THOUGH from the beginning music, painting, drama, and architectural design had a part in the life and history of the pueblo of Los Angeles, there has been no continuing line of development in any of the arts. The traditional Spanish culture was gradually diluted in the decades after 1840, and about 1875 was abruptly displaced. It was not until the great numbers of new residents had begun to take root that creative artists appeared and began to turn to the history and esthetic traditions of the region.
The city of Los Angeles has great expanse but little height. It sprawls over the plain in a seemingly interminable series of suburbs from the City Hall, the only building that can be called a skyscraper. Aggressive real-estate promoters, the desire of many new residents from small towns and farms to avoid metropolitan noise and bustle, and the automobile, are responsible for its size. An ordinance, the result of the earthquake possibilities, limits private buildings to the height of 150 feet. This, and the cost of earthquake-proof construction for tall buildings, are responsible for the low sky line.
The downtown commercial buildings are on the whole sedate and commonplace, but elsewhere Los Angeles is architecturally flamboyant, and even discordant. The city contains structures of every style imaginable, a single block often exhibiting half a dozen different treatments.
Los Angeles architecture is characterized by a flare for the eclectic and the unusual. Lacking discipline in the past, this taste has resulted in experiments that frequently were, to say the least, unproductive. But with the growth of local culture and the development of sounder modern designs all over the world, grotesqueries have been giving way to interesting and important innovations. Particularly is this true of domestic architecture. Besides making contributions to the design of the moderately-priced houses that have been adopted in other sections of the country, Los Angeles architects have evolved, through modifications of earlier local styles, certain features that are particularly fitted to the climate and topography of the region. Los Angeles is becoming a center of the modern movement in architectural construction and design.
Early Los Angeles had a simple, almost uniform type of building constructed of the adobe brick the Indians of Mexico had long used for their dwellings. It is doubtful if any formula existed for the making of these bricks, though Donald R. Hannaford and Revel Edwards, in Spanish Colonial or Adobe Architecture of California, have published material on the subject gathered from interviews with descendants of old Spanish families. In the process these people had observed that a basin about twenty feet in diameter and two feet deep was dug in the ground near the building site. Into this was put loam, sand, and clay, together with straw, tile chips, or other binder. After the materials had been stirred to a soupy consistency, the mixture was taken out, put into molds, and dried in the sun.
The design evolved for the California missions was the result of ideas brought from Spain and modified by the experience of the Franciscan padres in Mexico, by the Indian workmen who executed the designs, and by the limitations of the region’s building materials. The patio, the covered passage, and the dome recall plans used in Spain; the pierced belfry, the buttress, and the absence of ornament were results of adobe construction.
Two missions, San Fernando and San Gabriel, were established in what is now the metropolitan area of Los Angeles. Both suffered from disuse after the secularization in the 1830’s. Only the cloister, or living quarters, and church have been preserved at Mission San Fernando; it is evident that the elongated adobe cloister was conceived as a building of majestic proportions, with sweeping horizontal lines accentuated by the archways of a long arcade. The original floor tiles, worn hollow in places, are still in the arcade floor, and hand-wrought ironwork around doors and windows shows the quality of the work of Indian blacksmiths. The original lines of the rear wall of the cloister have been partly obscured by restoration with modern brick, steel, and concrete, and new openings have been cut without apparent plan. The church behind the cloister still contains some of the original hand-hewn rafters. Lying between the church and the living quarters of the fathers are the roofless ruins of other buildings, formerly shops and the like. No attempt has been made to restore them.
The church of Mission San Gabriel appears much as it did when built, although here also old windows have been bricked up and new ones cut. The proportions of the present belfry, which are unsatisfactory in relation to the rest of the church, suggest that the original belfry, which was situated towards the front of the building, was higher. The living quarters of Mission San Gabriel are smaller and less conspicuous than those of San Fernando.
Civil architectural design, springing from the same traditions and using the same materials, repeated the severe, simple lines of the missions. Adobe brick buildings housed the soldiers, officials, and settlers of the pueblos. There seems to have been no effort to complicate their construction or to ornament them. Not all of those that have survived are beautiful, but most of them are characterized by a simplicity of design that comes from straightforward methods of solving problems of construction and planning.
The walls were laid on light foundations of stone, if any, and averaged about three feet in thickness on the ground floor with an offset on the inner face of the wall at the upper story decreasing its thickness a foot. The walls of the better houses were covered with mud plaster ; these were heavily whitewashed at least once a year to protect the surface from the effects of rain. The exterior lines were usually broken only by unobtrusive windows, and, in the two-story houses, by a simple balcony. Economy dictated an even greater simplicity for the less elaborate dwellings, producing small houses with flat, pitch-covered roofs and pleasing lines. Usually they were of one, two, or three rooms, built in a row or in the shape of an L, or, less frequently, forming a rectangle with one open side.
The typical plan of the larger houses was well adapted to the simple and hospitable life of the times. On the ground floor were the living room, dining room, kitchen, storage rooms, and the veranda from which stairs led to the balcony. All bedrooms were usually on the second floor and were entered from the balcony, besides being intercommunicating. Doors opened onto the patio, a wholly or semienclosed interior court inherited from southern Spain. Planted with flowers and sometimes having a fountain, the patio was a social center used almost as much for living as was the house. The Pio Pico mansion in Montebello, a rambling structure with a patio, built about 1824, is probably the best example of a large adobe still standing in the Los Angeles area.
During the Mexican period many of the larger houses served a double purpose: they were both residences and government offices. Thus the Abel Stearns’ palacio was also the prefect’s office, and the curate’s house of the Church of Our Lady of the Angels was a jail. The only building used entirely for official purposes was the Government House, an adobe built in the early 1830’s.
Before 1850 the Yankee traders, drawn to California largely by the trade in hides and tallow, had begun the blending of New England traditions with those native to California, which resulted in an outstanding subdivision of early California design—the Monterey. Essentially a Spanish adobe structure with woodwork from New England, the most distinguishing feature of the Monterey house was the covered frame balcony projecting from the main facade. One-and two-story porches on several sides of the house were also common.
By 1850 clay bricks were being manufactured locally and were soon being used in nonecclesiastical buildings. Usually brick structures followed the lines of the adobes. The two-story buildings, however, differed from those of native design, and followed the design of buildings in the East. Frame construction gained popularity a few years later when Los Angeles began to import quantities of lumber from the Pacific Northwest. The traditional frame house of the East and the equally traditional wooden store of the frontier with its false second-story facade, became common—even fashionable. Board-and-batten construction, in which planks were nailed upright with the intervening cracks covered by thin wood strips, was likewise used extensively at this time.
The wave of building after the Civil War gave Los Angeles many office buildings and hotels two and three stories high. The builders, for the most part being easterners, naturally followed the prevailing eastern vogue for curlicues, gables, and mansard roofs. Some of the buildings of this period still standing in the northern end of the business district indicate the lack of trained architects in Los Angeles in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and they show that the plague of overornamentation current at the time was not confined to the East. In residential areas, bay windows bulged from almost every fashionable house; pillars supported little or nothing; colored glass ornamented the doors and windows.
In the nineties architects and engineers came to Los Angeles from the East in increasing numbers, bringing new architectural ideas. Buildings grew taller, their height tending to minimize their overornamentation. In 1898 the city’s first structural steel building was erected, the Homer Laughlin building, still standing in 1940. The introduction of structural steel helped to terminate a period of garishness that had lasted for nearly thirty years. Around 1900, builders began to modify the harshness of the new type of structure by grouping windows and introducing light wells.
At the turn of the century an innovation, the bungalow, was introduced from the Far East, and adapted to local needs; the California bungalow gained nation-wide popularity. The stuccoed house was also developed and the design was called Mission style. The Mission style house can be studied for the most part only in photographs, but the bungalow still stands in the older sections of the city—a one-story structure of shingles or redwood siding, frequently with pergolas, occasionally with curved roof lines inspired by the Oriental, and often a front porch supported by cobblestone piers. In its heyday, the California bungalow was almost a symbol of southern California.
Adaptations of American Colonial, French, and English styles appeared shortly after 1900, as highly trained Beaux Arts architects came to Los Angeles from the East. A wave of building in the Swiss chalet style began about 1908, followed soon after by “Dutch” Colonial.
