HomeMy WebLinkAboutHeyd Adobe Architectural History Report
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THE HEYD ADOBE
614 MONTEREY STREET
The 1939 Louis and Lucy Heyd Adobe is the first of only two twentieth-century examples
from San Luis Obispo’s thirteen surviving adobes, ten of which can be documented to the
nineteenth century and one (the mission) to the eighteenth. The Heyd Adobe was built at
the midpoint of the Adobe Revival, during its period of greatest technological advance and
social influence. As an early, innovative, and well publicized structure of Bitudobe—a
material introduced by the American Bitumuls Company in 1936 and employed by the
Works Progress Administration and other public and private entities—the Heyd Adobe is
eligible for the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion C, embodying the
distinctive characteristics of a method of construction, and for San Luis Obispo’s Master
List as one of “the most unique and historic properties in terms of […] architectural or
historical significance [and] rarity.” Its architect, William Scott, is noted for significant
Bitudobe buildings on the Central Coast.
The Heyd Adobe retains its integrity in all seven aspects: location, design, setting, materials,
workmanship, feeling, and association. Its concrete perimeter foundation, concrete capping
beam, and post-1933 masonry reinforcement make it feasible to relocate as defined under
CEQA case law. Relocation within the proposed project would impact some, but not all, of
its integrity of setting and feeling. Relocation nearby would remove the adobe’s integrity of
location but could reintroduce a setting of low-built structures and an appropriate view of
Cerro San Luis.
In contrast, it is unclear why 610 Monterey is on the Contributing List, as it neither
maintains architectural character nor contributes to the historic character of the district.
The EIR does not appear to have assessed either resource.
James Papp, PhD
Historian and Architectural Historian
Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualifications
Historicities, LLC
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CONTENTS
Timeline 2
The Mission, Pueblo, and Adobe Revival Movements 3
Bitudobe 11
The Heyd Adobe 14
TIMELINE
1772 Father Serra founds the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, for two years
comprising ramadas and for a two decades paling, mud, and thatch jacales
1793 The church and convento of the Mission San Luis Obispo are completed of adobe
brick and roof tile in the form familiar to us today
1801–10 Eighty small houses in adobe brick, with tile roofs and windows, are constructed
for (and by) converted Indians northeast of the mission around Chorro
Street. The two ground floor rooms of the Sauer-Adams Adobe and all or part
of the Sauer Adobe—based on location, size, and design—are the probable
remainder of these.
1860 Pierre Dallidet builds the Dallidet Adobe
1864 Edward Vischer’s drawing San Luis Obispo, the Lower (Older) Portion of the Town
appears to show the Murray Adobe
1865 L. Trousset’s panoramic painting of San Luis Obispo shows the Hays-Latimer
Adobe surrounded by the current Italianate veranda
1870 Juan Cappe builds a saloon on the south side of Monterey Street between Chorro
and Morro, the last documented adobe constructed in San Luis Obispo in the
nineteenth century
1874 The San Luis Obispo Sanborn Map, covering the downtown area only, shows 29
adobe buildings, including adobes covered with wood; 50 purely wood
buildings, and 4 brick buildings. The ruins of the Indian houses on the west
side of Chorro Street are also noted. Of the adobe buildings, only the Mission,
the Sauer-Adams Adobe, and the Sauer Adobe remain today.
1884 Helen Hunt Jackson publishes Ramona, which
starts a wave of Mission Era nostalgia. Four
years later, San Luis Obispo’s Ramona Hotel,
advertised as being “as beautiful as the
heroine after whom it is named,” is built—in
Tudor Revival style outside and Aesthetic
style inside.
1886 The Sanborn map documents the Murray Adobe
and Mancilla-Freitas Adobe
1891 The Sanborn map documents the Rosa Butron
Adobe
Ramona, 1916 edition, Little, Brown, Boston
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1893 The Chicago World’s Fair’s California Building, designed by A. Page Brown and A.
C. Schweinfurth, is the first Mission Revival structure, an amalgam of Santa
Barbara and San Carlos Borromeo
1894 The Hacienda del Oso, designed by A. C. Schweinfurth for William Randolph
Hearst in Suñol (now Pleasanton) is probably the first Pueblo Revival
structure
1895 An article on the Adobe Revival in Colorado Springs is published in newspapers
across America
The Landmarks Club, now the California Landmark Foundation, is founded in
Los Angeles
1924 Invention of bitumen emulsion
1936 Invention of Bitudobe
1939 Louis Heyd, Jr. commissions the Heyd Adobe from architect and builder William
Scott. The bricks are manufactured on site from the site’s dirt.
