Argument Swirls Around House That Junk Built

For a piece of junk, this place is pretty darn artistic. For art, well, it looks an awful lot like junk.

And there you have it: the paradox of Nitt Witt Ridge.

That’s the name of this tottering, rambling, oddly exuberant mock castle carved into a sharp rock cliff high above the antique stores of Cambria’s West Village.

Local character Art Beal, known to have wandered town in his bathrobe regaling strangers with salty stories, built the place over half a century from salvaged odds and ends: toilet seats used as picture frames, abalone shells crafted into pillars, light bulbs and car bumpers and beer cans and television sets sunk into concrete walls. He even threw in the kitchen sink--two sinks and a bathtub, actually, recycled as garden planters.

When Beal died five years ago, he left behind his creation--and a furious debate on what to do with it.

Is it art or junk? Glory or eyesore? Does it deserve preservation--it’s crumbling horribly--or should it be bulldozed at once?

With fans of Nitt Witt Ridge launching one last attempt to raise money to save it, the dispute has rumbled ever louder in recent weeks. Adding to the controversy is the undeniable fact that the folks most ardent about preserving Nitt Witt Ridge don’t live within 30 miles of it.

As Cambria real estate agent David Craig said: “Folk art is one of those things best appreciated by people who don’t live near it.”

Preservationists in Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo rave about Nitt Witt Ridge’s whimsy and wit. They marvel at the intellectual and physical energy it must have taken for Beal to construct the castle on his own.

Neighbors, on the other hand, tend to equate Nitt Witt Ridge with rats and vandals. The disintegrating home is a firetrap, they warn, and the rotting ceilings are sure to crash down on a tourist soon--if the sagging floors don’t give way first.

Scoffing at the state’s 1981 anointment of Nitt Witt as a historical monument, neighbor Casey Beals dubs it “a hysterical monument.” And that’s when she’s feeling charitable. Usually she calls it a menace, a mess, “a disaster waiting to happen.”

Nadine and Bill Powers agree, with feeling. Their back porch overlooks the terraced gardens of Nitt Witt Ridge. Their view is a tangle of overgrown paths, unidentified hunks of rusting metal and the two-seater outhouse Beal built in case he had guests. “It was beautiful at one time,” Nadine Powers said. “But it’s ludicrous to try to preserve something that’s continually crumbling.”

Even Nitt Witt Ridge’s biggest fans concede that they won’t be able to save the entire structure. Beal stuck his castle together using cement made with beach sand, which is not the most stable of building materials. “The rock work, the walls, the arches are all literally melting,” said San Luis Obispo Supervisor Bud Laurent, whose district includes Cambria.

Walking gingerly through the buckling house, preservationist Steve Rebuck agrees that some of it will have to go. He dreams of saving at least the ground levels, with their abalone-shell arches and inlaid tiles. The rest he would like to convert into a public park, perhaps adorned with exhibits showing photos of Nitt Witt Ridge in its heyday.

The catch, as always, is money.

The Art Beal Foundation, the nonprofit group that owns Nitt Witt Ridge, has only two active members. It’s so hard up that Rebuck, who heads the foundation, had to sell the property’s water rights to raise money for back taxes. Now he hopes to remove the castle from the tax rolls altogether by donating it to the county. Then he would try to raise the cash--he has no notion how much will be needed--to save at least part of Nitt Witt.

Rebuck’s idea has already won support from some key county officials.

“In this era of glass high-rises and cookie-cutter housing tracts, I think it’s important to maintain the spirit of individuality that this place represents,” parks manager Pete Jenny said.

After oohing at the startling assortment of knickknacks embedded in the walls on a recent tour, Laurent had to agree. “This is a special place,” he said. “It deserves preservation.”

Still, both Jenny and Laurent quickly add that the county has no money to maintain the mansion--or to convert the gardens into a public park. If Nitt Witt Ridge is to be saved, they said, a major community effort will be required. And that might be hard to come by.

Although many in Cambria proudly regard Nitt Witt Ridge as an emblem of local color, others agree with the jogger who waved disdainfully at it one recent morning and growled, “Tear it down.”

Even those who think parts of the castle should be rescued are not necessarily big fans of the decor. “It’s just . . . different,” said Bob Penfield, president-elect of Cambria’s historical society. Abandoning his diplomatic rhetoric, he then confessed: “I’m not wild about it.”

Jo Anne Orr, a Los Angeles resident devoted to the place, was even more blunt. “It’s an eyesore,” she acknowledged. “But it sure is an interesting one, isn’t it?”

Beal built Nitt Witt Ridge from material he picked up on his rounds as the Cambria garbage man, from his days as a laborer at nearby Hearst Castle and from treasures (some might say junk) washed up on the beach.

“I had a lot of stuff, but I just didn’t know where to put it all,” Beal told The Times in 1988. “I finally said to myself, ‘Why don’t you use that noggin for something besides a hat rack?’ So I’d pick up something and find a place for it here.”

Friends say Beal loved to play the eccentric, wandering around his property naked (he dubbed himself “Chief Runfast” because when tourists came by, he’d high-tail it inside) and railing at the top of his formidable lungs against the “Johnny-come-latelies” who he thought were wrecking his beloved Cambria. He’d put portraits of people he particularly hated--cowboy actor Tom Mix was a favorite target--in the toilet seat frames.

Over the decades, Beal wedged himself--and his home--firmly into local lore.

“It’s definitely part of Cambria,” local merchant Shelley Woeste said. “There’s not any other place like it on earth.”

To Ann Munro, who owns a miniatures store on Main Street, Nitt Witt is a reminder of Cambria’s quirky pioneer days, before the crowds of antiquers and vacationers gentrified the Central Coast. As an heirloom, she said, it should be restored. “There’s so much about our town that’s changed,” Munro said. “It would be nice to have something that remains the same.”

Beal himself was never obsessed with preserving Nitt Witt Ridge. In fact, he more or less expected it to crumble apart after his death.

He built it for fun, not fame.

And that’s exactly what makes the castle a treasure, said Los Angeles resident Seymour Rosen, who heads a nonprofit group called SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments).

Like Los Angeles’ Watts Towers, with their fanciful mosaics of seashells, glass and pottery, or Simi Valley’s Bottle Village, with its toothbrush trees and bedspring gardens, Nitt Witt Ridge represents the life’s work of an individual “untrained in the arts, but with enough chutzpah to go ahead and do it,” Rosen said.

This kind of folk art should be saved, Rosen said, because it communicates the splendor of imagination far better than a canvas scrawled on by a famous artist with an eye toward posterity.

“Big-city kids are driving 400 miles to see something that was simply a joy to build,” Rosen said. “That’s part of the magic of it.”

Nitt Witt’s neighbors, however, don’t see the appeal.

They are annoyed by tourists parking on their narrow streets to photograph the landmark. They fear vandals might set the place ablaze. They don’t like the way it looks, of course. Above all, they’re worried that someone will get hurt prowling through Nitt Witt’s seductive crannies.

And so Al Rowe, whose house overlooks the junk-art mansion, has no compunction about calling for a bulldozer to knock it all down--the sooner, the better. “It’s a junkyard,” he said. “It’s long past due.”