Some unfinished business

Beautiful and vexing. An expensive piece of unfinished business.

That’s what Frank Lloyd Wright thought of his architectural jewel, Hollyhock House, in 1921 after planting it atop a hill that sits like a 90-foot-high gumdrop stuck to the flat terrain of eastern Hollywood.

And beautiful, vexing, expensive and unfinished are what the house and its surrounding park have proved to be again. During the past two years, a small army of builders, architects, historical preservation experts and city bureaucrats has been striving -- sometimes contentiously -- to revitalize the neglected grounds and stabilize the dilapidated, earthquake-damaged house. That’s twice as long as they expected the work to take. And the cost, $17.1 million, is 20% more than the $14.3 million that project’s overseer, the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, had initially estimated.

The results are stirring to some who love Barnsdall Park and Hollyhock House, but even they feel strongly the sense of incompletion that seems to be the place’s legacy or curse. The park is scheduled to reopen today, and the public can stroll the grounds to see what the first installment of a two-phase renewal project has wrought. An art show opens Wednesday in the gallery the city built near the house in 1971, and art classes will resume in the fall at the Junior Arts Center, added to Barnsdall in 1967.

But there is no guarantee that building inspectors will find Hollyhock House sufficiently safe and accessible to reopen for the guided tours that used to attract 60,000 visitors annually; Melvyn Green, the project’s structural engineer, says the house is stronger now, and he sees no reason why tours can’t resume. As for the second phase of the project -- needed to restore the still cracked and weathered-looking house to vintage condition -- it’s not even on the drawing board yet. Not a cent has been secured to pay for the additional work, which the city has estimated at roughly $20 million or more for Hollyhock and a nearby, Wright-designed guest house.

People who return to the park at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue will be greeted by more than 400 newly planted olive trees. The driveways and walkways are lined by old-fashioned lamps decorated with the geometric rendering of the hollyhock flower that Wright coined as the site’s core motif. At the top, visitors will encounter new gardens and a fresh grove of 107 pine trees -- an approximation of what was planted there by Wright and his two famous assistants, his son, Lloyd, and R.M. Schindler. They will see Hollyhock House, evocative of ancient Mayan architecture, adorned anew with concrete spires and smaller roof decorations that were toppled or damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. And they will find the upper reaches of the formerly all-beige house restored to its original tint, the palest of greens, which Wright intended to match the underside of an olive leaf.

But at least for now, visitors will only be able to peer from the outside at the furniture and the Modernist fireplace frieze that Wright designed for Hollyhock House. The historic outlying building known as Residence A will be strictly off-limits, no longer available for the art classes it had housed since the 1940s.

Before examining the accomplishments and mishaps of the Barnsdall Park project, it’s worth considering the great hopes that went into the creation of Hollyhock House more than 80 years ago -- and how most of them crumbled.

Aline Barnsdall, a petroleum heiress and Chicago theater producer, envisioned Los Angeles as a great city of the future and wanted to cast herself as its cultural benefactress. She bought the 36-acre city block known as Olive Hill and had Wright design an arts complex that included her residence, Hollyhock House, named for her favorite flower. But little got built -- what does exist was accomplished amid monumental haggling over money and disputes between Wright and the contractor.

In her book “Frank Lloyd Wright: Hollyhock House and Olive Hill,” historian Kathryn Smith quotes the pained and grandiloquent letter the great architect wrote to Barnsdall after the house was finished:

“Well -- the building stands....It is yours for what it has cost you. It is mine for what it has cost me. And it is for all mankind

Hollyhock House might have been a treasure for all mankind, but it was nothing but a burden to Barnsdall. She couldn’t stand living under its leaky roof. A small woman, she complained that she couldn’t even budge its concrete front door by herself. She soon moved out, and in 1927 she deeded the house and part of the surrounding acreage to the city for use as an arts-oriented park.

Over the years, the landscaping deteriorated, the pines died and the olive trees were uprooted. A hospital, a shopping center and apartments were built on chunks of the Barnsdall land, walling off the park on all but the Hollywood Boulevard side.

