Lost L.A.: School gardens, an idea planted a century ago

Good schools make good citizens and responsible citizens plant gardens. Combine the two and you get the school garden movement that's back in Los Angeles a century after it began.

In 1889, officials built one of the city's first public schools, four rooms in a building at the corner of East 7th and Wilson streets downtown. It soon became a two-story, windowed pile crowded with a thousand kids.

At the time, social engineers wrote that an effective education combined classroom learning and outdoor experience. Here in Los Angeles, still a region of fields and orchards, the Board of Education in 1910 hired Marie Aloysius Larkey. Trained in agriculture economy, she brought the school garden movement to Angelenos.

Larkey arranged the purchase of a 100-foot-long square lot at the back of the 7th Street school. Bordered by railroad yards and factories belching fumes from smokestacks, it was a barren, weedy dump. The lot was in a district that reformers called “squalid,” a rundown and littered neighborhood of blue-collar workers renting wood-framed, gardenless houses along treeless, unpaved streets.

Politicians and philanthropists agreed that America's global power depended on educating not just the few whose parents endowed private schools but the many whose moms and dads worked in the factories, banks and department stores. Larkey's open land was ideal for teaching poor children how they could one day transform a yard of their own and contribute to L.A.'s beautification.

Lost L.A.: Boys Republic and the Della Robbia wreath

“Do real men make Christmas wreaths?” Tweet that to your presidential candidates and see how they respond. The answer is yes, of course -- for more than a century, at the Boys Republic in Chino Hills. Early supporter Margaret Brewer of San Francisco was what Americans in 1900 called a New Woman, a self-supporting, university-educated teacher who made an independent life for herself long before marrying Minnesota lumber and mining industrialist Eldridge M. Fowler and moving to swanky Pasadena.

With her husband's fortune and her early experience earning self-respect through self-sufficiency, Margaret Fowler rallied wealthy friends to fund the Boys Republic in 1907. Two years later she purchased land that became its present-day campus to house, teach and inspire teenage boys brought down low by abuse and broken families.

VINTAGE PHOTOS: Boys Republic and Della Robbia wreaths

The organization's motto was “Nothing without labor.” Kids earned aluminum coins minted by trustees to pay for food and lodging. The boys planted and harvested crops on the land Fowler donated, and they maintained buildings in a village designed by Myron Hunt, architect of the Rose Bowl and the recently demolished Ambassador Hotel. The kids were self-governing, electing their own mayor and student council.

After a trip to Europe, Fowler conceived a craft tradition to extend the noble cause of honest pay for honest work. In 1923, Boys Republic residents made their first Christmas wreaths, still a Southland holiday standard. Beginning in January, boys and now girls trek through forests and fields gathering seeds, nuts, cones and pods to decorate by hand 40,000 fir wreaths, available on the Boys Republic website. Their classic circular form, with apples and lemons mixed with teasels and cotton burs, is inspired by Margaret Fowler's original design, based on sculpture by the Italian Renaissance Della Robbia family.

There never has been glitter or glitz on a Boys Republic wreath, but Tinsel Town celebs have long endorsed the community's annual Christmas campaign since the rise of TV in the 1950s. Natalie Wood (above right), Diahann Carroll, Tom Selleck and, of course, the goody two-shoes American family par excellence, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, have celebrated the holiday season with smiling endorsements.

Lost L.A.: For artist Mike Hart, a water world no more

Artist Michael Hart will tell you that every L.A. backyard has one thing in common: water. And his paintings show you what this may mean for your family's gardening future. Green today will be dead tomorrow if we don't change our thirsty ways.

Working from home in La Verne, he's an old-school artist who draws and paints on vellum the landscapes of Southern California's past, like the one above. At first glance, you'll think it's a view of a hacienda estate, with a private vineyard and lake. But, in fact, it's the historic Old Mill in San Marino as Hart imagines it looked two centuries ago.

Hart was the general manager of Pasadena's Sunny Slope Water Co. for nearly 40 years until he retired in 2008. Running the works was ideal for this artist-historian, a fifth-generation descendant of wagon-wheel pioneers.

Sunny Slope owns 22 acres of a pre-Civil War ranch. It protects the last surviving dam built by the San Gabriel Mission. The company manages five wells drawing from the Raymond Basin aquifer that sprawls 40 square miles under Pasadena and surrounding communities.

When the ranch's owners drilled the first well in 1899 to develop land they subdivided, water was 3 feet below the surface. About a century later, water is 196 feet below. This grim statistic and keen observations informed by years of research inspired Hart to map and illustrate the canals, mills, dams and ditches of the San Gabriel Mission that irrigated 6,000 acres and quenched 1,300 residents and 29,000 heads of cattle in the 1830s. The mission's sustainable water network came decades before the L.A. business elite extracted water from eastern California's Owens Valley in 1913 and before the Hoover Dam (finished in 1936) between Arizona and Nevada engineered the Colorado River so Angelenos could continue to grow roses hundreds of miles away.