1939–40 A 4,400-square foot Bitudobe hilltop courtyard ranch house designed by William
Scott is built in Santa Barbara for Dr. Horace F. Pierce, a pioneer of avocado
cultivation and marketing
1941 Invention of the lay down machine multiplies by a factor of ten the adobe bricks
that a team can manufacture in a day. Lay down machines and Bitudobe
yards in San Diego create an industry there of Bitudobe design and
construction that persists for half a century and comprises housing
developments, commercial buildings, apartment complexes, and houses
1946 A booklet published by the American Bitumuls Company features the William
Scott’s Pierce Adobe. The contemporary press discusses Bitudobe as a
solution for the postwar shortage of materials and skilled construction
workers.
1974 Construction of San Luis Obispo’s second stabilized adobe building, the Nelson,
Nelson and Garris Commercial Building at 605 Santa Rosa Street at the
corner of Walnut Street
THE MISSION, PUEBLO, AND ADOBE REVIVAL MOVEMENTS
The Adobe Revival coincided with the Mission Revival and Pueblo Revival. While the latter
two are stylistic movements that have most often used stucco, concrete, brick, stone, and
wood to achieve their effect, the Adobe Revival is based on a building material and its
historic, environmental, and aesthetic context, including the
• craft of manufacturing and assembling it
• ability of nonprofessionals to build their own structure
• economy and environmental friendliness of building from an autochthonous material and
benefiting from ambient solar heating
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• appearance of authenticity
• sensual effect, such as visual irregularity, aural soundproofing, and tactile warmth
As such, the Adobe Revival is an offshoot of the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts
movement, integrating traditional building methods into modern life and attempting to
alter modern life as a result.
Birth of the Mission Revival In the early 1880s, most of California’s missions were in
ruinous condition. Many of its residential adobes had either fallen into decay or—like the
Hays-Latimer Adobe on Monterey Street, the Sauer-Adams Adobe on Chorro, and the
convento of the Mission San Luis Obispo—been covered with wood siding to protect their
structure and easternize their appearance.
Then in 1884 Helen Hunt Jackson published Ramona, a novel intended to draw national
attention to the plight of California’s Indians, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had drawn attention to
the plight of the South’s slaves. Instead, Ramona inspired a wave of nostalgia tourism for
the Mission Era, and California would come to be regarded as “the scene of the last stand in
the century-long western retreat of romance” (Irving F. Morrow, “The Restoration of the
California Missions,” The Architect and Engineer, Jan. 1920).
San Luis Obispo’s vast and luxurious Hotel Ramona, built in 1888, was an explicit part of
this reaction. The hotel was designed, however, in English styles being popularized by
Oscar Wilde and Norman Shaw. Visitors disappointed with the ruinous missions, or San
Luis Obispo’s tidy wood-covered one, would have to wait for restoration and revival.
California Building, Chicago World’s Fair, A.
Page Brown and A. C. Schweinfurth, 1893
This began in 1893 with the California Building at the Chicago World’s Fair. The fair
encouraged the states to show off their regional architecture, and the contest to design
California’s pavilion specified it had to look like a mission. The commission was won by San
Francisco architects A. Page Brown and Albert Cicero Schweinfurth. Hence the first Mission
Revival building was a temporary structure in the Midwest
Birth of the Pueblo Revival The following year, A. C. Schweinfurth designed a hunting
lodge, the Hacienda del Oso, for the young William Randolph Hearst at Suñol in Alameda
County (The American Architect and Building News, 2 May 1896). This appears to have been
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the first building designed in the Pueblo Revival style, taking its inspiration from the more
angular architecture of New Mexico.
Soon after its completion, Phoebe Apperson Hearst returned from Washington, DC; evicted
her son; renamed the house the Hacienda del Pozo de Verona; and hired Julia Morgan—
once she had finished her architectural training at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris—to
retain the overall design but soften and articulate the details, while transforming the façade
into something more akin to a French chateau, with flanking towers connected by arcades.
Hacienda del Oso, A. C. Schweinfurth, 1894. From the American Architect and Building News
Reimagined as the Hacienda del Pozo de Verona by Julia Morgan, early twentieth century.
Courtesy of Cal Poly Special Collections and Archives.
Influence of the Hearsts Under Phoebe Hearst’s patronage, the Hacienda became the
major private cultural and diplomatic hub in the Western United States, hosting concerts,
conferences, and delegates of the many nations participating in the San Francisco’s
Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, whose California Building—twenty-two
years after the Chicago World’s Fair—once again stood out among many international
styles by flaunting monumental Mission Revival.