“It became something less than lovable and less than visible in the community,” said Peter Walker, the Berkeley landscape architect who oversaw plans for the park’s revitalization. “Our objective was to make it visible.”

Delays and unforeseen expenses

CoNSTRUCTION began two years ago. But almost instantly, the project fell behind and began running up unforeseen expenses. Gas, telephone and electrical lines were not where architects’ renderings said they should be, and they turned out to be in terrible shape. Relocating and replacing them cost nearly $1 million.

The historic buildings were in worse shape than expected. The city and its contractor, Mallcraft Inc., became embroiled in a running, time-consuming argument over procedure. The city, citing federal regulations for buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, wanted every step of the process of working on Hollyhock House, its outlying garage and Residence A to be photographed and documented with detailed plans and drawings. The contractor bridled at what it saw as nit-picking exactitude. “Unfortunately, due to the complexities of this project, common sense does not apply,” Mallcraft’s project manager complained in a letter to city officials. As delays stretched out, the meter kept running for consultants the city had hired to oversee construction and the historical preservation process, further jacking up costs.

The Barnsdall Park project already has generated a lawsuit over the utility-line snafu, with landscape architect Walker and two engineering firms arguing over who is to blame. The city is expected to seek damages as well over the utilities, according to the case file in Los Angeles Superior Court. Memos in government files foresee more possible litigation to come: the prospect of Mallcraft taking the city to court for more than $1 million, and of the city invoking a $1,750-a-day late fee against Mallcraft.

The park’s constituents -- lovers of Wright’s architecture and the hilltop’s alluring vistas, and artists who relish working in Barnsdall’s historic setting -- couldn’t disguise their outrage at a community meeting in February, when they first learned that costs had ballooned, that Hollyhock House might not reopen, and that there was no money left for a hugely expensive Phase 2.

Some perceptions have mellowed since then as the project’s overseers have better detailed the problems they ran into on Olive Hill, and the work that was accomplished.

“They didn’t explain it well, so people were left to assume the worst,” said Sharon Delugach, district director for state Sen. Jackie Goldberg. “Things are not as dire and dreadful as they had seemed.”

“I think a dispassionate observer would say this was not the world’s greatest construction project, but it’s not terrible,” said Glen Dake, an aide to City Councilman Eric Garcetti. “I think we got value for our construction dollar.”

But Nyla Arslanian, president of the Hollywood Arts Council, thinks that for the money and time poured into Phase 1, the city should have gotten more.

“We were so pleased that at last [the park] was going to be restored. Now, years and millions of dollars later, they don’t know how much it is going to cost to finish the project, and they don’t know where the money is going to come from. I just find that horrific.”

City officials and Barnsdall Park constituents agree that with government budgets severely strained, it will take private donations as well as public money to finish the job of making Hollyhock House shine again.

Bill Lukehart, superintendent of planning and construction for Los Angeles parks, thinks the reopened Barnsdall Park will make its own sales pitch to prospective donors.

“It’s been brought up to a grandeur that the site deserves. You stand up there and look across the landscape of Hollywood and L.A. and you say, ‘Wow, this is an important place.’ ”

One recent afternoon, the magic of the place was working on Scott Crawford and Paul Gamberg, who figure to play important parts in the drive to finish the renewal of Olive Hill.

Crawford, who heads Friends of Hollyhock House, and Gamberg, president of the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, have had their share of beefs with the city. They can detail at length their concerns about the park’s unwieldy system of governance, which requires three city departments with three different agendas to cooperate in its operations and maintenance. Now that the city has pumped millions into Barnsdall, they worry it won’t secure its investment by maintaining the park well, or will defeat the park’s purpose by shortchanging art-instruction programs.

But as the men stood under the new pines and peered through new plantings at the newly painted top of Hollyhock House, enchantment took hold.

The sight made Crawford tap his heart with joy. Gamberg, who can be a prickly critic of the city’s park policies, melted and started extolling everything from the house in front of him to the storm drains underfoot.

“This is gorgeous. This is impressive,” he said. “There’s still so much work to be done. But the cup is definitely half full instead of half empty.”