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FALL/WINTER 2007 Planning the Huntington House TRADE IN THE PACIFIC • LOST IN AEROSPACE The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens The Huntington Library, Art Collections, FROM THE EDITOR and Botanical Gardens HOMING IN SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON STEVEN S. KOBLIK President GEORGE ABDO HE SCAFFOLDING AND CONSTRUCTION Vice President for Advancement trailers are gone, a sign that the renovation of the JAMES P. FOLSOM Huntington Gallery is nearing completion. Marge and Sherm Telleen Director of the Botanical Gardens Curators are busy reinstalling art throughout the KATHY HACKER Thouse, and gardeners have already begun to restore the land - Executive Assistant to the President SUSAN LAFFERTY scaping surrounding the home Henry and Arabella Huntington Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education commissioned 100 years ago. The building will open to the SUZY MOSER public once again in May 2008. Assistant Vice President for Advancement Curators have been working closely with engineers and JOHN MURDOCH preservationists to execute a plan that acknowledges the com - Hannah and Russel Kully Director of Art Collections peting visions of the Huntingtons and the architectural team of ROBERT C. RITCHIE Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey. Historian Sam Watters adds W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research and Education another layer to the story by comparing Hunt and Grey’s early LAURIE SOWD plans to those of Edward S. Cobb, the first architect Associate Vice President for Operations Huntington hired for the job (page 8). ALISON D. SOWDEN Early renderings and photos of the south facade show the Vice President for Financial Affairs house high on a hill overlooking a ranch that was gradually SUSAN TURNER-LOWE giving way to specialized botanical gardens. Forty years later, Vice President for Communications a different kind of ranch house appeared on the landscape of DAVID S. ZEIDBERG Southern California. Sunset editor Daniel P. Gregory explores Avery Director of the Library the allure of Maynard L. Parker’s photos for magazine readers MAGAZINE STAFF eager to see—if not move into—the postwar ranch houses designed by Cliff May (page 2). Editor MATT STEVENS Writer D. J. Waldie grew up in Lakewood, where 17,500 homes went up Designer in a mere 33 months. More than 70,000 people moved in by 1955, populating LORI ANN VANDER PLUYM the workforce of Douglas Aircraft and other Southern California companies occupying the home front of the Cold War. Waldie still resides in the modest Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by home he grew up in, a longevity that helps him ponder the impact of the rise, the Office of Communications. It strives to connect read ers more firmly with the rich intellectual life of fall, and rise of the aerospace industry on the lives and families of its workers The Huntington, capturing in news and features the (page 5). work of researchers, educators, curators, and others across a range of disciplines. All this construction—50 and 100 years in the making—is a reminder that This magazine is supported in part by the history in California is relatively new, if not fleeting. However, historian David Annenberg Foundation. Igler takes us back more than 400 years to a period before the arrival of INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS: British settlers in North America (page 17). Thousands of miles to the west of Matt Stevens, Editor Huntington Frontiers Jamestown, an international cast of characters was already making contact with 1151 Oxford Road Indians along the Pacific Coast. History is not so new, after all, and it’s in our San Marino, CA 91108 [email protected] own backyard. Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography provided by the Huntington’s Department of Photographic Services. MATT STEVENS Printed by Pace Lithographers, Inc. City of Industry, Calif. Opposite page, upper left: The south facade of the Huntington house, ca. 1911. Right: Maynard L. Parker © 2007 The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and (1900–1976), photograph of Cliff May’s Pace Setter house, ca.1948. Parker collection . Lower left: Abraham Botanical Gardens. