1987test

1987 (1986) (1988) (1970-1980) (1980-1990) Table of Contents

Sources

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1970s, 1965, 1960s, 1950s, 1945, 1940s, 1932, 1930s, 1920s, See Text

Susan Larsen Oral History Interview with Richard Diebenkorn in his Ocean Park Studo, Archives of American Art, December 15, 1987 See Text

James R. Oestreich Variations on Chance, Anarchy and Silence, The New York Times, Sunday, 25 January 2004, AR 25, 2004, 1987, See Text

Regina V. Phelan The Gold Chain: A California Family Saga, The Arthur H. Clark Co.: Glendale, CA, Illustrated, 1987, 432 pp., 1875 See Text

Singing Chair, Doug Hollis, Artist, 1987 SMart Festival Post Card See Image
Singing Chair Announcement 1987 SMarts Festival Post Card Text
Sky Poem, David Antin, 1987 SMarts Festival Post Card, Santa Monica, CA, See Image
Sky Poem David Antin, 1987 SMarts Festival Announcement See Text
Trialogue, Philip Augerson 1987 SMarts Festival Post Card, See Image
Trialogue, Philip Augerson, Artist, Announcement, 1987 SMarts Festival Post Card, See Text
Watermark, Michele Hamrick, Artist, 1987 SMarts Festival Post Card See Image
Watermark Announcement 1987 SMarts Festival Text Santa Monica Planning Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.
32. Loof Hippodrome, 1916 See Text

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1970s, 1968, 1967, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1960, 1960s, 1959, 1958, 1956, 1950s, 1946, 1943, 1940s, 1934, 1933, 1932, 1931, 1930s, 1926, 1920s, 1918, 1917, 1916, 1915, 1912, 1911, 1910s, 1907, 1906, 1905, 1904, 1903, 1900s, 1897, 1896, 1895, 1890s, See Text

Notes

Regina Phelan's book is ambitious and interesting but the story she tells of Santa Monica's beginnings seems to be conflated with San Pedro events. So far I haven't read of many beach cottages in Santa Monica which weren't in dispute, and the South Santa Monica beach cottages came later . . .

Documents

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987

Interview with Esther McCoy [1904-1989]

Conducted by Joseph Giovannini

At her home in Santa Monica, California

June 7-8 and November 14, 1987

Interview

[BEGIN TAPE 1 SIDE 1]

JG: The interviewee is Esther McCoy, in Santa Monica, on June 7th. This is tape 1.

EM: Oh, let's see. Eight of my grandparents [ancestors] came to the United States before the Revolution. They were all intensely political and intensely interested in lumber. My mother was born in Illinois, my father in Ohio. My education started with one child reading aloud to the other, so we read very early and . . .

JG: Were you the oldest?

EM: No-- You're not to ask questions! My sister and I went to a boarding school. She was two years older than I, a little less than two years, and I think I was thirteen and she was fourteen and three-quarters. Or I was twelve, I can't remember. [Laughs] It was a very great experience. In English class, there was a Miss Hamilton and we had half, maybe a month, or a month and a half on one thing. One was Canterbury Tales and we memorized a great deal. I still remember the opening lines of Canterbury Tales, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote" et cetera, et cetera. And then we [also read] Shakespeare and others, but it was nice to spend enough time on one thing so you began to know it and like it. But there was a great deal of memorizing, and I think it was many years after I memorized the Milton's "On His Blindness" that I understood that when [it said] "My light was spent" that it meant that he was blind. I took it more literally that his light, his electric light--so . . . I read a great deal, and my sister was a very bright, much brighter than I was. We were so close and we were in the same grade in school, and so it wasn't any use for me to try to keep up with her. I was always the youngest one in my class and not a great deal was expected of me, but my mother urged me just to do the best I could and so I did. But I usually went into things that my sister wasn't interested in because--I can remember once in a psychology examination where the professor said, "You will know this so well that all you'll have to do is just start writing," and I was sitting next to my sister and she started writing and I [laughs] I couldn't. And I've found it happened later too. Once, anytime Schindler--R.M. Schindler--would come up behind me and ask me for some figures on something, I simply couldn't--under pressure--do anything. And so, I'm writing about that right now, something about Schindler and his asking me for an area of . . .

My sister and I then finally went to different schools. I went to Michigan, Ann Arbor, and she went to Northwestern. I was very eager to go to New York and to Paris. I'd had quite a bit of French, but I did go to New York, then, after school, and I have written about that in Grand Street.

There isn't very much more to say about it except that when I got off the train I left my bags and trunk at the station, at Pennsylvania Station, and took a taxi to a bookshop. What's the name of that bookshop?--publisher and bookshop?--on 47th street?--Brentano's. Because I'd had an account at Brentano's there while I was in college, and so it seemed a good place to get a job. So I did get a job. It turned out that it was selling Christmas cards.

I loved New York; I loved it. I wanted to live some place not in a big apartment house but in one of those nice [laughs] Georgian houses. I think most places I go I like to pick out my newspaper early and my cafe in all cities, European cities especially. So I found the World. Also, I was intensely interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case and so I found that in the World and found they were sympathetic; they were on my side. That was one of the things that endeared me to the World, and also I liked the columnists. So I found a place listed, and I took a taxi and went over and rented it. It was on the Bowery and it was [run by] the wife of a reviewer--a writer, who reviewed books. So, they'd separated. She rented me a room. I didn't have any sense of money, whatever. None. Because I was using up . . . I didn't have too much and I was determined not to depend on my father, so that was using up quite a bit on taxis and the rent. I was getting, I think, something like sixteen dollars a week from Brentano's and paying ten dollars a week on rent.

I went to the theatre almost every night. I would run from Brentano's to Gray's cut-rate place . . . Is this the kind of thing?

JG: Yes; also some of the items, some of the people you met in the meantime, and some of the ideas that you encountered as well.

EM: I didn't encounter any ideas then, I was just all eyes and ears.

JG: What were you reading?

EM: I wasn't reading anything except the World, and I took lots of books with me to New York, a Victrola, and lots of records, but I really didn't do anything except just learn New York and go to the theatre, the cut-rate . . . After [work I'd] run down to Gray's and get cut-rate tickets and then standing room. I would usually get in late from the theatre. And I had a friend who would stand in line at the Met for me--so I could get standing room at the opera. That would be one night a week anyway.

JG: What years were these?

EM: This was '27, I think, 1927. No, it would be '26.

JG: So you were twenty-two.

EM: I was twenty-one and a half. Then I got a job in . . . As soon as Christmas was over, Brentano's let me go. I got a job in . . . Well, the place I was living, the woman decided to close the house and leave it, so I had to move very hurriedly. Someone at Brentano's, a girl who lived on in the hundred's in New York, in the Bronx, took me home with her to get a room. So I got a room in her house. She was going after work, after Brentano's, to get a job in garment center. And that was a wonderful experience, working in garment center. I got on as a-- You know, showing dresses, and modeling them. I was on a draw and I sold only one.

JG: You were on a draw, that's a percentage?

EM: Yes. I wasn't making any [money]. At the same time I was going to publishers at noon to see if I could get a job. I wanted to get a job doing editorial work, which I finally . . . Dreiser [and I] had met and--

JG : How did you meet him?

EM: He came to Ann Arbor, and so he gave me a job doing a small research job, doing research at the public library in New York on Emma Goldman.

JG: Back to Ann Arbor. Had you been an English major and a French major or . . .

EM: English. So, then Dreiser left. There may have been another little job I did for him, I don't know. He left, and so I was just going to publishers and answering ads and at the same time working at the garment center.

JG: This was the start of your long association with Dreiser as a researcher and as a friend. When you researched for Dreiser what did you do? Did you read and calculate the material, or . . .

EM: Yes, it was on Emma Goldman, because he had wanted to write something about her. He felt that she needed something sympathetic written about her.

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987

[Tape 2, Side 1]

[After living in New York, Paris, Berlin, Florida . . . ]

JG: So you came back to Leroy Street [in New York], and you were . . . EM: Yeah, and I got pneumonia. I was in the hospital and it was double pneumonia, and so they finally got Dreiser and he got me some good attention at the hospital. A nurse; it was before antibiotics, and so it was more or less a nursing job, to keep the fever down. So then Bonnie, this friend, had been in California and she had set up some friends of hers at a bookshop, and so she wrote them, the Needhams, Ida and Wilbur Needham. She wrote them and asked them if they could put me up for a month and let me do odd selling, spell them on selling. So I did. I came out in '32.

JG: So this was part of the convalescence?

EM: Yes.

JG: And the thought then was that a warm climate would be good for your . . .

EM: Yes. I was just getting out of it for the winter, but I stayed on. I had letters from people saying it was still pretty bad in New York.

One terrible thing happened. The novel did not sell, but Scribner's had a competition for novelettes (I think they were about 10,000 words). So I cut my novel down. One of the things about it was they felt it was a little short, you know publishers. So I learned to write even shorter, though, you know, in time [laughs] with working hard at it. So [laughing] I cut it down from about . . . Anyway, I cut it. I've forgotten how many words it was in the beginning.

It went in, and I was at my sister's. She was in Denver, she was having a baby. That was on my way to California. And the word came that . . . I think it was four they were going to buy, print three, no, print two. Anyway, it was just out of the running--the last one. I think there were four, and I was fifth. And God, you know, how close, how chance, really. I had a letter from one of the editors saying how sorry she was, that she felt it was very, very nice, and it was a pity. So that made a hell of a difference, you know. God, that would have--to go back to New York with a . . .

JG: Book . . .

EM: And it paid, you know. So that would have . . . It was all I needed. But instead--and California was nothing, absolutely nothing. I'd done so much editorial work and research and there was nothing like that here. So I did get a job rewriting a book for a woman whose English was very poor; she was Russian. God, that was deadly. I got jobs like that, and then a couple of times I worked in a bookshop, you know Christmas rush. What's that big one down, who is it, the end of Olympic?

JG: Downtown?

EM: It was an old, famous bookshop. Well, it doesn't matter. And then I did a lot of reviewing here, because Wilbur Needham reviewed for the Times and for...

JG: The Los Angeles Times?

EM: Yes. He also reviewed for a magazine called Fortnight, I believe the name of it was. He would give me lots of books to review, but I wouldn't get paid for them and I couldn't keep the books, because they needed the books to sell. So I got nothing out of it, but I did get published. I remember one was Buckminster Fuller's Seven to the Moon.[ note: title is Nine Chains to the Moon] What is that book of Fuller's?

JG: I don't know it.

EM: I became very keenly aware of building here, of architecture.

JG: Why was that?

EM: Well, it was wonderful. You could see it in the houses. And I began reading on architecture, all the books.

JG: Who was wonderful at that time?

EM: Neutra, I learned, very soon. And oh--the first thing I saw that I liked were the Monterey houses, you know, of John . . . ?, in Santa Monica.

JG: Parkinson?

EM: No, not Parkinson, John Byers. Over on Georgina Street, in Santa Monica.

JG: These are traditionalized Spanish?

EM: Yes. And then from that, I would stop and look at houses that were under construction if they looked interesting, and I got to see a great many of them. And Neutra I found very early, and liked him. Harris I found very early. First week I was here I met John Entenza. He had nothing to do with architecture then.

JG: He had not bought Art and Architecture yet?

EM: No. That was '32.

JG: That was '32 that he bought it or that you were here?

EM: That we met.

JG: What did you find about the intellectual life here? Was there much of it, or . . . ?

EM: No.

JG: Not much, and you missed the conversations from back East?

EM: Yes, I did.

JG: But what did you like about the city?

EM: I loved . . . It was laughed at so, Los Angeles, in New York. And they thought no one came except the people to make money, and get their money and pick up and run. But when I got off the train in San Bernardino, I said, "What is that, what is that, what is that?" And [they] said "What's what?" "That wonderful smell." "Oh, that's orange blossoms."

God, you know, that was the beginning, and then I got to Santa Monica and the Needham's shop was half a block from the ocean. So I could go down every day and swim, and God, it was close to one of the inclines down to the ocean; it was on Santa Monica Boulevard.

JG: So, you were better by that time?

EM: I got better here, yes. It was so stimulating, and I've always liked warm climates anyway.

JG: You mean just that physical aspect is stimulating?

EM: Yes. And the mountains, too. To have the mountains and the sea so close together. That was just heaven.

JG: How is it that you came to Santa Monica, rather than, say, Pasadena, or . . . ?

EM: Oh, that's because they had the Needham's bookshop. I was going to stay with them. That was the agreement, with Bonnie. I think she'd put up several hundred dollars which, in Depression days, went . . .

JG: It was a lot of money then. Santa Monica in that time was a vacation town, a beachside . . .

EM: Yes, yes, it was always end of the line.

JG: So did you stay on for longer than you thought?

EM: I stayed there about a month, and that's when I got the job rewriting the book, the Russian woman. Her husband's family had a little shed with living quarters above it. It even had a bathroom in it. That was on Pico. So I lived there. Loved it.

Then I fell in love. John didn't come out, and John became something of an alcoholic, too. It was such a disappointment to him that his book was not taken. I think I can see now, you know, "the penumbra of your silence," why it may not, but I really couldn't understand it because it just seemed absolutely wonderful to me. He was hurt. I don't know, did I say this before? That when mine would get attention and his didn't, it really hurt him. He was writing when I was working in Newark, at the department store, and I can remember he would read what he'd written aloud to me, and I was exhausted, you know, and would fall asleep. And that would hurt him. So he became very, very sensitive, and then he began getting awfully drunk. He would sort of lurch out into the street.

JG: This was before you got sick with pneumonia?

EM: Yeah.

JG: And then when you came out here, he stayed there?

EM: Yes. And I really didn't want him to come because he was too comfortable in the position of my going out and working and his staying home and writing. Because he did feel that he was the writer in the family.

JG: So you supported the family?

EM: Briefly, briefly.

JG: So out here, then, you were here and then you met somebody?

EM: Yes.

JG: And you stayed on.

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1932, 1930s

EM: Yes, I stayed on. I went back to New York in 1935. During this time, those two or three years, that I was here, I began doing work in the left wing, the radical movement. I did things, articles, for--there were three or four of them-- EPIC [End Poverty In California] News was one of them, and then there was the communist paper in San Francisco, and then there was another one here. I can't remember the name of that other one, but I know that Kathryn Smith found it because I did some housing surveys, slum housing surveys, that I published there. This was something I just set myself to do. If you have lots of time, no money sense, and-- interested in the subject--so that was good. I published a lot of other things then, in the papers. I began publishing in the little magazines in . . . God, I don't even remember the names of them. One, I think was called Blast. Could that have been Jack Conroy, or one of those, that edited it?

JG: I don't know. I saw the word Blast somewhere, in the sketch here.

Ek.

EM: Good God.

JG: Was it at this time that you lived in Malibu?

EM: Oh, yes, after I left the place writing for the Russian woman, Tim and I house-sat a house in Malibu.

JG: What was Tim's last name?

EM: Robert.

JG: And you house-sat in Malibu?

EM: Yes, Zuma it was. I heard from his son not long ago.

[END TAPE 2, SIDE 1]

[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE 2]

JG: On June 8, in Santa Monica, this is tape 2, side 2, the second day of our sessions. Esther?

EM: Yes. I want to say that I think the chronology impedes progress, and I'd like to depart from that. And then I want to comment further on your categorizing me as a minimalist, and then asking me to say how I became a minimalist, and what my influences were in becoming a minimalist. As I understand the minimalism, I'm not sure that I am a minimalist, and I'm not sure that's it's correct to categorize what I am for researchers. I think they might come to their conclusions. I think that should be treated with some little . . . Well, drop it, since I can't find the word. Now let's close it off for a minute and talk about how we're going to--and whether we should [machine switched off, and on again] So what should we talk about?

JG: At the last session, we ended with you in Malibu.

EM: Yeah. Tim. He'd had some heart trouble. He was in the first World War and there'd been some injury, some slight, I think, gassing or something, and it had begun to affect his heart. He had just stopped everything and had begun to write and to do the things he wanted to. He was French-Canadian. His interests were Montaigne, and Remy de Gourmont and--I can't think of the others. But it made a difference. Oh turn it off! I can't, I don't know-- [Machine is turned off, and on again].

The Depression was a curious period, where everyone had lots of time, and there was nothing much to do. And in California, where there was no editorial work to do, it was almost impossible to earn livings in the way that I would have in New York. No publishing. So I did do odd jobs for writing, editing manuscripts, people who wanted to write. Then I began, through the Needhams, to get into the radical movement.

. . .

J.G: So before the Depression, you had a strong political instinct?

EM: Yes. Let's see, what else can I tell you about that.

JG: Were your political leanings similar to that of your parents?

EM: No, it was farther left, and then during the Depression, it became much more left. From the Needhams. There were all political groups came in there and so . . . But even Entenza, you know, who was not really political, but there was no one who wasn't on the left. It was a period of protestors, the thirties.

JG: Was Southern California a sort of conservative place at that time?

EM: Yes it was, it was--the Times called it "the last white hope," you know; it was a non-union town.

JG: Did the Times establish that climate or steer that climate?

EM: It prolonged it. [Long pause] Turn it off. [Machine is turned off, and on again.]

EM: I finally went back to New York in 1936 or '37 because things were not getting any better out here. I thought they might have been clearing up there. I was still hoping to get back into fiction and to sell more. I'd sold a couple of things--they were non-payment things. So Bonnie was going to England, offered me her place. She was going for a couple of months, so I went and stayed at her apartment. She had one on Ninth Street then. By this time, a friend that she had taken care of when the friend needed help set up a trust fund for her. So, she lived on Ninth Street and I stayed in her place. But there wasn't very much. I saw Dreiser, and I did things for publishers and applied for jobs and got little small jobs, freelance, and then I began to--because of California--really to like the freelance life. I think I've written even on John Flanagan.

. . .

The Depression changed the picture for my father. Before that, I knew that if things got really bad I could swallow my pride and ask for help. And then I had to face the nitty-gritty, and I learned to think ahead. This is something every free-lancer has to learn, to know that the checks, when they come in, don't belong to you, but to the creditors. When I meet people who can write or paint, and want to free-lance, I always look to see how they use their money, because that's the way to know whether they're able to go through the lean periods, to write a book, or to paint. In my case, getting the last installment from a publisher, which went to the photographers, and to repay what you may have borrowed, that was the problem. It's only after you're established that you can expect to get grants.

So, in my case, gradually, very early, I began to cut down on my needs, to simplify my life. You live more and more simply and need less and less, and that's good. I saw how Schindler lived, R.M. Schindler, the architect. He wanted something more than money and he simplified. So, I guess that's the morality that I'm trying to say, of writing. All of this is sort of a moral tale. You learn to go to the typewriter every morning and you learn that the money isn't yours, that you spent it before you get it. You come out of a book exhausted, and also broke, and that's something to handle. Because if you like the book, and you think you did a good job, you really have an inclination to reward yourself, and you can't. The money's not there for any real rewards.

Berkeley (we married in 1941) had money from the Rhode Island Greenes. We had a wonderful time with it. But after the war, there was the inflation, and then he had two bouts of cancer that were very expensive, and so it all fell on me. But he was a wonderful companion. He was the kind of man that women go to for comfort after they've had a mastectomy. I know, remember two, who wanted to see him. He was a wonderful storyteller. When he came in of an evening, he was full of stories.

And we both loved food, serious food, a leg of lamb, a rib roast, a pork loin, or a tongue, or a filet of barracuda, or a good pea soup with ham hock. I like cooking. Even now with so little breath, I eat very much, I eat very well. Schindler used to come sometimes for dinner. This was in the mid-forties. Sometimes with Barbara Myers, who was his more-or-less steady girlfriend when I first went into the office. We would complain because Schindler ate so heartily. Too little left of a leg of lamb, after Schindler had had what he wanted, and Berk. Anyway, not enough left for what Berk loved, cold lamb, or lamb hash. I really don't know what food has to do with writing, but it really helps.

For a period I wrote at night. I don't know why. Maybe two or three years I wrote at night. Six months of this was on TV writing. A friend who had become an agent, briefly, sold a couple of published stories of mine to television, and I had the assignment to write them. I really enjoyed that. I enjoyed the dialogue, writing the dialogue. It was incredible, the money you made on it, more than I'd ever made. That six months is more than I've ever made in my life in any six months. And the residuals, then. But that was a period I wrote at night. I wrote Five California Architects at night, too. We'd have dinner, and then I'd go to the typewriter, and work till--maybe from eight till four. But there were always the telephone calls, the doorbell, and others that cut into sleep.

I must have been almost seventy, before I stopped writing, you know, finishing something, writing until it was finished, sometimes mailing something at two or three in the morning. Then suddenly I decided I was going to close the typewriter at five or six, have dinner, and listen to the news, and go to bed. Or see friends. I don't know what brought me to that decision. It wasn't health entirely, because I've had several bouts of sickness, but I could always convince myself that it must be put off, being sick, until I finished something. I don't think I've ever really been unable to finish something because of sickness.

You spend so much time, in that box, alone, the typewriter room. I sat where I could face a view, through the . . . The typewriter room is elevated, oh, two feet, above the one in front of it, upstairs, and I could see out to the eucalyptus trees, and then on my left hand, I could see onto the upstairs porch. At times I had hanging baskets, and lots of plants, so that was pleasant. And then I always sit and stare, when I'm writing, put my elbows on the typewriter and always turn off the electric typewriter (it always says, "hurry up, hurry up, hurry up") and I can't write that way. I don't know how people write fast, although in television, I could take a script in of a morning, and we'd go over it, and decide on rewrites, and I could take it home and write it that night and have it back the following morning. Or they'd send a Red Arrow out for it. But I was always good on keeping . . . able to meet deadlines. I think you have to, if you're going to depend on writing for a living. There's so few, few people who do that.

I remember once when I went to the bank to borrow money. I usually had loans going, maybe a thirty-day loan, a six month's loan, and then a long-term loan. So those had to be paid, and I really depended on this quick money. But it was that or try to borrow from friends, and I always felt borrowed, with my tail between my legs, and I just didn't want the pain of having to look at someone in the eye and ask for money. And I never have, if I could avoid it in any way. I suppose that's one thing that kept me busy. I felt that I would have to explain my life to someone that I asked for money from, and I didn't want to do that, because I didn't know what drove me. What does drive one to write? Because it is a losing thing.

And then I quickly got into this thing. I got into writing about architecture because . . . to support fiction. Because it would take a month to write a story, and then if it didn't sell, it would go to one of the university quarterlies that paid nothing at the time. So you really couldn't do it. It's one of those . . .

But these were the ones that I eventually made money off of from television. I must say, what television did with them, even though I wrote them they could hoke them up in a way I can't tell you; it was always so unbelievable. I was determined that I was going to do one. I'd even go on the set and watch. And God, just in front of your eyes it could be hoked, and I wouldn't know it, I was too innocent.

Anyway, I got to the point where I would be making changes, writing in or out a character on TV, after shooting had started. I'd call in to tell them what sets were not needed and any new one that was needed.

This all stopped at-the end of the season, and I went to Italy. That was for an issue on Italy (for arts and crafts in Italy) for the L.A. Times (that was Home Magazine), and then things on architecture for Arts and Architecture magazine. I did this every summer for five years. The Italians routed me through various cities, and the Times would do the story. Actually I made very little off these, but the travel was well worth it. I think I was always in revolt against provincialism. So was my mother, she adored travel.

But it was good living in Santa Monica, the edge of a city. Santa Monica, the end of the line, that was where you could write, and then stopping and going to Europe. Before Europe it was Mexico. For my first visit to Mexico, I stayed a month. I wrote an issue for Arts and Architecture on domestic architecture. It was 1951. On Luis Barragan, O'Gorman, Max Cetto and all the others, Candela. And the following year an issue on New University City for Arts and Architecture.

Mexico--the air was very clear then, and the volcanoes beautiful. I loved it; I loved it. And there was this feeling that the strong shadows . . . and on Barragan's architecture, was made for strong shadows. Barragan, he drew much of his inspiration from the small churches of the villages. Chapels. Planes. Those clear, blank planes. And the pine, the wood's poor in Italy [sic], and he emphasized that, in these broad pine boards, the poorness of the wood. It gave it a simplicity, a sort of a purity, that was thrilling.

[END TAPE 3, SIDE 1]

[BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE 2]

. . .

Interest in California architecture began in '32 when I saw the Monterey houses, the second floor balcony. That was my first love, and then I saw Neutra and then other houses. I got so I would stop and look at houses under construction. I think I've said that before. I don't want to repeat too many times. So I got interested in how they were done. With Tim, who was a draftsman, we could talk about that, and then my natural interest in how things are put together, how stories are put together, how a television show is put together . . .

JG: You were actually interested in how Ray Eames was interested in how things were put together.

EM: Yes, yes, yes. There were many things that I learned from him, and I learned from him a little and I learned from Schindler a great deal.

JG: I had thought that the war was a turning point in terms of your being explicitly interested in architecture, but I see that it started in the 30's.

EM: Yes. JG: But so you hadn't started your drafting until Douglas, in '42?

EM: Oh, yes, I started. I would do a little for Tim.

JG: Oh, did you?

EM: Yeah. He tried to get . . . He would try to do a spec house, Tim.

JG: So he was a builder?

EM: Yes.

JG: I knew he was a contractor, but . . .

EM: He wasn't a contractor, no. He had no contractor's license. He would go from one thing to another. What he ended up at was reading.

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1940s

JG: So you entered the program at Douglas after Pearl Harbor at some point?

EM: Yeah. As soon as the program was set up, I heard about it, and I applied, and I got on.

JG: Was that because you knew--was it patriotic for you or you needed the money or . . .

EM: I wanted to, and it was very clear, it seemed very clear to us, that all of us would have to be part of war work in some way. So I actually chose. I said, "I'm going to be a draftsman." You can see my age--I still say "drafts-man." I'll never be able to change that--and "person" is to long.

JG: Unnatural, it's true. You detailed wings of planes?

EM: Yes.

JG: You wrote a little bit about it in that wonderful introduction to the piece in the Whitney show on design, called High Styles, and I recall your having spoken about Shorty the foreman, and how he went off to solve . . . wings . . .

EM: Oh, that, yes. We had a six week's refresher on mathematics in which we learned engineering drawing, the special kinds of things that you did, and engineering drawing, as opposed to other kinds. Then we went to the plant and we had a month there, where we had a week in four different departments. The week that I shall always remember was in experimental, because here was this wonderful character who was out of the past and who really couldn't face all these kids coming in who knew nothing about it. Before that, the planes were built maybe two at a time, [that] would be a big order. Then, suddenly there were all these enormous orders, and he wasn't used to it. could see the old order dying, and I could see how sad it was, and how he--angry . . .

[END TAPE 3 SIDE 2]

[BEGIN TAPE 4, SIDE 1, JUNE 8]

JG: We were talking about drafting at Douglas, one of the weeks of introduction and Esther's memory of the old order--the eclipse of the old order where they used to do two planes at a time and now the orders were for many more planes . . .

EM: Yeah, it was the experimental department. I liked this most of all because I saw someone really working. It was still a handcraft operation with him. Everything else upstairs was mechanized and it was becoming more and more mechanized, and, by the end of the war, everything would be completely mechanized.

That, by the way, was what gave us the hope that architecture, that building the houses would also become mechanized, but it never did. It should have, and that was what Konrad Wachsmann wanted, and that was what many other people wanted--to have a house, I think, in some cases where you could buy parts of it, as you could in Japan, and put them together. Or at least I was told you could in Japan; I'm not sure you could. Then you could build your house as you wanted, out of these parts. But it didn't go that far, but planes did become mechanized and that was one thing, at least.

I went, many of the trainees went, to Westwood. I went to engineering in Westwood on La Cienega near Wilshire, the big hangars there. There were several thousand boards there, just one after another after another. I worked in the wing section and I did the detail drawings. The engineers were dull people. There was once, I was with maybe four or five of them, and something came up, and not one of them had ever heard the name Walt Whitman. Not one. I think, what they were up to, the intellectual engineer, was the one who read Time magazine. That's the high point.

. . .

JG: But why was there the architecture here? You were not as interested by it in New York; it was not happening there in the same way, was it?

EM: No. It's because, I think, here, no one was watching. And you could just do it your own way. The person who understood this best, then talking to, was Cesar Pelli, who knew that it was a good place where you could just do what you liked. But that's the history of Los Angeles, always, from the Spanish days, that it always went its own way. Even, you know (who was the writer who wrote about the early Spanish days?), he said that people would not--you know, they had to go some place, and they wouldn't--they never walked, they always rode a horse. It's the same thing today, the way they never walk, they always drive a car. So it was always that way.