Los Angeles was diverted from the eclectic paths being followed in the East largely through the introduction and wide acceptance of traditional Mexican, Spanish, and Italian Mediterranean designs and motifs. For this diversion Bertram G. Goodhue was largely responsible. A New York architect who had revived traditional designs in the East, Goodhue recognized the fitness of traditional Mexican design for the Southwest. He became chief architect of the San Diego Exposition in 1915, which popularized the revival, just as the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 had popularized a revival of Greek and Roman motifs. His adaptations of Mexican ecclesiastical architecture, a combination of plain surfaces and elaborately carved ornament, directed scores of southern California architects to the Spanish-Colonial revival.
Early southern California efforts in the Mexican tradition were for the most part clumsy, and contrasted sharply with the restrained and tasteful work in the Spanish tradition developed a few years later by George Washington Smith. Smith’s own house, constructed in Santa Barbara about 1920, influenced other architects and helped establish a new version of design in the Spanish tradition in southern California. Plans for his house were inspired by the rural buildings of Spanish Andalusia; besides establishing the intimate relationship between house and garden by means of the patio, it was notable for its simplicity and proportions. The work of Elmer Grey and Myron Hunt also had an important bearing on the southern California trend toward designs based on old Mediterranean examples.
Italian adaptations were also evolved during this period, more formal and monumental than the Spanish; but interest was growing in early California structures, caused to some degree by the gradual vulgarization of the Mediterranean styles in untrained hands. Among the first architects to turn toward California’s earlier buildings were Reginald Johnson and Roland Coate, who about 1925 began to draw inspiration from the old buildings, particularly those in Monterey because the best examples remaining are in that town. The new southern California designers in what became known as the Monterey style added such details as ornamental cast iron on balconies, inspired by the elaborate iron grills of New Orleans.
Eclecticism is still the keynote. Although the Mediterranean tradition has declined, the Monterey-Early California style shows no signs of decreasing. It is particularly evident in the one-story house constructed entirely of wood. Stucco is the most common exterior surfacing, although brick, stone and wood boarding, vertical boarding, and shingles are common. Adapted American Colonial and English Georgian designs are also prevalent. But in nearly all designs and combinations of designs, such local influences as the patio, low pitch of roofs, large window space, and bright colors, have caused modifications.
Adherents of the modern school that emphasizes a restatement of values and a more logical use of materials and accessories have been growing in influence. They have been particularly strong in the field of domestic architecture since the early thirties, and today Los Angeles is becoming internationally known for its many houses exhibiting the modern trend. This is largely the result of the work of two European-trained architects, Richard J. Neutra and R. M. Schindler, and a group of men under their leadership. During the past few years this group has won many prizes in national competitions. The exteriors of their structures display decks stressing the horizontal line and contrasting vertical surfaces of concrete and glass, which are especially striking when the house projects from the side or top of a hill. The interiors are usually based on a floor plan of flowing room spaces, with wide expanses of glass increasing the effect of cool airiness.
Possibly the best example of Neutra’s work is the Beard House on Meadowbrook Road in Altadena. It is of steel, glass, and concrete, no wood having been used in its construction. Frank Lloyd Wright, a pioneer in the field of functional design, planned five residences in the Los Angeles area, but his effect upon public taste as evidenced in local houses has not been great. With the exception of the Millard House (La Miniatura) in Pasadena, and possibly the Barnsdall residence on Olive Hill, now occupied by the California Art Club, Wright’s local houses are not considered the best examples of his work.
The worst of southern California’s stucco bungalows—and there are many acres of them that are ugly—have been the result of speculative builders’ efforts to keep abreast of recurrent waves of newcomers. There is a growing tendency, however, for the speculative builder to follow a few standard floor plans and designs that for the most part are imitative of the work of prominent architects. As a consequence, though lagging behind the professionally designed house, the cheaper residences have improved in appearance and utility in recent years. A number of Los Angeles architects, including H. Roy Kelley, are widely recognized for improving small-home architecture.
Commercial building activities were released during the early twenties in a building boom of tremendous impetus that did not subside until after the economic collapse of 1929. Office buildings, factories, and stores sprang up in surrounding areas as well as downtown. This was the period that produced most of Los Angeles’ domed and turreted filling stations, wayside hot dog stands designed to resemble unhappy pups, mammoth ice cream cones, Egyptian temples, baskets of fruit, and piebald pigs. But the tendency of that day was for a minimum of ornament; narrower windows, often recessed; vertical lines; concrete surfaces. And in factories and industrial plants prettification and excrescence were kept down to a minimum. One of the most interesting of the modern industrial structures is the Douglas Aircraft Company hangar at Santa Monica, designed by Taylor and Taylor, where the vast swing of the cantilever construction suggests the soaring lines of flight.
Several of Los Angeles’ civic buildings constructed in the late twenties and early thirties seek, within the limits imposed by reinforced concrete construction, to maintain the traditional appearance of massivity of structure, the most conspicuous example being the City Hall. The Central Public Library, characteristic of Goodhue’s work in the field of civic architecture, is also massive but restrained, and the new Acute Unit of the County Hospital, and the Los Angeles Times building, the latter designed to harmonize with the adjacent Civic Center, are characteristic of recent commercial and public construction.
An unhappy recent trend is the “moderne” facade, which utilizes polished steel, chromium, curved glass, mirrors, glass blocks, and concrete in what the designers believe to be a startling up-to-dateness. Usually, as seen in many renovated stores along Hollywood Boulevard, these superimposed decorations are both garish and unconvincing. Several attractive buildings, however, have been erected in Hollywood recently: notably the Columbia Broadcasting System Center, designed by William Lescaze, and the National Broadcasting Company’s new building of sweeping horizontal lines combined with glass and metal trim.
In the Wilshire Boulevard shopping district are several well-designed modern structures, including Bullock’s Wilshire department store, which displays an exterior of buff terra cotta and green metal, and I. Magnin’s, a lavish structure with a modernized exterior of classic simplicity and restraint.
In the construction of large commercial buildings Los Angeles is notable for its broad and in some ways original use of structural reinforced concrete and exposed concrete as a finished surface. Because of the high cost of importing structural steel, and the low cost of the plentiful cement, many downtown buildings, including the Paramount Theatre building, the Million Dollar Theatre building, and the Philharmonic Auditorium, are of reinforced concrete construction. When the Second Church of Christ, Scientist, was constructed in 1905-6, its massive dome, a single shell of reinforced concrete, was the only reinforced concrete structure with this feature in the United States. The earthquake hazard has decreased the use of brick and increased the use of this type of concrete construction in recent years.
Most of the churches in Los Angeles are of traditional design, for the most part in the Italian Renaissance and Gothic styles. An example is the St. James Episcopal Church in South Pasadena, designed by Goodhue and combining Tuscan Renaissance design with English Gothic detail. Spanish-Colonial influence is, however, discernible in several of the newer churches, among them the Church of St. Vincent de Paul on West Adams Boulevard. One of the city’s largest synagogues, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, is of Romanesque inspiration with a dome bearing bright terra-cotta tile mosaics.
In the field of school architecture, attempts to relate the plans to both climate and material have been highly successful. After southern California was belatedly awakened to the need for more soundly constructed schools by the 1933 earthquake, which damaged scores of brick school buildings, a large building program was at once drawn up. The architects were influenced by progressive ideas in education and by an appreciation of the possibilities for outdoor school activity in the region, as well as by the necessity for safe construction. Today, attractively landscaped playgrounds, flat roofs, and a spreading arrangement of one-and two-story buildings have become standard in local schools.
In recent years civic groups and architects have joined forces in a movement to extend the present Civic Center, the only actual stone-and-steel realization of many nebulous proposals for city planning. A plan for the Center, prepared by John C. Austin in 1938 for the Los Angeles County Development Committee, envisions development of the new Center within the area bounded by First, Alameda, Ord and Olive Streets, and the replacement of many shabby and dilapidated structures by public buildings, broad streets and parkways. The County Board of Supervisors in 1939 petitioned the Public Works Administration for a Federal grant to carry the project to completion.
Some architects, however, have condemned the plan, saying that the irregular topography of the site is incompatible with the massive formality of arrangement and structure, that the governmental buildings forming the present Center are unrelated in bulk, scale, and character, and that the completed Center will present an incongruous collection of architecturally heterogeneous types.
Through the administration of zoning measures, the City Planning Commission has urged adoption of a more comprehensive city plan designed to bring order out of the chaos engendered by industrial expansion, renewed subdivision activity, and the lack of adequate transportation facilities. Four new zone maps compiled by the Commission from 1936 to 1938 raised the total zoned area to 269 square miles, or 59 per cent of the total area of the city. The present-day trend in rezoning is toward a more restrictive classification, a movement which has been given added impetus through the Federal Housing Administration’s insistence on zoning protection as a requirement for mortgage insurance.