Fred MacMurray, the not-so-Modern man

The 1946 photo by the legendary Maynard Parker shows the Brentwood living room of actor Fred MacMurray. Where are the Eames plywood chairs and Noguchi coffee table, you might ask? Despite what you may see during Pacific Standard Time, the Getty-led celebration of postwar California art and design, midcentury wasn't as Modern as some might think, writes Sam Watters in his latest Lost L.A. column:

Exhibitions across the region will revisit the buildings, furniture and tchotchkes of a mythic halcyon time when Americans finally woke up to the genius of 20th century design, casting aside failed traditions for Formica futures. ... What actually got “buried” in this modernist tale are the stories of Americans who didn’t belong to the boomerang table and plywood set. They, like the MacMurrays, found reassurance in decorating that began with George Washington, not George Nelson.

For more on how much of midcentury America really lived, read Watters' monthly column, a look at the homes and gardens of times past through the lens of contemporary culture.

Full article: Fred MacMurray, a not-so-Modern man

 

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Photo credit: Maynard L. Parker / Courtesy of the Huntington Library

Lost L.A.: A bird lover's perch in Bel-Air

Gene Stratton-Porter's house in Bel-Air certainly was imposing enough, but in his latest Lost L.A. column, Sam Watters focuses on the garden instead. It was bird habitat and Stratton-Porter's nature sanctuary, a personal preserve in a place where tidy lawns and clipped hedges reign today. Writes Watters:

At the turn of the century women, keepers of home and church, organized to save America the Beautiful from extinction. They founded garden clubs and preservation societies, pushed town councils to restore city parks and lobbied congressmen to save coastal redwoods. For visibility, they exploited the era’s new media by bringing photographs of local garden successes to print.

Stratton-Porter's story takes an ironic twist just weeks before the house is completed in 1924. Read the rest of Watters' tale: Lost L.A.: A nature sanctuary amid the mansions of Bel-Air

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Richard Neutra's Kronish House

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Photo: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

Lost L.A.: Richard Neutra's Kronish House

For some, it was hard to tell which was the bigger piece of inconsequential news this week: that Beverly Hills officials indicated that, gosh, perhaps some architecture is worth preserving, or that the investors planning to sell Richard Neutra's Kronish House as a $14-million tear-down will stave off the bulldozers until at least Oct. 10.

In a city where Frank Lloyd Wright's celebrated Ennis House, widely regarded as one of the region's most important pieces of residential architecture, couldn't even fetch $5 million after two years on the market, do we think a design savior will step forward and plunk down $14 million for one of Neutra's lesser works? For Sam Watters, who writes our Lost L.A. column about our ghosts of home and garden, the  story is all too familiar. The proposed solutions? Too little, too late.

Lost L.A.: Richard Neutra's Kronish House

Photo: An undated historical photo of the 1954 Kronish House, whose condition has since deteriorated. Credit: Associated Press / J. Paul Getty Trust

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Milestone Mo-tel, home away from home at California's first roadside lodging

Road-tripping this holiday weekend? Perhaps it's a good reason to celebrate the design of the Milestone Mo-tel.

For Pasadena developer and architect Arthur S. Heineman, who coined the word “motel” from “motor” and “hotel,” catching the eye of the weary traveler was key. What better way to draw motorists' attention than to create the look of a California mission? Heineman built white stucco buildings with red-tile roofs, a tower inspired by the mission in Santa Barbara and an arcade that emulated nearby Mission San Luis Obispo.

Our Lost L.A. columnist Sam Watters spins the story behind the Milestone Mo-tel, California's first motel.

Photo: The Milestone Mo-tel, circa 1925. Credit: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

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Lost L.A.: A wee bit of Scotland in Exposition Park

The 1921 photo shows Exposition Park in L.A., unrecognizable from the architectural mishmash that stands there today. Why the thatched-roof Scottish cottage, with its “gentle shepherd” welcoming visitors to join in song and dance the Highland Fling? Why the ducklings, the pigs, the chickens and the Guernsey calves, all in the heart of what today is urban L.A.?

Sam Watters has the answer in the latest installment of Lost L.A., our monthly look at the homes and gardens of times past seen through the eyes of contemporary California.

Photo: Museum Archives, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

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Lost L.A.: The Arabella Huntington gallery, a fleeting tribute from husband to wife

It was railroad magnate Henry Huntington's tribute to his late wife, Arabella: the gallery, pictured above, with Italian and Northern Renaissance paintings, French gilded bronzes and inlaid furniture, and other treasured collections lighted by chandeliers inside his San Marino estate. For flourish and authenticity, Henry took the Italian Baroque red velvet that had hung on the walls of the couple's New York home, below, and reinstalled it in his California rare-book library.

For more back story to the Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Art Gallery and to find out its ultimate fate, read the latest installment of our column Lost L.A.

-- Sam Watters

Photo credit, top: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

Photo credit, below: Hispanic Society of America

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Lost L.A.: Short life of a Japanese village

The 1925 photo shows Terminal Island, near the port of Los Angeles. For immigrant families, the single-story, red-shingled bungalows were efficient and affordable. Front porches looked onto goldfish ponds and picket-fence gardens. Streets were named Tuna, Mackerel and Sardine, a nod to the Japanese fishermen who made their homes here.

Sam Watters has the story on the bungalows -- and their ultimate fate -- in his Lost L.A. column on the Japanese village on Terminal Island.

Photo: From the Los Angeles Public Library

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