JG: What about the difference between architecture on the East Coast, and modernism on the East Coast, and the modernism here? You had said that you enjoyed . . . One of your groups had met in Lescaze's house, and that it was very strictly . . .

EM: But you saw so little of it. There wasn't very much of it. There was the Museum of Modern Art, but it was impossible in New York City to see it. This was one of the few things, that I could see. The two things were the house, Lescaze house, and the Museum of Modern Art.

JG: I've never understood why there was a good deal of good modern architecture in Southern California but there was not very much painting of the same caliber, and modern, or was there?

EM: You're right. I think it's hard to say. I'm not sure, I'm really not sure why.

JG: What about the movie community here, as you experienced Los Angeles? Was the movie community pretty isolated, as it seems to me to be now, or was there more interface with intellectuals and certainly people from . . .

EM: Well, now let's see. There were so many people, Germans, coming over, and I think there was the German group. I didn't know about that until I knew the Davidsons, later, and Ernst Lubitsch. And I think he was a friend of Thomas Mann's, and I think that was how Davidson got the design for the Mann house, through Lubitsch. It is Lubitsch, isn't it, Ernst Lubitsch? It doesn't quite sound right. Anyway, it was separate--it was quite separate.

And music was separate, too. But architecture did impinge on this. Let's see, Schindler did--all the architects I've known did something for musicians. Schindler did a remodel for Kompinsky, a violinist I believe he was, and Davidson did--they've all had-- Harris did one, it was never . . . It was a project, but it was a house for the composer who was at UCLA. What's his name, you know, the famous one...

JG: Schoenberg?

EM: Schoenberg, yes. He did a house for Schoenberg.

JG: He also did a house, Schindler, for the music critic of the Herald. [note: was music critic for Arts and Architecture.]

EM: Who was that?

JG: [note: 1938-1947 Schindler renovation, homeowner/music critic Peter Yates] Oh, it was the hillside house, I think in Silver Lake. It's the one with that wonderful rail, that kind of a paperclip rail, up to the uphill part of the site [inaudible]. My impression of the art of that time, through Arts and Architecture, was that there was a lot of conversation between people in different fields, but apparently that was really not the case.

EM: That is what a following generation always likes to believe. It sounds as if they must have liked each other, and they must have discussed, talked a lot. And I know that they always felt, in Europe, during that transition period, transition magazine, that everyone liked each other. But I have never found that true. In any case, there were--and I know Neutra was the most jealous of people.

JG: Was there more sort of interdisciplinary conversation in New York than here, or was it that there was more conversation in New York?

EM: More conversation, but I think there was as much backbiting everywhere.

JG: My impression of that is through Arts and Architecture, which seems to be quite remarkable in tracking . . . Such a high caliber publication in which there was literary criticism and music criticism and architecture.

EM: Yes, yes.

JG: I know that period primarily through Arts and Architecture, and that remains my impression.

. . .

JG: So, I think we're jumping the gun here [inaudible]. Was there anything more about the time at Douglas? Anything more that interests you?

EM: It was the time, the time it took. You were really--and you know, you had to be so damned organized to be able to get a house in order and everything, to get food. You had to stand in line for your meat and other food, after working a ten-hour or a nine-and-a- half-hour day, so it was exhaustion.

There was a woman, the only person about my age (she was slightly older than I was) who was in this program, who had a very wicked sense of humor, and so that helped enormously, that helped enormously. Then, when I chose to go to engineering, she decided to go too, and so we were in different departments there but we could always have great laughs together. I decided I wanted to get into architecture after I left Douglas. I knew we'd all be out when the war was over, and so she decided to do that too. She got a job with Fred Barienbrock, who did the Santa Monica City Hall, you know. It's a pretty poor job. She was loaned to Edla Muir; they loaned people back and forth, Ed and Fred.

JG: You tried to apply to architecture school after the war, didn't you?

EM: Yes, I did; I tried to get in USC. I knew it might be a terrible problem of money, but I did try. I was--oh, this was something! I was completely, you know, discouraged. A woman, and a woman who was over thirty--that was just the laughs for them.

JG: There was no other architecture school that you were interested in?

EM: No. By this time I had, I was so deep in architecture that...

JG: So that was in '44? '45?

EM: Yes, '45. Now here's something I never talk about. It was when we had a week off. We had a week off each year at Douglas, a vacation, and we went both times to Ensenada. We would rent a house there. I wrote during the week fifty to seventy-five pages of a novel, and it was about an architect, and it shows that I was interested, by 1943, enough in architecture to want to do a book on one.

JG: Is that among your papers?

EM: Yeah. Each year Houghton Mifflin gives awards for--you submit manuscripts and they give you awards or something, not awards, but they give you a contract. Mine was sent in, this fifty pages, because at the end of that week I went back to work, and just mailed it off to Houghton Mifflin. Well! Goddamn if I didn't place--there were two of us first. It's funny, that's my luck in a way; it was the same thing on this novel I'd written in Key West, which I'd cut down, which had been . . .

JG: . . . out of four.

EM: Yeah. Just out of the running, just out of the running. Well, this was second. So, I did get a small advance, and I'm sorry to say--I don't talk about it because lots of it was based on, the character was based on Tim, but it was a Tim who was a young architect, which Tim was not, and which he never stood still long enough to . . . And he certainly would not have been a modern, and this man was a modern.

JG: That was a great distinction at the time, to be modern, not to be modern?

EM: Oh, yes indeed, yes. It was like being . . . Sinning and not sinning. [Laughs] I think I got fifteen hundred dollars which was just. . . And this was after two years at Douglas, and it was after V-E day--or was it V-J day, whichever was first--and so the war was winding down, obviously, so I quit. I got this money, I quit, and I went to my typewriter. But I also put a drafting table by the typewriter, because after I'd just tossed off a novel, I wanted to go back into architecture. I wanted to go into architecture.

. . .

JG: You know how these were the halcyon days. So when did you start writing for Arts and Architecture magazine?

EM: Let's see, I met John in 1932. The first thing I wrote for him was on . . . I think it was the issue, 1951, a whole issue on building, on residential building in Mexico. Now I may have done one or two small stories for him before that. I think I probably did, but they would have been unimportant. This was the one. But I'd been writing during that time, for other magazines, and so I wouldn't have written much for John. John didn't pay.

JG: What was your first article on architecture? You were at the Schindler house, with Schindler, weren't you?

EM: Yeah, I wrote about Schindler in 1945. The first one, though, was a letter to the New York World, on a review, Harry Hansen, a review on Le Corbusier's book Cathedrals Are White. I wrote a letter about his review. It had to do with the silos, and silo architecture, and he published it. So you can imagine my pride, in having a letter in the New York World, in the Harry Hansen column. [Laughs]

JG: This was the newspaper you had first gravitated to when you were in New York?

EM: Yes, oh, it was a great newspaper. [Inaudible]

JG: When did it fail?

EM: Oh, the bastards, the sons and daughters, wouldn't take the losses any more. [Laughs] I think it was in the thirties or forties. It was a Depression death.

. . .

JG: This is Joseph Giovannini, in Santa Monica, with Esther McCoy, Side 2 of Tape 4. This is from the . . .?

EM: This is from manuscript; it's what now is in the typewriter. It's on Schindler. I want to finish it; there's a celebration for his hundredth birthday in October, and I'm writing about my days with Schindler. It's how I set up a typewriter, drafting board next to my typewriter, and [EM reads]

I did all sorts of cross-sections and then necessary details. The house had an L- plan, like one of Harwell Harris's I knew in Santa Monica Canyon, and many of the details were borrowed from Neutra. The plans could easily have been squeezed into three pages, but with all my cross-sections and details, I stretched them out to six. I did this mainly because I wanted to keep the drawing close to me, hoping that the pencil under my hand would teach me something more than how to set down the condition, when a wall meets a floor or a roof. I was hoping that if I'd listen carefully, I would get a clue to why one building was wonderful and another ordinary. That is, the pencil yielded no secrets. I stuck close to Neutra and Harris.

That's enough, isn't it? And so that's the transition between . . .Then I gave up on the novel because, after rewriting it, then the great success of Ayn Rand's book put me at a disadvantage. I must say, that her research on the period, Chicago period of Sullivan and Wright, was fascinating.

JG: You gave up because you didn't want to continue, or because you'd finished the second draft and the publisher didn't like it?

EM: The publishers didn't like the second draft, and I could have worked out something, but I didn't think I . . . By this time a year had passed, and I was in other writing, and

JG: It's hard to go back.

EM: Yes. And also, there were many things that I was learning so much more about architecture by this time, working for Schindler, that it became really passé. It was not what I believed, and so this was another reason why I didn't want to rework that again.

JG: So you were working with Schindler at that time?

EM: Yes.

JG: What houses were you working on with him?

EM: Well, let's see. I can't find the Gebhard book on Schindler where I've marked the ones I worked on, but let's see. I think the first . . . I don't remember the first house I worked on. I've gone over the names many times but it was a project . . . But it was extremely painful because I didn't know . . .

I was to get a couple of elevations ready for the blueprinter when he got back, to be ready. He was off on his jobs. I couldn't find where it indicated in any way what the windows were to be in the living room, and it was a great pain, my first day there, feeling that it was my fault.

Finally he came in, and I had to admit defeat.

He said, "Oh, that's OK," and he just took the pencil, a blunt pencil, and drew in something fast and said, "Call the blueprinter." And he said, "I don't know what I want to do with that yet."

So he just waited, you know, was waiting. They said, always, at City Hall, that they knew that he was on his jobs, and that he'd take care of them. Nothing would get by him.

JG: How did you get the job there? You knew you wanted to work with him, or did you . . .?

EM: No, I was very much interested in the house, and I knew Pauline. Well. It's easier to read it. Can I read it?

I saw the house first in 1941, when Berk and I were taken to meet Pauline, and then . . . I couldn't understand it. It was curious and disturbing. What Pauline said about it was poetic, but to someone who had lately worried about 032 metal at Douglas and was concerned with how things were put together, the Kings Road house was a closed world. At Pauline's I stared at the clerestories, my eye followed the transfer of loads from member to member, the transition between high roof and low roof. I tried to guess how it was done. I tried to guess why it was done. I even tried to guess how it would be drawn. I gave up questioning Pauline because the kind of questions I asked brought only assurances that structure was not the route to an aesthetic appreciation of Schindler.

Then one day Pauline told me that Schindler's only draftsman had been called into the armed service. She suggested that I apply. I'd seen Schindler only once He was standing by his parked car kicking a tire. His thick dark hair stood out from his head in a wiry wreath (he always cut it himself), and his heavy torso was covered with a silk shirt with V-neck and no cuffs. He designed it himself.

[inaudible] was offensive. He looked dusty and tired. I remember then that one of the reasons that people said he was not serious about architecture was that he did his own contracting. How could anyone serious about architecture spend most of the day on the job sites, one of my architect friends asked.

It took some courage to go to see him. I selected from among a dozen or so engineering drawings the two most precisely drawn and most complicated. Then I cleaned up the drawings of the house that I designed. I dressed in something that made me look serious and dependable. What did I expect? A cool dismissal. My wildest hopes were to be in the office long enough to study a set of drawings of one of his houses.

At eleven o'clock one morning I went along the row of wild eugenias to his door, a heavy redwood swinging door with a small glazed peephole in which there was a sign reading "By appointment only." The door was ajar. I entered.

The drafting room was off a hail to the right. It was a large room lighted by windows and clerestory on the west and thin slits of glass between the concrete panels on the east. The room was divided in the middle by a low row of shelves, with the two drafting boards at the far end. At the near end was Schindler's long desk, and back of it was a piano bench covered with a piece of cowhide. Along the west wall, was a table with nothing on it but a small, portable typewriter, locked into uppercase. [Laughs]

Schindler was sitting at the drafting board with his back to me. When I spoke he turned around, obviously annoyed at being disturbed. I could see that I'd come at a bad time. "I wanted to ask you about a job. Maybe I should come back another time," I said.

He didn't look up from the drawing as he asked me what I had done. I took the two engineering drawings out, and said I had been two years at Douglas. He brushed them aside. "Aircraft draftsmen never know anything about the plane except the part they're working on," he said. Then, indifferently, he unrolled my drawings of the house.

I dreaded to hear what he would say about them. I hoped he would only say, "You need more experience," and I could leave. Instead he anchored them to the very dirty drawing on the board with a long flat camel's hair brush, and looked at them closely. Then he turned the pages, once even referring back to the plan on page one.

"The glass," he said. He was looking at the strip of glass I'd used in all the rooms between door height and ceiling height.

I waited. I was ready with the reason for using the glass, to bring south light into north-facing rooms, to see the trees when the curtains were pulled, and then a reason I would not have had the guts to give, to make the house fly, perhaps a hangover from working so long on the airplane wings. But he wasn't curious about why I used the glass, but how I'd used it. The glass was broken up with the studs.

"You could have used a longer span, you know that." That was the most encouraging thing he could have said, that I should have known something. Once pointed out, I saw it immediately, but the architectural standards book I'd been studying deigned no variations on the 2 x 4 stud system, 16 inches on center.

There were other bits of advice, and with each one, I became more confident. For instance, I'd located the sofa too close to the flow of traffic. I wanted to thank him profusely and go home and rework the drawings. Then I could take them out next week to another architect.

I said in apology, "I tried to get in USC, but they discouraged me."

"The less to unlearn," he said. "Come in tomorrow at eleven, eleven to five or six. I can give you a dollar an hour."

I was stunned. He'd already helped me, and a dollar an hour was not bad. I was getting $1.30 an hour at Douglas when I quit.

My job the first day was to have a set of drawings of a house ready for the blueprinter when he returned from the job sites. We went over the drawings together before he left, and it all seemed clear. Blow up two elevations, which he'd done almost free-hand, in 1/8 scale, to 1/4 scale, use a four-foot module, and with a grid system, it was easy to follow the dimensions.

"Don't etch them," he said, referring obviously to my neat engineering drawings. But after he left I discovered that there was no way to get the dimensions for the view windows in the living room.

Now, is that enough?

JG: It's . . .

EM: This piece, which is called Happy Birthday, R.M.S., for celebration of his hundredth birthday, begins

The Eugenia hedge at the north side of 83335 was neatly clipped to head height with not a sprig out of place, while the one to the south grew wild and tall with tufts shooting out everywhere. Two people of different tastes and of equal strength obviously controlled the landscaping of the house on Kings Road. It was the same inside. On the north, the canvas of the sliding doors had been replaced by glass, the concrete wall panels covered with mahogany plywood or painted a Frank Lloyd Wright sun burnt apricot, and the redwood beams painted white. It was as if the house stood up by the pressure of opposing wills. I went to work on the south side in the spring of 1944 for the architect R.M. Schindler. On the north side lived my friend Pauline Schindler, who, after ten or so years of absence, returned to a divided house. The two sides were connected by one kitchen in the house, which Pauline took over.

That's enough.

[END TAPE 4, SIDE 2] [NOTE: the last half of the tape is blank]

[BEGIN TAPE 5, SIDE 1]

JG: . . . for the Archives of American Art, on Saturday, November 14, 1987, in Santa Monica. Esther?

. . .

EM: In 1940 I married Berkeley Tobey, and in 1941, at the end of '41, we were on a picnic at Malibu with George and Elaine Biddle. When we came up and got to radios, we found out about Pearl Harbor. That was the end of the honeymoon and the beginning of a wholly new life. The end of the Depression. The end of leisure, and writing at leisure. I applied for admission to a training program at Douglas for engineering draftsmen. It was mainly made up of women, of 4-F's, and of--well, that's about the main thing, most of them were under forty. They were all under forty.

JG: Men and women?

EM: Yes. So we reviewed mathematics and worked on engineering drawings for six weeks; then we went for a month through various departments at Douglas, before we were assigned to drafting boards. The place that interested me most was the experimental department, where there was a man who had worked with Douglas on models of early planes, and he was very unhappy about all these young people coming in, who really didn't know the plane, and didn't love planes the way he did. It made him really physically sick, all of this, and everything coming down in triplicate, or having to go up from him in triplicate. What he would do would be to go to the plane and fit a part, come back and draw it up on the board, and then cut it out of sheet metal, and go and fit it on and see if it worked.

JG: What was his name?

EM: I don't know. We called him Shorty. I don't know his name. I was in that department for a week. It was in one of the hangars at Douglas, very, very cold, and grim. Then I went to engineering, which was not at Santa Monica but it was off Wilshire on Sepulveda, and there were maybe a thousand drawing boards or more, just one after another. I worked on the wing section for the most part. That meant drawing lightening holes which were in wing assemblies. The lightening holes were being changed constantly, so you'd just check out the electric eraser, and erase what you'd done, and draw in the changes.

JG: I don't know what a lightening hole is.

EM: In the wing. It's the rib, a wing rib, and the hole is to . . . The thing about planes is that you measure weight as much as possible, to keep them as light as possible. A wing rib is stronger if it has holes in it, and it's also lighter. So that was a lot of what I did. I was there for two years.

JG: Doing the same thing?

EM: Yes. I worked on various parts. It was all on the wing section, what I did.

JG: Had you known how to draft before?

EM: Yes.

JG: You learned how to draft then, or before?

EM: No, before. I'd been interested in it, and I learned it from a friend of mine who was building houses, a Canadian. I liked it very much. It was a nine-hour day, and the engineers I found were very stupid. Their idea of intellectual reading was Time magazine. There was one time when something I mentioned, something came up about Walt Whitman, and not one of the engineers standing around my board had ever heard of him. It's sort of typical.

I remember once, on my first trip to Europe, when I was twenty-two, twenty- three, I was introduced to two Russian engineers who were going back to the Soviet Union after a year in the United States. One of them was very literary and had asked one of the engineers to get books for him, you know, to send back books for him and his wife, American literature. Well, he'd sent Zane Grey, and Harold Bell Wright, and he said to me on the boat . . . Well, he'd expressed some reservations about this, as literature. So I had laughed, and I gave him all the books that I was taking with me to read, which were . . . There was some Hemingway then, early Hemingway, and some of the avant-garde writers--books that'd I'd been given by a friend who had a magazine, Plain Talk--Geoff Eaton, who had review books, and had given me the ones that he liked, that he didn't want to review, and these we re all the ones that I liked.

So anyway, to go back now. How do I get back on track?

JG: If back is Douglas, you were talking about engineers, and you had been there for two years . . .

EM: So then, we had one week off a year, at Douglas, and we'd gone to Ensenada a number of times before the war started, and we went there

JG: You and your husband?

EM: Yes, for vacations. While I was there, the week, I started a novel and got about a hundred pages. And so when I came back, I slowly typed it up and I sent it out to Houghton Mifflin. You know, they had young writers. So I got a . . . Two people were awarded this whatever it was, the award. So then I stopped Douglas at that time, after two years, and wrote the book. In the middle of it, the person I was writing about, or who was the protagonist, died. I was very unhappy about it, really just thrown off. It was about architecture. I did an enormous amount of reading about architecture at the time. When it was turned in, Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead had come out a couple of months before, and it was making a great hit.

JG: What year? Do you recall what year?

EM: It would be late '43, I think. You could find out the time of publication of The Fountainhead. They wanted me to rewrite it and put in more architecture. I tried to. It was very disturbing. Anyway, it was dropped. About this time, I decided to go into . . . While I was writing, I had a drafting board by the typewriter, and I began designing a house. At the time I left Douglas, all the young architects there, and engineers, were designing houses for themselves. Most of them were engineering feats of some sort or other. I see some of them along the beach now, some of them that had very novel kinds of construction. Turn it off. [Machine is turned off, and on again].

JG: Okay, we're on again.

EM: I designed a house.

JG: After Douglas?

EM: After Douglas, I designed a house. I bought a book of architectural standards, and then [laughing] at Douglas one of my bosses was Rodney Walker, who had worked in Schindler's office and was very much interested in low-cost housing and had designed some case studies for Arts and Architecture. So he gave me a set of drawings, and I had another set from someone, I can't remember whose it was. There were a great many architects at Douglas. They would stay there until they were called into the service. One was Bill Becket.

Let's see, let me get back on track. Where was I going?

JG: You were talking about designing your own house.

EM: Yes. So I wrote something about this in the L.A. Architect, published in October 1987. After finishing the house, I did endless sections, you know, just to try them out. I think the odd thing about it was that I had a transom strip between all rooms, and even the bathroom, you know, so light would just pour into the place. I was also writing.

I knew Pauline Schindler; I'd met her through Beryl Lacaba, who was the ex-wife of Gregory Lacaba, and they were both in the radical movement, which I was too. I was fascinated with the Schindler house, where Pauline lived. She had been separated from Schindler for eight or ten years, and then she moved back when Mark was ready for high school. She moved back; they just split the house-legally separated and split the house down the middle, and he took the south side and she took the north side.

JG: She'd already been in there, and he was always in there?

EM: Yes. He was out for a little while he tried an office in the architect's building on Figueroa, but he wasn't happy and so moved back to King's Road. Anyway, I was just so fascinated with the house, with Pauline, seeing her there and not understanding how it was done, having been working on a house, and seeing how different this was, and how the difference between something that was really enormously important and my own, which was very modern. I was fascinated with modern. I'd already known Neutra's work and had seen quite a bit of it, and Harris. I knew Harris and Ain, and several others. I'd never seen a Schindler house until this. It was so different from the stripped-down work of Neutra.

Pauline told me one time . . . I saw her maybe four or five times, often I'd see her because over the years I did reading and other work for Dreiser, who lived a block and a half from Pauline on King's Road. I would just go by her place sometimes, or when I had to go to Dreiser's. Then she told me once that Schindler's draftsman had left, had gone into the service (they were still being called up into the service at that time, it would be '44). So I cleaned up the drawings of the house that I'd done and got some engineering drawings together and took them in to Schindler. He was not interested in the engineering drawings. (This is all in the L.A. Architect piece that I did on Schindler's office, so I don't know whether I should go on too long about this. Do you think so?)

JG: Go ahead. Try to do things that are not covered in the article itself.

EM: Well. I was astonished anyway to have him offer me a job so quickly. He had no one in the office then. He never had more than two draftsman at a time in the office. Often he had students that would come for the summer, and some he would use on construction work. I worked there for two years, and worked on the . . . The first thing was to do some detailing on the church, Bethlehem Baptist Church, and then there were several others, houses, that I worked on. I don't have the book here. I marked them. Is that interesting?

JG: Go ahead.

EM: There were times too when . . .This was still wartime and materials were hard to get; they were frozen for the most part, or very restricted, for houses. Even after the war ended, when I was still working in the office, the shortages were so great that the office would be closed for several days or a week until materials became available.

JG: How did you get them, when they were short?

EM: God, they'd sit on the telephone for hours, you know--not hours, but, trying to find even 2 x 4's . . .

JG: Uh-huh. Did that make a difference in the design? If you could get 2 x 3's, would you use 2 x 3's?

EM: You can't use 2 x 3's; they're not permitted.

JG: Well, you can use them in some non-structural situations.

EM: Well, no. This would be for framing.

JG: But, I mean, did he make substitutions that affected the design?

EM: No, no. And they were working around the clock in the Northwest, you know, to get lumber down, so it was coming but just . . . No one knew when. And then often things would be stolen from the site. You couldn't stockpile because someone would be around with a truck.

JG: Was this just after the war or . . .

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1945, 1940s

EM: Just after the war, mainly. Because even after the war there were restrictions on the type of building you could do--the square footage and what materials you could use.

JG: It was very small, wasn't it?

EM: Yes.

JG: The houses . . .

EM: Yes. And that's why in the case-study houses, they were two bedroom houses. But then, too, another reason for this was that the families during the Depression were much smaller. Two was a fairly large family during the Depression. After the war, when small houses were planned . . . You see, even before the Depression, there were not many small houses built. What you did was just to take an old big one and make do with it. Very little work had been done, experimenting with the small house. I think in England they had, and various other places, but not in the United States. So that's why the case-study house program was important-to get good designs for two-bedroom houses. An innovation was that they all had two baths, which was good.

Now, where am I?

JG: About houses. At the time, did the floor plan reflect any change in, sort of the sociology of . . .

EM: Yes, yes, they did. Take Davidson's first case study. It had no halls, and it had the . . .

[END TAPE 5, SIDE 1]

[BEGIN TAPE 5, SIDE 2]

JG: This is Joseph Giovannini interviewing Esther [McCoy] for the Archives of American Art on Saturday, November 14th, in Santa Monica. We're continuing, Esther. We were talking about the floor plan?

EM: Yes. That was a hall-less floor plan, on the Davidson's case study in Brentwood. I'd almost have to show you the floor plan to show you how it worked, but the . . .

JG: What did it reflect about the family? There weren't servants?

EM: Yes. Also, there was a division, another new thing was, between the two bedrooms. There was space. They weren't banked together. Schindler had done that; he did that in the Pressburger house, which was the first one of his that I worked on. I guess that was about '44, and the master bedroom was separated from the children's wing. He may have started that; I don't know. But Wright had really established the open plan. It had come from others before him, but Wright was the one who gave it authority and gave it architectural significance.

JG: That was true of Wright in a lot of things. He was very derivative; there might have been a Leif Ericson who discovered America first but Columbus was the one who made the significant discovery.

EM: Yes. So, what shall I say now.

JG: We were back in about '46 or '47. You were talking about the two-bedroom houses, two bathrooms.

EM: The case-study house program was initiated in 1945. Many people have asked since then why was not Schindler invited to do one. There was a great distinction between the postwar architects and the pre-war architects. Most of the prewar architects were not invited, the ones who were important. First of all, it was a program that was planned to be short-lived, but it was so successful that it went on and on. It was not only the case-study house, there were all sorts of houses that were built as model houses, and they were constantly visited. They were very popular, some on Wilshire Boulevard. One was Neutra's plywood house.

JG: In Brentwood?

EM: Yes, it was moved to Brentwood, but it was first a model house and was moved there. It was bought by John Entenza's father's law partner, whose name was . . . I've forgotten her first name, but her last name was Gramer. She bought it and moved it to the Brentwood location, where it now still is. Any place you'd drive, there would be some model house, flags out, "open to the public," and you could see it. They were mainly ranch houses, or colonials, or salt boxes, anything, but this was the only case studies that were modern. Another thing, too, they had all modern furnishings and modern kitchens, and the landscaping was done by good modern landscape architects.

JG: Was this the only place in the country where this sort of modern case-study house was . . .

EM: Yes, yes it was.

JG: Neutra had been asked by Levitt to study Levittown, but I guess that was a little bit later.

EM: That was later, yes.

JG: That Levitt decided against doing the modern . . .

Can you place a little bit the importance of modernism, the presence of modernism in Southern California and its importance for the modern movement?

EM: Well, it was late coming. It was strong, but it was late, and most of the architects . . . First let me finish why Neutra, why Schindler was not asked and others . . . The case-study house program started as a short-lived thing, and some of John Entenza's friends and Charles Eames's friends from . . . Where did he go to school?

JG: Oh, Cranbrook.

EM: Cranbrook were invited in. Those are the younger, Eero Saarinen, and others. But after this group, the only older ones . . . There were older ones, Davidson and Wurster. And it was, not Honnold & Rex, but, well, Rex was the one of that partnership who designed the house. Most of the houses that were case-studies, after these first six or eight, were ones that were in the works. The architect came to John, and told him, you know, that they had a house, and it looked good, and so then they worked it out to see whether it was going to fit. It usually did.

Some of them were not all that good, the case studies. I wanted to take them out, when I did the book on the case studies, but the editor wanted them all in. That's why, if Ain had had a house, and had gone to John, he would have done it, put it in the case-study house program.

But after a while it was the younger ones, and that was a very important thing. It was why the magazine became so important, because all the post-war architects wanted to be published in it. It was a sign of having arrived to have something in Arts and Architecture.

While I was working for Schindler I did . . . Schindler, like so many of the other older architects, was rather contemptuous of John Entenza. They looked upon him as a Johnny-come-lately. And since John was more oriented to Europe, and Schindler by this time had cut himself off from Europe, he was rather cool to John. And many things, you know, I would take of Schindler's. Call John and ask him to publish things of Schindler's as they were photographed, and Schindler was always critical about the way the stories were handled. They were not too happy with John, the older architects, and they felt he was too much toward Europe and not enough toward Wright and the modern, the native. What is it now I wanted to get back to?