One of the most pressing problems confronting the city today arises from the need for inexpensive but soundly constructed dwellings. Los Angeles housing conditions for low-income groups are somewhat better than those in the crowded population centers of the East; the vast area over which the city is spread permits most families to obtain at least air and sunlight. The city has its share of slums, nevertheless, and its problem of ground rents in blighted areas. Such low-cost housing efforts as have so far been undertaken by Los Angeles County are Federal Housing projects in outlying areas. One is planned for the San Pedro area, one on Atlantic Boulevard near Long Beach, and one in Belvedere Gardens in east Los Angeles. Several privately financed housing projects have been planned or are under construction, including one near Boyle Heights and one in San Gabriel.
Well-planned towns are not a novelty in southern California. Beverly Hills was laid out in 1906, and there are half a dozen other beautifully situated communities with building restrictions including San Clemente, and San Marino. A development in connection with these communities of the wealthy is the use of architectural juries—a group of architects, generally engaged by the developers of the area, to pass on the suitability of proposed residences. This custom has since been adopted by promoters of less expensive subdivisions.
The new low-cost housing projects, designed to bring well-planned and esthetically pleasing houses within the reach of low-income families, are of both architectural and social significance. But there are other factors contributing to a promising outlook for Los Angeles architecture. The restless search for the new and different, which during the twenties resulted in such things as lavender stucco houses with Moorish minarets, has also brought about a ready acceptance of new efforts to make architecture a true expression of the life of the community. Los Angeles lacks the strong tendency to cling to traditional paths that in many other parts of the country has partially barred the way to new architectural ideas. It is clear that a large part of Los Angeles’ buildings are ill-adapted to their function and their surroundings. It is less obvious but certainly significant that there are new ideas in the air, a steady and intelligent adaptation of old ones, and much architectural enthusiasm. Consequently Los Angeles seems likely to develop a sane, well-related architecture that will benefit the whole population.
Music played a vital and intimate part in the everyday lives of southern California Indians. Their music was characterized by the use of many unfamiliar scales, resembling in their pattern no recognized tonal system, and their primitive instruments fluctuated in pitch; vocal intonation was uncertain with the result that subtly differing scale successions were achieved that cannot be duplicated by the twelve fixed keys of the piano. Their patterns were more complex than those of many other American tribes, and were at times curiously suggestive of syncopation. Each song was a series of phrases or measure repetitions, often with melodic ornaments and variations of rhythm that suggest the plaintive Oriental music. Their instruments included flutes blown with the mouth or nose, rattles made of shells or dried skins filled with pebbles, crude drums, wooden clappers, and musical bows that the Indians played so expertly that they are said to have been able to “talk” and make love with them.
When the Indians began to come under the influence of the Franciscan missionaries in the late 18th century, they were taught to intone in Latin for church ceremonies and to play bow instruments, and the guitar and mandolin. The Franciscans tried to induce them to give up their tribal ceremonies and heathen music, but these persisted and have been seen in isolated places until such recent times that the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles has been able to preserve many songs by phonograph recording. These records made in 1900 on cylinders are too worn to be used today, but some of the best have been converted into musical scores available in albums collected by Arthur Farwell.
Spanish and Mexican folk songs were the music of Los Angeles for some seventy years after the founding of the city in 1781. Of the lazy, carefree pueblo, Charles F. Lummis, devoted collector of southwestern folklore, wrote: “There was no paying $5 to be seen chattering in satin while some Diva sang her highest. There was no Grand Opera—and no fool songs. There were Songs of the Soil, and songs of poets and of troubadours, in this far, lone, beautiful, happy land; and songs that came over from Mother Spain and up from Stepmother Mexico. But everybody sang; and a great many made their own songs, or verses to other songs. . . . They felt music, and arrived at it.”
When the Yankee invaders arrived in 1847, the music-loving Californios as usual celebrated the occasion with a song. The lyric, whose words were Spanish with the exception of the English “Kiss me!” and “Yes!” is translated as follows:
“Ay! here come the Yankees!
Ay! they’re here, you see.
Come and let’s dispense with
All formality.
“Already the senoritas
Speak English with finesse.
‘Kiss me!’ say the Yankees.
The girls all answer: ‘Yes!’”
When at first the Mexicans showed resentment toward their American conquerors, a person familiar with native psychology offered Commodore Jones, the Yankee commander, this bit of advice: “You have a fine band of music; such a thing was never before in this country. Let it play one hour in the Plaza each day at sunset, and I assure you it will do more toward reconciling the people than all your written proclamations, which, indeed, but few of them could read.” The suggestion was taken, with satisfactory results.
The Spanish and Mexican songs lived on for a time under American rule. But after the American influx of the seventies the younger generations of Angelenos adopted Yankee ways and Yankee music and the traditional melodies were gradually forgotten. Most of them exist today only on phonograph records made by Lummis, who for the Southwest Museum recorded more than 450 songs that were sung for him by survivors of the old era.
During the fifties and sixties much of the town’s musical entertainment was provided by military and civilian brass bands, with occasional visits by light opera companies from Mexico and traveling minstrel shows. Los Angeles also heard its share of gambling house “orchestras” with Mexican-Indian players, who according to Horace Bell, chronicler of that boisterous epoch, “sent forth most discordant sound, by no means in harmony with the eternal jingle of gold.” At the same time, Los Angeles began singing such ballads brought in by the pioneers as The New Eldorado.
During the seventies Los Angeles gradually shed the crudeness of its first Yankee days and began to settle down, but it was not until the boom times of the middle eighties, when thousands of settlers flocked in, that Los Angeles became an American community and began to develop the cultural institutions long established in the East. Music made by the people was supplanted by music given by professionals in concert halls, theatres, and opera houses. Road shows came in increasing numbers, and virtually all of the world’s then famous artists included southern California in their tours.
The first serious effort toward the appreciation of classical music began with a series of chamber music concerts given in private homes by such family groups as the Heines and by the Haydn Quartet, formed by Harley Hamilton, the city’s musical leader during the eighties and nineties. Shortly after the turn of the century Alice Coleman (active today as Mrs. Ernest Coleman Balchelden) and Blanche Rogers (now Mrs. Clifford Lott), two talented young pianists, took the lead in promoting chamber music; Miss Coleman founded Pasadena’s Coleman Concerts and Miss Rogers the Los Angeles Chamber Music Society. In 1910 Albert C. Bilicke, a local music patron, brought Adolph Tandler, Rudolph Kopp, and Axel Simonson from Vienna; they with Ralph Wylie, became the Brahms Quartet. The Saint-Saens Quintet was organized in 1910; the quintet’s cellist, William A. Clark, Jr., became so interested in promoting public appreciation of music that he later founded and financed the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
The early chamber music groups helped to build up support for symphony orchestras though most of the orchestras had brief histories. One—the Woman’s Symphony Orchestra, organized in 1895 by Harley Hamilton—has continued to function and is today the oldest orchestral group on the Pacific coast. Two years later Hamilton formed the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. This organization, despite early financial troubles, survived twenty-three consecutive seasons, after which its place in the city’s musical life was filled by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1919 by William A. Clark, Jr., with L. E. Behymer as manager. Walter Henry Rothwell was conductor until his death in 1927. The Philharmonic Orchestra has high rank among the orchestras of the country. Under the permanent direction of Otto Klemperer it now (1939) plays at the Philharmonic Auditorium during the winter and at Hollywood Bowl in summer.
The Hollywood Bowl idea had its inception with the presentation of Julius Caesar in a natural amphitheater in Beachwood Canyon, Hollywood, May 19, 1916. The production was a charity affair, directed by Raymon Wells and the cast included such notables as Tyrone Power, Sr., W. De Wolf Hopper, William Farnum, Frank Keenan, Theodore Roberts, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mae Murray. Other dramatic ventures followed, and in 1918 the Theater Alliance was organized under the guidance of L. E. Behymer following which the first concert was presented in what is now Hollywood Bowl in 1922. A world-wide campaign was instituted and by 1923 sufficient funds had been received to pay off all obligations against the new institution. Many notable artists have appeared in the Bowl including Lawrence Tibbett, who was reared in Los Angeles. The operatic and concert baritone made his debut there in September, 1923, as Amonasro in Aída.