As soon as Phoebe Hearst died (1919 in the Spanish Flu epidemic), W. R. Hearst engaged
Julia Morgan to work on what would become Hearst Castle, for which they considered
Mission Revival but rejected it as too plain. Spanish and Italian Renaissance styles were
adopted instead. Morgan did, however, design a number of other buildings for W. R. Hearst
in the Mission Revival style, including the Los Angeles Examiner Building (1915), a
warehouse (1927) and other ranch buildings at San Simeon, and the Milpitas Ranch House
at Jolon (1930, now a military hotel at Fort Hunter Liggett). Phoebe Hearst had donated to
the missions (including a historic textile to the Mission San Luis Obispo), and W. R. Hearst,
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whose aesthetic interests were deeply influenced by his mother, was to become a major
driver in the California missions’ restoration, a tradition the Hearst family continues today.
Growth of the Mission and Pueblo Revivals Mission Revival and Pueblo Revival
buildings spread throughout the United States, though the styles were especially influential
and persistent in the Southwest. From 1905 the University of New Mexico’s president
battled with the university’s regents to adopt Pueblo rather than Mission Revival for
university buildings, constructing four in the Pueblo style but being dismissed in 1909
(“Richard Amero, History of the Balboa Park Club/New Mexico Building in Balboa Park,”
San Diego History Center, sandiegohistory.org). In 1908 Isaac Hamilton Rapp, at his client’s
urging, designed the Colorado Supply Company Building in Morley, Colorado after the
churches of San Estevan at Acoma and San Buenaventura at Cochiti. Rapp and Rapp was
recruited to design, in Pueblo Revival, the building for the new State of New Mexico at the
1915–16 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. The firm again used San Estevan and
San Buenventura as models. The New Mexico Building created a stir, being praised by
former president Theodore Roosevelt, and Rapp and Rapp was asked to recreate the design
for the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico (now the New Mexico Museum of Art) in
Santa Fe (1917).
Irving Gill, La Jolla Woman’s Club, 1913. HABS photograph 1971.
San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, unlike its larger rival in San Francisco, planned
to have a unified architectural style and settled on Mission Revival “as typical of Southern
California and emblematic of the entire Southwest,” but it also anticipated other state and
national exhibitors contributing “cliff dwellings of Arizona,” “a pueblo village from New
Mexico,” and “an Aztec village, the gift of Mexico” ([Director-General] D. C. Collier, “Some
Suggestions for the Exposition Building Committee,” San Diego Union, 8 Aug. 1910, p. 6).
Irving Gill, whose elegant and austere concrete slab buildings were the first move of the
Mission Revival into Modernism, was expected to be appointed supervisory architect, but
the Boston-based Bertram Goodhue connived to snatch the prize. With Carleton Winslow,
Sr from Goodhue’s New York office then replacing Gill as on-site assistant architect, they
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introduced the Spanish Colonial Revival to the United States, designing the exposition’s
cathedral-towered California Building in the Churrigueresque style of the Spanish and
Mexican Baroque. This was wholly ahistorical for California, but its drama undoubtedly led
to a pair of cathedral towers in the Spanish Plateresque style being adopted for the Casa
Grande of Hearst Castle in 1922.
The casual observer may have had trouble distinguishing the stucco and tile productions of
the Mission, Pueblo, Spanish, Spanish Colonial, Moorish, Mediterranean, Italian
Renaissance, and Lombard styles—and their amalgams, bastardizations, and
debasements—all booming in popularity during the 1920s as architecture became
advertisement. When the Fremont Theater, a Streamline Moderne cinema employing
exclusively Ancient Greek decorative motifs, began construction in San Luis Obispo, the
Telegram-Tribune stated, under the architect’s drawing of the building, that it “will be of
semi-mission style architecture” (5 Aug. 1941, p. 3).
Gill died in relative obscurity and poverty in 1936, but the spirit of his stripped down
Mission and Pueblo grew, giving subtle historic reference to bungalows and apartments
that might otherwise have been denatured Bauhaus blocks. At the opposite pole, Mission
Revival was adopted by companies as diverse as the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe
Railroads (for their stations), the short-lived Milestone Interstate Corporation (which built
the world’s first motel in San Luis Obispo, the Motel Inn), and the fast food chain Taco Bell
to market nostalgia through commercial structures. Despite trivialization, both Mission and
Pueblo have produced significant architectural monuments and continue popular today.
Persistence of Adobe in the Late-Nineteenth-Century West New adobe
construction continued in rural areas, small towns, and some cities in Utah, Arizona, New
Mexico, and California into the 1890s, eliciting little or no sense of oddity or novelty. But in
San Luis Obispo, close to a port and later supplied by rail, the writing was on the wall. The
1874 Sanborn map of downtown San Luis Obispo shows 29 adobe buildings, 50 wood
buildings, and only 4 brick ones. By the 1886 map, the same downtown area shows two
thirds of these adobes gone, with wood and a dozen new brick replacements.