JG: I had asked you about the place of modernism through the national picture.

EM: California?

JG: Yes, you'd said it was late . . .

EM: No, I think that after Chicago, I think it . . . Modern architecture really came to fruit in Chicago, and then it was killed by the . . .

JG: Columbian Exhibition?

EM: World's Fair, yes. It then came to California where it really established itself. Since the East has always looked to Europe more than inward, or to the West, they really did not believe that anything was happening here. Maybeck-well, Schindler, even-was considered by most of the architects who came out of the Beaux-Arts school as a clown.

JG: Where, here?

EM: Yes, here, and also in . . . There was a Dutchman who became the editor of Reinhold after the editor who commissioned Five California Architects left, before the book was turned in, and he, when he saw it, was appalled, because he thought that Gill was just like Oud, but Oud was better, and he thought that Maybeck was just a fool, just a clown, and that Schindler, you know, that this was pulling his leg.

JG: Why did they give that impression?

EM: He came from Europe and . . .

JG: Couldn't he see their work was serious?

EM: No. No. But you know even in San Francisco they didn't-When I was writing about Maybeck, some of the people I talked to did not believe that he could do anything. Gill's nephew, who went through architecture school and then came to work with Gill in San Diego, was quite contemptuous of him because he couldn't, didn't know (he really was not a good architect). But Maybeck was generally considered very lacking in taste and ability by the people who came out from the East. One of them said to me, when I was interviewing various people that were left, that he couldn't even do a simple "Hotel de yule." [Both laugh]

JG: That's a great loss for California! For Mr. Maybeck. The reason I asked about the place of Southern California modernism in the nation is that at a recent exhibition in Long Island on modernism there it was clear that modernism had a struggle in Long Island. Here you were just miles away from New York, and there really weren't very many interesting buildings done in the Modernist Style. Neutra had done one.

EM: Yeah, on Fisher's Island.

JG: . . . and it seemed to be fairly interesting, but there were really very few, and it was a hard show to put together. There may have been a lot of Modernist architecture . . .

EM: But there was Lescaze. There was some Lescaze there, in that show.

JG: Possibly; I honestly don't recall. There were some interesting aviation buildings that were just in La Guardia . . . There was modernism, but at least in residential terms it came late to Long Island and in residential terms it was never fully developed, or not as developed [as] here, and I realize as a result of seeing the show there (this was just last summer) how important and substantial the opus was in Southern California.

EM: Yeah. Well, you see, there was a magazine, Two Times a Year, it was called (I think that's the title), and they had a big story on architecture, and they had maps, and there was more in California than any other place. The map was just . . .

JG: clotted?

EM: . . . peppered, yes [laughing], on the West Coast. The only magazine . . . All the Eastern magazines still printed eclectic stuff, along with modern. Arts and Architecture was the only one that printed just modern. I was writing to Harwell Harris yesterday, telling him this, because he had said some nasty things about John Entenza to Carter Manny and Manny had told me, and was hurt by them, and I was trying to tell him the difference, you know, between the pre-war architects, post&endash;war architects, and that John really had done something to establish architecture on the West Coast. And I was writing for Arts and Architecture and they weren't all out of Europe . . . There were many things, and I did things on O'Gorman for the magazine which were, you know, you can't call those out of the International Style. (I'm wavering again, where was I going?)

JG: One thing about the O'Gorman's, it was not International Style but it was still Modernist.

EM: Well, there were his early things that were International Style, and then he went, really you know, to the Aztec, and it was the decorated. His library, on the campus of Mexico University, was a box that was papered with mosaics.

JG: But it was still volumetrically modern.

EM: Yes, yes.

When California began sending things, you know, it's message, they got sent back at the Rockies; it never got to the East. [Laughs]

JG: [inaudible] never made it to the city.

EM: They did in San Francisco. San Francisco was always the city that was closely connected with the East, never Los Angeles.

JG: Well, what is it. I know this is a digression, but what is it about California that makes it so discredited, Southern California?

EM: Oh, well, because Los Angeles was a pueblo and San Francisco was a presidio and that meant that ships could not call into Los Angeles. They would go to San Francisco and goods had to be then brought down to Los Angeles. Los Angeles at that time had no port. It needed a great deal done to it, and the thieves could operate in Los Angeles. The center of the city was some distance from the sea, but also it was an agricultural center, Los Angeles, and it was always . . . The reason it's so spread out is because the large land holdings that were given to the . . . The land grants were enormous. That's how the ranch house developed; its form came really from just getting materials to these distant places, and also the heat and the way they lived, and they had enormous number of people to take care of. Often they had their own grist mills and their own . . . They had to be self-supporting. So the ranch houses were very long, broad buildings, and they had porches around because they lived outdoors. I wrote about this in California Magazine about two years ago, and it's called California, Los Angeles, something-Destiny through Geography, I think it is.

JG: Wasn't that in the collection of shows that occurred here?

EM: Yes, that was the basis of it. But this is more about what happened, how it developed.

JG: Uh-huh. Geography As Destiny [inaudible]?

EM: Yeah. So it would be freer, and Los Angeles always had the larger population; it had more thieves, and more speculators, and it was livelier from the beginning. And it's always from these very lively places that new design comes. You find it in Texas, you find it in Oklahoma, and in Arizona. You don't find it in Iowa or Michigan in the 19th century, or the first quarter of the 20th century. I think people who made their money easily, vast speculators, they were plungers. And I've written this about Bruce Goff, in writing about him, and people making money in oil. And there was that plungers approach to money. That's why so many houses of Bruce Goff could get built. I know that Lisa Ponti in Milan asked me, "Who are the people who build these, these Goff houses?" She couldn't understand. It's hard to explain to an Italian what oil does to people.

JG: But he also did them for people who didn't have very much money.

EM: True, yes, but it's the design that's unusual.

JG: Uh-huh. But it wasn't the plungers only who, it wasn't the financial plungers who . . .

EM: Oh, the atmosphere of plunging is in the air.

JG: I see.

EM: Yeah.

JG: . . . and by plunging you mean sort of bet what you've got and...

EM: Here today. Yeah. It's fast. It's like stock market money. You get it. It's like the yuppies who make it, the quick millionaires. Especially with oil coming in, waiting for that oil well to come in. I know the money. I went to a boarding school where there were many, many people with oil fortunes who came, and I'd always thought of myself as well off, but there's a great difference between being well off and oil rich. [Both laugh] I change that. I didn't think of myself as well off, I mean it was just money was never mentioned, but it was, you know, we were comfortable. Well, we were well off, damn it! To hell with it.

JG: Why . . . we can erase this if you don't want, but why do you think you're so reticent to talk about your family?

EM: Well, let's see. The thing that I've been writing about them should be finished. My eight grandparents were all pre-revolutionary. Seven of them came in through the South, and they had a strong southern feeling, and then they moved across the continent, and many of them stayed in the South. Well, one of them was a preacher who wrote his autobiography that I have in here some place, and he writes something about that.

JG: In your papers?

EM: No, it's published. His name was Cartwright. Let's see, my grandmother's names were Cartwright, her mother was Stillwell, she was Cartwright, her mother was Stillwell and then there was Alsop, and-most were from the north of England. Only my mother's father came from Germany, pre-revolution. I mean his ancestors. But her mother was a southerner, a southern woman. Anyway, most of them ended up going from Virginia through Kentucky up into southern Ohio, near Cincinnati. I have some pictures upstairs of a house they had. It's this gabled house, you know, with my grandfather and grandmother sitting on one side, and then the children on the other, and the girls with their pompadours, and high, high . . .

JG: collars, bonnets?

EM: No, high, sort of net things. Let's see, they had two distinctions. One, they were the only people in the township who took the Cincinnati Enquirer. [Laughs] They've all been great newspaper readers; all my life, you know, there've been papers all over the house. Where I grew up, in Kansas, there was the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and a local paper, and Tulsa World, Sundays. And then endless magazines. And endless sets of books. The books my mother . . . You know, what's a wonderful thing about that period, there were book salesmen who went all over the United States, and they sold sets. And my mother had such faith in sets. They didn't do . . . We lived in a house that was built in 1902, a brick house, and

JG: Recently sold for $57,000?

EM: [Musing, faintly] Yeah. I don't--I wanted to see what it sold for. I wanted to see the things. My nephew told me it had. I wanted to see the . . . But, what was I going to tell you about that?

JG: About the sets of books?

EM: They had what they called "Globe Warneke" bookcases, sectional bookcases. Have you seen them?

JG: No, I haven't.

EM: Well.

JG: With glass, or . . . ?

EM: Yes, you could just buy them endlessly. So, they were all along the walls, you know, from the . . . I remember the bottom shelf, the Harvard classics. And then there was Shakespeare. Then there was Tolstoy. Then there was Dickens . . .

[END TAPE 5, SIDE 21

[BEGIN TAPE 6, SIDE 1]

JG: This is tape 6, Joseph Giovannini interviewing Esther McCoy in Santa Monica on November 14, 1987, for the Archives of American Art. We were talking about the Midwest, and Esther's family . . .

EM: I don't remember what the last was.

JG: You were talking about the house, and the sets of books, the Tolstoy, the Shakespeare, and your mother's fondness for sets of books.

EM: Yes. But they did really do something, the salesmen. They performed a great service. You were really close to books. You grew up with them. We all learned to read early because we read to each other and then people, any servant read to us, and it was constantly--we were aware of--there was no emphasis put on it, but all the newspaper reading and magazine reading and book reading. My father had an oak revolving bookcase by his bed. In it were Mark Twain, George Ade, Ring Lardner. I'd never seen a case like that until I saw one in Milan, with Rogers, what's his name Rogers?

JG: Richard Rogers?

EM: No, no, no, his uncle.

JG: Oh! Um. I don't know. Rezzo? No . . .

EM: Not Edgardo, but--anyway, he was editor of Casa Bella [ note: Ernesto Rogers, cousin of Richard Rogers] And he had one in his place. [Exclaiming] How this could have gotten to Kansas I have no idea! Or how it could have gotten there. It's more American, I think, than it is Italian. It could be something that may be done there. But anyway, we lived close to the oil country, and it's a triangle, sort of, the oil. There was lots of money being made, lots of sense of freedom, and people travelled a great deal. My father was in the lumber business. He had a group of lumberyards, a chain of them, and he had some lumber mills. [Long pause] Now let's see. But the house itself, it's . . . If you grow up you spend much time in one--you dream about it, and you know every part of it, of that house. You know the newel posts, and the front stairs, the back stairs, and . . . and . . .

JG: You were saying that there was something of a prejudice about the Midwest? People thought of it as all the same?

EM: After the war, I think. Because they came out of the . . . The small town died at the end of the war. And it was a small town, 25,000, and so . . .

JG: Was the Midwest, or was the United States more equalized before the war, were the . . .

EM: Oh, no, no, no. It was more regional.

JG: More regional?

EM: And this was not like Kansas, not like the wheat country at all. This was the oil and the mining country.

JG: What states made up this triangle?

EM: Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Louisiana. And then Texas, too. Then the next strike was in Texas. But the first big strike was in Oklahoma. And that's where Getty got his money. He went there, and so did Barnsdall. They made their money in Oklahoma.

JG: Oh, I didn't realize Oklahoma was older than Texas oil.

EM: Well, it wasn't in the Union, it was a . . . But they were in there, you know. And Getty made great friends with one of the chiefs, and that's one reason why he was in on the ground floor. And Barnsdall, too; he made friends with the Indians.

JG: So that would have been at the turn of the century?

EM: Yes. I don't know when Oklahoma was opened up, but it was . . . They'd moved the Indian tribes to the most terrible part of the United States, I mean where there was nothing. The soil was red, nothing would grow there . . .

JG: Oil alone.

EM: . . . and then put them there, and the Osage--Bruce Richards was half Osage, and he was part of that, you know, where they'd walked for a thousand miles and died along the way and then they got there, nothing would grow, or they just had to be cared for. And then [pauses] oil came. [Laughs]

JG: Now, getting back to the 1940's, where were we?

EM: Now let's see, I got through Douglas, I got through Schindler, I was writing for Arts and Architecture. I wrote for other magazines. I was publishing stories; I had several stories in . . . I was writing while I was in Schindler's office, I was writing while I was at Douglas, and I seemed to have boundless energy. I don't know how I did it. And then did all the cooking. But I loved to cook.

JG: Mmmmm. She's a very good cook, for your information. [Both laugh]

EM: So, I was a scout for a magazine when Mademoiselle . . . I published some stories in Harper's Bazaar, which was considered a literary place. I mean they had a high percentage of stories in Best Short Stories of the Year. Also Mademoiselle. I hadn't published in Mademoiselle, but because I'd published in Bazaar, Mademoiselle asked me to scout architecture out here for them. They were starting a new magazine for young. So, I did. That's my first, in getting--they had to be young. So it was most of the young architects coming back from the war, and they were all modern. I think that was the first time that I began my concentration on young, the youngs, and the moderns. So I did stories for them all over Los Angeles and the West Coast, went up to the Northwest, did a series of stories for them from the Northwest, and went to around Santa Fe. That lasted about maybe three years. It would take about one week a month, went to that.

JG: This was in the early fifties? Late forties?

EM: No, that's the late forties.

JG: What happened to radical politics and your involvement in radical politics in the meantime.

EM: Well, the war changed a great deal of that. Many of us were not happy about the way things were going in the radical movement here, so it was easy to sort of drop out. I sort of dropped out. But then when the hearings came, in the fifties, there, you know, we were all so horrified that these things were--that they could do this--that it changed. I'm really a grass roots liberal, I suppose, when it comes down to it, and I resented all this.

Let's see. Then, I did stories . . . Shulman--I'd gotten him to do stories for Mademoiselle magazine.

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1950s

JG: Julius Shulman?

EM: Yes. I'd first gotten him to do Schindler work. Schindler wasn't very happy with it, but, anyway, it was done. Then Shulman asked me to do things for the Times, because so many of the architects . . . There were two places the house architects wanted to appear in, Home Magazine and Sunset. So I would do them, you know; I may have done them for another magazine in the East, and the Times would take them second. But I'd do the story then. So I was writing for the Times and then doing my own writing.

JG: It was always a free-lance life though, wasn't it?

EM: Yes, always. Yes.

JG: What did that mean in terms of what you were able to do and couldn't do.

EM: Well, there was no great pressure until Berkeley had cancer. He had it twice, and this was about 1950. And then the second time, it sort of used up--I guess the second time was in 1950--it sort of used up all we had. So I really--it was dependent--the household--it fell on me, to--and I wasn't very good at it.

JG: What, to make money?

EM: Yeah. I was good at work. I had more industry than money sense. And I had great zest for what I was doing.

JG: You've always worked very hard, your entire life.

EM: Yes, I have. I started out doing nothing, and then, you know, I don't know how it happened but I did. Then I had an idea that we could make some money going to Mexico. I mean we could live on what I was . . . I could write from there. Berkeley was very much, you know--after having x-ray and all, needed something else, and so we rented the house to someone at UCLA and went down for nine months to Mexico. Someone got us a house in Cuernavaca, and it was much less. But somehow it didn't work out. Also, while I was there, I did a big story, a full issue of Arts and Architecture on domestic architecture. Oh, I'd done that before! That's right, I'd gone down to Mexico before that, and had done this story . . .

JG: When was that, the first time?

EM: That was 1950. That was the way it was. I went to Mexico in 1950, and Berkeley was over his first cancer.

JG: That was your first trip there?

EM: Yes, yes. We'd gone down to Ensenada a lot, and we'd stayed there often, but that was the first. A friend down there, I was going with a neighbor, someone wwho'd I worked at Douglas with, and we went down and I knew someone there who got an apartment for us with a bedroom. It was in the center of town, and we had a wonderful time. There was a show at the Belles Artes on Mexican architecture. I just flipped when I saw it; it was so wonderful.

JG: Belles Artes in Mexico City, obviously. The apartment was in Mexico City?

EM: Yes, yes, on Oaxaca Avenue, off . . .

JG: They had an extraordinary plastic sense, it seems, the Mexicans.

EM: Yes, yes. So, let's see, there were stories on--a big story on Barragan.

JG: For the Times, L.A. Times?

EM: Well, no, this was for Arts and Architecture. I did it first for Arts and Architecture, and then the Times wanted me to do it. So I went down again, and did it for them. Then we went back. Then I'd sold a couple of things to New York Times Magazine. That was when they thought I could write. Later, they wanted everything changed. So, I thought it would be good, you know, that we could live. But after nine months it didn't work out. So we came back.

JG: Nine months in Ensenada or nine months in Mexico City?

EM: Nine months in Cuernavaca. It was when we went down to Mexico that I did the big story on University City, all the buildings. That was another issue of Arts and Architecture. But in the meantime, I was doing stories also, big stories, travel stories for the Times Home Magazine. I worked there for a man named Jimmy Toland, who was really wonderful, and would let me do whatever I wanted. But I was organized enough, so it worked.

So then Sunset asked me to scout for them down here, and so I did. But they wanted just the wood, you know, lumberyard houses. They had no interest at all in the case studies. But I got interested in the landscape department, so I did an enormous number of things on landscape people. It was the beginning of my travels, and I went to Mexico. I went to Yucatan and Guatemala and Mexico for Sunset, and then for the Times.

And then one time Toland said he'd like to meet the editor of Sunset who was down here. So then we had lunch with John Entenza and Toland and the Sunset editor. We walked out to the car, Jimmy walked me out to the car, and he said "How'd you like to go to Italy for me?"

Well, I didn't throw my arms around his neck, but in spirit I did. It started my trips to Italy. I first went over on my own, and it took a long time and I really didn't see how I was going to do it until I hit someone in Florence. They were in charge of quality control of all material that came to the United States, and they had photographs of everything. The head of it had been in a prison camp with the English in North Africa and so his English was perfect. I had just studied Italian on the plane over. But I did get on with people so well, I loved it, and it was so wonderful.

So I came back, did this full issue on Italy, and I hadn't asked the help of any of the Italians here, and when they saw it, they immediately came out with all sorts of presents for me. After that, I went for five years; they paid my expenses, the Italians. I would go over for a month every year, and they would route me through various parts of Italy so I got to know it; I got to know all of Italy.

JG: This started in what, '52?

EM: No, that was '56, the first trip to Italy. But I'd had lots of trips to Mexico before that. Actually the work in Italy was three weeks, and so I took another week and travelled. Once I went to Egypt, I went to Greece a couple of times, I went to Germany, I went to England.

Very often I'd go to John Collier's place in Grasse, in St. Francois de Grasse. They had a big house there that was built by Josephine and her Italian lover--they had a stage--her Italian lover was an actor so . . . But it was a great place, great, and I loved John. John had been in Mexico a couple of times when I was there, and I adore him. He is so funny, he is so great. So I'd go there, and stay for . . .

JG: This was after he--you knew him from Southern California.

EM: Yes. So he was in movies, he wrote for movies then, and he'd made quite a bit of money on African Queen. He owned the story rights and had done the first script for it. But he controlled the . . . He made a lot of money on that. So they bought this [house].

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1960s

So anyway, my travels ended about 19 . . . Let's see, in the meantime I had some books out, 1960.

Oh, yes, I went to Brazil; the Brazilian government asked me as one of their critics to go over. I was astonished how much Arts and Architecture was prized in Europe. The people I knew, you know, they knew my name from having written for Arts and Architecture. It was unbelievable to me, because it paid little or nothing. I went to Brazil . . . Saarinen was there, too, Saarinen and Eames were at Brazil.

JG: Where, in Rio? They were at [inaudible]

EM: Yes. It was the opening of Brazilia. And Zevi was there.

JG: Bruno Zevi?

EM: Yes. It was incredible, the people in Brazilia.

JG: Now were you writing about--go ahead about Brazilia, I'm sorry.

EM: Well, I came back and did an issue for the Times on that, on the architecture.

JG: Now, during the time you were going to Mexico and to Italy were you writing about architecture in Southern California, or in the United States as well?

EM: Yes, yes.

JG: Berkeley was still alive at that time.

EM: Yes, yes. He died in '62. But it was awfully close. We lived well. We didn't have any . . . Well, there was nothing really to save because I--this was the only way I could do it, to get any reward myself [laughs] for sitting at the typewriter so closely. To take trips. And they were just paid for, they were just barely paid for. So, let's see, the first book came out in 1960.

Oh, there was a period of four months when I wrote television, and that happened when a friend of mine, a writer, had become an agent. He took some of my things, published stories, and took them around and sold them, and he sold a couple, and I got incredible prices for them, and then an extra price for writing the screenplay. Of course I work like hell, and I could bring it home if there had to be changes, and after having written all night and taking it in the morning, I could work--come home, and make the changes. So it was worth it. It paid up all our debts and got us in shape again, paid off the mortgage. I must have written about ten, and I loved it. I loved writing dialogue.

JG: What shows were they? Are these among your papers?

EM: No, oh, no, they're thrown out. They could take a good story and I don't know what they'd do--they'd just muck it up, and you know, once I went in to watch how they did it, how they could muck it up, and I even abetted them in it because they asked me if they could take out a certain character. Well, they thought that it wasn't a structural character. It was. [Both laugh loudly] What it did, it gave the actress more room on the stage to say . . .

JG: [Both laugh uncontrollably] Sorry, folks.

EM: But even there, I was going to go on; I wanted to--to do that right, and to do it well, and to get some really good . . . You know, to crack television and not just write, you know, the things . . . Well, I got so I could turn them out very fast.

[END TAPE 6, SIDE 1]

[BEGIN TAPE 6, SIDE 2] Esther , McCoy for the Archives of American Art, on Saturday, November 14th, 1987, in Santa Monica. This is side 2 of tape 6. We were talking about the...

EM: Yes. Well, this was ended when I got the contract for Five California Architects. And so then I began working--that was my downfall. Just when I had a taste of leisure and money, then this comes.

JG: You had said before that you had spent your life trying to escape the middle class, though, do you recall?

EM: Well, yes, I have escaped it. I escaped it. I escaped it at age 21 when I went to New York because I didn't want, I really didn't want possessions. And that's what appalls me at all this stuff--it's no value, but it's, you know, to have this much stuff.

JG: So you were escaping affluence by going into architectural writing? I mean, did you know it at the time?

EM: No, I didn't. And I wanted to do the book because I'd already done the catalogue for the show of the Roots of California Contemporary Architecture, that had been shown here. And so it was from that that they gave me the contract for the book. So then I worked on that for a year, and then I got the contract for the Neutra book, and came out of--turned it in in '59, the manuscript, and then went into the Neutra book. And that was, oh, that was hell. This man was no one to write about. That's when I knew that I must always write about the dead. Wherever I could. [Both laugh]

JG: So you wrote the Neutra book.

EM: Yes.

JG: Was that published before California Five [Five California Architects]?

EM: No, it was published after. They were both published in 1960. But it came out afterward. Five California Architects was delayed because the editor who commissioned it had left and . . . Did I tell you this a little while ago? The Dutchman who took over didn't like . . . He thought they were all pretty crappy.

JG: But you were able to salvage the manuscript; it went through.

EM: Well, I fought for it. You know, if you spend a year on something, by God, you're going to fight for it.

JG: And it sure proved very successful, even on their terms.

EM: Yes, yes it did.

JG: It's a remarkable book, I think. Whenever I go into an architect's library, it's always there. Sometimes it's out. It's almost hard to say why the moment for it was so right.

EM: It was slow. It was slow catching on, and I know that someone told me that he could tell, in going into a young architect's office, that it was . . . He'd see it up by the book on engineering [laughs], and knew that it was something that . . . I think the young architects liked it, because . . .

Oh, by that time, too, I'd been writing for the Italian magazines, and in Mexico I'd written a whole issue on California architecture for Architectura, the Mexican magazine. Then, in Italy, I began contributing the California architecture to the Italian art magazines. To, not Lotus, but what's the other one? Zodiac. The Pirelli magazine. I think the first thing I wrote for that was on Pierre Koenig, and then Moore, and then I did issues on young architects for them and for Lotus. Bruno Alfieri, the editor, when it died, he opened his own magazine, Lotus. So I went on writing for him.

JG: Did you save all these articles and are they in your papers?

EM: Yes, they're here. So then I would come back from Europe and publish things in Arts and Architecture and then in the Times. But after the book writing (after the Neutra), it was so traumatic, the experience with Neutra, that I was in New York . . .

JG: What was traumatic about it? He was difficult?

EM: Well, yes. He wanted me to say things that were not true. He wanted me to say that he was still in partnership with Alexander, and when the manuscript was in, I went to New York, and I sat down with Braziller. He said, "But Neutra showed me the contract--it was dated just months ago--to show that he was still in partnership with Alexander."

I said, "All right, I'll pay for the telephone calls. Let's call."

And then there was something else too about Davidson that he had said was untrue and he wanted out, so we called Alexander, and Braziller was listening, and he said that this contract was something. . . .They had had to draw up a new one because of changes.

But he said, "If you say I'm in partnership with Neutra, I'll sue you."

So then I was going to call Davidson for Braziller to hear, and Braziller said, "No, no; that's enough."

But Neutra did get his way in certain things after I'd gone. There was one point where he picked up all the photographs. He said, "They belong to me. I own the negatives; they're in Shulman's keeping, but I own them."

JG: Is that true? He owned them?

EM: Yes, that was his agreement with Shulman.

JG: So he really tried to control his image in the press?

EM: Yes he did, yes. He sent his son out to see me once, to beg me to be kind to his father. Well, God, he wanted everything changed in the book, as he wanted to see it. He wanted everything changed.

JG: You showed it to him?

EM: Yeah, I showed it to him. And then at the end, I wouldn't let him see it. But he did see it at Braziller; Braziller showed it to him.

JG: It was to create a more positive image. But was it negative to start with, or . . . ?

EM: No, no.

JG: You liked his work so there was no problem?

EM: Yeah, yeah; it was very . . . I just had to divorce him. I had to make the decision--would I stop it, or would I divorce him from his work and just look at his work.

JG: What sort of self-image did he want to portray, that would . . . ?

EM: Well, he wanted--now, for another thing, he wanted me to put the date of the Lovell house in 1927, and I said, "That isn't true." I told him I'd had a check through the records at City Hall and got the date of when the drawings were filed and when the building permit was issued, and this was 1929. And then, finally, he said, "Yes, but I like 1927, that was the year that the Barcelona Pavilion . . . " And then a couple of other things, too. He wanted to be that year.

JG: Yes, he wanted to be seminal.

EM: Yeah, uh-huh.

JG: So he was competing historically, but not with Schindler? When did Schindler do the Beach House? '23?

EM: It was underway when Neutra arrived, and I think he came in '25.

JG: So he wasn't trying to beat the Lovell house, the beach house.

EM: No, but he did get the next one.

JG: I wanted to know whether he was actually trying to lie to pre-date Schindler or . . .

EM: No.

JG: . . . but it was actually the Mies thing.

EM: And then some of the drawings for the Lovell Beach House. Lovell was having Schindler do so many things for him that a certain letter of Lovell's shows that he couldn't decide which would be done first. But many of the drawings were already in, and the sketches for the Lovell house that were done, I think, in '23.

JG: The Lovell, the Beach House?

EM: Beach House, yes.

JG: Which one first? Lovell didn't know whether he was going to build the..

EM: Well, he was doing a house in the...

JG: Los Feliz?

EM: No, he was doing a house in the country, a farm. He had a farm.

JG: Oh, I didn't know that. And Schindler had designed that too?

EM: Yes, he did that.

JG: Was that ever built?

EM: Oh, yes.

JG: I didn't know that.

EM: Yeah. A ranch house.

JG: I've never seen that illustrated.

EM: Yeah, it's in David's book. It wasn't an important house.

JG: So we were getting--Neutra . . .

EM: So that was over. That was '60, and then things began to be rather bad. It was the end of the Italy trips and work was low. I was doing some work then for [Architectural] Forum, occasional pieces for Forum, and what John paid wasn't enough. I'd have calls for things. People would call. I did, you know, things for Life magazine and for others that were unsigned. Some just doing the writing and getting the material together. That would be for unsigned pieces. At that time, loose magazines were not . . .There were no . . . signing. They were not attributed to anyone.

And let's see, about 1957 I went on publishing stories. I think the last one I published was in the end of the '50s. And then, you see, it would take some little time to write one, and if they didn't go to one of the magazines that paid well, they would wind up in the little literary magazines that didn't pay. And so I was really stuck. It just could not do it.

