A Radical Act of Arts & Crafts

No one ever called Charles Lummis ordinary. Eccentric, yes. Charismatic. Bohemian. Self-promoting. Womanizing. But definitely not ordinary.

It was a reputation Lummis seemed to encourage in every way possible, from the flamboyant hat and green corduroy suit he habitually wore, to the castle made of stone he built largely by himself, to the rowdy parties he hosted there.

He was the first city editor of The Los Angeles Times, the director of the Los Angeles Public Library, editor of Land of Sunshine and Out West magazines, and author of multiple books about the Southwest, for which he had a lifelong passion.

He was an irrepressible booster, sweeping everyone up in his enthusiasms. Never a man of means, he persuaded state and city leaders and wealthy benefactors to support his dreams. Lummis founded the Southwest Museum, which was Los Angeles’ first museum. He created the California Landmarks Club, one of the nation’s first historic preservation societies, in his effort to preserve California’s crumbling missions. He recorded the Spanish Colonial music of the Southwest as it was disappearing. He formed the Sequoya League to advocate for the rights of Native Americans.

Both his outsized public persona and his passion for the Southwest arose from the stunt that made him famous: his 143-day, 3,507-mile walk from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Los Angeles. He filed newspaper dispatches about his adventures along the way, and when he arrived in Los Angeles he was a national celebrity.

Most importantly, he had fallen deeply in love with the people, arts, culture, and architecture of the American Southwest.

His most personal expression of that passion was El Alisal, the house he built by hand in Highland Park. Located along the Arroyo Seco, the house features rock walls constructed with boulders from the arroyo. Lummis hauled and stacked the huge stones himself, along with some helpers, building the house over 12 years beginning in 1897.

The interior walls are covered in plaster made to look like adobe. The floors are cement, easy to hose down after one of his parties. Lummis hewed the woodwork himself, including the windows featuring contact prints on glass of photographs he took in Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, and New Mexico. There are arches, curving windows, and a bell tower.

Heavy doors feature elaborate hardware. Niches in the thick walls display Native pottery. High wooden shelves are suspended from the ceiling; they once held the extensive basket and pottery collections that Lummis donated to the Southwest Museum. Photos of Lummis and his distinguished friends, including his old college chum Theodore Roosevelt, cover the walls.

Like the missions that inspired it, the house relies on thick walls to stay cool, with shaded exterior colonnades. It opens onto a courtyard with a fountain and some modest casitas, which served as guesthouses. The name El Alisal honors the sycamores that stand at its center. The house and its courtyard are graceful, frank, and unpretentious.

He filled this unique and striking house with the most prominent artists, architects, and public figures of the day, hosting frequent bacchanals that he called “noises.” His guests included Will Rogers, John Muir, Dorothea Lange, Carl Sandburg, Douglas Fairbanks, and the local artists of the arroyo, who created a bohemian artistic community led by Lummis.

If the Arts & Crafts movement was a reaction to the cookie-cutter mechanical manufacturing of the Industrial Revolution, El Alisal stood as a “radical act of Arts & Crafts,” according to docent Christian Rodriguez, who has been guiding visitors to the house for 12 years. To Rodriguez, the house is arguably the first Arts & Crafts home in Los Angeles.

Lummis’ commitment to building his house by hand, using local materials, and highlighting the landscape, certainly reflects the spirit of the Arts & Crafts movement, albeit idiosyncratically. Rather than calling on the British tradition of William Morris, Lummis was influenced by the pueblos and missions of the Southwest and California.

“At El Alisal he is taking the vernacular of Southwestern architecture and wrapping it in an Arts & Crafts sensibility,” Rodriguez said.  

Today El Alisal is open to the public on weekends. The house has been a museum longer than it was a home. When it originally opened to visitors in 1958, it was a monument to Lummis. The house itself was considered a “kooky byproduct of this interesting man’s life,” Rodriguez said.

But over time Lummis faded from public memory, and the house itself emerged as a more prominent part of his legacy. “If he had done nothing but build this house, it would still be architecturally significant as a house and an influence,” Rodriguez said.

Through his writing and his pioneering effort to preserve the California missions, Lummis helped influence a growing interest in the Pueblo and Mission Revival styles at the turn of the 20^th century, in addition to the do-it-yourself ethos of the Arts & Crafts movement.

Overseen now by the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, El Alisal is showing its age. Chain link fencing surrounds the house, and just beyond it roars the Arroyo Seco Freeway, carved into the landscape in the late 1930s, almost taking the house. Despite Lummis’ best efforts to anchor Los Angeles in the culture of the Southwest, movies and the automobile led Los Angeles’ growth, making the city more abstractly modern, less rooted in its past.

And yet the house endures, as does its influence, fulfilling Lummis’ greatest dream:

“A man’s home should be part of himself. It should be enduring, and fit to endure,” he said, in a profile in the September 1, 1900, issue of Harpers Weekly. “It should be good architecture, honest construction, comfortable, convenient…. Something at least of the owner’s individuality (presuming him to have some) should inform it. Some activity of his head, heart, and hands should make it really his….The more of himself he can put into it, the better for it and for him…."