press coverage, Austin continued to work and imagine her city of the future.
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Figure 7. Cover of Llano del Rio’s community paper, The Western Comrade . Source: California Historical Society.
Figure 8. Austin’s circular design for the Llano del Rio community. Source: California Historical Society.
69
CONCLUSION
Christine Sterling’s Olvera Street crusade reveals a woman who utilized the past to gain access and power. Sterling did this in two ways. First, she drew from traditional methods of municipal housekeeping. This approach grew as women in the latter half of the nineteenth century managed to exert power through traditional claims of female purity. Women, the story went, acted as a purifying force and their domestic skills, when applied to public power, helped alleviate the male realms of work and politics of corruption and vice. Historical preservation and conservation became two areas where progressive women assumed leadership positions and affected change.
The second way that Sterling utilized the past was by invoking images from
Southern California’s mythic ethnic past. Los Angeles’s relationship to its urban, ethnic minorities was tumultuous at best as City officials and planners sought to rid the urban center of slums in the name of civic improvement. This often meant the destruction of ethnic histories, limits on free speech and demonstrations, and the stigmatization of minority groups. Sterling’s project merged neatly with the goals of city leaders like Harry
Chandler as Olvera Street brought in tourist dollars, limited political activity in the adjacent Plaza area, and promoted a docile and commodified image of Mexican identity.
By drawing from a mythic past, working within the booster system, appealing to Anglo visions of ethnic minorities, and utilizing traditional feminine approaches to cultural production, Sterling was able to achieve her goal of preserving a cultural landmark and
70 remaking it in her vision. That vision and rewriting of the historical record stamped public memory and the public’s engagement with Los Angeles history as many visitors to the site continue to accept the narrative of historical preservation provided by Sterling as she embarked on the remaking of Olvera Street. In a way, her version of history successfully replaced the reality for many Los Angeles visitors.
Barnsdall lacked Sterling’s political savvy and was more ambivalent about the process of gaining power. Her roots stayed firmly in the present and she was truly a product of her time as she merged modernism, bohemianism, and feminism in her life’s work. Ultimately, Barnsdall defined herself as a “new kind of woman,” telling Wright,
“You will never know me if you don’t come to realize that I have never known fear in that or any other moral sense, that I am only at home and interested in uncharted seas. My willfulness I was born with. I haven’t that old fashioned thing called womans [sic] weakness and I doubt if many women ever really had it, rather they projected it to flatter the ego of men….”161 As a woman without fear, empowered by the safety of her wealth, she took risks and created space for herself. The study of cultural landscapes emphasizes the importance of space as an access point of power. Barnsdall’s financial position empowered her to grab her own piece of the emerging metropolis marking the landscape of the city permanently.
A new study of Barnsdall’s life that emphasizes her role as a patron and collaborator, rather than a keeper of failed dreams, would illuminate her work with
Wright and correct the limited picture of her available now. Historians ought to further their studies by examining the work she left behind. Her successful theatrical productions
161 Barnsdall to Wright, February 4, 1927. Quoted in Smith, 194.
71 in Chicago and briefly, Los Angeles, reveal a woman with an eye for talent and the ability to nurture it. The school and playground on the grounds of Olive Hill provided children in the area with a safe and beautiful space in the midst of the city. The use of
Hollyhock House by the California Arts Club led to a multitude of exhibitions, including a showing of pieces by Henry Ossawa Tanner, marking the first exhibition of a black artist in city history. Barnsdall’s funding of Tom Mooney certainly contributed to his eventual pardon in 1939. Aline Barnsdall outwardly expressed her artistic drive, and her letters reveal an inner world teeming with impatience, vision, and passion. Her life speaks to a specific cultural moment, rooted in her present, when the possibilities for men and women were more open than ever before. She burst out of that world looking to create something of value and left behind a legacy of rebellion and authenticity. On a recent tour of the newly renovated Hollyhock House, I overheard murmurs among the crowd praising Wright’s design, admiring the architecture and furniture, and heard questions about the woman involved in this amazing project. Families picnicked on the exterior lawn, while children engaged in free art projects, and artists of all levels set up easels in front of Barnsdall’s home to capture what they saw. In the distance, one could see the
Griffith Observatory and the famous Hollywood sign even through clouds and rain. It occurred to me that in spite of her shortcomings, Barnsdall’s legacy continues to maintain a place in Los Angeles’ complicated civic and artistic history, as well as in its present.
Alice Constance Austin’s impact on Southern California’s landscape is minimal in its physicality. Her designs and philosophies emerged from utopian ideas of what the future of city planning and domestic life could look like. Job Harriman’s socialist colony provided Austin with the benefit of starting from scratch and avoiding the political fights
72
Barnsdall faced. Austin’s approach to city planning required a blank slate, free from the mistakes she saw clearly in other city plans. Because Los Angeles failed to follow through on so many potential plans for development, the possibility of creating an organized, efficient, and affordable community seemed otherwise out of reach.
Austin’s designs reflected Progressive Era concerns over cleanliness, organization, and green space, but they also revealed her desire to free women from the drudgery of housework and domestic obligation thought kitchenless houses, centralized domestic services such as cooking and laundry, and exposure (for men and women) to leisure and beauty. In this way, her approach mirrors that of domestic engineers and feminists like Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Women’s entre into public power began before they won the right to vote as many fought to end oppressive conditions for other women, particularly the working class. If they could solve the problem of domestic work including childcare by establishing communal kitchens and daycares, women would be free to expand their inner lives and improve their financial status. Ultimately, Austin wanted to empower women through home design. If funding at
Llano del Rio continued, she could have revolutionized community designs and city planning. In spite of that failure, Austin’s concepts emerged several decades later as modernist home design took root in postwar Southern California.