Impossible to do a book because there was not the money to sit down and do a book. I could do one where I was contracted for it and had an advance, but otherwise . . . And I was pretty well off books by then, and then when Berkeley died, in 1962, I said I will never, never write about architecture again. It was almost like, you know, you're casting off a lover. Immediately, people began to feel sorry for me, and the--Italy came forward and asked me to go on a trip for them. Jimmy Toland sent me to Mexico. That's where I went with Marvin Rand and... [laughs] So, then Jimmy Toland got me the trip to Mexico . . .

JG: Before we go on with this aspect of your career, what had-in the large, big canvas stuff-happened to Southern California between the war? We're backtracking here a little bit, and say 1960, how was it that California changed? I know this is a sweeping . . . This is a question that's a book, but it's my perception that it had been a much smaller place before the war, more contained; you knew people and something happened after the war. It changed . . .

EM: You knew them, just the people, I mean. There were more architects, but you knew them by their work, and there was no good work that went unnoticed in Southern California. The magazines . . .

JG: Before the war, or after the war?

EM: After the war. The magazines by this time were sending out people all the time to California, especially the magazines that wanted houses, because they were the only place that were building interesting ones. The magazine I worked for, did scouting for, in New York, Mademoiselle magazine--all their advertising was eclectic stuff, and all the houses were moderns. Everything I sent them was modern. And there were times when there would be ten houses in them and maybe eight of them would be mine. I was the only one who could put together a good package fast, I guess, and who could write on the things. Although they crapped up the writing, you know; they made them really--it was-- in first person things.

JG: They turned your articles into first person.

EM: Yeah, as if they were written by the person.

JG: By the [inaudible]?

EM: Flippant; yes, very flippant?

JG: Under your name?

EM: Oh no, no names were published. Oh yes, the name of the person, the owner, yeah.

JG: It's not as though they changed your articles into first person under your name?

EM: Oh no, oh no. I wouldn't have permitted that. Let's see. The changes? Well, the strict International Style had always been more or less corrupted here. There's very little that was not eventually corrupted by the climate, and the kind of people who live here.

JG: In what sense corrupted?

EM: Well, I mean, it was less severe. It was more . . . It was freer here.

JG: Did the weather in fact encourage the . . . You say "corrupted," but did it actually bring out the nature of International Style more in terms of flow and space?

EM: No. Well, I'm thinking about Lescaze, say. Lescaze would, you know, if he'd come out here, he would have been softened, too, I think. Neutra, was softened, at 1949, or '48, when he did the Brentwood house. You know, what's that Brentwood house? Not the one on the slope, but the flat one.

JG: Very rich materials in that.

EM: Yeah. Anyway, it was a Wright client to begin with that Neutra managed to get. It had a way of softening things, California. And it was never . . . I think Clark and Frey, in Palm Springs--it was closer there to the International Style, and then even the Neutra house in Palm Springs is very strict, rigid. But it's a nice house, and I happen to like . . . I wouldn't live in an International Style house, but God, you know, I go back to that first shock when I saw one, and it's something incredibly wonderful about it, so stripped down. You wouldn't have known its bones were so beautiful. [Laughs]

JG: Hmmm. Which one, for example?

EM: Well, Neutra, I think, especially. Those apartment houses of his, and then his house in Palm Springs, too, was very . . .

JG: That is a nice house.

EM: Yes.

JG: That passage of you, when you . . . Where was it, in . . . ?--you walking downstairs in the Lovell house, walking into that light? Was that in the . . . ?

EM: I think that would have been in Vienna to Los Angeles. The last part, I think. The stairways, comparing the stairs of the Schindler and the Neutra. Then I swore never to write about architecture again, but then I did. And then, too, you don't . . . Fiction is something you can't pick up and put down. In fiction you set a scene, and in other writing you inform. You can't move back and forth from one to the other.

Let's see, where am I going, in the 50's? I don't think I can stop. I would have to think about that, to break it down, about what the changes . . . There was a change in the . . . Johnson did some of it. The people that I talked to (I told you this before), in 1964. Oh yes, that's another thing, John Entenza got me a Graham grant. Well, no, it was Ford. I think he helped. He got me a Ford grant to study young architects. And that was '64. And so how could I give it up? I mean, I was just pushed back into it. And being at home with it anyway.

But it was '64 that the effects of Johnson, his softening. That the way he would, you know, he would take a column and sculpture it. And well, so had Niemeyer in Brazilia, that was 1960. But the young architects, none of them approved of him, of Johnson, and yet they were all so careful, because they knew his power and they were really afraid to say anything. Johnson was always very nice to me, whenever we met, and I liked him. God, he made me laugh; no one is funnier than Johnson.

JG: Mmmhmmm. When did you meet him?

EM: I met him a number of times, at meetings and in New York. Well, a dozen times, maybe; half dozen times.

JG: Johnson said he really should have written about you?

EM: And you know, this is what I think he was talking about. It was a book that was being re-published. What was it? I've forgotten. This was only a couple of years ago. And I think it was John Dixon who said . . . I said I was looking for someone to . . . The publisher wanted to get someone to say a word about it for the... And he said, "I can get Johnson to." And then he called back later and said that he couldn't. Johnson didn't do this. And I thought that might have been what he was talking about. (It's [the tape] not on now, is it?)

JG: It is on now. So it was, that he would have . . . He was talking about what?

EM: Well, he said . . .

JG: Oh, he would have written about the book . . .

EM: He said, "I should have written about you." And then I think he read it after that, maybe. It is quick reading, and I know that several architects have phoned me just after they've read it. I know Cesar called me.

JG: Oh, yes, that was Vienna to Los Angeles.

EM: Yes, yeah.

JG: It was amazing that he had found that. There weren't many printed, were there? Vienna to Los Angeles?

EM: Well, there were a lot printed, and they're still in the warehouse.

JG: In the bin, yes. It's just that it's not as though Johnson goes prowling through the bookstores.

EM: If you want me to give him a copy, I'll . . .

JG: Oh, he has it! He told me he loved it.

EM: Oh, I see. It's his kind of book. Because it's quick, quick.

JG: It's a very good book.

EM: You know, Konrad Wachsmann, too, came to see me as soon as he'd read it. Quincy Jones called me just after he finished it.

JG: This is the book over which you and I met, you recall?

EM: Yes! Yes. And there are a couple of other people who just read it, and, I think, architects who knew the period anyway. But no, you wrote the only really good review.

JG: Aw, gee. [Laughs]

EM: Oh, I couldn't believe it when I read your review. Someone who really reads.

JG: You said the nicest thing, that it was as though I had been looking over your shoulder as you wrote it.

EM: [Laughing] Did I?

JG: Yeah.

EM: [Still laughing] Good for me. [Both laugh]

JG: So, after this self-congratulatory episode, we'll sign off for the next edition.

EM: All right.

[END TAPE 6, SIDE 2]

[BEGIN TAPE 7, SIDE 1]

JG: ... for the Archives of American Art, on Sunday, November 15, in Santa Monica. We are in the late sixties approximately.

EM: The sixties was what I could call the grant period. The first one came in 1964, the Ford grant. It was sort of a reward for having worked so long in the vineyard, I suppose. The Ford grant was to study the work of young architects. Well, tapes of my interviews with them are all at the Smithsonian. I can't name all of them now, but some of the important ones were Charles Moore, Robert Venturi--people who had been in Philip Johnson's office.

JG: Jim Polshek?

EM: Jim Polshek, yes.

JG: Was this the start of your association with some of these people?

EM: Yes. And then in Philadelphia, too, there were a number of people. Tim Vreeland and... What's the name of the Italian?

JG: Oh, I know who you mean.

EM: Aldo Giurgola. And then the Detroit architect, first name begins with a G, the Latvian.

JG: I don't know that one.

EM: Gunnar Birkerts and various people in New York. I think I mentioned those in the office of Philip Johnson.

JG: This gives us an idea, but the whole list is in your file.

EM: Yes, it is. Then, I was going to do a book on the young architects, and Bruno Alfieri was interested in publishing it in Italy. And he even gave me a page make-up, to show to editors. Very bright, nice cover, the first of the ones I'd seen that had horizontal strips of various buildings pasted together. There was no money in it from Alfieri, and I was then writing for Arts and Architecture. David Travers had bought it, and he didn't see the . . . He didn't like the architects. He would do one piece on them, so it was all one article on young architects.

JG: How did you choose them?

EM: Well, I'd had some help, and I'd known the work of a number of them. Peter Blake had given me some names, and Paul Grotz had given me some names, I think, although Paul was not too keen on Venturi or some of the others. I was staying with the Grotzes in New York several days when I was there, and Bob Venturi came to New York and came to see me there. There was no indication that he was going to be an important architect in the reception.

But this is the first time I'd had such full notes and was prepared to write a book that did not come off. The cost of the trips had been very high, and there wasn't too much left from the grant by the time I had got to the point of writing.

JG: Venturi had written his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by that time?

EM: No, he had not. He had published one piece from it. But this was '64, and I think it was '66 that it came out. Anyway, there was another piece of it that I had asked him to let me try to get David Travers to publish. David was not as experimental as John Entenza. He paid more, and he was very easy to work with, and he made more changes in my text than John ever had, or John's office. But I liked David very much, and he was a very fair person. But he just simply did not see this as material for publication. They looked strange to him, and he was so used to the Bauhaus that anything that was the beginning of post-modern was just not for him.

JG: This was a round-up of everybody who became the establishment of the next generation.

EM: Yes, it was. I had done earlier-very early, for the Mademoiselle thing--architects who later became famous. Not that famous. But most of these turned out to be very famous-germinal figures in the seventies. I tried to get David to be more experimental in the things he used in Case Studies. But he had taken a road that was the middle road, and I'd wanted him to use inflatables and, oh, a spin-off from Bucky Fuller and other things. But he did do a number of experimental things--I mean, writers he published. He always alludes to this when we discuss it, that he did do some writers who became famous. Or the things they wrote about became famous.

That was the beginning of a life that was easier, and then by this time my name was known to many young architects. I was sort of an under-the-counter book that the young architects were beginning to find. Five California Architects didn't get too high marks among the historians because there was too much in it that was not the way architectural history was written. I think it was not until Peter Banham came along and brought engineering as a subject for architectural history that it was broadened.

JG: What was it especially about your work that was not suitable or appropriate . . . . ?

EM: Well, I don't know really how to describe it except that it did deal more with their lives, and my feeling that architecture did come out of people, and those people came out of backgrounds, and the things they saw when they were children, things they grew up with, and how these affected their choices, and also their own points of view on things, many things that were not purely architectural.

I think the usual architectural history at the time was written from the point of view of the facade, and there wasn't too great emphasis even on the floor plan. Having worked in an architect's office, knowing the importance of the floor plan as the basis for the creation, I did give it great attention. I already had a great sensitivity to floor plans, and I think now, three or four years after finishing Second Generation, I can still walk the floor plans of almost all the buildings that I wrote about, and would recognize them, I think. At least if the window openings were in, I could recognize them. Harris's especially. I keep walking those at night and know them all. He had a very good floor plan. His was the only one among those that was not really universal space. This was closer to space for use rather than space as simply a great expanse for photography.

There are many reasons for this, I think. Many architects were experimenting with walls and wall systems, as Soriano was, so you can't just say that one was forward looking or made a more livable space. Others were doing experimentation which has really benefitted architecture very much. Soriano, for instance, in developing walls that could be put together in factories, that even had everything in them, the electricity and the phone connections and the bed, desks and the bed head, and the doors already in them.

JG: Konrad Wachsmann was doing something similar too.

EM: Yes, he had. But not in the way that Soriano did. Konrad had never put desks and things of this sort, he never put the wiring in, and in the houses of his . . . I wrote about one of these houses for Mademoiselle.

JG: Soriano?

EM: . . . of Wachsmann's. As I remember. Wachsmann's was a wood system and Soriano's was steel. Experiments in steel became very important as far as the case study houses went because they moved away from wood and they emphasized the pavilion aspect of the house, as Pierre Koenig, Eliwood and Soriano did.

JG: Pavilion in the sense of opening to the outside?

EM: Yes. And all on one level, with a minimum of walls. One funny thing I always remember about Soriano's case study, that he still believed the kitchen should be separated, as most Europeans did, from anything else. He has doors a foot apart, one to the service and one to the entrance hail. You open them both and go into the same space. But one was the kitchen, and I think that he believed that. I know Schindler and Neutra both believed in this.

When I was in Schindler's office I tried to take away the separation between the service space and the kitchen, and he always put it back in. I think once he let it stay.

JG: Service space, you mean the washing machine and . . .

EM: Yes, yes. He always believed that the smells from the kitchen should not enter the living space.

JG: Now, who?

EM: Schindler, yes. And Neutra too. It is a place . . . It's something that comes out of the many servants that were possible, servants as a class. And that, at the end of World War II, so many people who'd worked in kitchens left the kitchen and went to work in airplane plants or in factories. So they never went back. So we became a servantless people, certainly in California, until the Mexicans . . . South Americans really now have supplanted it. They've made another group of servants, but not live--in, as they were formerly, which required a house with a servant's room and servants' quarters, in some cases, for big houses.

JG: You think that might come back, that floor plan that reflects the servant class?

EM: Floor plans always reflect the economy.

JG: The economy now has servants. People can now afford servants.

EM: But the floor plan doesn't quite go back. Once it's made a change, it wouldn't revert to the Victorian house with the servants' quarters.

JG: Back stairway . . .

EM: Well, now, say even in the red house, which was an early modern house, you see the servants' spaces there. I think I commented on this some place, the long hall from the kitchen to the dining room. That's both [spelling it out] H-A-L-L and H-A-U-L to the dining room, in the red house. Mary Banham took me there once when I was in England, and I was interested in it and then studied the plan in various other ways.

JG: Whose house is that, the red house?

EM: Well, it was for--oh, the arts and crafts man, Morris. It was for Morris, and it was by, oh God, I know, but--you can look that up. In writing I leave these. If I can't think of a name, I leave that blank, and go on, and then turn my chair around and pull down books from the shelf and fill in the spaces. Or, by that time, I may remember them. Phillip Webb, it was, who designed the house.

JG: Getting back to the young architects that you were studying who became kind of the deans of their generation, how did you select them? You found their works simply interesting, or . . .

EM: I looked at their work. They had very little published, all of them, but I looked at it, and made the selection of the architects from this.

JG: What was emerging as the ideas of that time? Were things more complex or metaphorical or . . . ?

EM: It was a move away from the Bauhaus, mainly.

JG: And these were the people who were doing it.

EM: Yes.

JG: Did you think of it as a radical thing at the time, or was it a curiosity, or did you sense a much larger thing going on?

EM: I saw change coming. Something has continued for a long time, and no real freshness comes out of it. Then, you like change.

Well, I was starting to bring in Mexico, but I find it doesn't . . . I was thinking about Barragan, but his was really such a cross between the European. Well, Corb, it would be, the Mexicans look to Corb. It would be a cross between Corb--in Barragan--a cross between Corb and the village churches. You saw he used this very poor pine they had, and he really made an aesthetic principle out of the poor wood they had in Mexico. That's why they use so much concrete. Concrete became very popular in Mexico because there were so few trees, and the transportation from the forested part of Mexico was not easy. So they used the material, which was concrete, and that's why Felix Candela became so . . . bringing something new to that.

But to go back, to Barragan for instance, he used various elements of the village churches and religious buildings, and the buildings where the religious people lived, and combined those with Corb. It was a Corbusian thing, a regionalism, and done with a skill that was unbelievable.

JG: There was a certain amount of the rancho in there too, wasn't there?

EM: No, not in Barragan. No, no rancho. None, none whatever.

JG: Cancel that.

EM: Yes. In Candela. I wrote a great deal about Candela, because in the fifties there was a shell on every student's drawing board. I wrote about him so much, I think, when he did a small shell for the university campus, a tiny building, for study of rays--Cosmic Ray Pavilion, I think it was called. At the same time he was doing this church which was made concrete. While in Italy (what's the Italian's name?) was using various parts for the concrete elements, in Mexico . . .

JG: Nervi.

EM: Nervi, yes, was using pre-fabricated parts, while in Mexico Felix Candela was applying it directly, and it was in doubly curved surfaces. He could use it that way very thin. And he did the church this way that was really very well known. They looked extremely complicated but as I asked him how he could get the workmen to understand this, such a complicated thing, he said, "It's not complicated; it is simply a surface that is easily--the plane is doubly curved but it is on a grid.

JG: It's the double curvature that gives it strength, isn't it?

EM: Yes, yes, it does. Which I'd understood in working in planes, too--the curves strengthened the 032 sheet metal.

JG: Oh, I see. You said that the concrete work in Italy by Nervi was pre-cast concrete, more than poured?

EM: Yeah, it was pre-cast, you know, in the salt. I don't know if it was true of the salt mines he did, the factory, but it was in the stations and the stadia that he did.

JG: What about the influences of North, across the border, North to South, South to North? Was there much then? Mexico to the United States?

EM: I think the only one that really had the lasting effect was--no, I don't mean lasting, but it was Candela. But it didn't work out in the United States because . . . It did in Mexico because labor cost was very low. In the United States labor cost was extremely high. So . . .

[END OF TAPE 7, SIDE 1]

[BEGIN TAPE 7, SIDE 21

JG: . . . November 15, in Santa Monica, we're talking about Candela, Mexico, concrete.

EM: I've forgotten what I was going to say, but I've written all this; it's been in Arts and Architecture, and I wrote about Candela for various regional magazines, literary magazines like New Mexico Quarterly.

JG: You have copies of this among your papers?

EM: Yes.

JG: To get back to the influence across the border. Why was there not more dialogue, or why has there not been more dialogue between the North and the South?

EM: Well, just that thing, the economics.

JG: The labor.

EM: Yes, labor, and the . . .

JG: But France would influence America through Corb, and Corb would influence Mexico, but for some reason the intellectual influence didn't seem to go back and forth across the borders; it still isn't going across the borders.

EM: Between Mexico and the United States?

JG: Yeah.

EM: No, but I don't think they're doing anything very exciting in Mexico now. This was a high period simply because they had a . . . Presidents can't succeed themselves; they have a six year office. This president was going out of office and so he was having the university built as sort of his monument. That had taken a number of years to start, and so that was part of the thing that kept the ideas alive. Before that, it had been started by the development of the concrete industry in Mexico, which had influenced Juan O'Gorman. He did the schools in International Style for the Department of Education.

JG: In concrete.

EM: Yes. But now, take something like the . . . Oh, where the lava beds are. What's the name of that?

JG: In Mexico City? The community is called . . .

EM: Anyway, it was planned by Barragan, and he invited various people to design houses there. They're all very large. All of them have, I've noticed and said in writing, entry halls larger than the servants' quarters, servants' bedrooms, certainly. This was true by a Communist designer in Brazil, Niemeyer. I saw an apartment of his. But there they were living in . . . They had no air in the apartment; it just came through openings in the room that went out to a hail which had some opening. But they were so small.

JG: The servants' quarters?

EM: Yes. Very, very small. Juan O'Gorman, for instance, he was designing a house, and I was there at the time, staying with them. And I pointed out to him that his entry hail was larger than the servant's room, and here, he was very left wing, and it sort of shocked him, I think. He changed it; he added a little [laughing], a few square feet to the servant's room, but I don't think he cut down too much, because they really required show, in Mexico.

There was nothing like the case study house program which was . . . Space was very hard to come by, expensive, and the people, they had a middle class that had been immensely expanded by the war, which could afford some houses. Mexico--its middle class began to grow with the building of the University, but never to the extent that it did here. And then it pretty well stopped, mainly because of the money that's stolen by the people in power. And I think the oil money, when they discovered oil in Mexico, I think most of that money went out of Mexico; it wasn't used. I think the difference between incomes of the rich and the poor has become greater in Mexico in the last years. The difference in United States between the rich and the poor has become greater under Reagan, but it is still less than in Mexico. One good thing, it keeps crafts, hand crafts alive. The difference between, you know, when there's no lower working class, no hand craft class, the crafts fail. And can be brought back then only by, given new life only by money grants from governments.

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1965

I was asked to be . . . I think my title at UCLA . . . I think I went in in about 1965. It was before the school opened. George Dudley was the dean.

JG: Before the architecture school opened?

EM: Yes. There were many things that I did there. In fact I was plugged into most every place. Denise Scott Brown was there, who later married Bob Venturi, and we got on very well together. I helped her in the development of her lectures, and because I knew Ocean Park, and her seminars were on a group of buildings in Ocean Park, in planning. She was a planner. So I liked it very much.

George, then, finally gave me a thing to do which was to develop, in the Neutra collection, a way of displaying certain things without they're having to be touched, because Neutra's drawings were old, fragile, and they'd had them for about ten years and had never unrolled any of them. So I discovered this, and that was the first thing I set out to do.

The students were paid, oh, you know, two-fifty, whatever the going wage was then, to help, and there was always one in the office, one in the Neutra collection with me. He turned out to be someone who was working part-time in the computer. So I asked him how it could be done, you know, how it could be computerized? I'd already investigated the things on campus, the way they kept their buildings, and found that they had them on microfiche, and had to have them in drawers. The drawings themselves were in dead storage.

Then I went to Sears, to see how they--because they have a great system, you know, where they just throw something on a screen when you order something. These were very interesting systems, and so I decided on the Neutra it should be a combination of the punch card, with a hole in it that had a little microfiche--a small, small microfiche of the drawing. So we were doing that, and that went on for, I don't know, six or eight months. It was dusty, hard work, and it was fun. But I never had any satisfaction of seeing it carried out, because when the dean changed, the new dean called me in and asked me what I did. And I did so many things, that it was hard to say, so I stumbled around.

JG: That was Perloff?

EM: Perloff, yes. And so he could see that I was of no help, and he knew nothing about architecture, Perloff . . .

JG: He was a planner.

EM: He wasn't even a planner. He raised money in Washington. An economist, I think he was. We'd had a little run-in because I'd wanted the school to buy the Dodge House. It had about four acres, and it was about $900,000. I thought they could raise the money for this, and they could sell off part of it, and you know, in West Hollywood, what three or four acres would go for now. But he said, "No, if I were going to do something like this, I would want something that the kids, the students, could tear down and put together again." And then the Dodge house, of course, was one of the great houses that we had tried so desperately to save.

JG: Was that the first major historic preservation issue in the city?

EM: No, there had been others. There had been others.

JG: Such as?

EM: I'm trying to think.

JG: Atlantic Richfield?

EM: That we could not do anything about. The money of Atlantic Richfield, it was too great, I think. David Gebhard wrote a book on the building. It was a picture book, more than a book. I did quite a bit of the research for that. It was one of the things on the Register. I hated to see it go, but . . . And the library was always threatened. Mainly, because the financial center was moving from one street . . .

JG: Spring.

EM: Spring, over to this new center. Oh, many things after that. You really could not get great interest in preservation then. I had gotten some money from a small grant from Edgar Kaufman to do a film on the Dodge House, as . . . Because it was so tight, one didn't know. So I worked on that; that was one of those losers too. The film is still around. A copy of it, I think, is at the Smithsonian. That went a number of places, was shown widely. It opened at the County Museum.

JG: By the way, you speak of the County Museum. Let's digress a little bit to shows you were involved with. You did a number of shows . . .

EM: Yes. The first one was when I knew Jim Elliott and I knew his associate, Bill Osmun. When I was doing the show, I got the contract to write the book on Five California Architects. Another show had been done on this; I wasn't involved in the show, putting the show together, but I did write the catalog for it, Roots of California American Architecture. So I was somewhat known for that. And then my pieces in the Times had always had wide attention; I'd written on the early moderns, you know, round-ups on them, ten or twelve pages stories in the Times.

JG: That was when the magazine existed?

EM: Yes, well, it has existed for . . . It lost favor, but I mean, at one time it was an important thing. I mean, important; the architecture magazines in the East always got it, and saw things that they would not have seen otherwise. So I was known in a way, here; so Jim, I think, asked me if I would do a show for them and we settled on the Gill show.

JG: What year?

EM: I'd have to look it up, but that would be the late fifties, I think. It's in the catalogue. So I was doing that while I was writing the book. Yeah, it would be late fifties, because I wrote the thing for the catalogue, which would be the essay for the book. It was changed, I mean, second draft of it, for the book, but it was also in the catalogue. I worked with Marvin Rand on [it]. We did all the shows, all the houses, buildings of Gill. That's why it happened to be, it was through the help of the money from the County Museum that Gill got so widely photographed and collected. But I'd had to do it rather fast. I had written a couple of things on Gill for Times Home Magazine, on his early work, his importance here, as part of a round-up. So that show had been successful.

Hitchcock had come out to give the lecture at the show, and it was interesting because he didn't know Gill; he'd never heard of him. He was seeing photographs of work of a man he did not know at all, and it was a little embarrassing to him, and amusing to us, how little he knew. But he did know the Viennese, what's his name, the Viennese &endash;Loos--he did know Loos's work.

Oddly enough, Loos and Gill were born the same year, and this idea that Loos had influenced Gill was preposterous. And Gill had done some of his stripped-down buildings before Loos had. Loos had written about it, but . . . There was always a feeling on the East Coast . . . I don't know whether I've said this here, in these tapes, that they, the East, will believe Europe before they will believe anything west of the Mississippi. Even the Yale guy, Scully, had minimized Gill and had even said that he was influenced by Loos. Loos had written about "the ornament as crime" things in a Vienna paper, but they were written while Gill was already working. It would have meant that the papers would have had to be sent to San Diego from Vienna and to be read by Gill. Gill's nephew, who worked with him at the time, said that he never read anything, that the magazines came in and were unopened, and that he had stopped the subscriptions to Gill's magazines. Well, anyway, it just is one more indication that the West was not taken very seriously, and that if it was an idea, a new idea, it must have come out of Europe. And that was carried on.

When they edited my piece on Gill for Five California Architects, they took out several things. One of them was, they took out Schindler's given names, and so he just came out R.M. I had said that he was baptized Rudolph Michael at the Gummendorfert?) Catholic Church. So then, another thing was that they took out of Gill . . . Gill had, when his nephew started studying architecture, asked him to learn German, because he wanted some things translated, and Louis Gill had not studied German, according to his son. But Scully got this, that he'd had his nephew study German so he could read the Loos articles. So it was really going far afield, to give Europe the advantage over California. It's why Maybeck was neglected so long. And why the Greenes, and, well, Schindler, too. I know, Paul Grotz told me that Neutra was published much by the Forum because, he said, he sent in such a complete package: good photography, all the material, the drawings, you know, presentation drawings, and text were all there. Just put it to bed.

JG: The catalogue to the Gill show I presume is in your papers?

EM: Yes, it is, yes.

JG: What other shows after Gill?

EM: The next year was the Felix Candela show for USC. I did the catalogue on that; I'd done heavy research on that anyway for my articles. And then, well, let's see, a much later one was Ten Italian Architects for the County Museum. I'd gone to Italy for two months on that. And then, oh, yes, the O'Gorman show of mosaics. It was when Marvin and I were in Mexico, and we did that. During this time, too, I was also writing about these things for Zodiac and the other Italian magazine, Lotus. By this time I also was doing occasional things for English magazines. I became great friends with the Pontis and had liked them very much. That came about when I was in Italy doing things for the Times. Ponti had worked in so many fields that if I was short of things in anything I would go to the Ponti office. One of his daughters was there in, sort of in communications. They had photographs of everything. And so Ponti was extremely well represented in the stories I did in the Times.

Let's see if there was anything else. Oh yes, I taught. David Gebhard asked me to take his class when he was in Europe. He did a book on Schindler after; I think it came out in 1970, and so this would be the end of the sixties. Yeah, it was, about '69, I think. I went for two quarters, and that was a change, too, because I was paid so much that I could really start a little nest egg for the poor times, so I could get it in some CD's which would help. Because I knew that they would come again; they always did, low periods. And then by this time I wanted to write the things that I liked to write, and that you have to pay for. You buy time. So I bought time.

Let's see, there was a couple of other shows; I don't quite remember what they were. It's in the list there, yes.

JG: And you started teaching, you said, at Santa Barbara. Did you do that frequently or...

EM: I'd begun to lecture quite a bit, before that, but I lectured four classes a week at Santa Barbara.

[END TAPE 7, SIDE 2)

[BEGIN TAPE 8, SIDE 1]

JG: ...interviewing Esther McCoy, for the Archives of American Art, on Monday, November 16, in Santa Monica.

