1959 (1958) (1960) (1950-1960) (1960-1970) Table of Contents
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1959 See Text
Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985, 1959 See Text
Fritz Leiber, 2004a, 1959 See Text
Gordon Newell and Joe Williamson Pacific Coastal Liners, Superior Publishing Co.: Seattle, WA, (Bonanza Books, Crown Publishing: NY), 1959, 192 pp., 1910s, 1880s, 1870s, 1869, 1860s, 1850s, See Text
Notes:
"Winter and spring storms during 1959 wrecked havoc in what remained of the city's harbor. The January 5, 1959 storm was the worst in eleven years. . . waves thirty feet high. The harbor master, Pat Lister, narrowly missed being tossed into the . . . waters . . . in a 70 mph wind gust . . . De Luca's Fish Market flooded . . ." Stanton, 1990
Documents
Hans Burkhardt (1904-), 1959
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1959
Hans Burkhardt (b. 1904), 1990
"Born to an impoverished carpenter and a laundress in Basel, Switzerland on 20 December 1904, Burkhardt was abandoned by his father at the age of three, witnessed his mother die of tuberculosis three years later, and was subsequently placed in an orphanage. After completing his schooling at fifteen, he apprenticed himself to a gardener and spent the next few years in this trade.
"In 1924 Burkhardt immigrated to New York City where he worked as a furniture decorator. Wishing to further himself in this craft, he took courses in design at the Cooper Union School. Four years later, he began to train with artist Arshile Gorky in private tutorials which intermittently spanned a decade. . . By 1937, Burkhardt had grown disenchanted with life in New York and moved to Los Angeles. Supporting himself as a furniture refinisher, he painted evenings and weekends, and built a house on the side of a cliff in Laurel Canyon where he and his wife still live.
"During the 1930s, Burkhardt painted in a Cubist vein indebted to Picasso by way of Gorky. Then, at the turn of the decade, he began to create Expressionist works in which he decried the carnage in Europe. . . . The amalgamation of weapon and beast recallls Picasso's Guernica horse and looks forward to Rico Lebrun's Crucifixtion soldiers . . .
"While Burkhardt frequently railed against social evils, he also applauded West Coast life in a number of handsome abstractions. . . . By the Sea of 1945 evokes a casual day at the beach. An azure sky, warmed by the sun, greets the cool Pacific in which Burkhardt regularly swam.
" . . .
"In 1959 Burkhardt began to teach, initiating a distinguished career that included poisitions at California State University at Long Beach, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles, Chouinard Art Institute, and California State University at Northridge.
" . . .
"Since 1982 his work has appeared in a series of one-man shows at the Jack Rutberg Gallery in Los Angeles.
"Through his painterly, impassioned works, Burkhardt has served as a West Coast master of Abstract Expressionism. Not only did he help to forge that aesthetic during its early stages of growth, but he enriched it with his distinctive vision. He extended Action Painting into the realm of political protest where few of his peers . . . were willing to tread. . . . he prefigured the Neo-Expressionist course of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and Markus Lupertz. On the other hand, he foreshadowed the bright geocentric expressions of Carlos Almarez, Frank Romero, Astrid Preston, and Joe Fay.
Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985, 1959
"Penguin, 1959, Armét and Davis. Lincoln at Olympic, Santa Monica. Indoor planters, glowing orbs, and original artwork, often in plastic, were integral to many coffee shop designs. Rather than add ornament to the architectural structure, Davis believed in incorporating contemporary art work by artists and crafts people. Then the structure, left simply expressive of its structure, would not date.
"Mainly known as a science fiction writer and as an actor, upon his death Leiber left to the University of Houston more than 60 boxes of his literary effects. Box #38 (one of the 15 boxes of Leiber's own writings) contains an item called "Poetry 1959-The Beach at Santa Monica from Venice to Malibu."
Gordon Newell and Joe Williamson Pacific Coastal Liners, Superior Publishing Co.: Seattle, WA, (Bonanza Books, Crown Publishing: NY), 1959, 192 pp.
Jack Smith The Big Orange Ward Ritchie Press: Pasadena, CA, 1976. 252 pp.
Watts Towers 1959, 1923
""They tried to knock it down, you know."
"In the southeast corner of the section know as Watts there is a piece of 107th Street that is cut off by old Pacific Electric tracks. It can be entered from Wlllowbrook Avenue, but it runs only one short block, and there it dead-ends in the rusted old tracks that slash across the neighborhood on their way to nowhere.
"In most ways it is a typical Watts street; two rows of small frame houses, dateless houses that have outlived their time but are trying to keep up appearances, like old chorus girls, with paint and flowers. But this is a distinguished street, because at its dead end, on a small lot cut like a piece of pie by the old tracks, stand the Watt Towers. They are the most remarkable works of open air art in Southern California, and perhaps in the nation.
"They are the work of the late Simon Rodia, an immigrant Italian who gave up women and liquor at the age of forty and spent the next thirty-three years of his life erecting these implausible monuments." p. 121
" . . . The Watts Towers are a wondrous poem, built in the sky by a man who was possessed by unquenchable urgings and fancies . . . "
"'I wanted to do something big,' said Simon Rodia; and he did.