Since the days when music-lovers had to sit on lap robes on the dusty hillsides, down to 1938, attendance at musical events in the Bowl has steadily increased. By 1939 there were seats for an audience of twenty thousand and every modern facility for the presentation and the enjoyment of music. In the Bowl during the summer season are given the Symphonies under the Stars of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The list of operas, concerts, and other musical events given in the Bowl during its seventeen years is impressive. Among the conductors at the Bowl’s summer concerts have been Eugene Goossens, Alfred Hertz, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Bruno Walter, Ernest Bloch, Pierre Monteux, Albert Coates, Leopold Stokowski, Willem van Hoogstraten, Sir Henry Wood, Hans Kindler, Jose Iturbi, Bernardino Molinari, and Otto Klemperer.
Choral groups, both secular and religious, have for years contributed much to the city’s cultural life. Among the several choral societies founded before 1900 was the Euterpe Male Quartet, progenitor of the present Orpheus Club. The Women’s Lyric Club, organized in 1903, is still in existence. Preeminent today is the Los Angeles Oratorio Society, formed in 1912 as the People’s Chorus. John Smallman, who became the conductor in 1918, exerted wide influence on choral organizations throughout the country until his death in 1937. Active in Los Angeles today are many excellent church choirs, including the First Congregational Church chorus of one hundred voices, which in addition to its church work annually presents a two-day Bach festival, including a performance of the Messiah.
Musical education in Los Angeles schools and colleges during the last two decades is partly responsible for the growing music-consciousness of the city. Nearly sixty thousand pupils are enrolled in various music courses in Los Angeles junior and senior high schools. Most universities and colleges in the Los Angeles area maintain choirs and glee clubs, and the larger institutions, such as the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles, have excellent bands and symphony orchestras. U.C.L.A. presents frequent concerts by vocalists and instrumentalists and daily organ recitals that are free to students.
Attracted by opportunities to work in sound motion pictures, singers, instrumentalists, and composers have come to Los Angeles from many parts of the world, many of them to make their homes here. Among the resident musicians who have done screen and radio work in local studios are Lawrence Tibbett, Grace Moore, Marion Talley, Nelson Eddy, Tito Schipa, Amelita Galli-Curci, Gladys Swarthout, and Jascha Heifetz. The composers employed by Hollywood studios have included Jerome Kern, George Antheil, George Gershwin, Robert Russell Bennett, Irving Berlin, Werner Janssen, Richard Hageman, Herbert Stothart, Sigmund Romberg, Deems Taylor, Max Steiner, Alfred New-man, and Victor Young. Today millions of people throughout the world hear a good part of their music in movie theatres, and most of it is produced in Hollywood.
Among composers now living in southern California but not identified with the film studios are Charles Wakefield Cadman, Elinor Remick Warren, Fannie Charles Dillon, Mary Carr Moore, Homer Grunn, Kathleen Lockhart Manning, Joseph Clokey, Oscar Rasbach, Gertrude Ross, William Grant Still, Edgar Varese, noted for his lavish use of percussion; the modernist Ernest Toch; Arnold Schoenberg, and many others. Several of the most prominent figures in the Los Angeles music world, including Schoenberg, Toch, and Klemperer, are Germans and Austrians.
During 1938 and 1939 one of the most active musical organizations in the city was the Federal Music Project, formed in 1935 under Dr. Bruno David Ussher to assist unemployed musicians. The Los Angeles project, largest in California, has employed more than 900 people at a time and maintained symphony and concert orchestras, a Negro concert band and two white symphonic bands, operatic units, choruses, dance orchestras, teaching units, and operatic production staffs. Operas and symphonies have been presented commercially and music appreciation programs have been given in public schools and city and county recreational departments, and band concerts in public parks.
The grand opera unit, which had an extensive repertoire, presented the world premiere of Felix Borowski’s Fernando del Nonsentsico, a satire on classical grand opera, and gave the first performance west of the Mississippi of Deems Taylor’s The King’s Henchman. The light opera group notably presented Auber’s Fra Diavolo (with an all-Negro cast), Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pinafore and Mikado, and world premieres of Barbecue Isle by Homer Grunn and Gay Grenadiers by C. Warner Van Valkenburg and Vern Elliott.
The project’s symphony orchestra presented numerous new American compositions, and introduced to Los Angeles many symphonic compositions, among them Strauss’ tone poem Macbeth and Gettysburg, scored by Arthur Robinson with lyrics by Morris Ruger. An outstanding success of the Los Angeles project, working in conjunction with the Federal Theatre Project, was the presentation of its Negro chorus of eighty voices (Carlyle Scott, founder-director), in Hall Johnson’s folk-opera Run Little Chillun.
Popular music—ragtime followed by jazz—came to Los Angeles after the turn of the century, when “hot” music from the South started a national craze. The early careers of many band leaders and musicians, and popular singers are associated with the city. Paul Whiteman used to play at the beach resorts with an itinerant band whose members walked about among the crowds with a big can into which dancers tossed coins; Bing Crosby was hired by Whiteman as one of the “Three Rhythm Boys,” then went to the East where he gained renown in radio before he was “rediscovered” by Hollywood; Kenny Baker, Abe Lyman, Gus Arnheim, Jimmy Grier, Donald Novis, and Mildred Bailey have also worked here in their earlier days.
Popular song composers from Tin Pan Alley in New York began a trek to Hollywood in the twenties, when studios began making sound pictures. Songs are usually written to order for a particular film. Many of the studios have close tie-ups with large sheet-music houses, whose branch offices in Los Angeles publish songs from motion pictures. Because of the wide circulation of the movies and the incessant “plugging” of hit songs from current films on radio programs, the music produced in Hollywood is probably heard by more people throughout the world than all the music composed in Tin Pan Alley.
Los Angeles ranks second in the nation in the production of popular phonograph records, which are manufactured in local plants maintained by eastern companies. Transcriptions of musical shows for radio programs are also produced in large numbers. These “platters” have replaced many “live talent” programs and find a rapidly growing market in foreign countries as well as at home. Variety estimates that between 85 and 90 per cent of the transcriptions exported to English-speaking countries are made in Hollywood.
In sheer number of writers and quantity of work produced, Los Angeles is today a literary capital of the first magnitude. Scores of well-known authors and hundreds of obscure ones live in and around the city, turning out many millions of words annually for books, pulp and slick magazines, motion pictures, the stage, and radio broadcasts. But as to the quality of its output, and the extent of its truly native literature, Los Angeles has yet to attain the stature of a true literary center. Few of its writers are mentioned in standard histories of American letters; few have identified themselves and their works with the local scene; and of those who have, most have been undistinguished.
The reason for this is that culturally the area is comparatively young. During almost the whole of its first hundred years Los Angeles was a small provincial town in remote country. Communication with the outside world, and especially with the artistic world, was slow and infrequent. The townsfolk, first the Spaniards and Mexicans and then the early American settlers, had neither time nor inclination for literary activities. As a result, the period from the founding of the city in 1781 to the publication of Ramona, more than a century later, was almost wholly unproductive of anything that can properly be termed literature.
Travelers’ journals, memoirs of early settlers, descriptive accounts of the region, and local newspaper writings were virtually the only fruits of these long years. The first person to describe the Los Angeles area was Father Juan Crespi, whose diary is a valuable record of the Portola expedition of 1769-70. The earliest known description by an American did not appear until almost forty years later, when William Shaler (1773-1833), a Boston sea captain, wrote a report of his visit to the California coast for the American Register. At long intervals other accounts of the strange and little-known land followed. Among the most interesting was the description of San Pedro Harbor in Richard Henry Dana’s (1815-1882) Two Years Before the Mast, first published in 1840. Dana was not at all impressed by his first sight of the region: “We all agreed that it was the worst place we had seen yet.” It was while the Pilgrim lay at San Pedro that the brutal flogging of two sailors took place as recorded in his book. Other accounts of southern California appeared in Alfred Robinson’s (1806-1895) Life in California (1846), one of the first books on this region to reach a large audience in the United States; Edwin Bryant’s (1805-1869) What I Saw in California (1848), an entertaining record of the author’s experiences with the American Army of occupation; and A Flower from the Golden Land by Ludwig Salvator (1847-1915), an Austrian archduke who visited southern California in 1876 and whose book was the first work on Los Angeles to have wide European circulation.
Outstanding among pre-Ramona publications is the uproarious Reminiscences of a Ranger (1881) by Major Horace Bell (1830-1918), a fiery, crusading editor with a flair for Gargantuan humor and caricature. Bell’s rollicking accounts of events and personalities in the boisterous Los Angeles of the fifties and sixties are generally unorthodox and questionable, but they probably give a truer picture of those incredible times than any sober chronicle can. A further volume of Bell’s memoirs, On the Old West Coast, was published posthumously in 1930.