Softwood construction lumber was being imported from Northern California, which
outmoded autochthonous adobe roofed with pine beams from Cambria. Schwartz, Harford,
and Co. advertised its lumber yard at the People’s Wharf, San Luis Obispo Landing (i.e.,
Avila Beach) in the first issue of the Tribune in 1869. James Cass began advertising a
Cayucos lumber yard in February 1871 and C. S. Williams & Co. a Morro Bay yard in
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December 1871, both supplied by exclusive ships from the north. In June 1872, Schwartz,
Harford began to advertise a softwood lumberyard in San Luis Obispo. Once the Pacific
Coast Railway—from the landing to San Luis Obispo—was finished in 1876, the town’s
lumber-built residential districts boomed.
The last documented adobes built in San Luis Obispo in the nineteenth century were a
saloon and store, one and two stories, on stone and mortar foundations, on the south side
of Monterey Street between Chorro and Morro. These were constructed for the
saloonkeeper “Don” Juan Cappe by carpenter Michael Henderson (“Town Improvements,”
Tribune, 3 Sep. 1870, p. 2; “Enterprising,” 24 Sep. 1870, p. 2). The Tribune described the
saloon as “an edifice which beats the Snow Palace of the Russian Emperor and the Marble
Halls of New York all hollow” and reported its cost at $8,000 (“Enterprising”). The Tribune
attributed the choice of material to Cappe’s “patria” (he was born in Mexico, according to
the 1870 U.S. Census) and to his being “bent on showing the newcomers that the age of
adobe building is not over” (ibid.). But in San Luis Obispo—for the time being—it was.
Birth of the Adobe Revival An unsigned column with one illustration—alternately
headlined “Adobe House Coming In: Colorado Springs Setting the Fashion for the
Remainder of America” and “Again in Use: Adobe Houses Are Once More Being Built in the
West”— ran in January and February 1895 in at least fourteen newspapers nationwide.
They included, from west to east, South Dakota’s Madison Daily Leader; Nebraska’s Lincoln
Journal Star; Kansas’s, Hutchinson News, Atchison Daily Globe, and Topeka State Journal;
Michigan’s Muskegon Daily Chronicle; Alabama’s Vernon Courier; Georgia’s Columbus Daily
Enquirer-Sun; Pennsylvania’s Middleburgh Post, Harrisburg Telegraph, York Daily, and
Freeland Tribune; New Jersey’s Elizabeth Daily Journal; and Connecticut’s Waterbury
Evening Democrat.
The column appeared where—with the
exception of basic farm buildings in some
sections of South Dakota, Nebraska, and
Kansas—there was no tradition of adobe.
The column did not appear in any of the 28
papers in the California Digital Newspaper
Collection that were being published at
that time.
The article argued that the first American houses were of adobe and that “adobe houses
now promise to become quite a fad in the West,” tracing that fad to Colorado Springs,
where General William Jackson Palmer “set the adobe house fashion … several years ago,”
with a score of adobes having been built in the town since then. “We seem to be at last on
the trail of a genuine national school of architecture.” However, “half breed Mexicans have
been imported to make the adobes,” and they “closely guard the secret.”
Palmer, a railroad baron who laid out Colorado Springs as a designed community, built his
wood and adobe mansion, Glen Eyrie, in 1871, the same year as the town’s founding (Larry
Ralston, “William Jackson Palmer”). He added to the lumber construction in 1881–82,
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including a tower, and in the early 1900s he rebuilt Glen Eyrie as a stone castle. It was (and
is) an extravagant and much photographed structure, but in none of the early photographs
is adobe apparent. The article, however, captured the zeitgeist of the new West, a search for
the Old West’s authenticity, which was to intersect with Mission Era references in the
California Bungalow by Greene and Greene (Arturo Bandini House, Pasadena, 1903),
Theodore Eisen (Charles Lummis House [El Alisal], Los Angeles, 1895–1910), and Irving
Gill. The year 1895 also saw the founding (by Lummis) of the Landmarks Club in Los
Angeles, now the California Landmark Foundation, which devoted itself to California
preservation, beginning with the missions.
Growth of the Adobe Revival in the Early Twentieth Century University of New
Mexico president William Tight, not satisfied with promoting the Pueblo Revival style on
campus, in 1907–08 guided the adobe construction of the Estufa, a fraternity building in
the form of a kiva at the University of New Mexico. In 1911 the East Coast socialites Jack
and Gertrude Nairn commissioned the Casa del Gavilan, an adobe courtyard ranch house in
the Pueblo Revival style outside Cimarron, New Mexico, for $100,000. According to the
Cimarron News and Cimarron Citizen, it was to “afford all modern conveniences to be
desired,” would be “one of the most picturesque residences in America,” and was to be the
first of a colony of such houses (22 July 1911, p. 1), though these were never built.