The case study project of 1945 allowed modernist, experimental architects to take on the task that Austin faced at Llano del Rio. Guided to create a new vision of what a home could be, in light of economics, efficiency, and aesthetics, the eight architects created homes with similar approaches to Austin. They embraced utility, merged the distinction between indoor and outdoor space, and provided ideas for equanimity while
73 maintaining a sense of identity for potential homeowners. Austin never found a space to realize her forward thinking approach to home design in her lifetime, but the drawings and renderings she left behind reveal her to be a designer who was simply ahead of her time.
In these chapters I have examined three unique approaches to gaining civic power. One woman looked to the past, one stood firmly in the present, and the last envisioned a home for the future. Each woman guides our understanding of the shifts taking place for women in the first half of the twentieth century. As Victorian domestic ideas regarding separate spheres shifted into Progressive Era concerns over cleaning up government and communities, women made new inroads to power and expanded into the public sphere. The fight for suffrage and its culmination with the passage of the nineteenth amendment collided with an emerging, independent woman. As Los Angeles grew rapidly in the postwar era and sought solutions for housing shortages while dealing with intensifying racial conflict, city officials, landowners, and the police maintained a stronghold on civic power. However, more women emerged to fight for access and inclusiveness.
The women in this examination show unique strengths and weaknesses, but each benefited from their class positions and their ethnic identity. Women from diverse ethnic groups and financial backgrounds fought the same fights but bore heavier burdens in their struggles. Los Angeles, it seems, remains uncomfortable with its own history and its diversity even as the city continues to grow in size. The fight in the late 1950s between the residents of Chaves Ravine and city officials over their forced eviction through eminent domain laws gave a face to the consistent eviction of ethnic minorities from their
74 homes based on official planning decisions and business deals. Many residents of Chavez
Ravine sold their property to the City to turn into a stadium for the recently acquired
Dodger’s baseball team. The Chamber of Commerce, the City Council, and the Los
Angeles Times attempted to convince the rest of the city that the area contained little more than “rusty tin cans, rotting tires, moribund mattresses, and broken beer bottles…an eyesore only a mile away from the imposing Civic Center.” 162 Aurora Vargus, along with her family, opted to stay in their homes until the police arrived to forcibly evict them and the remaining residents on May 8, 1959. Vargus emerged as the face of the struggle as news cameras captured images of police ripping her away from her home while she struggled with her crying baby as seen in figure 9. In spite of media coverage and public outcry, the evictions continued and the developers destroyed the homes. The fight over
Dodger Stadium reflected class and ethnic tensions within the city and illustrated the limits of power for young, working class, ethnic women. In an interesting turn of events,
Christine Sterling lost her Chavez Ravine home in this fight. Her residence among a predominantly Mexican population underscores her professed attachment to the Mexican community and also reveals the overlapping arenas in the lives of Los Angeles residents.
Sterling spent the rest of her life living in the Avila Adobe and died there at the age of
82. 163
Professor and artist Judy Baca began producing public art in Los Angeles in 1969 and embarked on one of her most famous projects in 1976. The Great Wall of Los
Angeles is a half mile long mural painted along a flood channel in the San Fernando
162 Editorial, “A Vote in Favor of Everybody,” Los Angeles Times , June 1, 1958. 163 Estrada, Los Angeles’s Olvera Street , (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing Company, 2006), 52.
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Valley. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reached out to Baca and she worked to design a mural reflecting and recalling to memory the region’s forgotten ethnic past stating,
“When I first saw the wall, I envisioned a long narrative of another history of California; one which included ethnic peoples, women and minorities who were so invisible in conventional textbook accounts. The discovery of the history of California’s multicolored peoples was a revelation to me.” 164 After engaging in public art for the better part of the decade, Baca utilized artistic collaboration with young people from local neighborhoods.
Some were graffiti artists and taggers and some belonged to street gangs and Baca engaged them in the construction of public art in a highly visible space. 165 One portion of the vast mural, seen in figure 10, engaged with the battle over the stadium and the residents of Chavez Ravine portraying the stadium as an incoming alien-like object looming over the community. 166 Baca’s art represents many of the struggles of contemporary Los Angeles residents including their ethnic tensions. In 2005, this representation provoked anti-immigration activists to demand that the city of Baldwin
Park edit Baca’s art piece at the Metrolink station, Danzas Indigenas, by covering up language they deemed offensive and anti-American. The piece includes inscriptions like,
“It was better before they came.” Current political tensions over illegal immigration and the brief rise of border state militiamen contributed to the protest against Baca’s mural.
The protest and counter protest led to police intervention and revealed the continued divisions between the region’s growing Chicano population and white residents who fear a loss of dominance and power. Baca, with the support of city officials and residents,
164 Erika Doss, “Raising Community Consciousness with Public Art: Contrasting Projects by Judy Baca and Andrew Leicester,” American Art 6, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 62-81. 165 Judy Baca quoted in Doss. 166 Avila, 170.
76 refused to change the piece stating, “What is at stake is a community’s right to express itself.” 167 By representing California’s neglected ethnic history, engaging the community in public art on multiple levels, and maintaining a strong sense of identity, Baca successfully engages in the construction of public space. As Los Angeles continues to grow and as the demographics of the region change, women of all backgrounds will continue to fight for contemporary representation in the public arena while looking to the past and to the future.
167 David Pierson and Patricia Ward Biederman, “Protest Over Art Forces Police to Draw the Line,” Los Angeles Times , May 15, 2005, accessed October 9, 2015, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/15/local/me- mural15/2.
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Figure 9. Aurora Vargas being forcibly removed from her Chavez Ravine home. Source: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library.
Figure 10. The Great Wall of Los Angeles . Source: Social and Public Art Resource Center.
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