The first local newspaper, La Estrella de Los Angeles (The Star of Los Angeles), deserves mention not only for having been the town’s chief source of reading matter for almost three decades, but also because it contains writing that is peculiarly expressive of the life and times. Founded in 1851, the paper was printed in English and Spanish until 1855, then in English only until its demise in 1879. Local news was often reported with considerable humor and even sarcasm, as in the issue of February 19, 1853, which related: “On Tuesday of last week we had four weddings, two funerals, one street fight with knives, a lynch court, two men flogged, and a serenade by a callithumpian band; also a fist fight and one man tossed in a blanket. If any of the flourishing up-country towns can hold a candle to that, let them do it forthwith or forever hold their peace.” Editorials were frequently vigorous and full of vivid vituperation, particularly during the Civil War when the paper, like most of the town, openly favored the South. An issue of 1863 contained the blast: “Abe Lincoln ‘honest’! Why his every act, from the hour of his departure from Springfield to Washington to begin his saturnalia of blood, till the prsent day, has been replete with gross and palpable deception. . . . When an obscure, fourth-rate lawyer at the Illinois capitol, pettifogging for a livelihood and retailing stale jokes and anecdotes for pastime, he was, probably, ‘Honest Abe.’ . . . But association with corruption has changed the man.” That the booster spirit was rampant even in those early days is shown in an item of 1873, entitled “What Nature Has Done” (for Los Angeles) : “She has given us the love-chanting mockingbird, the canary . . . to sing in our groves, . . . She has given us . . . the lime, the orange, and the olive, and in splendid wedding has blended together all that is good, harmonious or lovely in the earth, the sea and the air.”
The Star ceased publication in the late 1870’s, and soon afterward there appeared the Porcupine, a weekly “journalistic scourge” edited by the redoubtable Horace Bell. This paper of the eighties and nineties crusaded for all kinds of civic improvements, muckraked all manner of graft and scandal, and violently attacked various public figures, from the local sheriff to the Prince of Wales. In an era otherwise devoid of any good writing, the Porcupine deserves some mention for its masterful invective.
During the eighties and nineties appeared a number of books designed to acquaint the eastern traveler or settler with the wonders of California. Charles Nordhoff (1830-1901), grandfather of the Nordhoff of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, wrote five books about California, the most important, California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence (1882), giving a detailed account of the colony settlements, the cultivation of the grapes, oranges, and olives of southern California, and the methods of irrigation. Our Italy (1892) by Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), describes among other things the commercial and climatic assets of southern California, the price of land, and the prospects for laborers and small farmers. In Old Mexico and Her Lost Provinces (1883) William Henry Bishop (1847-1928), devotes a chapter to Los Angeles, dismissing it as “only another San Jose.” Between the Gates (1878), by Benjamin F. Taylor (1819-1887), includes a romantic and florid account of a trip to southern California. Theodore S. Van Dyke (1842-1923) wrote three books on the Los Angeles region: Rifle, Rod and Gun in California (1890) includes a technical description of southern California game; Millionaires of a Day (1890) is an account of the great southern California boom; and Southern California (1896) describes in detail almost every aspect of topography, climate, and game, as well as “hints” on migrating to California.
The publication in 1884 of Helen Hunt Jackson’s (1831-1885) novel, Ramona, marked the real beginning of Los Angeles literature, making the fiction-reading public conscious for the first time of southern California’s life and historical background. It created a demand for works based on this locale, and acquainted writers with the remarkable possibilities of the region. At the same time, however, the city was undergoing a radical change in character, which was soon to change the scene Mrs. Jackson had described but make it far more receptive to cultural development. In place of the uncouth and illiterate small town of Mexican and early American days, there was now a rapidly-growing and comparatively articulate city, connected by rail with the eastern United States and receiving therefrom not only immigrants but also cultural influences.
Mrs. Jackson, a New Englander, came to Los Angeles in the early eighties to investigate the condition of the Mission Indians and to write a series of articles on southern California for Century Magazine. Her articles, later published in a book called Glimpses of California and the Missions (1883), are a storehouse of the results of original research that has been utilized and even plagiarized. It was her sympathy for the Indians, however, and in fact for the old order as a whole in its conflict with American aggression, that led to the writing of Ramona. “I am going to write a novel,” Mrs. Jackson is reputed to have said, “in which will be set forth some Indian experiences in a way to move people’s hearts.” Much of the work was done while she was a guest at the charming old adobe mansion of Don Antonio F. Coronel, which stood on what is now the bustling corner of Alameda and Seventh Streets. In 1885, a few months after the publication of her book, “H.H.” died in San Francisco, unaware that she had produced a romance which was to play an incalculable part in attracting people to southern California.
It is perhaps a commentary on the youthfulness of southern California literature that the first novel to come out of this region is still by all odds the best-known and best-loved. Despite its artistic faults, its dated style, and Victorian sentimentality, Ramona has gone through more than 130 printings; it has been filmed time and again, in silent, sound, and color motion pictures; it has been played on the stage, and is performed annually in a pageant at Hemet.
Ramona can be said to have inaugurated the “local color” school of writing that dominated Los Angeles literary circles until well into the twentieth century. This is not to say that writers of that so-called middle period followed the Ramona formula; on the contrary, they produced few historical romances. But most of their work—whether novels, short stories, poems, or articles—was based on picturesque aspects of the local life and scene, especially old-time ones: legends, Indians, padres, ranchos, animal and plant life, beautiful scenery—all viewed through fond, sentimental eyes in which quaintness and romance loomed large.
The leader of the regional school was Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859-1928), literary oracle of Los Angeles for three decades. A New Englander and a newspaperman, Lummis arrived in southern California in 1884 after walking 3,500 miles on a roundabout route from Cincinnati. He proceeded to steep himself in southwestern life with such energy and devotion that he soon became more “native” than most born Californians. He wrote constantly (“too many hours a day,” as Mary Austin put it) about California, Arizona, and New Mexico; he founded and edited a magazine, served as City Librarian for five years, helped found the Southwest Museum, founded the Landmarks Club, collected Indian and Spanish relics and folksongs, laboring for his adopted country with staggering enthusiasm. He became paralyzed for a time and just before the end of his life went blind. Lummis’ magazine, The Land of Sunshine—later called Out West, crystallized and directed western literary trends by encouraging California writers to take advantage of the wealth of inspiration in their own environment. “The local field,” he wrote in 1897, literally boundless—the longer I look at it the deeplier I feel this. What we do lack is the people to exploit it—and I am now trying to vaccinate a few of the really competent people we have on the Coast and to get them to group.” A large number of southern California literary folk, whom he thus “vaccinated,” revolved around Lummis, forming a virtual salon at his home, El Alisal, which he built largely with his own hands on the bank of the Arroyo Seco in Highland Park.
Lummis was by no means a first-rate literary artist, but he was a good storyteller and reporter, with a style that was virile though sentimental. Of his numerous books, including The Spanish Pioneers (1893), The Enchanted Burro (1897), A Bronco Pegasus (1928), and Flowers of Our Lost Romance (1929), few are read today, but they are likely to retain value through the years as repositories of southwestern lore.
A similar appraisal can be made of the best works of other writers belonging to the regional traditions: Charles Francis Saunders (1859—), George Wharton James (1858-1923), and John Steven McGroarty (1862—), to name a few. Some fiction was produced by this group and also by resident and visiting writers who were not identified with the regional school. Most of such work, however, was run-of-the-mill stuff which has long since been forgotten. Among the few authors who dealt competently with the southern California scene were Gertrude Atherton (1857—), Peter B. Kyne (1880—), and Mary Austin (1868-1934). The latter was a member of the Lummis colony during her early years of writing, and among her first ventures into print were several poems in The Land of Sunshine.
Even before Lummis’ death in 1928 the local-color school had begun to decline. Its passing was due in some degree to the city’s change of character, and even more to the international change in literary values. The boom of the twenties metamorphosed Los Angeles in a few years from a medium-sized city with a fairly stable population to a metropolis peopled by heterogeneous multitudes. Many things dear to the hearts of old-time Angelenos were submerged, among them the physical evidences of the region’s past history, as well as many of its distinctive folkways. The national literary taste, moreover, was switching from sentimental romanticism to realism, and this trend naturally affected southern California.
Today, and in fact since the post-war period, Los Angeles has become a huge word factory. Fiction, particularly, is turned out on a mass-production scale. Writers from all over the world have been drawn here by the motion pictures and later by the radio studios, as well as by the climate, the natural scene and the growing cultural activity. The work produced by these comparative newcomers is so varied that most of it can be classed as “Los Angeles” only because it happens to be written here, and most of it as “literature” only by courtesy. The latter is especially true of film and radio fiction, not only because it is ephemeral but also because much of it is rewrite work and hence not original. But the products of the Hollywood writers reach an audience of millions, thus giving them more influence than authors as a group ever had before. Strangely enough, despite their power and the lavish salaries that many of them receive, screen and radio scribes remain virtually anonymous to the general public, their names being overshadowed by those of the stars, producers, and directors.