In 1913, Santa Barbara’s Morning Press wrote that brothers-in-law Frank Cruz and Carlos
Castillo, “descendants of early Santa Barbara families,” were building adjoining adobes on
Cañon Perdido Street, “the first … to go up in Santa Barbara in more than a quarter of a
century” (“Adobe Bricks Come into Use Again, Houses to Be Built of That Material: First
Effort in City in Many Years to Return to Early Spanish Style,” 9 Oct.).
A 1922 article in the Morning Press touted
the “Romantic Carillo Studios Building,” a
new Monterey style adobe, and added that
the general contractor had won “an
enviable reputation for his buildings of
genuine adobe construction, following the
methods and practices of the Spanish
Fathers,” with two houses currently under
construction and many previous examples
around Santa Barbara (“Carillo Studios
Building to House Variety of Arts, First of
Which Will Open Doors Monday,” 25 June).
Back in New Mexico, John Gaw Meem, the noted Pueblo and Territorial style architect, was
restoring and adding to adobes by the mid 1920s and building new adobes in the late
1920s and into the 1930s, including Cyrus McCormick, Jr.’s trefoil ranch house Pojoaque
(1931), the National Guard Armory at Taos (1932), and the Church of Cristo Rey at Santa Fe
(1939).
Democratization of the Adobe Revival in the Mid Twentieth Century The
availability of the material, its environmental practicality, and its accessibility to non-
experts came to the fore as the Adobe Revival moved into the mid century. A New York
Times article in 1920 led with, “Out in California, where adobe is coming back, women and
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girls have turned builders and are rearing some attractive looking bungalows,” closing with
the observation that the “saving in brick and tiles, the principle items in home construction,
is an important factor in the cost of providing the small home” (“New Adobe Dwellings,” 9
May). In 1933 the Times noted adobe buildings being built in Kansas by farmers and the
Civilian Conservation Corps (“Back to Pioneer Customs,” 18 March; “CCC to Get Adobe
Barracks, 21 Oct.”). The United Press distributed an item from El Segundo, California in
1939 on a program for relief clients to build adobe houses for themselves on county land
(“Adobe Houses Come Back,” New Orleans Item, 9 Jan.).
Do-it-yourself guides included W. E. Groban’s 1941 Adobe Architecture: Its Design and
Construction (Washington, DC: US Forest Service), Paul and Doris Aller’s 1946 Build Your
Own Adobe (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press), Mark R. Harrington’s 1948 How to Build
a California Adobe (Los Angeles: W. Ritchie), Hugh Comstock’s 1948 Post-Adobe
(Monterey), G. F. Middleton’s 1953 Build Your House of Earth (London: Angus and
Robertson), and William Lumpkins’ 1961 La Casa Adobe (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press).
Cover of Post-Adobe, 1948
Plan and drawing from William Lumpkins’
1961 La Casa Adobe
Adobe Research, Preservation, and Reconstruction Contemporary with these were
attention to the recording and (ideally) preservation of decaying adobes. A group of
preservationists, including archaeologists, architects, and artists, triumphed over
progressives in persuading the New Mexico Territorial Legislature in 1909 not to demolish
the Palace of the Governors. The Committee for the Preservation and Restoration of New
Mexico Churches began, in 1922, to adopt a new restoration project each summer. From
1931, four women, two of them members of the Monday Club’s History and Landmarks
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Department, drove around San Luis Obispo County taking photographs of historic (and in
many cases now vanished) adobes. One of them, Rosa Dallidet, stilled lived in the Dallidet
Adobe. Another, Constance Van Harreveld, recorded that her grandfather, William Evans,
had added the wooden skin to the Mission San Luis Obispo’s convent in the mid 1870s.
In 1934 the Historic American Buildings Survey, a make-work program under the National
Park Service, began the systematic documentation of the most prominent adobes in
California, including the Rios-Caledonia and Dana Adobes and the Missions San Luis Obispo
and San Miguel Arcángel in San Luis Obispo County. The removal of the wooden skin and
restoration of the Mission San Luis Obispo to its original appearance also took place in the
1930s, supported by W. R. Hearst and La Fiesta.