EM: I did an early film, Architecture West, in 1947. I wrote the text for it. And there are a few other things that were left out. I was a consultant for the Hundred Years of A.I.A. in 1957. I was Regent's Lecturer at U.C. Santa Barbara, 1967. And Regent's Lecturer at U.C. Santa Cruz, 1974. I'm not sure about the dates of the first. I did a book on Craig Eliwood for Walker in 1968, published in Italy. I did it for Bruno Alfieri, for whom I'd written for Italian magazines. Let's see, there were some honors: I had the Star of Order of Solidiarity from the Republic of Italy in 1960, and I was made an Honorary Associate of the Southern California Chapter of American Institute of Architects in 1967, and received the Distinguished Service Citation from the California Council of the A.I.A. in 1968,

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1970s

and the M.C.A.C. award from Los Angeles County Museum of Art for distinguished achievement in 1982, and an A.I.A. Honor Award for Excellence in 1985, the Julia Morgan award from UCLA in 1987, and the--what's that last one?

JG: Oh, the A.I.A....

EM: No, from the Woman's Building.

JG: Oh, the Vesta...

EM: ...Vesta Award in 1987, for scholarship. I think that takes care of [it]. In 1969 I became a contributor to Progressive Architecture, and for a while did a monthly story for them, and then after that just contributed stories. That is the Craig Ellwood book [she is looking through papers], and that sort of finishes up the sixties. The Ten Italian Architects was 1967.

Then, in the seventies, I had other awards. I had a Graham in 1971. That was to pull together certain things from writings . . . Some of the work was on J.R. Davidson, and on Ain, and on various other people--to pull together papers that I had which led to writing, in the seventies, of Second Generation. The Guggenheim, also, was in 1979. That was what I used to write and do the traveling and expenses and everything on Second Generation.

I did about maybe, in all, over the years, forty pieces for Progressive Architecture, and for endless other magazines. I contributed to catalogues. One was on Naives and Visionaries, a show at the Walker Art Center, and I wrote on Bottle Village [Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, Simi Valley, CA] near Los Angeles. It was folk art, folk architecture. Then, also, I wrote another thing on the Eames, for Walker Art, on their work. It was the work of the (what's the name of the thing they work for?) the Herman Miller . . . It was a show; I did the Eames section.

Then I began researching on the Vienna to Los Angeles book. I had done stories, or I had put together the letters between Neutra and Schindler for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. And then also the letters from Louis Sullivan to Schindler. That also was published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. So, in this book, Vienna to Los Angeles, about Neutra and Schindler, those letters are in the back of the book. It's a story of how both of them got to the United States and their friendship, and the break-up of their friendship, and their work together in King's Road, when Neutra moved into the house. It was a small book, very compact, and was liked mainly by architects. I don't know many other people who knew it. It didn't have wide distribution. It's, I think really, one of my favorite books, because it was so taut. I think it was so taut that I really wanted to loosen up, and so the next book was Second Generation, which just spilled out and carried the architects into various phases of their life and their development, far more fully than I did in Five California Architects, and with less reason to have that length.

In 1974 I had some surgery. I had an ulcer that had recurred a number of times, was very painful, and finally I had surgery for it. While I was getting over it, I set up a typewriter by the table downstairs. My workroom's been upstairs. I just began writing about my life, mainly from the time I went to New York, and first worked in New York, Patchin Place, and work for Dreiser, and several of those pieces have been published--or two have been published now and one will be out next month in Grand Street. That has been work that I've liked very much. I have written several other parts of this, that are unpublished, and one about the radical movement in Los Angeles. That is unpublished. Then a piece on Schindler which has just been published in L.A. Architect, about my work in the office, his way of working. Oh, yeah, after that I did a small piece on Robert Venturi, of meeting him and seeing his house for the first time, reminiscence, really.

And then today I just started a piece on John Collier, the English writer, who was one of our dearest friends and wonderful with food and--his wit, his wit was just superb. The Colliers had a place in France, I think I mentioned this, where I went a number of times after I went to Italy. I did work in Italy for the Italian government and L.A. Times, and I would go a number of times to St. Francois Grasse. I really looked forward to this, writing this about John, because he was a wonderful, wonderful man and a great cook. He died at the stove, cooking. [Both laugh] He was a small man. He liked big houses, high ceilings and big dogs, small women.

JG: Is his wife still alive?

EM: Yes, she is, yes.

JG: And you're doing the memoirs as sections, in sort of handleable sections.

EM: Yes. I started writing it just freely, and then I began to draw it into a form where one person was dominant, or one place, as in Patchin Place. I think you do that; you really aren't aware how much someone contributed to your life until you begin writing, and you find someone that you hadn't realized was that important, and as you write, you see what your debt is. I think that all of us are so indebted to others. I think, you know, where some one gives us a hand up, and I'm grateful to the many people who gave me a hand up. I don't think it was altogether my talent, because it was unproved, very early, and someone has to have faith in you. And it's kind of a blind faith because nine times out of ten the person will fail, I think. But--it's this generosity that I love.

I did the section in the High Styles show in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It was on 1945 to '55, and most of it was on the . . . The Eames dominated my section of the show. Bob Venturi designed the show.

I'm looking for things that I may have done, and it's hard to, because it's hard to remember. [Sound of papers being turned over] I seem to have written in so many fields, so long, and I don't see too much of . . . I liked getting away from architecture and into writing about people I'd known. That was a great relief; I've liked doing that, and I'm glad to see them published. Simon and Schuster asked for a book of them, and if I can put them together . . . Some of the early things of my childhood, before going to New York, are in first and second draft, and I hope to get those together some time.

JG: You have them among your papers here?

EM: Yes, they are, yes, and I think copies of them are at the Smithsonian.

JG: So this is a different set of portraits from the ones you've done for Grand Street?

EM: Yes. The early sections of it, and some later sections. There's one on Paris that I'd never finished, the time in Paris, the people I met there. That is around, mainly, one of the editors of the magazine transition, and the people, the transition group, many of whom were writers on the Tribune, the Paris Tribune.

JG: And how do you see it as a book? Do you see it as one book?

EM: No, I see it as a book, really, of people, and I think it's very hard to write about oneself. It's when there is another person that you can . . . Yourself, your own personality develops as it's in relation to other people, is the only way I find I can comfortably write about myself. Eudora Welty had a phrase about this; "correcting history," she said, and that's what one does, in writing about oneself. You correct history. So I correct less if I write about someone else. One's family is the hardest thing to write about, I think.

Living so long in one house as a child, one remembers, I remember every corner of it and relive it many times. And I like writing about place. I place someone in a certain position. You know, Joe, yesterday you said something about my . . . Something I had said to you about your review of Vienna to Los Angeles. I think you said that I wrote that it was as if you had leaned over my shoulder, was it?

JG: Yes, "looked over my shoulder."

EM: Looked over my shoulder as I was writing. I think that is the way I write, as I set up a place, and I feel myself in that place, and walk that place, and it's very--as if I could touch things. And it's the way--the house in which I grew up . . . But then, also, going to boarding school at age thirteen, I can remember the rooms there very well, and the look, the colonnaded entrance, and my room.

JG: Do you know what school that was?

EM: Yes, the name had been changed to Central College, but it was an academy, and it was turned into a . . . I've forgotten what they changed the name to. It was a school in Lexington, Missouri. There was a military academy there too, Wentworth. There was another one that is still . . . This was closed; it burned and was closed. There was one near there that we almost went to that was called Stevens. I've had no diploma from anything because we finished high

school there, at Central, but there was no diploma. So I've never had any diploma of any sort. There are a number of people . . .

JG: In college, as well?

EM: Yeah. Some of my credits were not going to be accepted, but they would be if I would go to summer school. But having been to college for four years, that seemed a little too much. I was eager to go on to New York, and I thought I'd had enough education. But I had more than enough credits for a degree.

I remember at the boarding school, the Phillips girls were there, Phillips oil. They were beautiful girls. I said yesterday that Bruce was an Osage. It's not true, he was a . . . Oh God! now I can't say it--it's a tribe which most of these girls were. They're very beautiful Indians. Cherokee, Cherokee tribe, most of them belonged to.

[END TAPE 8, SIDE 1; counter at 394)

[TAPE 8, SIDE 2, blank)

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Esther McCoy, 1987 June 7-Nov. 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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Susan Larsen Oral History Interview with Richard Diebenkorn in his Ocean Park Studo, Archives of American Art, December 15, 1987, 1966

[Tape 9, side A]
[Continuation of Oral History Interview with Richard Diebenkorn in his Ocean Park Studio, December 15, 1987 Interviewer: Susan Larsen: RD: Richard Diebenkorn; SL: Susan Larsen]
. . .
SL: [W]e're here in Santa Monica, in Richard Diebenkorn's studio, and it's a cold Southern California winter morning, and we are finishing the third--fourth? (chuckles)--session of our interview for the Archives of American Art. . . . When we left off, we finished around 1966, and you were still in Northern California?
. . .
SL: Yes. And was it that spring or summer that you moved to Southern California?
RD: I would have moved for the beginning of the school year, so it would have been summer.
. . .
RD: And I remember that specifically because we hadn't had a, we hadn't found a place to live when school started.
SL: And where was school--for the record?
RD: Oh, that was UCLA. And we came down and thought, well, it'll be a matter of three or four days, so we'll splurge and stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then time went by and we weren't getting a house, and I could imagine the astronomical bill that was piling up, and then school started and I was teaching at UCLA and living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which I thought was really incongruous.
SL: (laughs) Pretty classy.
RD: Yeah, yeah. But then finally we found a house to rent that we liked in the Santa Monica Canyon.
SL: Is it near where you live now?
RD: It's closer to the ocean. I'm not sure what. . . . I forget what street.
SL: Did you come because you were invited by UCLA to teach? . . .
. . .
RD: No, no, it was. . . . Fred Wight had asked me for, oh, I guess it was about the third time that he had asked me to come down. . . .
SL: What was your image of the art world down here? And was that an attraction or was it the climate or the cultural. . . .
RD: Well, I think, just as the case now, I feel that I've been in one place too long, and things are wearing out for me a little bit, and I've. . . . Well, for now, I've been here twice as long as any other place. I think I was twelve years in Berkeley. Or, no, more than that. Lived in Berkeley from 1953 to '66. So, well, that's twelve, thirteen years. So we've been twenty-one years here.
SL: As of '87.
RD: Yeah. . . . I may have referred to the visit to Tamarind?
. . .
RD: I had come down to do a stint at Tamarind in sixty. . . . It doesn't matter, but early sixties. And I had seen Los Angeles in the new, in a new light. And there was considerable vitality artistically, as we know, and the pace was pretty exciting to me. . . .
SL: By nothing, do they mean culturally or economically?
RD: Just a desert.
SL: Just nothing.
RD: Yeah.
SL: How many years were you at UCLA?
RD: I was there '66 to '73. Eight.
. . .
SL: That's okay. So where did you set up your studio here in Santa Monica? It wasn't this building that we're sitting in.
RD: No, it's a building several blocks down, at Ashland and Main. It was an old brick building. . . . Well, I was of course looking for a studio, and I spoke to Sam Francis, and he said, well, he was moving out of his, and he wasn't quite sure when, but that I could have it when he does, on the second floor, to the rear, in this building at Ashland and Main, which is now jazzed up and refurbished, and. . . . It wasn't much then.
SL: Did you come here for the physical atmosphere, to this area in particular, or was it just convenient to your home, or. . . .
RD: I knew I wanted to be on the west side, and to work out here, because of the weather, sort of the clarity. I didn't realize that it had a very special kind of light that I, I discovered later. But at any rate, I had to wait in that studio. There was a room in the center of the second floor upstairs, and quite a bit, half as large as this room, and the light was terrible. But it was okay for drawing. I didn't try and set up, do oil painting there, but I drew for, oh, about eight months, I think, and then finally Sam left, and I moved into the old back section. Incidentally, a year later, Sam came back and took the front section.
. . .
RD: So we both have, we had the whole top floor then.
SL: What a dynamic duo, painting up there.
RD: Yeah. Seldom saw Sam. He was there at night; I was there in the daytime.
SL: Did you have natural light coming into that back space?
RD: Yeah, it was pretty good light. It wasn't as good as this, but it was okay.
SL: And so you drew for eight months.
. . .
RD: I was just drawing to, because I like to draw. And it was--I didn't realize it at the time--but I was coming to the end of the representational period and I was aware that things were flattening out and I was, the work in a good many ways was becoming more abstract, and. . . .
SL: Was there something in the [air], an influence, or something out there?
RD: I don't know. I really. . . . Well, right along, in the representational painting, I had. . . . Well, this works the other way around, too, but. . . . Oh, I don't think maybe a three-month period went by that I didn't sometime in that period go back to abstract painting and decide that I was an abstract painter again. And sometimes it would last for a day; sometimes this would last for a whole week. And then I'd go back again.

SL: Was this a conscious seesaw, or. . . .

RD: I think that I. . . . Oh, it's a little hard to say exactly what it was; it was many things really. But I think. . . . It can be as simple as this, that a painter is often getting into serious trouble with his work, and when that would happen, well, I'd say, "Well, the trouble is that I'm doing the wrong thing. I should be back where I belong--as an abstract painter."
. . .
RD: And this worked the other way around, too, and when I did abstract painting again, I, a good many times I [thought, when] I was going back to representation. . . . That large drawing down there, not drawing there, things that I've done out the window here. You can't see those things now because of construction across the street. {The Gehry Egg Co. Remodel}
SL: . . . in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky describes abstraction and figuration as two branches of the great old tree, and that they both grow out of the same source, and that they're not mutually exclusive. . . .
RD: I have to agree with that, yeah.
SL: But pursuing two tracks simultaneously could often be very difficult as well, could it not?
RD: Impossible for me. I'm either looking in one direction or the other. They're, they, they're just. . . . I think lots of people think that becoming an abstract painter from being a representational painter might be as simple as turning the picture upside down or, you know, you're still. . . . But it's of course not. It's conceptually, emotionally. . . . They're the two major, I mean, that is the polarity for me that I've discovered in art.
SL: When you're working in one [spirit], I would think that all of your subconscious thinking and solving are directed in one direction.
. . .
SL: They concern a set of possibilities, and when you consider doing figuration, you would consider a whole other constellation of possibility.
RD: . . . This was, believe it or not, accidental. It looks so much like grass and possibly ocean and then the, and a kind of. . . .
SL: Very active sky, yes.
RD: . . . menace in the sky, and it looks as though I really intended that, but I didn't see that. I worked rather late on it last night, and got pretty upset with it and. . . . [But, Then] I didn't realize that problem until I walked in this morning. I said, "Oh, my. I've done this lovely little landscape through a doorway."
. . .
RD: And that kind of thing of course can happen, but the doing of representational problems involves the embracing of, well, as you said, a whole set of concerns and values and, well. . . .
SL: So, let's see, so you were, you had the studio in Ocean Park, and aside from Sam Francis, were there other artists in that building or in the neighborhood? That you spent time with?
RD: Yeah, Sam Amato was across the street in the same block, and Les Biller shared that studio. Then there was Jim. . . . [Remembering:] A mountain in Arizona where I've been. Oh!
SL: Turrell?
RD: Jim Turrell. Jim Turrell was up at the next corner. There's a conceptual artist on that block who I don't know very well. Still there, I think. I can't think of. . . . Oh, Tony Berlant was there, was on Second Street.
SL: Did it feel like a neighborhood of artists, or was it a place you went, did your work pretty well in. . . .
RD: I would see Les Biller or Sam Amato. I'd see them at school.
SL: UCLA.
RD: I'd visit their studio once in six months, I guess, and occasionally we'd have a cup of coffee or something like that, beer. And then, as I told you, Sam was there at night. And why that was, why he worked at night, [you'd] have to ask him. Jim, I visited Turrell several times.
SL: Was he making room environments then?
RD: Yeah, um hmm. It was just a nice experience [together] with that studio, because everything was arranged and. . . . I mean, one can have these feelings about that--where everything is arranged--but nevertheless, everything--well, I was going to say everything was arranged with absolute care, and so that light at a certain hour came, and at a certain time of year hit here and did such and such. It was. . . .
SL: Those were special times when people made those studios.
RD: Yes. There's the German woman. . . . What's her name?
SL: Oh, Maria Nordman?
RD: Yeah, Nordman, yeah.
RD: She had a. . . . One of the places that I visited that she did, one of her studios, was at Beethoven and _____. I forget. It was very significant to her, the intersection. Beethoven and something else that would have to do with German history or something.
. . .
[Tape 9, side B]
. . .
SL: . . . So, you were drawing and you were making a whole group of drawings, and these were figurative drawings, right?

RD: Uh, yes. And I was. . . . I got to like the room very much, and it was a rectangular room with windows all the way around. It was in the center of the building. I don't know what it had been originally--some sort of a club. And it was, I think this was the kitchen area for the club, in the center, and surrounding it were. . . . There was a ballroom in the front, where Sam worked, beautiful floor. And I guess there was some sort of a lounge in the back, where I had my. . . .
. . .
RD: And off of my room there was a kind of. . . . What do you call it when there's a window from a kitchen into an eating area. . . .
. . .
RD: . . . But this little room, which was part of the kitchen, and the window into the big room, it was visually, it was put together in a good way, or in a way that I got to, got quite involved with drawing. So I made some drawings of that. And, so, I kept myself busy. I was really terribly anxious to get into the big studio with the light and the space, but then finally Sam left and. . . .
SL: So the paintings you title Ocean Park began in '67.
. . .
SL: . . . From the ones I have seen in person, they seem rather large.
. . . .
SL: Was it an enhancement of scale, that you all did? The Berkeley paintings, many of them are large, but they don't seem as large as that.
RD: But they're not nearly as. . . . No, no. No telling why, but I wanted to work roughly that size, and then my canvas, the cotton duck that I bought was 84 inches.
SL: That's pretty big.
RD: So that was three inches to turn over; that left 81. So my width was almost always 81 inches. And so then the height was what I could get out of the place, out of my . . . without doing an alteration of my door. And I could get a, well, I could manage to get a 93 out, I think. No, a 100.
SL: That's a big painting. (chuckles)
RD: Yeah. It was a relatively small, awkward hall, so 100 inches by 81 was the largest that I did.
SL: So as you set these canvases up, do you remember the. . . . Was there a switch to another sensibility, or a different vision of what you wanted to do as you set these larger canvases in a bigger space?
RD: Well, it interested me, having received the book that you just looked at [Richard Diebenkorn, by Gerald Nordland, Rizzoli, New York, 1987--SL], and I was looking at some of the late representational painting. I still, I was painting representationally when I moved into the big space.
. . .
RD: And I noticed, to my surprise, I realized I'd done some pretty large pieces, but they were that size. So the 81-dimension-canvas thing preceded my announcing to myself that now I was an abstract painter and approaching the canvas in that way. So the horse--or the cart came, I guess, just before the horse.
. . .
SL: The earliest of them seem to have larger wedges of color, that were rather strong and assertive. . . .
SL: . . . and often vertical, but not always.
. . .
SL: And they had a kind of architecture to them that was. . . .
RD: Yes. And they were, I think, most of them were more thinly painted than later on. Less densely painted. I think they perhaps were a little more airy, more atmospheric. Do you feel that?
SL: Yes. And yet at the same time, they're very, they have a lot of bone to them, substance.
. . .
SL: Those wedges carry from a long distance. You don't see through them. They're quite. . .
. . .
SL: Maybe we're thinking of different paintings, but I have a feeling in mind that they're heavy with, oh, oranges and greens and very assertive colors.
. . .
SL: Let's see, one of the things I wanted to ask is more of a general question, about the whole Ocean Park group of paintings. Do you feel that within this long run of work that there are certain subdivisions or episodes that suggest themselves? Switches or groups that stick together and then another group comes along.
. . .
SL: In other words, are there subsets to the larger set?
RD: I guess mainly the main difference I see is in the, is the atmospheric aspect. I don't think there was any. . . . I don't think there was any moment when I said, "I'm gonna reorient things. I'm going. . . ." I think the changes that occurred evolved, and did so piece by piece, or work by work. And. . . . This is maybe something I'll regret saying, or maybe I'll feel that I didn't mean to say it: Something that at first I thought I wanted to get away from was, in representational painting, a kind of insisting on--which is built into representational painting. . . . If you're going to do a figure, well, you are going to do a figure, and. . . .
SL: Declare a subject.
RD: Yeah, and the arms go here, and the heads there, and it has eyes, and. . . . [When, Well] I think along with this can come a kind of need to insist, or to exert will, to. . . . It seemed like toward the end of the representational period that there were things that I, that perhaps I would have done if it weren't for the logic of a situation. I mean, the logic that I would feel that was required in this chosen subject.
. . .
RD: I'm making this terribly complicated; it's not complicated.
SL: Are these painterly things, or. . . .
RD: Well, an example would be, well, I suppose, gravity. I've certainly never even flirted with. Oh yes, I guess in drawings, I did, but with surrealism, or I temperamentally was very, very far from a Chagall, who can have somebody flying or upside down or. . . . There was a certain sense, a certain logic, about this figure is going to be in such and such an interior, and the light is going to be in a certain way, and it's going to be a woman, or whatever. And so it's a. . . .
. . .
SL: Sure. So the working abstractly gave you a greater freedom.
RD: Well, I thought it would. [both chuckle, meaning that it did not--Trans.] And I should have known, because I had been an abstract painter before, but it didn't work that way. But it was one of the reasons why I, one of the reasons why I wanted to change. I wanted to get away from having to follow all the obligations, so to speak, that were carried by a given subject that I would. . . . And, in brief, I suppose I just wanted more freedom. And I was continually thinking back to the abstract painting, and those years, and it seemed to me that things just flowed so freely, and it was kind of invention and--what's the word I want?--improvisation, that, which was exciting. Things would turn over for me, and. . . . Turn over and in a half an hour I could be on a different footing, and so that was. . . SL: So did you feel some of that as you went back into abstraction?
RD: Oh, at first, sure. [said with a smile:] But then, it doesn't take long before that totally different set of disciplines start to, in the bad moment, start to throttle you, and so it's finally all the same thing, and. . . . But, one has moments of hope when he changes to a new scene.
. . .
RD: I think I probably, at first at any rate, wanted a kind of monumental thing. I wanted something that felt large. Also, there's a thing about working large--for me at any rate, and I've found it with some other artists in talking--that in working on a what you might say is an oversize support, one is involved physically.
. . .
SL: Okay, I guess I was wondering if there was anything that sort of came into the work that hadn't already been there, at that point, to give the bone or the structure. Was there. . . .
RD: I think what came into it was that changing the discipline caused me to look at different things, caused me to dwell on different aspects of my visual experience. In the studio, in the other, the earlier studio, there were windows to the east, large windows that were. . . . Transom windows? Do you understand?
. . .
RD: No. . . . there was this situation of a large, lighted rectangle, a more of a square within it, and then, seen from the side, the transom provided the diagonal. . . . Well, there's just so many of the elements there, and I remember several more astute people who visited that studio said, "Well, look, you're painting your transom windows." (laughter)
. . .
SL: Do you think the. . . . You mentioned the Turrell studio, and Maria's [Nordman--Ed.] studio, and all that. Do you think any of that awareness of the architecture and the. . . . Was that in the air here, or was it just something real special in your space?
RD: I don't, I guess I don't think so. I don't think anybody around there was. . . . As a matter of fact, I didn't meet Turrell until several years before I left that neighborhood and moved up here. So I don't think so.
. . .
SL: And that's, it seems studios often in New York are just spaces, and the light is pretty terrible often, and. . . .
RD: Yes.
SL: . . . they're very inward.
RD: Yes.
. . .
SL: People almost make a fetish of their studios here sometimes, in a way that's sometimes charming and sometimes very intense.
. . .
[Continue To Tape 10] --- [Return To Top of Richard Diebenkorn Interview]
SL: Okay, last question. You're about to move again.
RD: Yes.
SL: And where are you going and when and why and what sort of physical environment will you have?
RD: Well, the best thing I can, best reasons I can give for leaving here. . . . Well. . . . I guess I'm feeling kind of claustrophobia, and I think the pace that I once found very exciting is, I feel that I've, well, I've just sort of had it with that.
. . .
RD: It's near Healdsburg [California--SL].
. . .
SL: Uh huh. Is it all green and lush, or. . . .
RD: Well, now it is, yeah. And it's Alexander Valley, so it's a lot of grape to be seen, vinyards. And there are mountains, and there's Mount St. Helena out the from door.
. . .
SL: Very exciting. So you will be leaving this studio, this one up. . . .
RD: I'm going to keep the studio for a while. And, or I may just keep the building, I don't really know. Yeah. I guess that's it.
. . .
RD: Oh yes. And often there are things that I want to do. I have this itch to be working on something, and I really have only two hours when I'm home, and then I think, "Well, it's going to take me fifteen minutes to get down here, and I'm going to have to get fifteen to get home. I'll just get started when I get down here, what. . . ." So I won't come. And if I'm working with my studios at home while I'm there. . . .
. . .
END OF RICHARD DIEBENKORN INTERVIEW

(Back to Sources)

James R. Oestreich Variations on Chance, Anarchy and Silence, The New York Times, Sunday, 25 January 2004, AR 25, 2004, 1987,

""Thoreau was very happy to be little known while he was alive. He said it enabled him to do what he had to do. I'm now very well known. It makes me very happy, because I'm able to do what I have to do."

"Thus a self-analysis of John Cage, rendered in 1987 in the brief film "19 Questions," by Frank Scheffer and Andrew Culver. Not incidentally, that response was 23 seconds long, as dictated by Cageian chance operations imposed on the interview. The other replies ranged from one second (on Octavio Paz: "Indian") to 48 seconds.

""19 Questions" is one of four Cage films by Mr. Scheffer and Mr. Culver on a new DVD from Mode Records (www.mode.com), "From Zero.""

(Back to Sources)

Regina V. Phelan The Gold Chain: A California Family Saga, The Arthur H. Clark Co.: Glendale, CA, Illustrated, 1987, 432 pp.

(p. 303) Chapter 26 (Drawing: Weinshank Beach Cottage)

"Jenny Weinshank [1860 - ] returned from Sacramento because she felt she was needed at home after her father's death (Andrew Weinshank [1835 -18 February 1874]). She tried to get her mother (Regina Weinshank [ - ]) interested in new activities. A man by the name of J.P. Jones was selling lots at Santa Monica. He went to San Francisco to spread the word and he put an ad in the Los Angeles paper. Jenny saw the ad and the idea of haing a cottage at the seashore was more appealing, especially because her mother had always loved the ocean so.

"Jones arranged to have the steamship The Senator transport 150 eager buyers from San Francisco to participate in the land sale. It was on July 14th when the sidewheeler chugged into the harbor and dispatched its passengers.

"At daylight the next morning, the road from Los Angeles over the hot, dust mesa was a continuous line of Angelenos, driving their buggies through the wide-open pasture lands, as stages and hacks began shuttling citizens to the auction sale. Los Angeles livery stables were empty by noon, and the horse cars were the only moving vehicles on the streets.

"Jenny and her mother stood in the crowd, along with all the others, waiting for the bidding to begin. Then the autioneer, Jim Fitch, mounted the platform, stoood with his back to the ocean.

""Just visualize, if you will, several wharfs projected out into the (p. 304) bay, a gigantic smelting works erected to refine the Cerro Gordo and Panamint ores. Think of all the activity this will bring."

"One man from the crowd asked, "What about drinking water?"

""You can dig an Artesian well. Fresh water is close to the surface," answered Jim. "Now, can we get on?"

"Nearby stood a temporary bar, a row of beer kegs with a sign on it saying, "Grand Palace Saloon."

"Jim Fitch got right down to business. "We'll start with the first lot. Can I hear "two hundred?" Fine, how about "two-twenty-five?" and so it went.

"A few minutes later, one of the kegs of beer exploded, the beer sprayed out over the spectators. One of the witty onlookers remarked, "One of the Artesian wells just came in," and the crowd howled. It took a little doing to get the crowd back under control, but when the day was over, four thousand dollar's worth of lots had been sold, and Regina had hers.

"The Weinshanks built a beach cottage along the ocean front, just a bungalow with a porch facing the water. The children waded within easy vision of those in the house.