To give some idea of the varied array of writers who now live or have lived in and about Los Angeles in recent years, it is perhaps sufficient to name outstanding or typical figures in the different fields: Upton Sinclair (1878—), crusading novelist and pamphleteer, whose sixty books have been translated into an average of thirteen foreign languages apiece, making him one of the most widely-read of living authors; Zane Grey (1874-1939), prolific writer of two-gun Western novels; Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875—), creator of Tarzan; Willard Huntington Wright (1888-1939), who signed himself S. S. Van Dine in the detective stories whose hero was Philo Vance; Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933), whose detective was Charlie Chan; Jim Tully (1891—), hobo author of Beggars of Life (1924) and Jarnegan (1926) ; Rupert Hughes (1872—), author of many short stories, novels and a life of George Washington; Hamlin Garland (1860-1940), whose many books, among them Son of the Middle Border (1917), have gained him the title “grand old man of American letters” ; Will Rogers (1879-1935), cowboy philosopher, columnist, and author of The Illiterate Digest (1924) and Letters of a Self-made Diplomat to His President (1926); Eric Temple Bell (1883—), of the California Institute of Technology, who has written adventure novels such as The Purple Sapphire (1924) under the pseudonym of John Taine, as well as Men of Mathematics (1937) and other scientific bestsellers; Paul Jordan Smith (1885—), scholar and critic; June Hildegarde Flanner (1899—), author of A Tree in Bloom (1924) and Time’s Profile (1929); Lewis Browne (1897—), historian and producer of Stranger Than Fiction and The Story of the Jews (1925-26).
Dozens of other names, equally prominent or deserving of mention, might be included. Harry Carr (1877-1936), former Los Angeles columnist, wrote that “The Big Leaguers began to come in during the latter days of silent motion-pictures and the talkies washed them hither in a flood. A large part of the [country’s] literary population now lives in Los Angeles.” Obviously, this legion of writers does not constitute a distinctively southern California “group.” Not only is the work produced here extremely varied, including as it does virtually every type of writing from pulp fiction to scientific treatises, but also the bulk of it is almost wholly lacking in indigenous quality. It could just as well be written anywhere else.
Along with this great heterogeneous mass of writing that Los Angeles pours out, a certain amount of local color material continues to appear. A few of the stories, novels, and other works of this type possess real merit. Notable examples are the desert stories of Edwin Corle (1906—) in his volume entitled Mojave (1934), and his novel, Fig Tree John (1935), which relates with artistry the story of an Indian’s futile hostility toward the encroachments of the whites. In recent years the Lummis tradition of regional writing has been revived to some extent in a more realistic form by the magazine Westways, published since 1909 by the Automobile Club of Southern California and called Touring Topics until 1934. Since the beginning of Phil Townsend Hanna’s (1896—) editorship in 1927, this monthly has included some fiction, and has given special emphasis to material of a regional nature.
The outlook for the emergence of a distinctive regional literature seems favorable. For one thing, southern California offers the writer unusual themes and varied natural settings; a stimulating and romantic history as well as a dynamic contemporary life; and endlessly varied people in process of amalgamation; a wealth of curious customs, peculiar religions, bizarre political movements, and changing social modes. Another and perhaps a more important consideration betokening the eventual development of southern California literature is that the number of native-born Angelenos is rapidly increasing. Of the writers mentioned in this article, almost none are natives of the region; in fact, only a relatively small percentage of Los Angeles residents of middle age were born here. Thus the two or three generations of writers who have made up the city’s brief literary history have been essentially outsiders; their “old home” background has inevitably remained a part of them. But for the constantly growing numbers of native sons and daughters, the only background is southern California. It is their country by right of heritage, not adoption, and it seems reasonable to expect that some of them will write about it with a deeper insight than has so far been manifested.
In their designs and handicrafts the Indians of the Los Angeles area ranked among the less developed North American tribes. A peaceful and docile people, they moved about indolently on the mild, sunny beaches of the coast, feeding on the rich supplies of shellfish and sheltering themselves by the most primitive means. The occasional pottery and weaving produced in this low-grade paradise achieved little distinction in pattern or craftsmanship.
These natives and others brought from nearby sections were taken by the Spaniards into the missions, where they were taught to labor in the fields and buildings. The Indian neophytes, under the tutelage of the padres, painted decorations upon the walls of the missions and carved church implements, ornaments, and figurines. In this work the indigenous spirit became oddly intermingled with European styles and conceptions: the mixture is perhaps best exemplified in the Stations of the Cross series painted on sail-cloth at the San Gabriel Mission before 1779. The mission fathers and neophytes also produced plaques, iron grille work, costumes, tools, textiles, embroideries, and stamped and colored leather work.
In addition to the murals and carvings executed locally, the missions also contained paintings and sculptures from Mexico and Spain; a number of these works are now in Los Angeles institutions.
The dons and senoritas of the great ranchos, which came into existence shortly after the establishment of the missions, had their portraits painted by wandering Spanish and Mexican artists, and purchased silks, embroideries, and household implements from the Spanish homeland and, later, from traders whose ships had touched the ports of China, Russia, and Peru. Silversmiths and harness makers tooled horse trappings and decorated them with silver inlay work in the Mexican style. This influence later made itself felt in the crafts of the early Yankee settlers.
When the expansion of northern California surged forward in the 1850’s, a number of eastern landscape painters mounted the great ranges of the Sierras and descended into the vast valleys of Sacramento and San Joaquin, painting enormous canvases which have since come to be known as the work of the “Heroic School.” This phase of American painting, however, scarcely touched the Los Angeles region, and it was not until the 1880’s, after the coming of the railroads, that local art began its modern development.
William Wachtel arrived in southern California in 1883 and strove to capture the quality of light and color in the neighboring countryside. During the next few years a number of art clubs and organizations sprang up in and about Los Angeles. The Ruskin Art Club was established in 1888; the Los Angeles School of Art opened in 1890; and the Pasadena Academy of Fine Arts in 1897; and in 1903 the Los Angeles Municipal Art Commission was inaugurated.
William Wendt, who settled in California in 1903, painted many landscapes depicting this region in the different seasons of the year. A contemporary of Wendt, J. Bond Francisco, composed notable landscapes of canyons and wooded mountainsides. The influence of these men, especially that of Wendt, survives today among many California landscapists whose favorite study is the play of sunlight in their locality. Among these sound conservatives are Hanson Puthuff, Jack Wilkinson Smith, Edgar Alwin Payne, Benjamin Chambers Brown, and Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel. Other local painters in the traditional style are Alexander Warshawsky, Emile Jean Kosa, Jr., Arthur Millier, Roscoe Schrader, Dana Bartlett, Alson Clark, F. Tolles Chamberlin, Ejnar Hansen, Orrin A. White, Paul Lauritz, the late George K. Brandriff, Clyde Forsythe, Duncan Gleason, the late Gordon Coutts, and Mabel Alvarez.
Before the World War, Guy Rose was doing important work in the impressionist manner, and S. Macdonald Wright had founded a new movement based on his theories of color relations. In these pre-War years the Southwest Museum was organized (1903), with its collection of early California art material, and the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, showing permanent groups of European and American paintings and sculptures, was formally opened in 1913. The Huntington Art Gallery, established in 1919, is renowned for its collection of eighteenth century British art.
The most impressive aspect of Los Angeles art history, however, has been the lively flow of experimentation, both in technique and materials, which has reached its highest level during the past five years. Local artists have shown a creative interest in the new forms emanating from New York and Paris, and large public works of art have made their appearance in the parks, streets, and buildings of Los Angeles. Murals in fresco, tempera, and oil, mosaics, inlays, and monumental sculptures have been sponsored by private agencies and by the Federal Art Project and by the Section of Fine Arts of the U. S. Treasury Department. The “synchronism” of S. Macdonald Wright and the “postsurrealism” of Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Grace Clements, and Elizabeth Mills are local vanguard movements which have achieved recognition beyond the borders of the United States.
