ARCHITECTURE : Mansion Still Speaks Volumes : The 5,000-square-foot Islamic-inspired home of an important Glendale settler is now a city library.
Nestled amid the grassy lawns and mountains of Brand Park is an unusual structure: a huge Islamic-inspired edifice, complete with minarets, bulbous domes and repetitive horseshoe arches. It is the Brand Library, housing the Glendale public library system’s extensive art and music collection.
It was once “El Miradero,” the Xanadulike mansion of Glendale’s most important settler, Leslie Carlton Brand, who developed the city’s water company, light and power company, telephone company, First National Bank and brought the interurban railway system to town.
In 1893, Brand attended the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and was dazzled by the East Indian Pavilion, a Saracenic-style edifice that exuded foreign mystery and exoticism. The style combined Moorish, Spanish and Indian elements in a palatial structure. Smitten, Brand hired his brother-in-law, architect Nathaniel Dryden, to erect a similar building on Brand’s 1,000-acre tract in Glendale. He sent Dryden and an assistant to India to study the Saracenic style in greater detail before breaking ground.
Brand’s home was completed in 1904 at a then-exorbitant sum of $60,000. He called it El Miradero: “high place with an extensive view.”
Glendale residents later unofficially retitled the 5,000-square-foot mansion “Brand’s Castle”; for them, the Pleasure Palace was beyond compare.
El Miradero’s grounds featured an aerodrome for Brand’s small fleet of surplus planes from World War I, a clubhouse, tennis courts, swimming pool, pergola, stables, dog kennels, dog graveyard, long palm-lined entrance, orange groves, goldfish ponds, a lake and, high above the hillside, a family cemetery, where five generations of Brands are buried.
Brand, a flamboyant entertainer and adventurer, staged “fly-in” parties at his mansion, inviting silent-screen starlets and wealthy contemporaries to arrive by two-seater plane on the grounds. He frequently catered dinners for 300, and loved to gallop horses across his property and race his new National automobile, nicknamed “Tioga Wolf,” up and down the unpaved streets of developing Glendale.
Brand was also a pioneer aviator who enjoyed flying his 1919 Lincoln two-seater, which he called the “Knock-About,” over the flatlands of Los Angeles, often landing at his cabin hideaway at Mono Lake when he sought seclusion.
Before Brand died in 1925, he deeded his mansion and adjoining 488 acres to the city of Glendale, provided that they be used as a park and library after the death of his wife, Mary Louise. She died in 1945 at age 74.
At the entrance to Brand Park is the first evidence of Brand’s influence: a simple spanning arch in El Miradero’s Islamic style. The mansion itself, though clearly Eastern in exterior design, once featured ornate Victorian decoration within. Elaborate woodwork, frescoed ceilings, inlaid tile, hand-carved moldings and tasteful, though sumptuous Victorian furniture filled its expansive interiors.
The reception hall once contained an elaborate wood fireplace displaying the Brands’ coat of arms. The hall has been converted into the library’s circulation area, and its fireplace’s wooden molding now overlooks a collection of books in the checkout area. Oil portraits of Brand and his wife hang beside the fireplace’s still-remaining overhang.
To the right of the hall is the drawing room, whose entrance is marked by two hand-carved wooden Corinthian columns. The room features a second small fireplace with delicate ceramic tiling. Spiral stairs lead to El Miradero’s second-story master bedroom, inside an Eastern-style tower added by Brand years after the house’s completion. At the time, Southern California residents were taxed in the city where they slept. Though El Miradero was in Glendale, Brand’s new sleeping tower was actually in Los Angeles County, which just happened to levy lower taxes.
In 1969, Glendale architects Raymond Jones and Charles Walton created a 21,000-square-foot Modern-style addition to the Brand Library, which subtly interfaced with the building’s original Islamic-style facade. The newer addition houses an extensive music collection, as well as a gallery, auditorium, sculpture garden area and workroom for its users.
WHERE AND WHEN
Location: The Brand Library, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale.
Hours: 12:30 to 9 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, till 6 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
Price: Free.
Call: (818) 548-2051. To schedule group tours, call in advance.
