Lummis Day - 2008

• 2008-home page •

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What is Lummis Day all about?
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Lummis Day: The Festival of Northeast Los Angeles takes its name from Charles Fletcher Lummis, who served as the L.A. Times’ first city editor upon his arrival in this city in 1885.

Lummis was also one of the city’s first librarians, founded the Southwest Museum—the first museum in the city of Los Angeles—and helped introduce the concept of multiculturalism to Southern California.

Until his death in 1928, Lummis remained active as a photographer, an editor, a poet, a raconteur and an extraordinary champion of Native American and early Californio culture.

He built his home— El Alisal (aka Lummis Home)—with his hands. It remains one of Northeast Los Angeles’ cultural landmarks.

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Charles Fletcher Lummis - walked to LA from Ohio -	Lummis Home
	Lummis in his den	Charles Lummis

Charles F. Lummis Home (El Alisal) and Garden
(California Historic Landmark #531)

Nestled in Highland Park, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the the 110 (Pasadena) Freeway and Figueroa Avenue, the Charles F. Lummis Home and Garden provides the community a peaceful sanctuary within a world of concrete and deadlines.

Built between 1898 and 1910 the Lummis Home was built by Charles Fletcher Lummis which he said he built "to last a thousand years." Its architecture, Lummis had written, "is part of my life and my brains and my love and my hands."

The Lummis Home stands on the west bank of the Arroyo Seco, the usually-dry riverbed that begins in the San Gabriel Mountains and extends south to join the Los Angeles river on the water's path to the Pacific Ocean. Once, the Arroyo Seco trickled through the water-smoothed stones lining the property to the east, fluctuating between periods of heavy flow and utter dryness. Today, the Arroyo Seco--like the Los Angeles River--is but a concrete bed built to tame turbulent waters during the rainy season. However, the stones that once lay beneath the sycamore trees and native plants now form the structure that is the Lummis Home today. The south-facing facade of the home is comprised of intricately-placed stones acquired from this nearby stream-bed, built largely by the energy and discipline of Charles Lummis.

Booster, Native American rights activist, writer, City Librarian, translator, and ethnographer, Charles Lummis was a man of many talents. An eclectic man in many respects, the home represents Lummis' love of the American Southwest and wood-hewn household furnishings. In many respects the Lummis Home represents the beginning of the Arts & Crafts aesthetic that was to soon take the architectural world by storm--only to peak with Greene and Greene homes such as the Gamble House. A warm, intimate connecting with the outdoors is brought into the interior of the house with concrete floors, wood furniture, railroad pole supporting beams for the ceiling and delicate decorative carved woods.

The Southwest Museum
(Mount Washington)

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The Good, the Bold, and the Ornery

Charles Fletcher Lummis:
How One Man’s Character Shaped
the Southwest Museum

by Suzanne Lummis

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Three years after lawman Pat Garrett fired a couple of bullets into Billy the Kid, propelling them both into the folklore of the American West, and two years after an extravagantly affected Irish personality by the name of Oscar Wilde made some stops in Ohio to lecture on the moral power of beauty, a writer, printmaker, and Harvard flunkout—done in by trigonometry—set out walking.

Charles Fletcher Lummis, age 25, had been offered a top position at a new young newspaper, to start as soon as he showed up, and so he decided to stretch his legs. It was September 12, 1884.

On January 31, 1885, Lummis showed up for his newspaper job sun-browned and quite changed, mentally and physically - mentally because he’d lately gotten, as he would proclaim for years to come, a better education than Harvard ever gave him, and physically because he’d footed it from Chillicothe, Ohio, to Los Angeles—a trek of 3,507 miles.

What Los Angeles gained that winter’s day, inaddition to the first city editor of the Los Angeles Times (and the first person to stride into town from such a far-flung starting point—the first, leastways, anyone could remember), was a short man with bold ideas, ample ego, huge passions, and an outsized personality. Had he been instead a tall man with small ideas, modest passions, and a personality in proportion to some petite ego, several acres of real estate on a promontory in Northeast L.A. might support attractive, serviceable buildings for sale or rent, but not the landmark Southwest Museum. In 1885 it was a while yet coming, but it would—another first for the scrappy little start-up city that had never had a museum before this one.

Today, Los Angeles can boast other cultural architectural wonders strongly identified with one man. The titanium swoops and curves of that spectacular new destination spot on Grand Street evoke the name of Frank Gehry. Even so, Frank Gehry may have imagined its arrangements and designed the physical place, but he himself didn’t resolve that Los Angeles needed a new concert hall, and furthermore that it should stand right here, on this downtown intersection. And he didn’t then go about raising the money for it. In fact, it’s just possible that no other Los Angeles building and cultural institution of note so wholly reflects the ideology, drive, and sensibilities of one individual as does the Southwest Museum.

Lummis’s purpose—to create a museum devoted to the history and culture of the region, “a great characteristic Southern California Museum”— grew from his fascinations and convictions, particularly a conviction that took hold during his East-to-West trek and had been growing like a fireball in him ever since. It rankled Lummis that the seemingly educated people of the East languished in ignorance of their country and its languages, true history, the land, and its peoples. In his opinion, they were—by the evidence of his own eyes and head-on experience—grossly self-misinformed about Native Americans.