Modern schools include among the expressionists, Bear Newman, Boris Deutsch, Jerre Murry, Denny Winters, and Herman Cherry; among the abstractionists, Arthur Durston, Helen Klokke, Olinka Hrdy, Kaye Waters, Warren Newcomb, and Elise Armitage; and among the surrealists, Carlos Dyer, Ben Berlin, and Charles Mattox. Other artists of the modern school are Nicholas Brigante, Rex Slinkard, Fred Sexton, Conrad Buff, Jack Stark, and Peter Krasnow. Al King, Don Totten, and James Redmond are influenced by S. Macdonald Wright.
Outstanding among Los Angeles painters of the American scene are Millard Sheets and Barse Miller; Paul Sample, Lee Blair, Fletcher Martin, Tom Craig, Phil Dike, Dan Lutz, and Ruth Miller Fracker also work in this popular genre. The late Frank Tenney Johnson was widely known for his romantic depictions of western range life and his night scenes. Kathryn Leighton has made an important recording of Indian life. Nicolai Fechin is a portraitist and figure painter in the traditional manner. The decorative tendency in modern painting is exemplified in the work of Jean Goodwin, Arthur Ames, Nathalie Newking, Buckley MacGurrin, Althea Ulber, Suzanne Miller, Viktor von Pribosic, and Hideo Date, who shows a Japanese influence.
The Mexican painters Orozco and Rivera have had an important effect upon Los Angeles mural painting. Another stimulating influence has been the Federal Art Project, which has commissioned murals for scores of public buildings. It is impossible to list here the many excellent murals executed in Los Angeles during the past few years. The history of California, the myths of the Aztecs and other tribes, scenes from contemporary life, and symbolic and cultural themes decorate profusely the walls of the city. Among outstanding works are the decorations of Dean Cornwell at the Los Angeles Public Library and of Charles Kassler in the Library patio; S. Macdonald Wright’s Mans Two-fold Development at the Santa Monica Public Library; Jose Clemente Orozco’s Prometheus at Pomona College, Claremont; MacGurrin’s Signing of the Magna Carta at the Hall of Records, Los Angeles; and the panels of Hugo Ballin at B’nai B’rith Temple, Los Angeles. Other local muralists of note are Giovanni Napolitano, Willy Pogany, Leo Katz, Suzanne Miller, Barse Miller, Conrad Buff, Millard Sheets, and Lorser Feitelson.
In sculpture, too, Los Angeles has witnessed a remarkable growth in recent years. The local craftsmen, George Stanley, Archibald Garner, and Roger Noble Burnham participated in designing the 40-foot Astronomers’ Monument in Griffith Park, and have contributed many other works. Henry Lion, the late David Edstrom, Merrel Gage, Donal Hord, William Atkinson, Eugenia Everett, Julia Bracken Wendt, and Ada May Sharpless are Los Angeles sculptors whose techniques vary from solid conservatism to the most advanced experimental handling.
In conclusion, mention should be made of Los Angeles commercial art and industrial design. In the Hollywood studios and workshops every phase of decorative technique has been thoroughly studied, and many innovations have been introduced there. The animated cartoons of Walt Disney, in whose studios many local artists have been employed, are known throughout the civilized world. Recognized industrial designers include Walter Beermann, Joseph Sinel, and Kem Weber. The intense activity of the Hollywood workshops has been an important factor in making Los Angeles a new art center of the West.
The story of the theatre in Los Angeles is largely a record of the appearances of road shows, ephemeral stock companies, and the rise and fall in popularity of playhouses, producers, and performers. Instead of showing continuous native growth, with sustained local traditions, it is for the most part a history of periods and personalities, succeeding one another with little continuity or interdependence.
During the almost seventy years of Spanish and Mexican rule, religious plays were the sole dramatic fare. Introduced by the Franciscan missionaries and presented only at Christmas time, they usually depicted the journey of the shepherds to Bethlehem, their encounter with the devil along the way, Satan’s final overthrow by the Arcangel Miguel, and the shepherds proceeding to the Christ child. Typical of this kind of drama were Los Pastores (The Shepherds), which was enlivened by songs, guitar music, and comic incidents; and La Pastorela (The Pastoral), written by Padre Florencio of Soledad Mission. The actors were amateurs. A nativity drama similar to these is still presented annually at the Old Mission Plaza Church in Los Angeles. In the last performance of La Pastorela, given on Christmas Eve of 1861, the role of the Arcangel Miguel was played by Arturo Bandini, a prominent don. Part of his traditional costume, a pair of curled tissue-paper wings, so aroused the curiosity of a nearsighted old lady that she held up a lighted taper to inspect them. The wings caught fire and blazed away on “Miguel’s” back until “Satan” rushed to the rescue.
With the influx of Yankees in the middle of the nineteenth century, the religious pageants were soon overshadowed by a different type of stage entertainment. As early as 1847 outdoor performances were given by a company of strolling comedians, the vanguard of countless traveling troupes, whose frequent visits by 1858, warranted the building of a small playhouse, Stearns’ Hall, on South Spring Street. Here, in 1859, the California Minstrels and Burlesque Troupe, with “Ethiopian Comedians,” performed to enthusiastic audiences. In the same year Don Juan Temple, an enterprising Yankee, constructed a combined market and auditorium, where the Great Star Company of Stark & Ryer of San Francisco presented Shakespearean drama and the plays of Von Kotzebue, a favorite European playwright of the time. Other troupes appeared occasionally during the sixties, most of them coming by ship from San Francisco, the theatrical metropolis of the West. Schedules of performances were flexible, allowing for the missing of a boat by a star or troupe or for late arrival of the passenger vessel.
Not until 1870 did Los Angeles possess its first real theatre, the Merced at 418 North Main Street, at which were given such plays as Esmeralda, The Danites, and M’Liss. The theatre was built by William Abbott and named for his Mexican wife, and its opening was advertised in the Los Angeles Star:
MERCED THEATRE
GRAND INAUGURATION
The opening of the New [Abbott’s] Theatre will take place on Friday, December 30, 1870, when a Grand Vocal and Instrumental Concert will be given by the 21st Regiment (Wilmington) Band, assisted by several well-known amateurs, who have kindly volunteered their services.
But there was still no regular stage entertainment. The arrival of a troupe was an event. The Daily News of January 18, 1871, reported that there was a “woeful lack of amusements” in Los Angeles and that “This has prompted some of the fun-loving spirits to offer on Thursday night, at the Merced, a mirth-provoking exhibition wherein the effect of laughing gas upon different persons will be practically illustrated.”
Such groups of fun-loving spirits appeared in increasing numbers during the seventies. Since the town was not yet large enough to support regular theatrical groups for more than short engagements, local social clubs gave “readings,” amateur minstrel shows, and one-act plays. Outstanding among these community enterprises was the annual series of entertainments directed by George A. Dobinson and called “Unitarian Thursdays,” many of the performers being members of the Unitarian Church. These Victorian “amateur hours” were given at Union Hall on Spring Street near Temple, and continued into the next decade.
The spectacular growth in population during the booming eighties changed Los Angeles from a rough-and-ready frontier town with a limited potential audience to an increasingly important theatrical center, visited more and more by traveling troupes. In 1884 the city was ready for its second theatre building, the Grand Opera House on Main Street south of First. Built by Ozro W. Childs, a local business man, and seating 1,200 people, this was the second largest theatre on the Pacific coast. It was opened with Mlle. Rhea in The School for Scandal. Handbills warned that children in arms would not be admitted; the mayor addressed the audience, and intermissions were enlivened with such tunes as “O, Fair Dove! O, Fond Dove!,” “Chimes of Corneville,” and “Sailor’s Joy.”
Theatre programs collected by George A. Dobinson, and now preserved at the Los Angeles Public Library, furnish a better picture of the period than any other source. They are filled with society and theatre gossip, advertisements, and columns of what at the time may have been risque jokes: “Many of the costumes worn by the ladies at the Grand last night were extremely elegant. . . . The orchestra played several new numbers. Good work, keep it up. . . . The iced water passed through the audience last night was a great accommodation to the ladies, if not to the gentlemen. . . . Delinquent subscribers are hereby warned not to let their daughters wear this paper for a bustle, as there is considerable due on it, and they might take cold.”
By the middle eighties Los Angeles had attained a place on the nation’s theatrical map as a regular one-week stand, in which shows were billed “direct from New York.” Booth and Barrett in Shakespearean repertoire (1887) grossed $17,936 in one week—a take that many a modern road show might envy. Another good-sized theatre, the Los Angeles, on Spring Street between Second and Third Streets, was built in 1888, and here during the next few years, the city saw such stars as Maurice Barrymore, E. H. Sothern, Lillian Russell, and Sarah Bernhardt. Plays included such European standbys as Gamille, Richelieu, Oliver Twist, and La Tosca; and, among American favorites, Only a Farmer’s Daughter, The Wages of Sin, and Col. Mulberry Sellers.