Regina took every opportunity to go there for a few days. Phineas Banning had purchased land from the Dominguez family and built a landing nearby. While they were staying at the beach cottage, Regina always loved to get up early in the morning and walk down to the water's edge. Then, no matter what the weather was like, she swam around the pier. She would be be back at the cottage before the others got up. But, if anyone thought they were gtood enough to join her, she always came back with the same answer, "You go have your fun, but when I swim, I swim alone."

(Back to Sources)

Santa Monica Planning Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.
32. Loof Hippodrome, 1916
Foot of Colorado Avenue
Architects: various builders
Designation: 17 August 1976

"The Hippodrome is a California-Byzantine-Moorish-style fantasy that has housed a succession of vintage merry-go-rounds, carousels and Wurlitzer organs over the years. The current carousel was built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in 1922. Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, the carousel was moved from the Venice pier to the Santa Monica Pier in 1947. It has 44 hand-carved and hand-painted wooden horses, which were restored in 1990.

"The Hippodrome building was restored during the period from 1981 through 1984, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987."

(Back to Sources)

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1906, 1905, 1904, 1903, 1897, 1896, 1895, 1890s,

Chapter I: Building Venice of America (1904-1906)

. . .

"Abbot Kinney had been feuding with his three Ocean Park Improvement Company partners for some time when they met in the company office in January 1904 to divide their beach front property. Kinney and his former partner Francis Ryan had purchased the tract of land just south of Santa Monica in 1895. Here they had developed a modest seaside resort by building a golf course, tennis courts, country clubhouse, boardwalk and a fishing pier at the foot of Pier Avenue. They gave the Santa Fe Railroad a small tract of land with the understanding that they would build a pavilion there, and a much larger tract to the Y.M.C.A. in hopes that the construction of an auditorium and bathhouse would attract conventions and assemblies to Ocean Park. The remainder of the property was subdivided into small 25 x 100 foot, $45 lots which sold well considering the economic slump of the 1890's. Unsold lots were rented for $15 per year with the understanding that 'neat and substantial cottages' would be built upon them. Transportation to the resort was arranged when a spur of the new Los Angeles electric railroad was extended south from Santa Monica to Hill Street in 1896.

"When Ryan died in 1899, his widow remarried. Thomas H. Dudley proved to be a satisfactory business partner for Kinney, as they began to pursue active development plans. However, in 1902, Dudley sold his half of the company to Alexander R. Fraser, George Merritt Jones and Henry R. Gage, three businessmen who didn't see eye to eye with their strong-willed and imaginative partner. After nearly two years of constant feuding, Kinney and his partners decided to divide their holdings with the flip of a coin." p. 6

Kinney won, and chose the southern half of the property.

{p. 7 photo of Ocean Front Walk 1906 looking north to the Fraser Pier}

"The southern half of their Ocean Park property consisted mostly of sand dunes fronting unusable swampy marsh, while the northern half had become a very popular and fashionable resort. A large number of beach cottages had been built and some permanent residents were beginning to settle in the area. A casino, containing a restaurant and vaudeville theater, was built beside the pier in summer 1903 as a replacement for the Auditorium that burned in 1897. There were plans for an immense bathing pavilion complete with plunge, ballroom and amphitheater to be built on the boardwalk south of the pier." pp. 6 & 7

{pp. 8 & 9 photos of the Ocean Park Plunge, 1905; Ingersoll's Toboggan Railroad. 1903; The Ocean Park Bathhouse, and the beach north(sic) of the Ocean Park Pier.}

"The Los Angeles Pacific had first extended tracks south from Santa Monica in 1901. A short line was completed in 1902 directly from Los Angeles. Its route was across bean field, following what is now Venice Boulevard, then north along Electric Way to Ocean Park. By 1903 Kinney had persuaded E.H. Harriman to extend its tracks directly to the beachfront." p. 8.

{p.10 photos of Pier Street entrance to Ocean Park Pier, 1905 and Bandstand and Casino at the Ocean Park Pier, 1905.}

"Disaster struck in February and March {1905]. The heaviest storms in more than a generation . . . the beach was littered with one vast pile of driftwood from both Kinney's and Ocean Park's piers. . . . " p. 12

{Yet by July 4, 1905, 40,000 people poured into Venice of America. Arend's forty piece Italian band played on the bandstand at the foot of the [Venice] pier. p.13}

"Ocean Park had a small celebration of its own that Fourth of July. Kinney's ex-partners {Fraser, Jones and Gage} dedicated their new bathing pavilion. The $150,000 building, with its graceful dome and turrets, was the pride of Ocean Park. Its interior contained a 70 by 70 foot salt water plunge and hundreds of dressing rooms. Patrons could rent the latest in bathing attire. At night the electric lights were ablaze, its thickly beaded towers made it look like a fairy palace silhouetted against the sky.

"It was apparent that these men weren't going to let Ocean Park become a second class resort. Plans were advanced to build a semi-circular Horseshoe Pier that would incorporate the two smaller recently built piers at Pier and Marine Avenues. A large 250 x 210 foot auditorium with music hall and balconied outdoor bandstand would be built on the land end.

"The pier already had a few amusements. These included a small tented carousel and a ferris wheel, which was set up along the boardwalk near the pier to entertain the children during the busy summer seasons. The first permanent ride wasn't built until the 1903 summer season when L.G. Ingersoll built his two-passenger toboggan coaster on pilings part way over the ocean adjacent to the casino. Each two-passenger car was pulled to the top in this gentle forerunner to the roller coaster, and then released to coast down along a wide but gentle oval track containing only a few three foot dips along its length. . . ." p. 14

(By the end of 1905 Ellery's Band replaced Armand's Band at the Venetian Gardens.) p. 21

"Ocean Park business interests were willing to enter the competition for the tourist's amusement dollar in a more substantial manner. As soon as Kinney announced the opening of the Midway Plaisance the previous fall they talked of building a Coney Island style amusement area, but only if they could convince promoters to build a scenic railroad, haunted castle, chutes and grottos on the pier or nearby on the sand.

"The area south of the pier was ruled out since all of the beach from Navy to Horizon streets was deeded to the public during the first official meeting of the newly incorporated city in February 1904 for non-commercial use only. They could either build on their nearly completed Horseshoe Pier or on the south side of the pier in Santa Monica. . . . The only entertainment feature to open that spring was a roller skating rink that occupied a portion of the newly completed Auditorium building." p. 23

"Ballroom dancing was an important social activity at any seaside resort at the turn of the century. . . . The finest orchestras played a variety of slow dances that were popular at the time.

"Roller skating was another popular pastime that year and during the fall became the rage in Southern California. Both the Venice and Ocean Park rinks were jammed nightly. Admission was ten cents and skate rental two bits. They featured exhibitions of championship skaters, Friday night races, and the new sport of roller polo.

"Venice quickly fielded a team in the fledgling Southern California Roller Polo League. They were handicapped in their first game against Long Beach because the team used ordinary ball-bearing skates, whereas their opponents used pin-bearing skates that enabled them to run, jump and stop quickly. Seven hundred spectators watched Venice defeat Long Beach 2-0 in their first home game in October. Games were every Wednesday and Saturday nights and the local team made headlines by winning most of the time . . ." p. 28

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp.

Chapter 2; Coney Island of the Pacific (1907-912)

"In the spring of 1907, Venice of America and Ocean Park, two sections of the city with opposing business interests were experiencing a series of muted differences. Neither the Marine Street businessmen led by G.M. Jones in Ocean Park, nor the Kinney people in Venice dared risk an open feud because it would be bad for business. The basic problem was that two rival communities were growing up in one municipality.

"Venice in 1907 was part of the city of Ocean Park which had previously dis-incorporated from the city of Santa Monica several years before. The issue had been over differences in attitudes among Santa Monica citizens dealing with gambling and serving alcoholic beverages in the Ocean Park pier district.

"There was a power struggle going on between Kinney and Ocean Park' five man Board of Trustees, two of whom were his ex-partners. At first their tactics were subtle; they provided less than adequate police, fire protection and garbage collection in the Venice of America area. When the citizens passed a bond issue to finance the City Hall, Kinney offered several land parcels that would have been fairly central to the community. Instead the trustees accepted a 10 acre site offered by David Evans, a partner of Mayor Burke. The land was in Venice's outback, . . . Despite an unofficial straw vote by the property owners in favor of an alternative site, the Trustees paid Evans $5,000 for the property and awarded the building contract to a contractor in May.

"Meanwhile Kinney . . . decided to consolidate . . . his two amusement areas . . . on the beach.

"When he applied for a construction permit for his bathhouse, the Board of Trustees refused to act. Several of them, who owned the Ocean Park Bathhouse, a mile north of Windward Avenue, were accused of being afraid of the competition. . . . Kinney . . . ordered his men to pour the concrete foundations for his new bathhouse." p. 36

"The Trustees were infuriated. They immediately pulled the licenses for Kinney's tent city, and ordered it removed. His liquor licenses were revoked, dancing was banned in the pier ballroom, and Marshall G.G. Watt was instructed to remove the foundation of the bathhouse by whatever means possible.

"The bathhouse foundation was scheduled for demolition by dynamite on Monday, June 10, 1907, a day when the beach crowds would be gone. Marshall Watt posted the necessary warning signs. But early that morning women and children began arriving with picnic baskets. At 9:30 a.m. Watt ordered them to disperse-they didn't move. Soon more than 200 women, mostly from the Pick and Shovel Club, a civic club of which Mrs. Kinney was an ardent supporter, were picnicking on the uncompleted walls . . .

"George Culver, city street superintendent, who was to perform the demolition, . . . at noon gave up . . . and the city Trustees did not attempt to demolish it again.

" . . . the incident focused attention on Jones' boss rule and the corrupt Board of Trustees.

"Kinney's strategy was to dis-incorporate . . .

" . . .

" . . . the dis-incorporation election was held on September 30, 1907. . . . The election was fought bitterly by both sides." p. 31

"Ocean Park forces won a hollow victory. Although Kinney's supporter's were clearly dominant, 206 to 176, they couldn't muster the necessary two thirds majority to dis-incorporate. The city government began to fall apart shortly thereafter, as several Trustees resigned under duress for their involvement in police department corruption. Kinney got his revenge in the 1908 spring elections. His Good Government League candidates forced the remainder of the Ocean Park supported Trustees out of office and controlled the Board of Trustees in to the early 1920's.

"It would be another three years, in another election before voters would finally change the name of their city officially to Venice. By 1911, . . . " p. 33

[In 1907 a concert by Placido Gilgi's sixteen piece band at Kinney's Midway Plaisance, where all the buildings had been painted white. "The attractions included Leora's trapeze act, and Tarasca's daring bicycle ride in which he rode down a steep ramp to gain enough speed to leap through a circle of fire then across a 36 foot wide gap." p. 33]

"Meanwhile, Alexander Fraser, Kinney's old partner, formed the Fraser Million -Dollar Pier Company. Their intent was to build the world's largest amusement pier in Ocean Park. It would be 285 feet wide, incorporate the existing pier and extend 1000 feet into the ocean. The pier alone without the buildings and concessions would cost $175,000. It would have a Dancing Pavilion, Revolving Cafe 110 feet in diameter, Thompson Scenic Railroad, Palace of Mysteries, Carousel, Mountain Roll Railroad, Trip to Mars, Vaudeville and Scenic Theaters. the grand opening would be June 1911.

"They were serious this time. The contract was awarded July 29, 1910. Half the pier piles were in place by December, and they had extended the pier to almost 1500 feet. By the time the buildings were under construction the following February the payroll was running at $10,000 per week." p. 38

"Ocean Park's Million-Dollar Pier was rapidly nearing completion. The L.A. Thompson Company, who had acquired the property south of the pier, was building the Dragon Gorge Scenic Railroad parallel to Ocean Front Walk. The building took up several blocks and contained several attractions like the 'Grotto Cafe', a revolving restaurant, and the 'Auto Maze'. The Loof family was building an ornate carousel in the Hippodrome building on the site of the old Toboggan Railway between the Dragon Gorge and the Casino. It was a 50 foot diameter pit machine with horses four abreast.

"The Grand Canyon Electric Railroad out on the pier was one of the first attractions to open. Its centerpiece was a 135 foot mountain peak with a waterfall at its summit. At night the electric lights gave it the appearance of an erupting volcano. The $100,000 ride built by Paul D. Houshi had a third rail to power the four car trains around curves and up steep inclines. A motorman had control of the car's speed and often added unexpected thrills by powering down the hills as well as up. It is remarkable that there were no serious accidents as the cars often exceeded their safe speed limit on turns.

"Apparently the builder wasn't initially satisfied with the attraction, for he began extensive renovation after it was open only one month. The ride turned out to be too short because of the high speed of the cars. In an attempt to make it the longest scenic railroad in the world, he added 200 feet of additional track, put in nine more dips and a scenic tunnel. The new improved ride was nearly a mile in length.

"Fraser's Million-Dollar Pier officially opened the weekend of June 17th, 1911. Tens of thousands attended the two day gala event. They danced in the huge ballroom at the end of the pier, watched vaudeville at the 1000 seat Starland Theater, or visited the pier's many rides, show and exhibits. The 'Third Degree' advertised 'a smart show for smart people', when in reality it featured a moving sidewalk that transported people past snow and mountain scenery. Ther was a Crooked House to explore, the City Jail to escape from and the Society Whirl. One of the more interesting exhibits was the 'Infant incubators' which showed the latest in medical technology. Premature infants were given free care by trained nurse in an era when it wasn't readily available at local hospitals.

"Additional attractions opened later that summer and into the fall season. Another hippodrome opened on the pier adjacent to the dance hall. It featured an ornate Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel. The Mystic Maze and Panama Canal exhibit also found space on the pier." pp. 42 and 43

{pp. 44 and 45 photo of Fraser's Million- Dollar Pier}

{p.46 postcards 1912 Carousel; Front of the Dragon Gorge Scenic Railroad; Dance Pavilion; Night Scene of Ocean park and Santa Monica from the Pier.}

{p.47 postcards of Fraser's Million-Dollar Pier Auditorium, 1911; entrance to the Frasier Pier, 1912.}

"The new Neptune Theater, an early nickelodeon, and the Merryland penny arcade opened for business on Ocean Front Walk across from the Thompson Scenic Railroad. By 1911 penny arcades were becoming amusement park mainstays. For a penny, people could drive slot cars, have their strength tested, or watch historical events in a hand cranked kinetoscopes(sic). Couples could have the emotion of their kiss measured, and men could look at what at that time were considered rather erotic shots of women clad in bathing suits.

" . . .

"That fall it began to look like the Ocean Park area would soon have two additional piers. Jones sued Fraser and won the franchise to build a small 400 foot by 100 foot pier next to the Million-Dollar pier. He wanted Fraser to tear down the small portion of the pier on his side of the property line.

"But the big news was Great Western Amusement Company's pier project across from the Decatur Hotel immediately south of Fraser's pier. Plans showed a pier 1000 feet long, 263 feet wide with a gigantic entrance arch 113 feet wide, 94 feet high and 60 feet deep. The Tivoli Cafe was to be on the south side of the arch in a 50 foot square tower, 135 feet high. A large 105 foot high racing roller coaster with 13,000 feet of track would occupy an area of nearly two acres. A casino, ferris wheel and sever other concessions would be built on the remaining space,m and at night 10,000 light bulbs would illuminate the entire pier. Work didn't start on the pilings until mid May 1912, and by then there was no rush to finish it for the coming summer season." p. 47

{p. 48 photo and postcard Along Ocean Front Walk just north of the Dragon Gorge Railroads, 1911; Dragon Gorge Scenic Railroad car on a high turn, 1911}

{p. 49 photo Ocean Front Walk at the Fraser Pier. The Dragon Gorge, the large ornate structure with the towers, was an early roller coaster. The white hippodrome building in the center housed a Looff carousel.}

{p. 50 a schematic map of Fraser Pier, 1912}

{p. 51 photos: The Crooked House on the Fraser Pier; the Tombs, 1911; Castle Court on the Fraser Pier, 1911.

"The Venice/Ocean Park area had become the finest amusement center on the west coast . . . Besides the innovative rides, dance halls, theaters, plunges, and bowling alleys, there were a dozen places for a game of chance. Hype and innovation were the rule , and it was on the Venice Pier that Felix Simmonds, a concessionaire, claimed to have invented the hamburger. In 1912, the bathing beauty contest was started as a promotional feature for the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper.

" . . .

"Venice was , in those days, a place of wonder. It was a dream of genteel good come to life. . ." p. 52 {which also has a photo of 1912 Hippodrome Carousel.}

" . . . shops included a wide selection of picture postcards, plaster of paris Italian stautes, coral beads and mother of pearl necklaces. Outside on the piers and on Ocean Front Walk, vendors pushed little carts. "Hokey-Pokey's - two for five," they called. They sold little squares of ice cream. Others sold candied apples, endless twists of long pearly white salt water taffy, clouds of pink cotton candy, strawberry phosphates, and cream puffs filled with custard. . . " p. 53 {which has a photo of the aftermath of the September 3, 1912 Fraser Pier fire.}

"The Ocean Park amusement area seemed to be awash in new pier proposals when the Mountain Roll Company announced their plans in July 1912 to build yet another pier. This one was to be medium in size;. 225 x 900 feet. An eight track mountain roll feature was planned as the main attraction and the remaining space to be used for concessions.

"Jones and Fraser meanwhile continued their squabble until that summer the court finally ruled in Jones' favor. It seemed that when Jones and Fraser were partners there was a transfer of 100 feet of property, which had become the entrance of the Million-Dollar Pier. Jones claimed half of it, so the pier entrance would have to be cut in half. He could then build a larger pier, 150 x 400 feet.

"Unfortunately, most of the new Ocean Park pier projects were prematurely derailed when fire broke out on Fraser's Million-dollar Pier at 5 p.m. on September 3, 1912. Diners first noticed flames in the Casino restaurant. The cause was thought to be either a cigarette or a defective flue in the kitchen. A stiff shore breeze, fanning the flames, spread it quickly to other structures on the pier and to the buildings across Ocean Front Walk. Seven hundred firefighters from twelve municipal fire companies, some as far away as downtown Los Angeles, took three and one half hours to get the fire under control. The problem in fighting the fire was a lack of water pressure. They managed to stop the fire at the Ocean Park Bathhouse when the wind shifted to an offshore breeze.

"The fire totally destroyed the pier, all of the amusements and six square blocks of businesses including many nearby hotels on Pier and Marine Streets. In all 225 structures burned. The loss was set at $3,000,000 with little of it covered by insurance. The business outlook for Ocean Park was bleak that fall, especially when Fraser, who was having a dispute with Santa Monica, talked of selling his beach property and moving out of town." p. 53

"Electric tram service on Ocean Front Walk between Venice and Ocean Park began operation in 1916." p. 51

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1919, 1918, 1917, 1916, 1915, 1914, 1913

Chapter 3: Growth through the Teens (1913-1919)

"Ocean Park businessmen were systematically rebuilding their burned out business district. . . .

"Fraser was discouraged and ready to leave when local businesses persuaded him to proceed with his new pier. . . .The State Amusement Company, run by Ernest Pickering, signed a long term lease to operate the pier's amusements.

" . . .

"In April Santa Monica filed an injunction to stop Fraser from building his pier. The city claimed that they owned 42 feet of ocean frontage at the foot of Pier Avenue, which in their eyes was merely an extension of the street. Fraser had previously given the city an easement to extend a sewer outfall there, but didn't deed them the land. Actually the injunction only prevented Fraser from building his pier entrance buildings adjacent to Ocean Front Walk. He was able to continue construction by setting the pier pilings further out than he had inteded on the sand beyond the disputed property line.

"The pier was rushed to completion and reopened on May 30, 1913. It was a much simpler design with a broad boardwalk running down the center of the pier. Various rides, booths and concessions were on either side. The pier, with is salt water fire prevention system using ten hydrants and a powerful steam pump, was supposed to be essentially fireproof.

"Many of the attractions on the old pier were rebuilt. The 200 x 230 foot Dance Hall stood on the the ocean end. Harry Hines directed his orchestra in the $50,000 structure. The bowling alleys and billiard hall were adjacent to it, and beyond them was the Rosemary Theater. A Parker carousel opened on the south side of the pier next to the Crazy House. Other attractions included the Breaker's Cafe, Crooked House, La Petite Theater, Roller Skating Rink, City Hall, Baby Incubators, Puzzletown and Mystic Maze. The pier lacked thrill rides its first season, but it did attract its share of tourist dollars.

" . . .

"Venice and Ocean Park businessmen were constantly campaigning for lower Pacific Electric trolley rates . . . . The Pacific Electric company . . . finally obliged and began offering special twenty-five cent half-fare days to the beach, mostly on summer Thursday.

" . . .

"A new round of competition between the two pier areas occurred during spring 1914. Fraser won his court case against the city of Santa Monica and was now able to build at his pier entrance at Ocean Front Walk. He decided to go ahead and rebuild the Casino.

"Promoters managed to successfully raise the capital to begin construction of the Ben Hur Racer on the north side of his pier. The three-in-one project contained a big racing roller coaster designed by William Labb, a 7000 seat bandstand on a broad plaza and a 56 foot diameter carousel within the structure. An immense electric sign with the picture of Ben Hur driving a chariot adorned the top of the bandstand. The coaster was 75 feet high, 4200 feet in length and extended 700 feet over the ocean. It took much longer to build than expected, but it did manage to begin operation in late summer." p. 55

Pickering joined Kinney in 1914.

" . . .

"Venice 's fascination with new forms of transportation extended to the automobile as well. road racing, the most exciting spectator sport of the era, captured the public's fancy and also that of the Board of Trustees, who authorized the 1915 Venice Grand Prix on the the streets of Venice. It was roughly a triangle course down Electric Avenue, Rose Avenue, and Compton Road (Lincoln Boulevard). The curves were banked for high speed turns. Eight thousand dollars in prize money was offered.

"A Saturday afternoon St. Patrick's Day crowd of 75,000 watched the 300 mile road race from the bleachers and anywhere they could find a view. Seventeen drivers entered some of the fastest racing machines of their day; Bugatti, Simplex, Stutz, Mercer, Peugeot, Maxwell, Napier, Chevrolet, DeLage and Hercules. Mechanical problems plagued most of the drivers as one after another dropped out of the grueling race. Dave Lewis was in the lead on the 80th lap with just 17 laps to go when engine trouble forced out of the race. Barney Oldfield's Maxwell went on to an easy victory. Billy Carlson, also driving a Maxwell, finished second just 41 seconds behind Oldfield. Only eight of the seventeen entries finished the race. Average speed of the winner in the four and one-half hour race was 68.5 mph.

"The race was considered a success despite injuries to bystanders when a scoreboard toppled, and the death of an elderly spectator who wandered on to the course and was struck by a car. However, the city lost $10,000 due to gate crashing and the sale of 1000 counterfeit tickets by con men. Despite 40,000 paid admissions, thousands rushed the gates and sneaked in when ticket takers were unable to handle the large crowd." p. 60

"Venice was beginning to play an important part in the motion picture business which was quick to take advantage of the town's unique architecture and colorful amusement district. Nearby studios like Biograph and Bison in Santa Monica and the Ince Studio in Culver City sent film crews to Venice. Charlie Chaplin starred in the 'Kid at the Auto Races', while Mary Pickford and Harold Lloyd each played the lead in movies along the Venice canals. Movie companies became so numerous and disruptive to local business that for a time in 1915 there was talk of banning them. However no action was taken and in later years movies like 'The Camera Man starring Buster Keaton and several 'Our Gang' comedies were filmed along the beach front and on the pier." pp. 62 and 63

" . . . The Venice/Ocean Park area had four permanent movie theaters: the California and Neptune Theaters on Ocean Front Walk near Windward, and the Dome and Rosemary Theaters on the Ocean Park Pier. Also, Venice's large auditorium on the pier was often used to show movies. Sound from its fine organ was a welcome addition to those silent films. Admission then was ten cents for all seat, although some theaters charged only a nickel for children." p. 63

"Ocean Park amusement interests suffered another setback that winter when a fire broke out in the Dance Pavilion on the Ocean Park Pier at 1 a.m. just as Christmas ended. The night watchman discovered the blaze in the check room and immediately called for help. The fire, fanned by a slight sea breeze, began its march up the pier. It consumed the Pioneer Bowling Alleys, Eskimo Village, Paris by Night, numerous small concessions and half the lofty Ben Hur Coaster before the combined fire brigades of three beach cities stopped it behind the Rosemary Theater. One-third of the pier was in ruins. The water-soaked Indian Village survived, but its merchandise was stolen when it was put out on the pier sidewalk.

"The origin of the fire was thought to be arson. A concessionaire saw two men in a boat rowing away from the pier shortly before the blaze spread, but nothing was ever proven. When the firemen were cleaning up, they pulled down some of the Japanese gambling game wheels and found intricate electric wiring on the under side of the spindles. The games were rigged!

"The first priority of the State Investment Company, operators of the Fraser Pier, was to build a temporary dance hall. Dance halls were more essential to nearby business interests than most people realized. Once their small 60 x 80 foot hall opened on February 12, 1916, other business' receipts improved dramatically." p. 64

"However, the company had much more ambitious plans. Obtaining the lease on the Jones Pier gave them control of 500 feet of beach frontage. They planned to rebuild the pier, erect a big first class cafe at the northwest corner of Ocean Front Walk and the pier entrance, add a big parking lot similar to the one on the Abbot Kinney Pier, . . .

"By April work on their new concrete dance hall near the end of the pier was nearing completion, and it looked like they would make the Easter Sunday opening. H.W. Schlueler leased space on the Great Western Pier at Ocean Front Walk. He razed the Pier Athletic Club where many famous boxers trained and the adjacent shooting gallery to make space for a 165 foot square building. It would be part dance hall and part concert hall. The dance hall section would be under an enromous 100 foot diameter concrete dome.

"Tom Prior and Fred Church leased space on Ocean Front Walk between the Fraser Pier's two entrances. They planned to introduce a new concept in amusement park rides, a racing carousel. They called their ride the 'Great American Racing Derby'. The inside portion of the ride was a standard carousel with 62 jumping horses and menagerie animals. However, on the outside rim of the 72 foot diameter machine were forty racing horses grouped four abreast in ten distinct races. The horses, which were set in six foot long tracks, would move back and forth as the side rotated, sometimes nosing ahead to gain the lead, other times suddenly falling back. The ride would slowly gain speed until it reached 25-30 mph, then the bell signifying victory for each of the lead horses would ring and the ride would slow down to a stop. The winners of each race would receive free repeat rides.

"I was impossible to determine ahead of time which horse would win since the cables that moved the horses back and forth criss-crossed beneath the platform. The cable pulling the outside horse in one row might be pulling the second horse out in the row ahead . . .

{Prior and Church opened their ride February 4, 1917.}

"The Dome Dance Pavilion, however did open on time for the Fourth of July weekend. Ben Laietsky's Orchestra provided the music. The dance hall did record business on July 4th. 34,000 tickets were sold at five cents each to 68,000 dancers during the all day and evening dance sessions. Dance sessions in those days ere usually three slow numbers long; combinations of fox-trots, one-steps and waltzes. When it was over they would clear the floor for a new group. In the evening Tex La Gronge entertained pier spectators with a thrilling daredevil aerial show surrounded by fireworks." p.65

{page 66 photo Main promenade on the rebuilt Fraser Pier, 1913.}

{page 67 photo of the opening of the Ben Hur Racer roller coaster in Ocean Park, 1914}

{United States entered the Great War on April 6, 1917.}

"The Venice Vigilance Committee was formed and sought out anyone making disloyal remarks. Sometimes they were over-zealous and harassed shopkeepers of Germanic origin. Slackers and idlers, also considered disloyal, were picked up in periodic raids on the pier." p. 66.

" . . . Venice was almost the only place in the vicinity of Los Angeles where drinking was still legal. . . .

"Nearby Santa Monica voted to go 'dry' on January 1, 1918. Venice's election of the liquor laws was to be that April. Both sides were campaigning for their cause, sometimes fighting unfairly. Just days before the election the Grand Jury began to dig into alleged fraud and false voter registration in Venice. It was an open secret that almost anyone who would vote 'wet' could obtain free lodgings in Venice . . . The 'wets' carried the April 7th election by 509 votes. Venice and Vernon were now the only places in Los Angeles County where one could buy a drink or a bottle of liquor.