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of the contents, in whole or in part, without Ortelius (1527–1598), map of the Pacific (detail), ca. 1595. per mission of the publisher is prohibited. [ VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2 ] Contents FALL/WINTER 2007 BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD 8 Planning the Huntington House By Sam Watters TRADING PLACES 17 Jamestown—and the Pacific—at 400 By David Igler 8 2 DEPARTMENTS ACCESSIONS: Photographing ranch houses By Daniel P. Gregory 2 ON REFLECTION: Lost in aerospace By D. J. Waldie 5 CURATOR’S NOTEBOOK: Building plant collections 17 By Dylan P. Hannon 22 IN PRINT: Recommended reading 24 HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 1 [ ACCESSIONS ] View with a Room MAYNARD L. PARKER PICTURES THE RANCH HOUSE by Daniel P. Gregory HE AMERICAN PUBLIC FIRST GLIMPSED the romance, practicality, innovation, and easy indoor-outdoor flow of Cliff May’s ranch house designs through Maynard L. Parker’s glossy, Tevocative, and highly informative photographs of May’s own house at Riviera Ranch in Brentwood, Calif. Finished in 1939, this was the third house that May built for his family, and it launched the most successful stage in his career. Parker (1900–1976) is most identified with the designs of May (1908 –1989), who is widely acknowledged to be the father of the suburban ranch house. An accomplished Los Angeles–based photographer, Parker specialized in shooting contemporary houses and gardens for such magazines as Architectural Digest, Home (an early title for the Los Angeles Times Magazine ), House Beautiful , and Sunset . Like his better - known contemporaries Julius Shulman and Marvin Rand— It’s easy to see why Maynard Parker and Cliff May made such an effective team. whose recent photo books have fanned public interest in Southern California’s midcentury modernism—Parker recorded the work of architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra. He also shot the gardens of San Francisco’s most famous midcentury-modern landscape architect, Thomas Church. It’s easy to see why Parker and May made such an effec - tive team. May’s houses were novel in the way they com - bined history with modernity, and Parker captured that duality perfectly, as these three images demonstrate. They’re stylish. The furniture is carefully edited and arranged. The photos are also technically proficient, with lighting artfully Picture window wall. Modern walls of glass open whole sections of May’s house to the patio. Parker uses the sleekest expanse of glass as an elegant frame or even a sort of movie screen to heighten the view of the living room, while making us aware that it’s visually connected to the patio. 2 Fall /Winter 2007 HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 3 balanced. At the same time they celebrate and idealize a way of life in which house and garden are interchangeable. Magazines like Sunset , which brought May to a regional audience, and House Beautiful , which introduced May to the nation at large, published them enthusiastically during the 1940s and 1950s. Superb promotional tools, Parker’s photographs fed the enormous pent-up demand— following World War II—for new house-building ideas. In 1995 The Huntington acquired the images shown here and approximately 65,000 others (mostly negatives and transparencies), the photographer’s entire lifework. A recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow The Huntington to make the archive accessible to scholars and the public in 2009. Daniel P. Gregory is a senior editor for the Home section of Sunset magazine. He holds a doctorate in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley. His book Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House will be published by Rizzoli in spring 2008. The book relies extensively on photographs from The Huntington’s collection. Above: California living is exemplified in a view of May’s Pace Setter house of 1948, which was sponsored by House Beautiful and also built at Riviera Ranch. Right: New appliances like a freezer show state-of-the-art modernity and May himself dispensing, not just ice cream, but also the latest design ideas. May always used his own home as a demonstration house where he could experiment with new concepts and gadgets and show them off to prospective clients. 4 Fall /Winter 2007 [ ON REFLECTION ] Lost in Aerospace INHABITING A FUTURE LONG SINCE PAST by D. J. Waldie COME FROM LAKEWOOD— a place that was At the inception of the Aerospace Age—in the midst of made to fabricate the future—but it’s a future now World War II, in fact—the image of the new workforce that past. This is not to say that my aerospace suburb has would build the future was being fabricated in Southern no future. Only that it’s not the future for which California. That image was Chester A. Riley, the earnest ILakewood was made in 1950. My suburb sold itself into and hapless hero of The Life of Riley , a long-running series existence as “The City of Tomorrow, Today” at the begin - that began on a radio program hosted by Groucho Marx, ning—or one beginning—of a new age in Los Angeles. Lakewood has seen the end of that age, or one of its ends, Assembling the Army Air Corps BT-15 trainer at the new Vultee Aircraft Corp. in the waning of the aerospace industry. plant in Downey meant more than building planes in 1941. The Age of Aerospace in Southern California also fabricated the men and women who What will be the meaning of that optimistic and terri - built them and the places—Downey, Lakewood, Torrance, and Lynwood fying age of rockets, atom bombs, and supersonic flight? among them—they called home. “Dick” Whittington Studio, photographer.

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