In the early nineties the stream of imported productions was gradually supplemented by the productions of local professional stock companies. The first of these home-town ventures was launched in 1893 at the Park Theatre (formerly Hazard’s Pavilion) at Fifth and Olive Streets, where the Philharmonic Auditorium now stands. This company was short-lived. Similar enterprises appeared during the next few years, prospered for a time and collapsed. None attained anything like permanence until after the turn of the century, but their number steadily grew. Vaudeville, too, began to rival the legitimate stage in the nineties, the Orpheum opening as a vaudeville house in 1894. Sarah Bernhardt appeared at the Orpheum in two of her three Los Angeles engagements. It was during the first of these engagements that she was injured in an automobile accident—an accident seemingly trivial at the time, that later caused the amputation of a leg. Road shows continued, however, to provide the city’s most substantial dramatic fare. Performances given in Los Angeles around 1900 included Trilby, The Prisoner of Zenda, Peck’s Bad Boy, The Wolves of New York, The Country Girl, Charley’s Aunt, and numerous Shakespearean plays; and among the popular actors of the time were Helena Modjeska, in whose honor a Los Angeles street is named, William Gillette, Trixie Friganza, Harry Langdon, George M. Cohan, William and Dustin Farnum, and Lionel Barrymore. Many of these remained to join local stock companies and later the films.
During this period of lavish road shows, local stock companies began to compete more and more successfully with them. The arrival of Oliver Morosco in Los Angeles in 1899 marked the opening of an era in which stock companies increased in importance until they dominated the local theatrical scene. Though Morosco leased the Burbank Theatre and at first presented the usual Eastern touring companies, he soon formed his own stock company—an organization that was exceedingly popular during the first quarter of the century. Then in Morosco took over the Belasco Theatre, which had been opened in 1904 by Fred Belasco—brother of David, and came to the fore as a nationally important producer.
The Belasco attracted wide comment with a series of notable revivals, and new plays. “Leading ladies came and went but the pueblo would never consent to the changing of the leading man: he was Lewis Stone . . .” Outstanding productions included When Knighthood Was in Flower, The Admirable Crichton, Zaza, Candida, Girl of the Golden West, and Undertow. The last was among the plays first produced here that later became New York hits.
Between 1904 and 1915 the theatre in Los Angeles attained its majority. A dozen playhouses were doing a profitable business. Plays were capably staged and performed, and as a producing center of new dramas the city was surpassed only by New York. Even the religious motif in drama reappeared with the opening in 1912 at San Gabriel of John Steven McGroarty’s Mission Play, which was destined to remain a favorite for two decades.
The little theatre movement, which swept the country between 1910 and 1918, led to the formation of numerous amateur organizations, most of which were of little significance because they attempted the same kind of drama that was done more expertly by traveling professional troupes and the motion pictures. One exception, however, was the Pasadena Community Playhouse group, founded by Gilmor Brown in 1917. The Playhouse soon began to attract talent from all over the United States and it became one of the outstanding little theatres. Because of its policy of presenting both premieres of the work of leading dramatists as well as new plays by obscure writers, it has been an active force in stimulating local drama.
But in Los Angeles as elsewhere, motion pictures affected the legitimate stage far more drastically than did the little theatre movement. By 1912 film companies were drawing many actors from the ranks of stage and vaudeville performers. During the World War, as movies attracted increasingly large audiences, the local stage entered a decline, and by the end of the war most of the old stock companies had failed and there were virtually no visits by road companies.
This set-back was only temporary. During the prosperous twenties there was room for both films and stage. “The road” revived, little theatres flourished. Two pageant plays were produced: the Pilgrimage Play, a presentation of the life of Christ, given annually in an open-air theatre in Hollywood Hills; and the Ramona Pageant, based on Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel and performed at Hemet each year since 1923.
The biggest event in recent theatrical history was the opening in 1924 of the Biltmore Theatre with a $10 top price, tickets printed in gold leaf, and Will Rogers as master of ceremonies. The production was Sally, Irene, and Mary. In the next three years seven theatres were built: the Figueroa Playhouse, El Capitan, the new Belasco, the Mayan, the Hollywood Playhouse, the Hollywood Music Box, and the Vine Street. The opening of these theatres started the greatest theatrical activity Los Angeles has ever known.
One of the most successful ventures of this period was headed by Henry Duffy, whose policy was to present current New York hits. Beginning with the El Capitan in 1927, he soon had a string of theatres along the Pacific coast that included the President in Los Angeles and the Playhouse in Hollywood. Among his actors were Charles Ray, Will Rogers, Reginald Denny, Colleen Moore, Joe E. Brown, Billie Burke, and Francis Lederer. Edward Everett Horton organized another successful stock company, with himself as producer and leading man. Other outstanding producers included Louis Macloon and his wife, Lillian Albertson.
Stock activity was carried on by Morosco’s company, which gave the first presentation of Ann Nichols’ Abie’s Irish Rose; it ran thirty-three weeks in Los Angeles before becoming a record-breaker in New York. But with the disbanding of this troupe in 1927 an era was ended, and most of the stock companies that arose thenceforth had a definite link with the film industry. In Hollywood some of the new companies were organized primarily to exploit the name value of motion picture stars. The local stage was so prosperous that in 1927 movie exhibitors began to complain about the competition—“ in the very citadel of the cinema.” It was believed that this condition was caused in a large degree by the public’s slackening interest in silent films, but even after the introduction of talkies, the legitimate theatre continued to flourish. Between 1928 and 1932 were some of the best seasons on record. While the 1931-32 theatrical season was good from the public’s viewpoint, producers were hard hit by financial conditions brought on by the general economic depression. During these years some of the best acting talent in the world, drawn here by Hollywood studios, was available for stage work.
Not until the full force of the depression was felt in southern California, beginning about 1932, did local drama commence a marked decline. Stock companies collapsed and road importations dwindled almost to the vanishing point. Even those perennial local performances, the Pilgrimage Play and the Mission Play, failed to open. But the little theatres, particularly the Pasadena Community Playhouse, the Beverly Hills Theatre, and the Gateway remained active for many months, supplying the bulk of the legitimate drama. Some of the amateur groups were organized to attract students who wished to enter the films, but instead they frequently drew established movie actors who could not get work in the studios. Productions at the Playhouse in Pasadena, for instance, were the best in its history because of the talent available.
An interest in working-class drama was a noteworthy development of the depression years. Emjo Basshe’s Doomsday Circus was produced in 1933; the next season saw productions of Paul and Claire Sifton’s Blood on the Moon, Wolfe’s Sailors of Cattaro, and Peters’ and Sklar’s Stevedore. In the same season, Odets’ Till the Day I Die and Waiting for hefty were presented in Hollywood. Other developments of the depression period were the Padua Hills Theatre at Claremont, presenting Mexican actors in a present-day approximation of folk drama; and the Theatre Mart’s revival of The Drunkard, an old-time melodrama that opened in 1933 and that, in December, 1938, broke the world’s record for long runs by surpassing the 283 consecutive weeks in New York of Abie’s Irish Rose. The Drunkard had its 350th performance in 1940.
Strangely enough, the lean 1930’s saw one of the most lavish stage spectacles ever presented in Los Angeles, Max Reinhardt’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, produced at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934. Two years later the Bowl was the scene of another spectacular outdoor drama, Everyman; and in 1938 Reinhardt staged an elaborate production of Faust in the Pilgrimage Play Theatre.
In 1937-38 the road showed signs of reviving. The Biltmore Theatre presented many outstanding New York successes and had one of the longest and most profitable seasons in its history. There was considerable activity among the little theatres, and several schools were opened to offer drama training to would-be stage, screen, and radio stars.
The Federal Theatre Project was established in 1935, when the professional theatre was at low ebb. The project’s actors were soon providing continuous stage entertainment. The Los Angeles project, second in size of personnel only to that of New York City, had radio and music units, a marionette division, vaudeville, colored, and Yiddish units, and a children’s theatre. Shakespearean dramas were given in public schools, and at Christmas time morality plays were presented at various theatres and in churches throughout the city. Among the project’s noteworthy presentations were Elmer’s Rice’s Judgment Day; Hall Johnson’s Run Little Chillun, which opened in July 1938 and ran eleven months; Ready! Aim! Fire!, by Jean Stone and Jack Robinson; Two a Day, and Pinocchio, a marionette show. From 1935 to 1938 the project staged more than 150 productions, including many dramas by new and hitherto unknown authors.