"The war effort did little to restrict additions in the amusement zone. Church-Prior installed another Great American Racing Derby on the Venice Pier between the Auditorium and Melodia. It was a larger machine, 315 feet in circumference with 64 horse in rows of four set on the racing rim. It was a much more efficient design with no inner carousel . . . "

"Tom Prior, who operated the business, seemed to be at odds with the politicians in both Venice and Santa Monica. When the trustees insisted that he cease playing his Race Thru the Clouds calliope, he severed relations. He scheduled a religious music concert one month later to prove to his foes that his calliope could play reverent and subtle music.

"He also sued the city of Santa Monica for unreimbursed expenses incurred in the building of a bandstand in conjunction with his Racing Derby on the Ocean Park Pier. In January 1918 he removed the ride from the pier and attempted to demolish the building. Fraser called in the police to stop him. Prior claimed that Santa Monica's restrictions, particularly those against games of chance, were bad for business. This was hard to fathom since just the previous season his ride had 211,993 customers during the period from June 1 to Sepember 16.

"W.H. Labb and William Ellison . . . took over the management of the Fraser Pier . . . they had ambitious plans . . .

"When the Armistice was signed November 11, 1918, California was in the midst of a killer influenza epidemic. At first the flu epidemic wasn't feared, for county health officials like Dr. J.L. Pomeroy were certain that Southern California's sunshine would prevent it. But by late October the flu spread and the health department overseeing Venice and Santa Monica was forced to close schools, theaters, saloons and all places where soft drinks and ice cream were sold. The latter places had to establish a sanitation and sterilization system for glasses before they were allowed to reopen. Regulations were quirky and often silly. Music and liquor were allowed in restaurants, but no dancing. Bars and saloons had to shut down but not package liquor stores.

"At first the flu seemed to spare Venice. Perhaps washing down the streets with salt water did the trick, or due to the lack of medical facilities the afflicted just went elsewhere. Regardless, Venice was well enough to lift the quarantine for the Armistice Day celebration. Only one dance hall and two theaters were closed, while nearby Santa Monica was shut down tight. Everyone thought the epidemic was over when an alarming increase occurred-169 new cases and six deaths were reported the week of December 12th. Everyone wore flu masks on the streets, and the flu bandits were having a splendid time robbing businesses. The influenza epidemic was still around but abating by the end of January 1919.

" . . .

"That summer the district attorney clamped down on all the so called 'games of chance' in both pier districts. It affected all those games where a prize was given, but not amusement games where admission was charged like skee ball and bowling. While there had been previous crackdowns on gambling style games, this time it looked like the games would have to change to those involving skill only. . . .

"In Ocean Park concessionaires were becoming extremely unhappy with pier management. They and the local business owners demanded that Labb and Ellison advertise, put in real attractions and decent entertainment on the pier. The American concessionaires felt that the Japanese concessionaires were getting a better deal . . . Ernest Pickering purchased the Fraser Million-Dollar Pier on July 2, 1919 . . . the Rosemary Theater's move(d) into the old Racing Derby building along Ocean Front Walk. . . . " p. 69

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1924, 1923, 1922, 1921, 1920, 1920s,

Chapter 4: Setbacks, Rebuilding, & Political Confusion (1920 -1924)

" . . .

{p. 72 postcard of Lick's dome Pier, 1922; Frolic ride on the Pickering Pier, 1920}

{p.73 photo of Dentzel Carousel on the Pickering Pier in Ocean Park, 1920}

". . . Ocean Park Pier owner, Fredrick Pickering, and amusement ride designers Fred Church and Frank Prior, who took over after his father's death . . . {razed} the old 'Rapids' ride to make space for a new roller coaster designed by John A. Miller . . . the 70 foot high 'Big Dipper' featured dips on the curves as well as the straight-aways . . . opened May 8th, 1920 . . .

"Leonard Crandell was busy razing his Scenic Railroad and planned to move it to Ocean Park. The 1500 seat California Theater was to be built on the former coaster site. New attractions near the end of the pier included the Bug House, an illusion ride where one sat in a swinging chair that appeared to swing higher and higher. In reality the walls rocked back and forth, higher and higher, until the room turned upside down around the nearly stationary customers. With the nearby Pig Slide the player had to throw a ball through a circular hole to star the animal performers. The little pigs that were released from their pens slid down an incline and were then herded back to their pens by a trained fox terrier. In addition, a Noah's Ark attraction depicting the biblical story opened near the pier entrance.

"Construction began in March on the expansion of Ocean Park's Pickering Pier and the addition of five exciting new rides. Pickering, . . . . was doubling the size of his pier to 400,000 square feet. It would be the largest pier in the world . . .

"Crandell decided to design and build a brand new racing roller coaster on the old Ben Hur site instead of reconstructing his outdated scenic railroad. His new Blarney Racer wasn't a very fast ride . . . It shared the site with a Ye Old Red Mill ride whose course ran under the arches of the racing coaster . . . On the far end of the site was a rather unique attraction, the Monkey Speedway Auto Races. It was a game in which monkeys would peddle miniature autos along three tracks and people could bet on the winner of each race." pp. 73 and 76.

"Pickering rebuilt and enlarged the pier's dance hall and placed new rides around it. The Captive Aeroplane and Tango rides were built directly opposite the Crackerbox Dance Hall. Over the Top, a big hit at Luna Park in Coney Island, was installed by Henry Riehl in the area west of the dance hall. It was a cross between a Virginal Reel and a small spiral coaster. The rotating saucer shaped cars, traveling up, over, and down the 30 degree slope, steadily spiraled inward until they exited through a tunnel to the outer loop's station.

"The 'Frolic' ride was placed directly across from the 'Ye Old Red Mill'. Twenty four people rode chariots that whirled around a circle 200 feet in circumference. The chariots tipped forward and backwards at a 45 degree angle, and swayed outward with centrifugal force.

"William Dentzel's beautiful 72 animal 'Carousell' occupied an 80 foot square building between the Frolic and the new Rosemary Theater. This Philadelphia-made ride along with its mechanical organ cost $22,500. Other attractions making their debut that season were Over the Rockies, a ride in a tub in and out of dark tunnels., The Bug House, a shooting gallery, and the 'Kentucky Derby' game.

"Ocean Park residents were proud of their new pier, and realized that they needed a convention center to accommodate thousands of visiting delegates. They approved $375,000 in bonds in the May election to build a new auditorium, bandstand, and auto park on the north side of the Pickering Pier. The bandstand plaza in front of the auditorium could entertain 10,000 people, and the auto park set on pilings behind the building could accommodate 500 autos.

"Two hundred men worked diligently to finish the pier, buildings and attractions in time for the June 18, 1920 grand opening. It was a weekend of celebration in which all the rides operated at capacity throughout the day until midnight, and the dance hall was full of happy couples. Twenty five thousand people came on Saturday; 60,000 people on Sunday. Their fun filled day was capped with a 30 minute fireworks display each evening.

"Stockholders were certainly pleased with business that summer. Pickering declared and paid one percent dividends on a monthly basis. In August he hired Barr's Illuminated Aerial Circus to entertain nightly. The plane had lights outlining it as it did tricks. Seventy five thousand people watched the show the first night." p. 76

{page 74 schematic of the Pickering/Lick Piers 1923}

{p. 75 photos of 1920 Blarney Racer roller coaster at the Pickering Pier and an aerial view of the 1920 Pickering Pier in Ocean Park.}

"Ocean Park got a big boost in September when Charles Lick, Austin McFaddden and George Leihy invested $250,000 in the construction of a new pier behind the Dome Dance Pavilion. The proposed Lick Pier at the foot of Navy Street adjoining the south side of the Pickering Pier was almost entirely within Venice's boundary.

"The 800 foot long, 225 foot wide pier was to have a roller coaster, dance hall, 40 car Dodge 'em, Caterpillar, Captive aeroplanes and Limit rides. McFadden, who was in charge of construction, hired John A. Miller to design his roller coaster. Plans were for the longest and steepest pier roller coaster in the Bay area. Each of its dips would be double instead of single; down 75 feet, up 60 feet, down 58 feet. They called the 600 foot long coaster the 'Zip' when it opened in time for Easter in 1922.

"Lick's new 22,000 square foot Bon Ton Ballroom featured an oval-shaped dance floor for better acoustics. The hall was large enough to be split into tow separate ballrooms with different orchestras. Major Baisden's twelve piece orchestra was the first to entertain dancers when it opened. The old Dome Dance Hall was converted into a theater, and a Casino was under construction across from it on Ocean Front Walk just north of Navy Street. It too would have a dance hall and shops, with billiards and bowling in the basement.

"Pickering made only a few changes to his pier that spring. He added the Double Whirl, Dodge 'em, and the Witching Waves rides to round out the amusements. . . . People rode a boat shaped car around an oval track, propelled by the down grade of a moving mechanical wave. Bell cranks and huge connecting rods imparted the wave motion to the ride's flexible metal flooring.

"The Double Whirl had cars set on a figure eight track with a slight incline where the two circular sections crossed. The cars were pushed by radial arms, rotating around the two fixed hubs. When the cars approached each other at the top and collision appeared inevitable, each car would glide into the other circle." p. 83

" . . . As the Windward business district proved to be too small to accommodate the city's rapid growth, other business centers developed including the Ocean Park Pier business district centering around Marine Street, the area next to city hall where Shell Avenue met the Short Line Track and on an area near the Center Street Pier. The existence of these centers and the lack of any central hub created political factionalism that weakened and often paralyzed Venice's municipal government." p. 86

"There were other problems such as an undependable supply of fresh water delivered by three water companies, a city owned incinerator whose volume of garbage had outgrown capacity and an inadequate municipally owned sewer system that had been designed in 1912 for 3000 people. The sewer system was so badly overloaded that at times the State Board of Health quarantined much of the ocean and beach on both sides of the outfall at the Center Street Pier. A new treatment plant had been designed, but voters did not approve the sale of bonds in the April 11, 1922 election." p. 86

{p. 87 picture looking north from Venice Plunge tower, 1922 toward O.P. Piers}

{p. 88 Picture of the Ocean Park Bathhouse and beach, 1924; people seem to be watching people entering the bathhouse.}

{p. 89 Picture showing Lick Pier and the Bon Ton Ballroom and Zip roller coaster, 1922.}

February 20, 1923 new charter and bond measures were defeated in the election.

July 10, 1923 annexation to Los Angeles vote defeated, 1849 to 1503.

"Overt gambling had always been an integral part of Venice's fun zone. razzle dazzle and layout games, where spinning wheels determined the prizewinners, proliferated along the boardwalk and piers. Their legality was questionable. Arrests were made periodically by crusading district attorneys and local police.

"Larger scale gambling was also the de-rigueur. Whether the gaming took place in private dining rooms at the Ship Cafe or in small casinos in the basements of various hotels and restaurants, if one were looking for a place to lose their money it was easily found.

"In September 1923 the police raided a gambling club that occupied the quarters of the Submarine Garden, once a high class cafe beneath the old Dome Pier. They found a maze of tunnels, cards and $150 on the tables and then arrested fifteen alleged gamblers.

"The place was very difficult to raid. It looked like a pool room, but the back of the room led to a long tunnel with branches leading every which way Exotic futuristic paintings, water stained and covered with cobwebs decorated the walls, and secret doors opened behind angles in the tunnel. Sand, covering the tunnel floor concealed secret buttons which operated a system of buzzers and colored lights in the main rooms of the labyrinth. The system of tunnels was so involved that it took two hours to find the fifteen arrested, and at least that many more were believed to have escaped. As soon as Lick found out about it, he closed the club. "During the years that Prohibition was in effect Canadian liquor was smuggled into Venice from offshore rumrunners by high-powered motorboats that docked beneath the pier in the dead of night. Mobster Tony Cornero ran the operation. Kinney's underground utility tunnels along the alleys on either side of Windward Avenue proved handy to the smugglers who delivered to 'speakeasy' bars in the basements of the business district. There were a few newspaper accounts of police engaging in shootouts with rumrunners along the beach near the Ocean Park Pier." p. 90

{Page 91 picture of Ocean Front Walk at the Pickering/Lick Piers; 1923}

"Another disastrous fire occurred in early 1924. This time both the Pickering and Lick piers in Ocean Park were totally consumed in an early morning blaze on January 6th. The fire was believed to have stared at 9:30 a.m. in the Ritz Cafe kitchen, but it didn't explain how the fire spread so rapidly. Some thought that rubbish was set ablaze beneath the pier near the restaurant.

"When the firemen first arrived it seemed like the Municipal Auditorium was doomed. Fire trucks laid hoses but before the water could be turned on, flames burst up from underneath and the entire walk was ablaze and the hoses burned. Another fire truck broke and the water stopped.

"The wind blowing offshore toward the southwest rose to its height and all of Ocean Park was threatened. Rumors that they were going to dynamite scattered the the huge crowd who lined up on every street to watch,. They became panic stricken. Many on the concessionaires who became trapped on the pier dove into the cold water.

"Ten fire companies fought the blaze. The shift of the wind by several points at 11 a.m. had firemen worried. Had it blown parallel to the beach, it would have devastated the entire business district. Luckily the Dome Theater's concrete structure at the northeast corner of the pier contained the fire and prevented it from leaping across Ocean Front Walk. By 11:45 a.m. firemen had the fire under control, and not one building east of Ocean Front Walk had burned.

"The losses were enormous, $2,000,000, with only $100,000 of the loss insured. Both the Rosemary and Dome Theaters were destroyed, the latter's loss alone was set at $500,000. All of the pier's rides and concessions were completely destroyed, with the exception of the sea end section of the Giant Dipper coaster. Frank Prior thought he could rebuild it because the ride's most difficult section was intact. They and everyone else would have to await new owners." p. 92

{p.92 pictures of the OP fires and remains, 1924}

{p. 93 picture of smoldering ruins, January 6, 1924.}

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1929, 1927, 1926, 1925, 1924, 1920, 1920s, 1919

Chapter 5: Annexation & Ruin (1924-1929)

"The Venice Investment Company and West Coast Theaters acquired Pickering's beach holdings for $2,000,000 just two weeks after the fire. The sale was a windfall for Pickering, who took a terrible loss and would have had difficulty financing a new concrete and fireproof pier that Santa Monica would have insisted upon. The new owners got a 50 year lease on the beach property, or at least they thought they did.

"When they applied for a building permit in mid February, city officials in Santa Monica informed them that they wouldn't grant a permit but would instead lease the sand which they claimed the city owned. Santa Monica officials intended to advertise for bids for a pier franchise on their property. The stunned new owners filed for an injunction to stop the bidding.

"The auction took place at City Hall on March 18, 1924. The Venice Investment Company, intent on regaining control of the pier property, out bid several other companies. Their winning bid was $2,000/month. The next day they announced plans to rebuild the pier at a cost of $3,000,000 and begin work one week later. Other than clearing the site, little was accomplished that spring. Work would begin in earnest on the pier in the fall.

"Owners of both the Dome and Rosemary theaters on Ocean Front Walk put higher priority on reopening than the Venice Investment company did. The Rosemary Theater began operating immediately in temporary quarters on the promenade at Kinney Street. The new 1600 seat Dome Theater, rebuilt in only 23 days, opened May 30th at the proposed entrance to the pier. The original interior had a Spanish design, but the following spring they redecorated it with an Egyptian motif to match the theme of the new dance hall. They also added a $65,000 organ.

"Lick, whose pier resided across the Venice boundary line, was able to begin reconstruction almost immediately after the fire. Work on his pier progressed rapidly, and by May 14th the Bon Ton Ballroom was ready for paying customers. The interior of the enlarged ballroom was decorated in a modified Louis XV motif. Caryle Stevenson and his orchestra entertained nightly and day on weekends." p. 94

{Page 94 photo of the rebuilt 1925 OP Pier. Playing at the Rosemary was Milton Sills "Men of Steel"}

{Page 95 Schematic of the 1929 OP/Lick Piers}

{Pages 96 and 97 1926 view of the South side of the Lick Pier.}

"Lick's new pier was basically the same layout, as his old pier, the Bon Ton Ballroom, Dodge 'em ride and a few concessions along the south side of the pier, with space for a roller coaster behind. Lick needed a new roller coaster for the summer so he contracted Prior and Church to rebuild their famous Giant Dipper coaster on the site formally occupied by the Zip. The 85 feet high ride opened July 4, 1924.

"The 1924 spring election brought to power an administration that seemed bent on self-destruction. The Civic Betterment League slate, C, Gordon Parkhurst, H.L. Anderman and Thomas Thurlow, gained control of the Board of Trustees and had no ties to the Kinney Company. They were committed to local government only if public confidence could be restored to enable financing of a comprehensive series of civic improvements. However, one of their ideas of improving Venice in the name of progress was to build more roads. That meant paving the Pacific Electric's right of way on Trolley Way and filling in the canals . . ." p. 98

{Page 98 photo of the Lighthouse slide and midway looking east on the OP Pier.}

{Page 99 photos of the Egyptian Ballroom on the OP Pier, 1925, and the entrance to the Hi-Boy roller coaster on the OP Pier.}

" . . .

"Nearby in Ocean park 200 men began working on the 960 foot long, 275 foot wide concrete pier. Work was progressing steadily and the owners expected it to open for Easter." p. 99

{Page 100 photo of the Toonerville Fun House on the OP Pier, 1929}

{Page 101 photo of the Parker carousel on the OP Pier before it was moved to the Venice Pier in 1929.}

"The Egyptian Ballroom on June 27, 1925 was the first to open on the new Ocean Park Pier. The owners made a point of emphasizing the word 'fireproof' in all their advertising. They built the structure entirely of reinforced concrete and steel. The pier, too, was fireproofed with a concrete deck. Eight fire hydrants were connected to a 200,000 gallon tank on the roof of the Dome Theater.

"The ballroom's interior was a replica in miniature of the Temple of Rameses III, King of Egypt. Carvings on the wall painted in soft Egyptian colors depicted the likenesses of all the kings of the ancient kingdom on the Nile, and sketches depicted its historic highlights. There were scenes of Cleopatra and the death of Karasan, soul god of the Nile. Dance music was provided by Dave Snell's orchestra.

"Jone's Fun Palace on Ocean Front Walk on the north side of the pier opened several days later. The large fun house style structure contained slides, rotating barrels, a miniature coaster, various kiddie rides and a large ornate Parker carousel. It was a large machine on a 48 foot diameter platform with 45 horses set three abreast. It also had to chariots and one row of very small horses." p. 101

"The pier celebrated its grand opening with a ten day festival beginning on Saturday August 29, 1925. One hundred thousand people visited the pier on opening day and watched entertainers like Jack Cox make a fire dive into a tank of water. There were numerous new rides and attractions to suit people of all ages including the 75 foot tall Hi-Boy roller coaster, (another Miller design), an Aerial Swing, Speedboats, Flying Planes, the Rosemary Theater and a bowling and billiards center. The Lighthouse Slide towered 150 feet above the bay and almost beneath it was the Miniature Auto Speedway where pint-sized autos raced through tunnels and over hills.

"Toonerville, the new fun house, looked from the midway like a village of dilapidated, possibly haunted shacks. Inside among its mostly dark winding passages were slides, rotating barrels and creepy things that scared you in the dark.

"A Looff carousel was installed inside the Merry-go-round building. The three abreast menagerie style machine was an old model built in 1916. It had beautifully carved giraffes, rabbits, ostriches, lions and stags among its rows of fancy white prancing horses.

"Venice continued to become more and more politically impossible to govern. . . . The trustees called a special annexation election for October 2, 1925 . . .

" . . . opponents charged that the amusement businesses were only concerned that Los Angeles' stiff 'Blue Laws', which contained anti-gambling statutes and also banned Sunday and all night dancing, could close one-third of the piers . . ." p.102

{p.. 102 photo of Aerial view of the OP Pier, Bristol Pier and SM Pier, 1929}

{p. 103 photo 1927 midway of the OP Pier}

" . . . Annexation won 3130 to 2215.

". . . Venice became part of Los Angeles as scheduled on November 25, 1925.

"Venice's amusement zone was affected immediately by Los Angeles' Blue Laws. The Sunday dancing ban and anti-gambling statutes went in effect and pier business consequently suffered. The effect was most pronounced in the Ocean Park area. Huge Sunday crowds thronged the Ocean Park Pier while few patrons wandered over to Venice's Lick Pier side where the Bon Ton Ballroom and other game concessions were closed. After two danceless Sundays amusement owners decided to campaign for a special amusement zone." p. 103

{p. 104 photos of The Chutes on the OP Pier, 1929}

{p. 105 Venice Beach looking north to the Lick Pier, I suppose}

""There was a big debate over the Sunday Blue Law measure. Its opponents wre mostly churches aligned with ultra-conservatives. The Venice Chamber of Commerce countered that the blue laws drive business out of Venice into the unrestricted amusement zones in Santa Monica. It was definitely affecting business as 24 places went out of business and one-third of Edison's meters were idle in the amusement zone. They pointed out that Sunday was the only day a working person in Southern California could get away for pleasure.

"The majority voted for the special amusement zone with all night and Sunday dancing: 112,305 for it, 77,832 against it. The Venice vote was more than three to one in favor and Venice dance halls reopened for Sunday business May 16th.

"The Venice Ballroom was once again crowded with Sunday dancers. Ben Pollack and his Californians occupied the ballroom bandstand. Customers, who bought forty dance tickets for a dollar, danced the charleston, fox trot, waltz and pivoting, a dance where the couple turned continuously as they moved rapidly about the dance floor.

"Attendants walked the floor and enforced the law against dancing 'cheek to cheek' by tapping the offending couple on the shoulder and instructing them to move apart. At the end of each five minute dance, attendants used a big long rope to herd the couples off (p. 105 )the dance floor and keep them separate from the new group coming onto the floor. Single girls would watch from the side until an eligible male would ask them to dance, while couples who came together usually occupied the loges."

"Venice's first spring as part of Los Angeles was a quiet one, until the disappearance of evangelist Aimee Sempre McPherson thrust it into the national limelight. She checked into her suite at the Ocean View Hotel on May 18, 1926. The she and her secretary walked to the beach. Aimee waded into the surf while her secretary read a bible. When she failed to return an intensive search making national headlines was launched.

"Airplanes and deep sea divers were called into the search. Thousands of 'Sister Aimee's' followers came to the beach to help and to pray. One mourner committed suicide and a lifeguard drowned during the search for her body.

"Of course it was rumored that local amusement interests were involved in foul play. The evangelist had advocated a referendum to ban Sunday dancing in Venice.

"A month later they held a memorial service at Venice beach. Then two days later Aimee reappeared outside Douglas, Arizona, and told a tale of kidnapping, torture, and escape across the Mexican desert. When contradictions in her story surfaced, charges were filed against her for obstructing justice. However, prosecution was suddenly halted, and all charges against the evangelist were dropped in 1927.

"Ocean Park amusement interests enjoyed the unexpected publicity and as usual prepared for the busy summer season by adding new attractions to their Ocean Park Pier. The Whip and Scooter rides were place between the Merry-go-round building and the Dome Theater. Other new attractions in 1926 included the Pig Slide, Freak Slide Show, Captive Aeroplanes, Tango and Rabit{sic} Racer.

"One of the most unusual attractions added that year was the 'Chinatown and the Underworld' wax works. Each of the 29 separate exhibits, designed by F.R. Glass of New York City, featured realistic scenes such as McGurk's suicide hall in the Bowery, a Chinese opium den and a wedding showing slave girls and tong hatchet men. Underworld scenes included gambling dens with the capture of drug smugglers, an electrocution at Sing Sing, crimes in the Parisian sewers, Brooklyn's black hand kidnapper's in action, the Furnail murder and several dramatically portrayed beheadings and torture scenes. They were a complete replica of the noted New York City Mott and Tyler streets inside. The entire wax exhibit was a work of art." pp. 113 and 118

"Ocean Park held their Mardi Gras festival and water carnival over the Fourth of July weekend. The three day festival climaxed with a presentation of 'Ocean Park on Fire', a grand firework display that held spectators spellbound. Apparently tourists who missed last year's fire, could watch a reenactment of the disaster in miniature.

"Ocean Park's parades and celebrations during the twenties were an alternative to those of rival Venice, somewhat offbeat and different. While the Children's Floral Parade had been an annual event since 1920, the Male Beauty Parade was first staged in the late twenties. Males of every type from Hollywood Sheiks with oily pomaded hair to big he-men competed for the $300 in prize money. There were burly men and puny men, ones that were fat and short, others that were tall and lean. There were prizes for the most perfect figure, most handsome male, most athletic male, homeliest male, and even a comic division." p. 118

"The roaring twenties ended with one last pier expansion in Ocean Park. In April 1929 E.P. King, general manager of Ocean Park Realty Corporation, announced $3,000,000 worth of improvements to the Ocean Park Pier. They lengthened the pier 500 feet and built five new buildings and attractions.

"Foremost was C.L. Langley's $150,000 Shoot the Shoots ride at the very end of the pier. It was the highest amusement chute ever built, and the only one on a pier. The 56 foot wide pool at the bottom contained 150,000 tons of water. Although the ride first appeared back in 1895 at Sea Lion Park in Coney Island and was a standard feature at most amusement parks, it wasn't built in the Venice/ Ocean Park area until concrete piers were built strong enough to support its huge weight.

"Flat bottom boats would make a thrilling descent down a 120 foot high 30 degree sloped water runway into a three feet deep pool. In charge of every boatload of passengers was a competent oarsman whose duty was to bring the boast to the landing stage after the boat ran out of momentum. They stood erect in the rear of the boat and maintained their balance with one heavy single oar in hand as the craft struck water at the bottom and bounded in the air. When the boat stopped the oarsman sculled it to one side of the pond where passengers landed.

"Other rides installed nearby were a Ferris Wheel with seats in pairs facing each other, some kiddie rides and an Aero Glider, Jone's Fun Palace on Ocean Front Walk was converted into a roller skating rink." pp. 123, 124, 125

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1941, 1938, 1935, 1934, 1933, 1932, 1931, 1929, 1923,

Chapter 6: Oil, Depression & War Years (1930-1945)

"Venice entered the Depression in the midst of hope and despair. On the one hand the economic downturn caused by the stock market crash and the subsequent failure of the banking industry meant little disposable income for the amusement industry. On the other hand the discovery of oil held the possibilities of untold wealth for the community.

"The Ohio Oil Company brought in a wildcat well on December 18, 1929 in Del Rey on county property just east of the Grand Canal at Avenue 35. . . . The . . . company then asked for a zoning variance that would permit them to drill for oil within the city limits on the Venice Peninsula.

"The town's excitement soon turned to oil fever. Parcels of land and mineral rights rapidly traded hands. Residents talked of nothing but oil and the money that could be made by having an oil well in one's backyard . . . Ocean Park residents, however, weren't so lucky. Santa Monica was strictly against drilling." p. 126

"Despite the economic cushion provided by the oil business, the amusement business began to suffer that first summer of the Depression . . ." p. 129

"With spending money becoming scarce and money for new attractions non-existent, amusement men resorted to promotions and celebrations to lure paying customers to Venice and Ocean Park. The schedule for 1931 included the St. Patrick's Day parade, Easter Fashion Pageant, Pacific Memorial Day services, Fiesta Week in June, Independence Day with fireworks, Annual Bathing Revue, Mermaid Mardi Gras in August, Labor Day celebration, Halloween Carnival, Armistice Day celebration, 1st Annual Turkey Trot, two weeks long Christmas Fiesta and the 24th annual New Year's Eve Frolic.

"Amusement interests were fortunate that summer as the crowds at the beach were larger than in the previous two years and water temperatures hovered between a record 76 and 78 degrees Fahrenheit, only a degree or two colder than the waters off Hawaii. Hammerhead sharks were sighted in the bay for the first time. World wide weather was bizarre that summer; extreme heat and drought in North America with record rain throughout Europe. Inland Los Angeles temperatures hovered around the 100 degree mark throughout the summer and residents headed for the beach to escape the heat. Sunday's July 26th crowd that packed the narrow beach solid from Del Rey to the Ocean Park Pier was estimated at 350,000 people. Five hundred people took a late evening swim by moon light near the pier. the only discomfort was the swarms of mosquitoes that plagued Venice throughout the summer.

" . . .

"The pier's amusement rides were considered safe, but on August 13th there was a bizarre accident on the Ocean Park Pier's Hi-Boy roller coaster. The front car became uncoupled from the rest of the train and didn't make it to the top of the next hill. The empty rear cars, with much less momentum, stopped near the bottom. When the front car, rolling backwards, struck the rest of the train at the bottom, its four passengers were hurled backwards out of their seats to land in the empty car behind. It was a lucky accident or they might have fallen between the rails to their deaths.