This omission would steam Lummis to the end of his days, not so much for the gaps in Eastern people’s academic knowledge—hell, everyone’s got gaps in their knowledge—as for their complacency and lack of lively curiosity. In Tramp Across the Continent he called for “a history that shall so far escape the ignorance of prejudice as to admit that the Anglo-Saxon played a very squeaky second fiddle in pioneering the New World.”

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“That this committee is pledged to spare no pains to insure that the Museum shall be as noble an architectural monument as it shall be possible to build in this community.”

This resolution appears in the minutes of the April 12, 1905, executive meeting of the Southwest Society, which Lummis assembled to advance a dream he had harbored at least since 1895, shortly after he returned from his joyous Peruvian expeditions with archeologist Adolph Bandelier. Eventually, at least in his private writings, the most “noble monument possible in this community” was revised upwards so as to imagine “the most beautiful museum in the world,” and finally—perhaps with an eye on neighboring planets— ”the most beautiful museum in existence.”

Which certainly makes for a steeply ascending progression of “mosts.” A look into his diary, however, page dated November 30, 1908, reveals both the Old Man’s (the family nickname for Lummis) uncertainties and his psychic strategy: “without a bean of money, and in debt . . . [i]t’s a showdown whether my dream comes true of the best museum in the world and the most beautiful,” but “tangible evidence shows that a good many of the leaders of business, religion and scholarship in the community are still misguided enough to back me in what I am trying to do. If I can fool myself and them a little longer, we will get it done.”

Call it positive thinking, bravado, self-hypnosis, or a mix of all three, but in a country where many still practiced a stoic acceptance of one’s fate, Lummis’s penchant for radical self-determination seemed to hearken back to the earlier Western pioneers, and at the same time prefigure certain future movements and ideas that would add to California’s colorful reputation.

Something else stands out in these meeting notes and diary entries: the primacy of beauty. After all,“the most” could have been followed by some other adjective like prestigious or respected or important. He did, of course, want those things too, most definitely—a museum of first-rate scholarship; deep understanding; rich, first-rate collections; all demonstrating proper regard for the legacy of the American Indian. Still, it seemed to loom large in his vision and his lexicon, the idea of beauty. So, we wonder—some of us do—what did Charles Lummis regard as beautiful?

Fortunately, we have an answer. It entails lightreflecting planar walls of concrete, whose texture, a quality of softness, could be mistaken for sun-bleached adobe, and rooftops of red brick. (Once we know this detail, none of us can see a Spanish tile roof without thinking how back in the day, before the mass production of all things, each brick curved differently, because the makers shaped the squares of clay on their arms.) The roof and wide, unembellished walls with tall, arched windows are in Spanish-Mission style, as are the patio and garden that the compound of buildings surrounds. However, the massive square tower with its crenellated rim, like a battlement, is the very image of a Moorish castle, a colossus like those originals built to endure, while around them the physical vestiges of towns and cities dissolved and reconfigured themselves, century after century.

The stone portal opening into the hillside and the corridor leading to the main galleries bears a Mexican or Mayan design. For the exhibition halls with barrel-vaulted ceilings and natural light, Lummis acquired chandeliers that he perceived to have descended, in inspiration at least, from some ancient Zuni creations.

All features gather to a unified whole, neither plain nor fussy, spare but sweeping—not so much “modern” as timeless (but somehow more modern than the office and apartment buildings decorated with loop-de-loo’s and fat terra-cotta bison heads that were, around the time of the museum’s construction, going up downtown). Curious, interesting, that architecturally the Southwest Museum draws together Christian, pre-Christian, and Islamic influences into something that looks and feels for all the world like the wide-reaching, straight-speaking, earthy soul of the early American West. And—who would have predicted it—not a single design element is fighting with the other.

So maybe that’s what he meant by “beautiful.”

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For the Southwest Museum, Lummis wanted a Caracol Tower, a spiral staircase with spacious storage rooms on either side. His eleven-year-old son Jordan, destined to become an engineer, had given him the idea. (Jordan, whose Indian name was Quimu, had a brother, Keith, and a sister, Turbese, all from Lummis’s second-to-last wife, Eve.) The diary page dated October 17, 1912, reports: “To Hunt’s, and fight over plans again. Quimu wants caracol tower and I decide on it. They aren’t ripe but I drive it in.”

Then: “November 14 (Meeting of the Museum) Hunt and Burns show plans & I fight & get ’em accepted—Caracol and all.”

Over fifty years later, in the pages of his own biography, Charles Fletcher Lummis: The Man and His West, Keith Lummis would muse, “One wonders if more sympathy is due the stubborn amateur who undertook to design the building or the architects and contractors who had to deal with him.”