In 1936 the New York Times wrote about a weatherproofing compound (vinyl resin in
acetone and toluene) invented by National Park Service scientists to preserve prehistoric
adobe ruins (“Saving Our Old Adobe Ruins,” 21 June). It also noted a UC Berkeley scientist’s
experiment of immersing a Mission San Luis Obispo inner wall adobe brick in a 383-degree
Fahrenheit paraffin bath to reveal “tens of millions of bacteria per gram” (“Bacteria
Awakened from 100-Year Sleep: ‘Tens of Millions Found in an Adobe Brick,” 23 May). By
1952 the Times mocked, “Show a Californian an adobe brick, and the chances are he will be
overcome by a nostalgic impulse to recreate the building from which it came and hang a
plaque thereon for the edification of tourists” (Gregory Hawkins, “Adobe Restorations in
California,” 30 March).
BITUDOBE
A Bitudobe brick with, on the right, a treated and untreated brick exposed to water.
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Technological Advances in the Adobe Revival The inventions in 1936 of Bitudobe
and in 1941 of Hans Sumpft’s lay down machine—the latter allowing adobe bricks to be
manufactured at the rate of thousands rather than hundreds of bricks per day (Buxton et
al)—meant that adobe structures could be presented as a solution to the Depression crisis
of lack of funding for materials and the World War II and postwar crisis of lack of
availability of materials.
Bitudobe, also marketed as Caladobe, is adobe mixed with emulsified asphalt (itself
invented in 1924), which strengthens the bond of the adobe and makes it waterproof. The
manufacturer touted “a quart of oil to each slab” (B. Z. Body, “Along the Creek,” Telegram-
Tribune, 9 May 1939, p. 10). Bitudobe was patented in 1936 by the American Bitumuls
Company of San Francisco and marketed throughout the United States, both as
manufactured bricks and as an emulsion to add to bricks made of autochthonous earth on
site. Sample self-made bricks could be sent to the Bitumuls lab to test for structural
soundness. Since Bitudobe was the only adobe approved by the Federal Housing
Administration for home loans, it made the Adobe Revival accessible to the middle class,
whether they built their own adobe house or purchased one from a builder or developer.
The American Bitumuls Company had ten district offices and plants in the Northeast,
Southeast, Midwest, Northwest, Southwest, and Puerto Rico, but it sold other emulsified
asphalt products as well, and contemporary news coverage and marketing materials
suggest Bitudobe construction was concentrated in regions of the West where adobe
already had a tradition. Some examples:
• Bitudobe was used to build a replica of Niles, California’s Vallejo Adobe for the 1939
Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island (“Bitudobe …,” postcard, Donal L.
Larson Collection on international Expositions and Fairs, Henry Madden Library, California
State University Fresno).
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• The same year, a Bitudobe brick yard opened at Taylor, Nebraska (“Bitudobe,” Omaha
World-Herald, 15 Oct. 1939).
• The next year, the National Youth Administration was building a Bitudobe terminal for
the Big Spring, Texas airport (“Airport Work Is Under Way,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 15
Dec. 1940).
• Bitudobe was used in the late 1930s and early to mid 1940s to coat historic (and
prehistoric) adobe (in one case impregnated with DDT to control insects) (A. Berle
Clemensen, Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Arizona: A Centennial History of the First
Prehistoric Reserve 1892–1992, United States Department of the Interior; Laura Soulliere
Harrison and Beverley Spears, Historic Structure Report, Thunderbird Lodge, Canyon de
Chelly, 1989, p. 68).
• The Civilian Conservation Corps used it for new construction at historic adobe sites
(National Parks Service, Casa Grande Ruins National Monument Arizona, Chemical
Preservatives, nps.gov).
• M&M Company provided the material for construction in Orange County, California in
1955, though the partnership dissolved two years later (Tustin News, 22 Sep. 1955).
• a motel was constructed of Bitudobe in Norman, Oklahoma (“Building with Earth Is Old,
Good Method—But Costly,” San Antonio Express, 19 Mar. 1960)
The San Diego Bitudobe Industry During World War II, the outdoor advertising
company Foster and Kleiser began manufacturing Bitudobe bricks “at military request”
(Foster and Kleiser—The History of Outdoor Advertising,” Aug. 2007,
notablekleisers.blogspot.com). In 1945 its Caladobe Department began production and sale
for residential and commercial use. In 1947 this division was sold to J. E. Dietrich in Fresno.
A critical mass of Bitudobe/Caladobe yards and construction companies opened in San
Diego County. In 1946 Forrest Holly, who was partially blinded by a high school football
injury and briefly attended Cal Poly before completely losing his sight, opened Forrest
Holly Adobe Co. in Ramona, a Bitudobe yard and construction business. He eventually
became the subject of a 1996 CBS biopic, What Love Sees, starring Richard Thomas
(Edmund Rucker, “Blind Man Builds Adobe Business,” San Diego Union, 21 Mar. 1951;
Darrell Beck, “On Memory’s Back Trail: The Holly Family of Ramona,” Ramona Home
Journal, 13 Aug. 2015; imdb.com). One of his employees, Ed Nelson, started his own adobe
construction company in Warner Springs.