"Others weren't always so lucky. There were always signs posted warning passengers 'Do not stand up!' One teenager, no doubt showing off to his friends, disobeyed the warning sign when Some Kick coaster first opened in 1923 and had his head smashed in by a protruding post. Over the years some stood up and were hurled out of the cars on sharp turns, only to land on the pier far below or sometimes in the ocean. Most were drunk but a few did it on a dare, One kid tried to ride a coaster unseated, hanging on to the restraining bar by his hands alone. He lost his grip on a fast turn and died when he struck the pier pilings below.

"Many consider 1932 the worst year of the depression. Banks like the First National Bank of Venice and Ocean Park's Marine Bank were failing in record numbers, and jobs were scarce everywhere. But Los Angeles was preparing for the 10th Olympiad and the Venice/ Ocean Park amusement interests intended to take advantage of it. They planned to lure the Olympic crowd with 25 cent Pacific Electric roundtrip excursion fares on Wednesdays and Sundays.

"In May the Southern California water polo team, composed mostly of Venice swimmers, won the West Coast championship. Five Venice men including Wally O'Conner (captain), Phil Daubenspeck, Charles Finn, Herb Wildman and Bill O'Conner won positions on the United States water polo team. The team upset Brazil and Japan in the playoffs and tied Germany 4-4 in the semi-finals. But in the August 11th final match, they lost to Hungary 7-0.

"Venice held some interesting events that summer. July 4th {1932} festivities included a daredevil's descent by parachute while operating a fireworks show. Louis 'Speedy' Babbs leaped from a plane at 8000 feet with bombs strapped to his body and a brand in his teeth. Unfortunately, one of the bombs prematurely exploded and his clothes caught fire at 5000 feet. Spectators didn't realize what had happened until his writhing body, enveloped in flames, dropped out of the fog into the clear a few hundred feet above the ocean where speed boats quickly rescued him. He was hospitalized with first and second degree burns. p. 130

"Natural disasters in 1933 and 1934 did almost as much to damage Venice as the Depression did. The Long Beach earthquake on March 10, 1933 wrecked the high school auditorium and damaged a number of buildings. . . ." p. 130

"Then in January 1934 heavy rains caused Ballona Creek and the Grand Canal to overflow and flood Venice. . . . The Works Progress Administration did, however, begin work on building a flood control levee on Ballona Creek the following year. It helped but failed to curtail the brunt of the 1938 flood.

"Congress pass the Little Volsted Act on April 7, 1933 as a prelude to ending Prohibition. It authorized the consumption 3.2% beer in any municipality that would allow it. Los Angeles put the issue on the May ballot and it passed. . . . By the end of the year the states ratified the repeal of the 21st Amendment, and it became legal once again to drink liquor on December 5, 1933." p. 132

{p. 133 photo :1941 aerial view of the Sunset, Venice and OP Piers, and Santa Monica.}

"The Venice Surfing Club gained prominence during the time {1935 - 1941} of the Mardi Gras festivals. Its thirty to forty members, mostly teens and young adults, met at a small clubhouse on the end of the Sunset Pier. It was first formed as a paddle board club in the early 30's, but when members like Luigi Varlucchi, Tom Wilde, Ed Adams, Tom Blake and Tully Clark began shaping the big wooden boards and experimenting with unmovable rudders placed on the tail, most members began to surf. Lifeguards reserved half of the beach area between Sunset Pier and the Venice Pier exclusively for surfboards and paddle boards.

"Venice began to recover from the Depression after 1935. Business conditions improved, primarily because of the success of the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, which was busy making DC-3's. Workers seeking housing and families who were staying in Venice through the winter because of higher rents inland cause a housing shortage. Garages were converted into living quarters and single family residences were converted to multi-family." p. 135

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1945, 1943, 1941

"America prepared for war in 1941. The draft was enacted and nearly 200 local youth were serving in the armed forces when hostilities broke out on December 7, 1941. . . .

"A blackout was immediately instituted, and National Guardsmen patrolled the beach. Helmeted air raid wardens took their duties seriously as they inspected their blocks nightly for any stray shaft of light that might become a beacon for enemy warships and subs. The Douglas Aircraft factory was completely camouflaged so that it looked like a harmless housing tract from the air.

"The amusement piers were open thorough out the war except at night. Soldiers and sailors came to the piers and boardwalk on weekend leaves . . . .

"Dancing was a favorite way to meet local girls. Harry James and Benny Goodman played swing music at the Casino Gardens on the Ocean Park Pier. The Venice Dance Hall offered country and western music by the best bands in the west.

"By 1943, threats of invasion had diminished sufficiently to permit near normal operation of the amusement zone during the evening hours. The piers were also a haven for young Mexican-Americans who adopted a style of dress distinctly their own. The boys wore ducktail haircuts, flat pancake hats, peg-top trousers, reet pleats, long glittering watch chains and long drape coats. The girls, dubbed 'cholitas' wore tight fitting sweaters and black hobble skirts that stopped above the knee line. Going out in your best attire was called 'zooting'.

"It was inevitable that tension would develop between the 'zoot suiters' and the servicemen that congregated at the piers on weekend nights. On the night of May 8, 1943 rumors circulated along the beach that one of the 'zoot-suiters' had knifed a sailor and a clash began. Several hundred soldiers, sailors and local teenagers ran the Mexican-Americans out of the Aragon Ballroom on the Lick Pier. They clashed again after midnight along Ocean Front Walk at Navy Street in front of a crowd of 2500 spectators. Thirteen 'zoot-suiters' were arrested and 28 more were taken into custody following the battle.

" . . .

"The stage was set for another round of fighting the following weekend. Police roadblocks intercepted over a hundred 'zoot-suiters' bound for Venice, and arrested eight local youths who were discovered carrying concealed weapons. It ended the Venice wars but the clashes soon moved to downtown Los Angeles where worse racial violence took place.

"The war years weren't very good for Venice. In 1943 the California State Board of Health quarantined the beach as far north as Brooks Avenue because Los Angeles was dumping raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay. {Lifted in 1950.} . . ..

"The war ended on August 14, 1945. . . . ' p. 138

Chapter 7: Dismantling of Venice (1946-1972)

". . .

". . . the {Venice} pier closed at midnight on Saturday April 20, 1946." p. 139

"The beach widening project begun in 1947 resulted in the sluicing of over 14 million tons of sand from the dune site of the proposed Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant in El Segundo to as far north as the Ocean Park Pier. The width of the beach along the eight mile stretch was increased to a uniform 500 feet. But the summer of 1948 sluicing progressed as far as Brooks Avenue. It was strange to see the Sunset Pier completely landlocked, the beach stretching far beyond its outer pilings. The project, including the sewage plant, was completed in 1950. The beach quarantine was lifted the following year.

" . . . the Ocean Park Pier entered a period of renovation just after World War II and kept the area's amusement park tradition alive. First they installed a double ferris wheel near the end of the pier. Edmund Marine's huge Strat-o-liner ride was also nearing completion. He and chief designer Bob Goldworthy had started working on it in 1941 but the war had interrupted their endeavor. When its four large sleek cars were finally attached to the tower's long swivel arms in 1946, pier people predicted the cars would fly off and land in the ocean.

"The Chute the Chutes closed permanently in late summer after an accident claimed the life of a little boy. He stood up and fell out of the boat as it slid down the ramp. Four years later Harry Cooper's Kiddy Town opened at the bottom of the ramp where the pool stood. This enclosed area had a miniature roller coaster, an airplane ride and several small kiddie car rides.

"But even these changes did little to increase business or the waning popularity of the old-fashioned amusement pier. Teenagers and young adults with families were indoors watching television or driving their cars to outdoor movie theaters for entertainment. Also, the closing of the bingo games in 1949 deprived the pier, especially the Lick Pier side, of much of its income. Pacific Electric's decision to shut down 'red car' service to the Venice/ Ocean Park area on September 15, 1970{?} didn't help either.

"By 1951 Lick Pier's Aragon Ballroom had fallen on hard times. The most recent orchestra to play there only drew eight couples, and KTLA television dropped its weekly telecasts. Its manager, Gordon 'Pops' Sadrup, in one last effort to salvage his declining dance business, hired band leader Lawrence Welk to perform a miracle. Welk's brand of light popular danceable music had drawn crowds at the Aragon back in 1946 despite the competition of Tommy Dorsey at the nearby Casino Gardens.

"Welk played at the Aragon and KTLA was persuaded to resume the telecasts. His first televised show on May 2, 1951 drew numerous viewers despite the late midnight hour. Beforfe long the Dodge dealers of Southern California became sponsors, and Welk's 'Champagne music', live from the Aragon Ballroom, became a popular national television show.

"The Venice area continued to deteriorate physically throughout the fifties. Pawnshops and liquor stores replaced the souvenir shops and bingo parlors. Tourist were replaced by derelicts, drug addicts and motorcycle gangs, and winos passed out laid beneath the sheltered colonnaded archways on Windward Avenue. Property values. far from rising, dropped dramatically.

"On June 23, 1957, the Urban Renewal Agency in Los Angeles announced that a portion of the city's $100 million in federally allocated funds would be available for redevelopment in the Venice area. . . . The majority of Venice's property owners were against relinquishing title to their property. . . . In March, 1958, they voted against it . . .

"In the late fifties a new group of people began to settle in the Venice area. They adopted a new lifestyle that rejected the bland contemporary values of work and success in favor of a Bohemian life centered on poetry, jazz and art. Jack Kerouac's novel called them the 'Beat Generation'.

"The Beats were lured by Venice's low rent, mid climate and toleration of their lifestyle. They included painters like John Altoon, Ben Talbert, Tony Landreau, George Herms {and Wallace Berman} and Fowad Magdalani - 'the mad artist of Venice West' who experimented with the limits of abstraction and new forms of assemblage works. . . . The poets included Stuart Perkoff, Frank Rios, Tony Scibella, Lawrence Lipton and James Ryan Morris. They wrote about disenchantment and nuclear overkill. Others included folksinger Julie Meredith, light show impresario Jimmy Alonzi and sculptor Tati.

" . . .

"Lawrence Lipton chronicled the coffee houses, personal searches, artists, poets and others of 'Venice West' in his book The Holy Barbarians. He called Venice the 'slum-by-the sea'. . . ." p. 142

{p.143 photo of OP Pier concession Felix the Cat.}

" . . . the Beats were soon followed by a new generation of 'flower children.'

" . . . Many art-educated upcoming artists gravitated to Venice in the early 60's because studio space was cheap. The first wave, who settled along Market and Main streets, included Peter Alexander, Billy Al Bengston, Ron Cooper, John Altoon and Dewain Valentine. They were soon joined in the late 60's by Chuck Arnoldi, Laddie Dill, Ann McCoy, Tom Wudl and Tony Berlant. . . . . " p. 143

{p.144 photo of the OP Pier Midway, 1950)

{p. 145 photos of the Skooter ride and the Loof carousel on the OP Pier, 1952}

Chapter 8: Pacific Ocean Park (1958-1967)

{page 147 photo Neptune's Courtyard entrance to POP}

"In 1956 CBS and the Los Angeles Turf Club {who also developed Lake Arrowhead} were granted the lease on the Ocean Park Pier and they proposed to build a $10,000,000 nautical theme park to compete with Disneyland. They closed the pier after Labor Day, hired the best amusement park designers and Hollywood special effects experts they could find and began to design innovative new attractions for the theme park. In all 80 special effects men, scenic designers and artists worked for more than a year on the project. They like Disney, found corporate sponsors to share the expenses of some of the exhibitions. To save money they renovated existing buildings and incorporated six of the old attractions into the layout; the merry-go-round, roller coaster, Toonerville Fun House, Glass House, twin diving bells and Strat-O-Liner ride. They called the new park Pacific Ocean Park.

"The 28 acre park was decorated throughout in a sea-green and white moderne look, an evocation of the ocean itself. Its entrance set amidst fountains, sculptures and large sea horse and clam shell decorated frieze, set the mood of the wonders within. The ticket booth in Neptune's Courtyard was set under a six-legged concrete starfish canopy; plastic bubbles and sea horses adorned its top. All day admission was ninety cents for adults, less for children. This included access to the park, Neptune's Kingdom, the Sea Circus and the Westinghouse Enchanted Forest exhibit. Other rides and attractions were at additional costs.

"Opening day on Saturday July 28, 1958 drew 20,000 curious people and dozens of Hollywood celebrities. Sunday's 37,262 paying customers brought traffic jams to the area. During its first six days it out performed Disneyland in attracting customers.

"Visitors entered the park through Neptune's Kingdom where they took a submarine elevator down to the suboceanic corridors below. Water filling the elevator's clear central tube gave the illusion of descending beneath the sea. Across from the elevator was an enormous sea tank set in the corridor wall. It was partitioned so that it appeared the shark and prey cohabited the same tank. Beyond and covering one entire wall along the corridor was a large diorama filled . . . " p. 147

{p.148 schematic of POP - 1959; p.149 aerial view of POP, 1963}

{p.150 Ocean Skyway bubble cars; p. 151 Local beauty queen}

"with creatures that couldn't live in captivity. Motorized artificial turtles, manta rays, sawfish, and sharks glided by over coral reef and hanging seaweed. In the distance, barely visible in the glimmering light was Neptune with his scepter in hand sitting on his throne. The display was a masterpiece of special effects, a convincing illusion of waterless liquid space presented by your Coca Cola bottler.

"Next door was Westinghouse's free Enchanted Forest and Nautilus Submarine exhibit. They had a 150 foot model, atomic reactor section of the famous atomic sub. Nearby was a room full of electronic appliances and gadgets for the House of Tomorrow. A modular house was put together by machinery as part of the show.

"The main feature of the Sea Circus area was the performing seal and dolphin shows. Two thousand people could watch the shows several times daily in the large amphitheater. Afterwards they could feed the seals in the Seal Pool.

"The twin Diving Bells nearby offered excursions beneath the surface of a large salt water tank. As one of the bells was loaded with passengers, the other was slowly pulled below the surface by hydraulic pistons. Those inside peered out of the small portholes in search of fish. Water seeping through the bell's riveted metal seams reminded one of the tremendous pressure outside., Then there was a sudden rush upwards, and the ride was over as the diving bell popped explosively to the surface. The two long lines of people, nervously awaiting their turn, were splashed by the sudden surge of water.

"The Ocean Skyway entrance was but a few steps away. Here passengers could board bubble gondolas for a six minute, half mile ride that would take them 75 feet above the Pacific. It offered panoramic views of the bay, Santa Monica Mountains, and the park. As it reached its turn-around point near the Mystery Island's volcanic peak, it offered a tantalizing preview of the Banana Train ride.

"Union 76's miniature Ocean Highway gave drivers a choice of futuristic styled model cars. The long, nearly oval course was built like a causeway directly over the ocean. Other rides in that section of the park included a Ferris wheel and a tilted aerial stye ride called the Paratrooper. Its two passenger seats suspended from parachute canopies swung outwards as the ride gained speed.

"On the other side of Neptune's Kingdom was a unique attraction called Flight to Mars. The inside lobby was decorated with a mural featuring a barren Martian . . . " p. 151

{p. 152 photo Union 76 Ocean Highway}

{p. 153 POP's main midway}

"landscape. Space travelers entered a round tiered spaceship-like theater with a column bank of television screen set in the floor's center. The door sealed and the seats reclined back as the ship prepared for flight. The whole theater and the individual seats shook during takeoff, while views of Earth receding in the distance were projected on the television monitors. A few minutes later the ship approached Mars and passengers prepared for a landing and were made to feel like they were slowly descending. The whole theater was built like an elevator so when passengers exited they stood before a vast diorama of the red planet and its green alien creatures. Visitors were magically returned to Earth by entering a mirrored black-light teleport chamber at the exit door.

"Across the main midway was the Flying Carpet ride, a fantasy excursion into the Tales of the Arabian Nights. Passengers boarded vehicles resembling large flying carpets that were suspended from above on tracks. The cars soared high into the air above the city lights below, past lofty mountains painted in the walls, and far away to the Sinbad's Bagdad where Arabian palace spires soared skyward. Below was a giant genie coming out of Ali Baba's lamp, and other characters from the old tales and legends. To attract customers they hired a giant 7'4" tall man whose Arabian Nights costume and large turban made him look gigantic.

"The Mirror Maze in the next building was a standard Fun House style attraction. The building's transparent facade revealed dozens of reflected images of each of the people inside the labyrinth. One had to first find a path through a glass maze to get to the area where the floors moved. Barrels turned, and rooms slanted, daring one to stand up straight. Then it was back into another maze of glass and mirrors to find a way out.

"Davy Jones Locker further along the midway was a much more interesting Fun House with a nautical theme. The revamped Toonerville Fun House was a walk thru with tunnels decorated with fake underwater paraphernalia including divers in old helmets. It had a crooked room, two slides with a bump in the center and dozens of distorted mirrors. Customers had to squeeze through giant upright padded rollers to exit. Teenagers liked the attraction because it was mostly dark, inside.

"Almost across from it was the Flying Dutchman, a 'dark' ride on tracks. Treasure chest styled cars passed through the hull of an old Spanish galleon where it narrowly missed upsetting a stack of rum barrels. Inside behind bars were prisoners crying to get out, and further on skeletons of those who were imprisoned far . . . " p. 152

{p. 154 Diving Bells}

{p. 155 Space Wheels, twin double Ferris wheels}

"too long. Threatening pirates gathered in one cabin to argue over their treasure. The overflowing treasure chest nearby had gold doubloons and jewels spilling out.

"The Deepest Deep was a smaller 'dark' ride that gave the illusion of exploring the sea in a two-man submersible. People would ride in a tracked car with a plastic bubble dome past fake looking underwater scenes. A hydraulic piston raised, lowered and turned the cars as they passed different scenes like mermaids and treasure chests. The ride was cheaply done and had endless mechanical problems that kept it closed much of the time.

"Round the World in 80 Turns took one for a tour of France, England, Germany, Turkey, China and Japan. The tub-like cars would whip sharply to the left and right to change scenes. Due to constant complaints of nausea and neck pains it was closed midway through the second season.

"Fun seekers could try hunting for big game on the Safari Ride. Tracked jeeps equipped with electronic rifles wound its way through African jungle. Lion prides fought over a recent kill and an occasional rhino would charge the jeep. The man-made plywood cutout animals were slightly animated.

"There were plenty of old fashined thrill rides along the Ports o' POP midway. Foremost was the Sea Serpent roller coaster. It was from the old pier but was now painted in an array of gaudy colors. The Whirl Pool was a huge centrifuge that pinned customers to the wall, then the floor dropped out. Another centrifuge ride called the Shell Spin slowly tilted until riders were being spun vertically. The old Stat-o-liner ride was now called Mr. Dolphin, and the Flying Fish was merely a 'wild mouse' coaster with cars decorated to look like fish. Nearby were Octopus and Mrs. Squid rides. The latter was a flat 'Scrambler' style ride whose cars would swing back and forth across the platform. They spun and appeared to narrowly miss each other as they crossed each other.

"The park's best ride was the Mystery Island Banana Train Ride at the end of the pier. Eight giant totem poles and two outrigger canoes formed the entrance to the area. Explorers crossed a suspension bridge above a 9000 gallon per minute waterfall to an authentic Polynesian stilt house where they boarded the U.S. Rubber train. The train, like those of tropical banana plantation trains, was pushed by the locomotive.

"The excursion carried one through a tropical paradise of palms, bamboo, and banana trees, past coconut throwing monkeys and into two back to back counter- . . . " p. 154

{p. 156 The Sea Serpent}

{p.157 Safari and mirrors}

{p. 158 The Sea Tub}

{p. 159 POP main midway]

{p. 160 Whirl Pool and Shell Spin}

{p. 161 Mr. Dolphin}

"rotating tunnels that simulated an earthquake. The tunnels led to inside the heart of an erupting volcano where the train circled the bubbling volcanic crater. Once the passengers passed through the spider caves, the train's precarious tracks suddenly emerged on a suspension bridge over real ocean surf below. Before the startled passengers realized it, the train just as suddenly reentered the mountain into a large room where geysers erupted. Finally it passed through a tropical rain storm complete with lightning and through the jungle to the passenger loading station. Then as the ride came to an end a friendly gooney bird shrieked, "Hope you enjoyed your trip!"

"The park had two dining and shopping areas. Inside the park was a recreation of a New England harbor called Fisherman's Cove. Outside along Ocean Front Walk was the International Promenade offering superb cuisine in authentic foreign restaurants, as well as exotic souvenirs, gifts and imports in the various shops.

"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.

"It was obvious to the new owner that the park needed a one price admission policy to attract more customers. He set a price for the following spring of $1.50 for adults and $1.00 for children. He did, however, expect to raise prices for the busy summer tourist season. The Sea Serpent roller coaster was still an extra twenty five cents per ride since it was the one ride not owned by the park." p. 161

[p. 162 Entrance to Mystery Island]

[p. 163 Mystery Island]

[pp. 164 & 165 Three photos of Mystery Island ride]

"Morehard's goal was to run the park as a small family amusement park business not as competition to Disneyland. He hoped to attract teens and family repeat business from people who lived within 30 to 40 miles.

"Unfortunately the park continued to lose customers. The trouble was that Pacific Ocean Park was in a run down, seedy part of town and the area attracted the wrong element. The nearby streets were littered with bums and winos who accosted customers for money. Local teenagers. aware that their parents frowned on them going to the park on weekend evenings, often told them they were going to a movie and then sneaked down to P.O.P.

"Local kids had a knack for sneaking into the park for nothing. They often used a catwalk beneath the pier to reach a trapdoor near the shooting gallery. Sometimes it was unlocked, but if that failed they would climb over the high exit turnstile.

"The park, too, was having trouble maintaining its own operation. It offered a large number of rides and attractions for the price, but with such a high overhead it had to skimp on maintenance. Rides were often broken and everything deteriorated against the rough ocean elements. In short, the park with its peeling paint looked run down It did, however, attract 1,216,000 paid customers in 1963.

"It was sold in October 1963 to Irving Kay, a San Francisco real estate developer for $7.5 million. The deal included some other property. At first he leased P.O.P. back to management headed by Jack Roberts, but then in January he sold the park to Roberts' company, Amusement Purchase, Inc. for $2.5 million.

"The 1964 season was the park's most successful attendance wise. It drew 1,663,013 visitors. New rides included a flat ride called the Himalaya near the Sea Circus, and a Monster Mouse steel roller coaster where Fun Forest stood. The coaster's ability to make 90 degree turns made the ride downright frightening. Passengers thought that the cars had jumped the track as the front of its small cars hung over the narrow track before they abruptly turned. The smaller Flying Fish 'wild mouse' was replace by a small Ferris Wheel and tilted centrifuge, called the Mixer that was located elsewhere in the park, and the kiddie rides were moved to the Fisherman's Village area.

"But Santa Monica in 1965 began its Ocean Park urban renewal project. There was wholesale demolition of nearby buildings and closings of streets leading to the park. The entire area was disordered while they were building two large apartment towers. A street leading to . . . " p. 165

[p. 166 Rock-O-Plane and Mr. Octopus]

[p.167 Flying Dutchman and Flying Fish]

[p.168 Westinghouse Enchanted Forest]

[p. 169 Union 76's Ocean Highway and Skyway; Paratrooper ride; Twin Diving Bells]

[p. 170 Sea Circus; Entrance to Mystery Island]

"the park would be open one week, then deliberately closed the next. Customers often called from nearby phone booths to complain that they could see the park but couldn't figure out how to get there. Attendance dropped to 621,000 in 1965 and 398,700 in 1966. Roberts paid bills rarely, not even his modest lease rent to Santa Monica.

"Santa Monica was ready to pull his park license at a meeting on March 16, 1967 when Roberts showed up at the last minute with a fist full of policies proving that the park was covered with $1.5 million in insurance. The city was ready to close the park when they got a cancellation notice from his insurance company.

"The Urban Redevelopment board was concerned that his park with its peeling paint and boarded up restaurants along Ocean Front Walk would scare away prospective apartment tenants. Although they would have liked to see the park closed, and nearly accomplished it during construction, they publicly wished Roberts well.

"Roberts, despite years of lagging attendance and piles of long overdue bills, expected things to improve. He was negotiating a loan of $1,600,000 from the Teamsters. In addition, urban redevelopment left him with a brand new access street, ample parking and a bus stop. The Cheetah, a mod rock and roll club planned to open in the Aragon Ballroom.

"Finally at the end of the 1967 season, P.O.P.'s creditors took action and forced the park into involuntary bankruptcy. Santa Monica precipitated the action when they filed suit to take control of the property because Roberts owed them $17,000 in back rent since 1965. The park closed on October 6, 1967.

"A.J. Bumb became Trustee of the park, and on April 25, 1968 federal bankruptcy referee Norman Neukom gave permission to dispose of the park. When he was asked if P.O.P. might be saved, he replied, 'No Chance! Santa Monica doesn't want it there.'

"The auction began on June 28, 1968 and ran through the 30th. The proceeds from the sale of 36 rides and sixteen games were used to pay off creditors. The park's dilapidated buildings and pier structure remained until several fires and the final demolition in the winter 1973-1974 removed it from all but people's fond memories. The long era of Venice/Ocean Park amusement parks was finally over." p. 170

[Rear cover OP night scene; amusements on the OP Pier]

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Singing Chair, Doug Hollis, 1987 Smart Festival Post Card

1987 SMarts Festival 1987 Singing Chair Post Card Text

1987 SMarts Festival Singing Chair, Doug Hollis, Artist, Post Card, Santa Monica, CA, KR, 1987

Post Card addressed to the S,M. Chamber Orchestra, Charlotte Cox, P.O. Box 5474, Santa Monica, CA, 90405, Franked by U.S. Postal Meter $0.12 on May 15, '87 at Santa Monica, Calif.

1987 SMarts Festival Presents A Beach Performance by Rachel Rosenthal Celebrating inauguration of Natural Elements Sculpture Park and permanent installation of Singing Beach Chairs by Doug Hollis. Saturday, May 30, 5:00 p.m. Between Lifeguard Stations 17 and 18 (North of Pico Blvd., opposite Seacastle Apartments) Santa Monica, California. Made possible by the City of Santa Monica, California Arts Council and the National Endowment of the Arts Special thanks to the City Council, Arts Commission, General Services Department and Parks and Recreation Department. Exchange this card for free parking at Civic Auditorium.

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Sky Poem, David Antin, 1987 SMarts Festival Post Card, Santa Monica, CA, KR, 1987

Sky Poem David Antin, 1987 SMarts Festival Announcement

1987 Smart Festival Presents Skypoem, An Aerial Literary Event by David Antin, An eighteen minute performance in the air over Santa Monica Bay, Saturday, May 23, 1987, 2:00 P.M. Skypoems project is funded by the California Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and City of Santa Monica. Special thanks to the City Council, Arts Commission, Airport Commission and Skytypers.

Addressed to S.M. Chamber Orchestra, Charlotte Cox, P.O. Box 5474, Santa Monica, CA 90405. $0.18, May 13, 1987 Postmark.

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Trialogue, Philip Augerson 1987 SMarts Festival Post Card

Trialogue, Philip Augerson 1987 SMarts Festival Announcements

Trialogue, Philip Augerson, Artist, Announcemnt, 1987 SMarts Festival Post Card. KR.

Addressed to the S.M. Chamber Orchestra, P.O. Box 5474, Santa Monica, CA, 90405 May 14, 1987, $0.12, 1987 SMart Festival Presents Twilight Jazz Featuring Max Bennett and Freeway. Celebrating Installation of Trialogue, A Sculpture by Philip Augerson Thursday, May 28, 1987, 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The Terrace at Colorado Avenue Santa Monica, California, Free validated parking. Made possible by the City of Santa Monica. California Arts Council and Southmark Pacific Corp. Special thanks to the City Council and Arts Commission.

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Watermark, Michele Hamrick, Artist, 1987, SMarts Festival Post Card

(Back to Sources)

Watermark Announcement 1987 SMarts Festival Text Post Office Meter, Jun 2, 1987, $0.12, Addressed to Ruth Weisberg, 2421 Third Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405

1987 SMarts Festival Presents Music on Main Featuring New West Brass Quintet, Santa Monica Heritage Museum, 2612 Main St., Sunday, June 14, 1987, 1:00 P.M. to 3:00 P.M. Celebrating installation of Watermark, Fiber Art by Michele Hamrick, Ocean Park Branch Library, 2601 Main Street

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