It might not qualify as the stuff of legend, but for the people of the Southwest Museum, even today, the achievement of the Caracol Tower makes for a triumphant story. After experts pronounced structurally impossible the tower father and son had dreamed up, the construction team called in foreman Henry Newton. Newton said it couldn’t be done. The bosses told him, “Lummis wants it.” Lummis-Who- Wanted-It gave this admiring account of what happened next:

And this fiery little genius did it as simply as if it were only a matter of established procedure, instead of the first and only thing of its kind in the world. Henry built a huge chimney of sheet iron, 3 ft. in diameter and 125 ft. tall for the shaft. Around this he built up such a forest of falsework that it was almost impossible for a thin man to wriggle through a room. Then one story at a time he “poured” this 125-foot tower . . . It was a splendid piece of engineering—and the result will be famous, I think, in perpetuity.

So that’s how it’s done—in case some folks out there are about to undertake a similar task. You might need a determined, stubborn man, and in some cases, you might need two.

But even a determined man doesn’t get everything he has in mind. The tower isn’t famous (except, perhaps, among a handful of museum professionals), and anyway, these days fame doesn’t count for much, now that anyone can be famous for fifteen minutes. The Southwest Museum may not be the “most” anything in the world, but it has about it a pure and durable beauty sure enough, in a city that needs it more than ever, a city that has gotten progressively homelier—filled out with strip malls, bland franchises and gray, prefab, bunker-like constructions.

Once, while the Southwest Museum founder was at work on his own strikingly unusual house, which he call El Alisal, a visitor named Walter Phillips Terry recorded Lummis’s explanation of what he was up to, what he hoped for:

It should be enduring and fit to endure. Life and death will hallow it; it mellows with the generations—if it outlasts them . . . something at least of the owner’s individuality should inform it. Some activity of his head, heart and hands should make it really his.

Happily for residents of Los Angeles, and aficionados of history and culture everywhere, the Southwest Museum is also really ours.

Excerpt from “The Good, the Bold, and the Ornery” by Suzanne Lummis in the Winter 2008 issue of Convergence magazine reprinted courtesy of the Autry National Center, Los Angeles, California. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from archival materials in this article are from the Braun Research Library, Institute for the Study of the American West, Autry National Center. Photos from Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection.

Casa de Adobe
(4605 N. Figueroa Street)

Come to the Casa de Adobe to see an exhibition of art work by contemporary artists all working in Northeast Los Angeles (it’s just across the street from the southern part of Sycamore Grove Park). It’s also a rare chance to see the Casa de Adobe.

History of the Casa de Adobe:

The Southwest Museum’s Casa de Adobe is a re-creation of a 19th century Spanish California rancho. In 1915 Mrs. Ralph Huntington Miner and Mr. Henry O’Melveny began planning to recreate an upper class home from California’s rancho period, where visitors would be able to see evidence of the daily lives of the rancheros. In 1916 the Hispanic Society of Los Angeles was founded to oversee the building of the Casa de Adobe.

In an effort to make the new home as authentic as possible, O’Melveny and Miner enlisted the help of Hector Alliot, then director of the Southwest Museum. Together they examined the surviving adobe houses of Southern California and chose Rancho Guajome, the home of the Coutts family in north San Diego County, to be the model for much of the Casa.

Construction started in 1917. Jose Velazquez, a “masterhand in the construction of adobe,” built the house to plans drawn by architect Theodore Eisen. The building progressed in the traditional way, with adobe bricks mixed and formed from earth dug at the construction site. The adobe used to plaster the kitchen walls was mixed with goat’s milk to give it a smooth and durable finish. The construction was completed in December 1918, but World War I interfered with plans to furnish the house and open it to the public. The Hispanic Society was eventually dissolved, and ownership of the property was transferred to the Southwest Museum in 1925.

The Casa de Adobe was opened to the public in 1927. Part of its purpose was to maintain the illusion of being an actual home. Furniture and artifacts represent changing styles—from about 1800 (before Mexican independence from Spain) to 1850, when the United States took possession of California. Much of the furniture was collected from original ranching families like the Sepulvedas and the Picos. The patio is referred to as the “heart of the home.”

Family life in the rancho days did indeed center around the patio, for it was there, in the shade of the vine-covered corredo, that they would dine, entertain guests, and perform daily chores. So every effort was made in the 1920s to ensure historical accuracy. Trees, plants, and shrubs that would be appropriate to the period of 1800 to 1850 were used. The Casa’s grape vines were grown from cuttings taken from the original grape vines at the San Fernando Mission that were first transported from Spain to Mexico and then brought to California in the 18th century. Two original trees, including a fig and pomegranate, still remain and are over 80 years old.

Although the Casa’s exhibitions were closed to the public in the early 1990s, the Casa remains the scene of Southwest Museum fiestas and celebrations, including the annual presentation of Las Posadas, a traditional Mexican and Mexican-American Christmas observance; an annual open house; and scheduled tours led by the Los Angeles Conservancy.

Living history tours are provided to school children by junior docents from the Arroyo Seco Museum Science Magnet School, who spent this past school year conducting research on California’s history during the mission and ranching periods. Tours can be booked by calling 323.667.2000, ext. 336.