A Personal Vision of Old California

If there has ever been a place in Los Angeles that captures the spirit of a time and a person it is El Alisal, the home, garden and passion of Charles Fletcher Lummis in Highland Park.

El Alisal in Spanish means the Sycamore, which was the tree that in numbers shaded the three-acre grove at Avenue 43 and Carlota Boulevard, which Lummis selected as the site for his rancho in 1897.

Some of the sycamores still stand there, as does the rambling, stone-clad house, which is now a museum and the headquarters of the Historical Society of Southern California. It is free and open to the public, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesdays through Sundays.

From 1897, when Lummis started building the house out of local stone taken from the adjacent Arroyo Seco, until his death in 1928, the idiosyncratically styled concoction, which was completed in 1910, served as a center of a movement labeled the “arroyo culture.”

The movement was a loosely knit community of artists, naturalists and pseudo intellectuals who tended to live in the area along the Arroyo Seco from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles. There they attempted to put down some cultural and communal roots while seeking to develop an appropriate Southern California style.

Lummis was at the center of the movement. A Harvard-educated journalist, he arrived in Los Angeles by foot in the the booming 1880s to embrace and help define the romantic myth of the Southwest, its native Indians and Spanish settlers and their history, art and architecture.

Lummis actively promoted the myth, wearing the various cloaks of a journalist, author, editor, folklorist, librarian (he was the city’s first), photographer, conservationist, preservationist and ethnologist, producing an estimated 450 books, articles, poems and translations.

As the founder of an organization known as the Landmarks Club, Lummis led an intense battle to save four of the area’s missions and did much to stimulate the area’s historic consciousness. For this and other efforts to raise the appreciation of the architectural and cultural history of a burgeoning Los Angeles, Lummis is considered the father of the local preservation movement.

With Lummis in mind and Sunday marking the beginning of National Preservation Week, it would be an appropriate time to visit El Alisal.

With buttresses of boulders, thick concrete walls, rough-hewn timbers, beams fashioned out of telephone poles, hand-carved doors, a variety of window sizes and shapes, and a fanciful turret, the one- and two-story house has a distinctive hands-on, homemade, rustic quality. Lummis is said to have designed the structure “to last a thousand years.”

A critic in the early part of the century, who took exception to what he termed the “Neo-Mission cult in Southern California,” described the house with its “combination of Mexican, Pueblo Indian, Mission Indian and New England architecture” as an example of the “mystical potpourri, which might be called Neo Mission.”

To me, El Alisal is a delightful, if eccentric, rendition of one person’s vision of Old California--warm and welcoming, expressing the man and his time and place. One cannot ask for much more from the art of architecture.

Through the thick, iron-studded wood front door and inside the house is a rich display of Lummis’ eclectic memorabilia, including some striking photographs he took on his many trips across the Southwest. Also examine the photographic images he tinted onto the living room windows, and check out the copy of the original guest book.

Buried in the wall in the corner of the veranda in the rear of the house are the ashes of Lummis. The inscription on the vault reads:

Charles Fletcher Lummis March 1, 1859, to November 25, 1928

He founded the Southwest Museum

He built this house

He saved four old missions

He studied and recorded Spanish America

“He tried to do his share.” Also on display at El Alisal is a conservation demonstration featuring various plants that grow with a minimum of water.