"More than anything else, the towers reminded me of the boojum tree, which is also unique and improbable. It is found only in the wilderness of Baja California, and there is nothing even close to it anywhere else. Ot the three towers, the highest is one hundred feet. They rise like upside-down ice cream cones made of lace and encrusted with costume jewelry.
"A wall runs around Rodia's triangular garden, and it also bears his mark. The wall is a mosaic of Rodia's improvisations. There are panels of broken tile and panels of green bottle glass and plaques of cement in which he impressed his initials, SR, and the date, 1923, and the shape of hammer and tile cutter and the other tools of his trade, or perhaps it should be called his passion. The wall seems without design, without order. Bits of broken tile, yellow and red and blue and purple; pieces of china plates; pieces of green and blue bottles; hundreds of white seashells - all are pressed into the cement of the wall without apparent pattern; yet the wall is a masterpiece. It dazzles the eye and delights the spirit. It is all one lovely harmony." p. 122
" . . . I sat in the gazebo and studied the towers.
"They are made of steel rings and spokes and central cores, all covered with cement, set in chicken wire and encrusted with the humble materials of Rodia's art - the debris of a wasteful society. They are connected by bejeweled spars that leap from one to the other and to the other fancies in the garden - the gazebo and the Marco Polo ship and the fountain - so that all is one interlocking structure.
"Rodia was only a tile setter by trade, without any schooling at all. He owned and boasted of a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but nobody was ever sure he could even read, Yet he had created from some infallible inner sense of order this exquisite feat of art and engineering. For thirty-three years he worked alone, rising with his towers, coming down to fill his cement pail and climbing up again to add another bit of frosting. He used no ladders. The towers themselves were his scaffold.
"Why did he work alone?
"'I no have anybody to help me out,' he said one. 'I was a poor man. Had to do a little at a time. Nobody helped me. I think if I hire a man he don't know what to do. A million times I don't know what to do myself.'
"Why did he build his towers at all?
"'Some of the people say what was he doing . . . some of the people think I was crazy and some people said I was going to do something. I wanted to do something. I wanted to do something in the United States because I was raised her you understand? I wanted to do something for the United State because there are nice people in this country. . . " p. 123
"Paul Laporte wrote: "Even the ornamentation, the bits and pieces of tile and glass and china, was essential to provide a protective shell over the reinforced cement. . . . 'Thus every part and combination of parts in these structures is a technical necessity while at the same time emerging as the character and beauty of the whole.'" p. 124
"A wood flooring has been laid over the foundations of Rodia's little house. Only the fireplace is left, and the arched doorway, which is faced with pieces of broken mirrors. Everyone come back for a second look at the doorway, seeing himself fragmented, abstracted, in that wall of broken mirrors." p. 124
{One historical consideration might be that so much has been written about the Ocean Park/Los Angeles landscape because it has changed so much so radically that it is always renewing itself, and that writers can find cheap digs from which to write about themselves in that landscape.}
"It was a dramatic day, October 10, 1959, when the main tower was put to the test. Reporters and television crews were there. A crowd gathered in the street, some hoping the tower would win, some hoping it would fail. A hydraulic jack was used to apply a ten thousand- pound load to the tower, much more than any wind or quake would give it. It was to be a five-minute test. A minute went by. The crowd was tense. The tower leaned almost imperceptibly. And then the main beam of the test rigging began to give.
"The city surrendered. The test was over. Simon Rodia's innate engineering skill was proved, and his work prevailed.
". . . Many people on the street had been there a long time and remembered Simon, the odd little Italian with the gnarled hands and the big nose.
"Simon used to sing as he worked, forty, fifty feet up, arias from operas and songs nobody in the neighborhood had ever heard anybody else sing. Funny man; complained about everything; taxes and painted women and drinking parents. But loved the country, loved America.
"'He used to go off down that railroad track walking, . . . all the way to Wilmington sometimes, with his gunnysack, picking up things. Be gone all day, come back with a sackful of junk.'" p. 125 to 126
"'You know he even put his car in those towers there?' . . . 'Old Hudson. He put the springs and the wheels and everything he could use.' 'What happened to the rest of it then?' . . . "Buried it. Right there by the tracks.' . . ." p.126
Jeffrey Stanton* Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987, 176 pp., 1960s, 1959, 1958, 1956
"Apparently many people enjoyed Pacific Ocean Park, for by the time it closed for construction and remodeling on January 5, 1959, it had attracted 1,190,000 visitors. Management decided to add four new attractions at a cost of nearly $2,000,000.
"Fun Forest located near the Sea Circus was primarily for children. It had helicopter, boat and covered wagon rides. It also had a picturesque tree maze with slides and other surprises. They purchased a 96 passenger ride called Space Wheels for $225,000 and placed it between the whale tank and Ocean Skyway ride. It was comprised of four ferris wheels, stacked two high, which rotated at the ends of four giant arms. Each wheel in turn spun in its own orbit as the arms revolved.
"The company planned to add an ornate bandstand area for entertainment and 8700 square feet of space on the south end of the pier for Zooland. This area adjacent to Fisherman's Cove would feature baby polar bears, penguins, otters flamingos, and other aquatic animals. Neither of these two attractions were completed.
"The second season's attendance wasn't nearly as good as the first. The owners decided to close it in October for the winter, then announced a month later that they sold the park to John Morehard for $10,000,000."