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The Adobe Brick Manufacturing Company,
also known as L. R. Green, operated in
Escondido from 1949 till Lawrence Green’s
death in 1971, producing—during the brick
drying season of April through October—as
many as 4,500 bricks a day, enough for one
and a half houses. (Michael Buxton et al.,
Archaeological Manifestations of a
Mechanical Adobe Manufacturing Site Near
Escondido, California, 1947–1975).
In 1949 Green teamed with Charles Paxton’s Adobe Construction Company of La Jolla to
build an adobe development near Lake Hodges, for which they appear to have bought the
Foster and Kleiser plant that fueled Green’s later production, supplying such other adobe
construction specialists as Escondido’s Weir Brothers (“Construction Begins on 100 Adobe
Homes in Rural Tract,” San Diego Union, 1 May 1949). William Lumpkins in “Adobe: Notes
on the Production and Placement of Adobe Brick (Sun-Dried) in Walls for the Building of
Housing” (1977) argued that acquisition of a lay down machine only became cost efficient
in excess of three million bricks or 750 houses.
Weir Brothers, in business for over six decades from 1947, built hundreds of custom adobe
houses of up to 21,000 square feet, as well as adobe developments such as Pala Mesa
Village and Adobe Villas of Escondido. It employed as many as eighty people and in 1964
spun off Larry Weir Adobe, which operated independently for four decades (“Weir
Brothers, Weir Bros., and Larry Weir Adobe,” Modern San Diego, modernsandiego.com).
One of Weir Brothers’ carpenters, Michael Goodbody, took over the old L. R. Green plant in
the 1970s (“Adobe Block Yard—Escondido Chronology and Owners,” 11/2017,
adobehometour.com).
By the late 1990s, adobe began to be seen as a problematic material for San Diego’s high
earthquake risk. Though San Diego’s historic Bitudobe buildings are in high demand, new
construction concentrates on restoration. For example, the University of California, San
Diego chancellor’s residence, a 1952 12,000-square-foot adobe house by William
Lumpkins, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008, retrofitted and
restored in 2012–13, and received the Governor’s Historic Preservation Award in 2015.
THE HEYD ADOBE
Louis Heyd, Sr. and the Heyd Adobe’s Predecessor Building Louis Heyd, Sr., born in
Alsace circa 1848, served in the 19th Infantry in the Indian Wars from 1866 to 1869,
afterwards lived in Los Angeles for five years, and ultimately settled in San Luis Obispo,
where the Tribune printed an item in 1878: “Mr. L. Heyd offers $1,000 to anyone who will
make a better new suit of clothes out of an old one than he does. Another chance for a
fortune” (4 May). The 1880 census listed his profession as tailor, his residence the Knapp
boarding house on South Higuera. An 1880 advertisement in the Tribune for cleaning and
repairing clothes asks for orders to be left at the same address.
15
As early as the 1886 Sanborn map, the lot at 614 Monterey was occupied by a 1- or 1 ½-
story wood-frame building. By 1904 Louis Reiser Heyd, Sr. was advertising it as his place of
business for cleaning and dying suits (26 July 1904), but the shed had been converted to a
cleaning and dying plant by 1891 (Sanborn map). He died there in 1917 (Daily Telegram 10
March 1917). His wife Eliza Falque or Falco died in 1933.
The 600 block of Monterey Street in 1886, showing Louis Heyd, Sr.’s one-story wood dwelling
second from right, the Pollard and Hays Latimer-Adobes in brown, and the Pacheco-Wilson
House at far right where the Carnegie Library is now. Sanborn map.
At left: 1891, the shed now a
dyeing and cleaning shop
At right: the 1926–56
Sanborn map, with the Heyd
Adobe (coded grey) and
later wooden extension (in
yellow) at back
Louis Reiser Heyd, Jr. and Lucy Kiger Heyd Louis Heyd, Jr., usually referred to as L.
R. Heyd, seems to have been a hands-on, experientially-taught practitioner with
technology. He turns up in local newpaper reports as a press-operator for the Tribune who
has been injured getting his hand caught in the press (Daily Telegram 9 Nov. 1911). In
World War I he is rejected from the Marine Corps for being an eighth of an inch under the
height requirement, then accepted after spending a week “taking exercise and practicing
stretching” (18 Oct. 1917). In 1920 he is an engineer at a Union Oil Company pump station
(22 July 1920), in 1923 owns a furniture store in San Luis Obispo (22 Jan. 1923), and in
1925 applies “to run a steam boiler for cleaning automobiles at Milton Righetti’s service
station” in San Luis Obispo (8 Dec. 1925). In 1930 he is back working for Union Oil (23 Oct.
