Garbutt’s Legacy Lives on in Landmarks

His name may not be familiar, but his monuments--from the Riviera Country Club to the Los Angeles Athletic Club--stand as reminders of an optimistic era.

Frank A. Garbutt’s building projects still have high profile, but none is higher, literally, than his house on a Silver Lake hilltop, visible from miles away.

Like a citadel, it was intended to last forever, built of concrete in the 1920s against earthquakes, floods and fire. The 35-acre site overlooking the reservoir was to shelter a Garbutt family dynasty.

On “Hathaway Hill”--named for Charles F. Hathaway, shipbuilder, real estate developer and Garbutt’s son-in-law--high above the reservoir’s reflection, Garbutt built three houses and other buildings.

*

All that remains of the estate, bounded by Duane and Effie streets and Silverlake and Glendale boulevards, is the main house, a three-story, 20-room mansion of marble floors, concrete roof and walls, steel-reinforced doors and no fireplaces--Garbutt had a terror of fire. It is a landmark of the pre-Depression opulence that defined Garbutt’s life as an industrialist, movie pioneer, writer and inventor.

When he wasn’t racing the car he designed around Agriculture Park (now the site of the Los Angeles Coliseum) with his buddy “speed king” Barney Oldfield, he was helping to create the film studio Famous Players-Lasky, Union Oil Co. and the Automobile Club of Southern California.

In his spare time, he wrote of his favorite hobbies: boxing and yachting. His good friend Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, ran his offerings as a regular column in the paper.

*

The only child of a Harvard graduate and a staunch organizer of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Garbutt came to Los Angeles from his hometown of Mason City, Ill., as a teenager with his parents in the mid-1880s. He attended Stanford University for less than a year, read law books and earned a law degree, but never practiced law.

In 1888 he invented oil drilling tools that he used to dig his own wells in Los Angeles. With the royalties from the tools and a few bubbling wells, he would be able to support his future family, for that same year he married 21-year-old Emilie Edouart.

While his wells kept pumping, he ran a ferry business from San Pedro to Terminal Island with his partner, Matt Walsh. They later launched a boat-building business.

In 1909, at the dawn of the age of aviation, Garbutt helped his friend Glenn L. Martin, a professional “birdman,” finance one of the country’s first airplane factories. It later became Martin-Marietta.

And Garbutt revived the Los Angeles Athletic Club, which had folded several years before.

In 1910, Garbutt and a group of influential businessmen bought a parcel of land on 7th Street. On it they built the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the first building in the West to boast a swimming pool on an upper floor.

It was part of Garbutt’s nature that he avoided the limelight; he was happy as No. 2 and served as vice president of the Athletic Club, Union Oil, Paramount, the Auto Club and other endeavors.

After World War I, Garbutt decided to build a club for returning servicemen. The result was the Riviera Country Club, which opened in 1927, a 168-acre golf and tennis resort in Pacific Palisades. Despite its original purpose as a haven for ex-servicemen, it soon became a favorite haunt for such film stars as Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Errol Flynn, and was the site for the 1932 Olympic equestrian events.

In his spare time, Garbutt spent many hours on his Silver Lake knoll, experimenting with new inventions. At his compound, he employed an engineer, chemist and draftsman and built race cars, invented a soapless detergent and tried to outdo his cross-town rival Wrigley to make a better chewing gum.

Garbutt’s three children and their families lived on the estate after his death in 1947. His children sold the property in 1960 to a corporation that rented the houses. In 1978, all but Garbutt’s mansion were torn down.

In 1982, almost 100 homes went up on the property, like a village at the foot of the castle on North Coronado Street.

*

Former Times archivist Carolyn Strickler wrote to say that the Braly Block, built in 1904 at the southeast corner of Spring and 4th streets, was the city’s first “true high-rise,” not the Pacific Electric Building, as was stated in a recent story about Cole’s P.E. Buffet.