Anthony T. Heinsbergen, 74; Restored the Interior Splendor of Landmarks
Anthony T. Heinsbergen, whose Los Angeles firm restored the interiors of the Wiltern Theatre, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and other landmark buildings across the country, many of whose interiors were designed by his father decades earlier, has died. He was 74.
Heinsbergen, a lifelong Los Angeles resident, was found dead of apparently natural causes Jan. 29 at his weekend retreat in Ojai, said his ex-wife, Dawn Heinsbergen. The results of an autopsy are pending.
The career of Tony Heinsbergen was inextricably linked with that of his father, Anthony B. Heinsbergen, who was known as one of the finest muralists in the United States.
“I think he did an excellent job at restoring many of the murals that his father painted or designed,” said Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy. “It was a great testament that the two generations were involved not only with creating these great masterpieces but in restoring them to their glory.”
The elder Heinsbergen was born in Holland. He apprenticed to a Dutch artist and restorer at age 10, emigrated to Los Angeles with his father at 13 in 1907 and immediately went to work for a local decorating firm. By 1918, he had launched A.B. Heinsbergen & Co.
The company, which ultimately employed a crew of 185 decorative painters, was known for its spectacular ceilings and wall decorations, including those for churches, synagogues, hotels, banks, civic buildings and 757 movie theaters around the country.
Early examples of the company’s beautiful and ornate work can be found in the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills city halls, the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco and the U.S. Department of Commerce Building in Washington.
Tony Heinsbergen, who graduated from the School of Architecture at USC, joined his father’s company full time in 1951. He bought the business after his father retired in the mid-1960s and renamed it A.T. Heinsbergen & Co. The elder Heinsbergen died in 1981.
For more than seven decades, the company has operated out of a castle-like building on Beverly Boulevard near La Brea Avenue that Anthony B. Heinsbergen had built in 1927 with used bricks from the old Los Angeles City Hall.
By the mid-1980s, A.T. Heinsbergen & Co. was still taking on new design work -- including banks, a country club and a sorority house at UCLA -- but it also had become heavily involved in restoring the interiors of many venerable buildings across the country.
It was part of a team that refurbished Carnegie Hall in New York City and was involved in the restoration of the Mission Inn in Riverside, the Los Angeles Central Library and the Washington State Capitol Rotunda in Olympia.
Many of the company’s projects involved restoring such work originally designed by Heinsbergen’s father as the ceilings of Los Angeles City Hall, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Wiltern, which some consider the finest example of Art Deco in the country.
“If you want to restore a historic theater, I would never think of going to anyone else,” said David Packard, whose David and Lucile Packard Foundation purchased the run-down Stanford Theatre, a 1925 movie palace in Palo Alto, in 1987.
“We wanted to restore it to the way it was in 1925, and that’s where Tony came in,” Packard, the son of the Hewlett-Packard founder, told The Times.
Heinsbergen’s father had designed the original interior of the theater, whose vivid Assyrian and Greek ornamentation on the walls and ceilings had long since been painted over.
Although the Packards had a 1925 black-and-white photograph showing the auditorium’s painted ceiling and other features, they didn’t know what the original colors had been.
But after going through thousands of old watercolor sketches in his company’s archives, Tony Heinsbergen found three of his father’s original watercolors for the Stanford Theatre and was able to match the original hues in re-creating the intricate, vivid patterns of its interior.
“What we try to do in our theater is re-create the experience people had when they went to the movies in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, of being in a wonderful movie palace, and Tony helped us re-create that experience,” Packard said.
Packard remembered Heinsbergen as being “very old-fashioned and elegant. He was always so well dressed and courteous. He just acted like a person who should spend his life in these elegant interiors.”
For the last 10 years, he lived in the penthouse of his company’s landmark building on Beverly Boulevard. An opera fan who supported the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Heinsbergen also was an avid sailor and classic car collector whose holdings included a 1925 Lincoln Phaeton.
“He appreciated fine things,” said Dawn Heinsbergen, who was married to Heinsbergen for 16 years and continued working as the company’s vice president 10 years after their divorce in the late 1970s.
“He loved the quality of the old cars, he loved wonderful music, he appreciated beauty and design and line, so he was a natural for this,” she said of his life’s work.
She said she and her daughter, Dawn Jr., who has been with the company 15 years, will continue to operate A.T. Heinsbergen & Co.
In addition to his daughter Dawn, Heinsbergen is survived by his other daughter, Elizabeth Freed, and four grandchildren.
The family is planning a celebration of Heinsbergen’s life on April 23 at the company’s building on Beverly Boulevard.