1930). This is the last report of his professional activities in the newspaper until 1946,
when he advertises Heyd’s Miscellaneous Repair Shop at the 614 Monterey address. “If it’s
broken, I’ll fix it. […] Pre-war prices. No overhead” (Telegram-Tribune 2 Nov. 1946).
16
Lucy Kiger Heyd advertised herself as a practical nurse and
was an officer in the Pythian Sisters, a leader in their sewing
club, and also an officer in the Park Past Chiefs. May 21,
1946, finds her appropriately hosting an enchilada luncheon
at her adobe revival house (Telegram)
Building the Heyd Adobe According to a telephone interview (20 July 2018) with
Bonnie Heyd Greenaway, the daughter of L. R. Heyd, Jr. and Lucy Heyd, her father saw
another adobe house being built and “fell in love” with the concept. He demolished the
wood house he had inherited from his father and mother. The bricks were formed on-site
out of the earth, as was the case with previous adobes in the immediate area, from the
Mission to the Rosa Butrón, Hays-Latimer, and Murray, as well as others since demolished,
including the Samuel Pollard Adobe next door and one on the site of the Harmony
Creamery (now Reis Family Mortuary).
Bonnie Heyd Greenaway, eleven at the time, also remembers that there was a quart of oil in
every brick—the added asphalt emulsion. This would add up to 1,250 gallons of oil. Her
father also hoped that the house would largely heat itself because of the adobe’s absorption
of heat during the day. But, because of 16-inch walls at the low end of thickness and
modern standards of comfort, after the first winter he installed central heating.
Above: first announcement of the Heyd
Adobe in the column Along the Creek by
“B. Z. Body,” Telegram-Tribune 9 May 1939
Right: advertisement for the Heyd Adobe’s
open house, Telegram-Tribune, 31 July 1939
17
William Scott It is unclear how L. R.
Heyd, Jr. met William Scott and how they
resolved on the new house becoming the
architect’s most publicized test case.
Possibly he was the architect of the adobe
that had originally caught Heyd’s
imagination. Scott combined traditional
craft and look with modern technology.
Bricks for the load-bearing walls could
have been ordered from a yard, and,
without a lay down machine, it would have
taken a team of four men at least two
weeks to make enough Bitudobe bricks on
site for L. R. Heyd’s house. But make them
on site they did. The Bitumuls Company
recommended a full perimeter concrete
capping beam, but Scott economically and
elegantly used this beam for door and
window lintels as well.
Hand-hewn rafters and wood ceilings
combine with modern touches like the
porthole window and bar-top kitchen and
transitional ideas like the in–dining room
barbeque pit, reminiscent of old-California
braziers. The structural aesthetic combines
Mission Era with Mid-Century Modern. The
projecting front door surround, exterior
crown molding, beveled window insets,
and tapering corner chimney are rustically
but sensitively articulated.
Heyd Adobe: porthole window, rear facade
Newspaper article on the newly built Heyd
Adobe, Telegram-Tribune, 31 July 1939
18
Plank door, projecting adobe surround,
concrete lintel, and exposed porch rafters
Exterior adobe crown molding
Tapering adobe corner chimney
Beveled adobe window inset with concrete
lintel
19
Within the year, Scott was working on a much bigger project: a 4,400-square foot hacienda
for Dr. Horace Pierce, a pioneer in avocado growing and marketing on the Central Coast.
The Pierce Adobe, built on a stunning site overlooking Santa Barbara, was also made from
Bitudobe. It was completed over 1939 and 1940 and provided the initial illustrations
(below) in the Bitumuls Company’s 1946 booklet Bitudobe: Water-Resistant Soil Bricks for
Modern Building, addressing the postwar shortage of materials.
Although the materials for adobe were readily available, without a lay down machine, the
process of making bricks on site was extremely time-consuming. The overwhelming
postwar trend in America was for ever larger, inexpensively built tracts, the infamous “little
houses made of ticky-tacky.”
Yet Scott’s carefully crafted designs for the Heyd and Pierce Adobes, as well as such other
adobes as those at El Caserio on Garden Street in Santa Barbara—including a house and
studio for the photographer J. Walter Collinge (1948)—show that a postwar desire for
traditional craftsmanship in modern materials spanned the classes of business and
professional men like Pierce, artists like Collinge, and workingmen like Heyd. It was
beautiful, ecological, and comfortable and formed a significant trend of resistance against
the mass-produced.
20
The Nelson and Garris Commercial Adobe (Pacific Engineers, 1974), 605 Santa Rosa Street
at Walnut Street, San Luis Obispo, with stabilized adobe made by the Sumpft process
imported from the San Joaquin Valley