Man’s Dream for Renaissance on the Peninsula Revealed in Models
John Vanderlip, who at 72 lives in the original Prairie-style home his family built on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, remembers his financier father as a man with big dreams firmly rooted in the Italian Renaissance.
Frank A. Vanderlip Sr. was “very imaginative” and a lover of the arts who came to cherish Italian architecture through his travels, his son recalled in a recent interview. “He likened the view from Palos Verdes to the Bay of Naples.”
And as the owner of the 16,000 acres that virtually made up the Peninsula, which he purchased in 1913, the senior Vanderlip set out to gradually create an Italian coastline.
He succeeded in putting up a series of cottages and guest houses that became the Villa Narcissa estate in Portuguese Bend.
But other estates got no further than gatehouses and outbuildings that still stand in Portuguese Bend, and the grand centerpiece of the Vanderlip dream--the Villa Palos Verdes, patterned after a 16th-Century villa of Pope Julius III--never materialized at all.
Or did it?
In the lobby of the Torrance Marriott Hotel, the villa is displayed in all its Renaissance grandeur: the ornate two-story residence with a tile roof and oval courtyard, stairs rising to a columned entrance from symmetrical formal gardens. Behind the building are woods and water cascading from a hilltop fountain.
Nearby in a second glass-domed wooden case is another Vanderlip dream, the Villa Nari artisan village. Narrow streets that wind up a hillside are lined with tile-roofed brown stucco buildings, some with arcades, galleries and towers. There are large churches and, along the seacoast below, a small lagoon for boats. Vanderlip’s intention was that a variety of craftsmen would live and maintain workshops in the Italian-style village that would have been situated at Point Vicente.
A little imagination brings them to life. Vanderlip says that 60 years has taken nothing from the beauty of his father’s concept: “I’d like to see them built today.”
After years as heirlooms in the Vanderlip’s primary home in New York state--and nearly a decade in storage in an old missile bunker at the Rancho Palos Verdes Civic Center--the restored models are being made available by the Rancho de los Palos Verdes Historical Society, which hopes that businesses with public display areas will want to show them. They will be at the Marriott for two months.
The models, made of painted plaster with trees of natural materials, were crafted in France in 1925 by Jacques Greber, a landscape architect.
Vanderlip, who grew up in a Hudson River home called Beechwood 30 miles north of New York City, remembers showing the models to school friends. When Beechwood was being sold in the late 1970s, the historical society learned of the models, and Ken Dyda, a former president of the society, advanced $2,600 to ship them by van to California after the family donated them to the group.
Although covered with the dust of the decades, the models were in excellent condition. Restorer Joe Cocke, a Peninsula resident, cleaned and refurbished them, charging only for materials.
Dyda, a former Rancho Palos Verdes city councilman and mayor, said it took several years for the society to raise the $9,500 needed for the wood and glass cases, as well as $2,500 for tape narration systems that are going to be installed in each model to tell their stories.
Meanwhile, the models were kept in storage.
The fate of the two romantic and ambitious Vanderlip projects was sealed by what John Vanderlip likes to call “the unpleasantness of 1929” and the lingering Great Depression of the 1930s.
He said that his father--a banker who had been assistant secretary of the treasury in the McKinley Administration--ordered his office to sell stock before the 1928 crash. “But they couldn’t believe anything was happening, so they didn’t,” he said.
How much did the family lose? “We used to have 26 servants and it went down to three. That was quite a setback,” Vanderlip said.
Real estate holdings, including the Peninsula property, were retained, but the grand dreams were shattered. Frank Vanderlip Sr. died in 1937.
The real Villa Palos Verdes was to have had 27-foot ceilings on the ground floor and 20-foot ceilings on the second. For earthquake and landslide protection, it was going to be built on a single steel-reinforced concrete slab to allow it to move as a unit, according to the historical society.
The artisan village would have been on the bluff above Point Vicente, at Point Vicente Park and the Rancho Palos Verdes Civic Center. John Vanderlip said the village may have been inspired by Meredith Watts, a Palos Verdes Estates furniture maker who in the 1920s crafted the furniture for the Malaga Cove Library.
Dyda said that the village buildings modeled after churches would in reality have been theaters, commercial buildings--and a city hall.
“The Rancho Palos Verdes City Hall is on that spot today,” he said.
