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HomeMy WebLinkAbout10/23/2019 Item 2, Papp Wilbanks, Megan From:James Papp <jamesralphpapp@hotmail.com> Sent:Tuesday, To:CityClerk Cc:Corey, Tyler; Cohen, Rachel Subject:Letter to PC on 609 Palm Street Attachments:Papp letter to PC 609 Palm 2019 10 22.pdf Please forward the attached correspondence to the Planning Commissioners. Thanks!! James 1 1 Historicities, LLC Sauer-Adams Adobe 964 Chorro Street San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 22 October 2019 Planning Commission City of San Luis Obispo Dear Planning Commissioners: I’m writing regarding 609 Palm. I was chair of the Cultural Heritage Committee when that committee reviewed the EIR in January 2018 and continued as a member when the committee reviewed the project in September 2019. I note that I’m also a historian and architectural historian to Secretary of the Interior professional qualifications. I would like to make a quick observation of mystification as to why the city—three of the whose five goals are to be car-free, carbon neutral, and support the cultural heart of the city—should propose as a first step tearing down a historic building in the Downtown Historic District to build a 400-stall parking garage. Only one city staff member (bless him, the city manager) has even attempted to explain this to me, and his suggestion that it would allow the city to tear down the Chinatown parking garage and put apartments there left me more mystified than before. My chief concern, however, is the Heyd Adobe. The EIR contains a barely cursory assessment of its significance, a single sentence stating it is the only adobe building of its period in the Downtown Historic District (true) and thus eligible for the Master List for its rarity (true) and representation of the vernacular renewal of adobe architecture (untrue, as it was designed by prominent adobe architect William Scott). I enclose with this letter a twenty-page architectural history report (don’t worry, mostly pictures) more thoroughly assessing its significance as a pioneering structure in Bitudobe, a material that technologically revolutionized the Adobe Revival in the mid twentieth century, thus making the Heyd Adobe eligible for the National Register of Historic Places (and hence automatically the California Register of Historical Resources). I commented in the CHC’s hearing of January 2018 that the EIR failed to consider the feasible alternative (as is required under CEQA) of relocating the Heyd Adobe on site or off site. This is a commonly proposed alternative and recognized as a mitigation not only in California statute (14 CCR § 4852) but in recent EIRs in the city where the city is not the applicant (e.g., San Luis Ranch). What is sauce for the private goose should be sauce for the public gander. But the city did not want to hold itself to the standards it demands of others and declined to offer substantial evidence in response to my comment, as required under CEQA. It insisted on sticking to demolition and HABS, despite Architectural Heritage Association v. County of Monterey, California Court of Appeal, Sixth District, 2004: “Drawing a chalk mark around a dead body is not mitigation.” The Community Development Director, however, following a conversation with a member of the council, asked me to provide a report on the feasibility of relocating the Heyd Adobe. I enclose that also. Eric Brandt, of Brandt House and Building Movers, made a site visit and 2 declared it feasible to move the Heyd Adobe either on or off site, though the latter would require the structure to be cut. Subsequently, the CHC unanimously voted to direct applicant to present alternatives for leaving the Heyd Adobe in place, relocating it on site, or relocating it off site. Subsequent to that, the City Attorney concluded that this action was not in the scope of what the CHC could direct, because the council had already made a finding of overriding considerations based on the (faulty) EIR. (I note that in a finding of overriding considerations there must be substantial evidence that there are not feasible alternatives; it is not a Get Out of Jail Free card.) My recollection is that the City Attorney told me that the CHC’s ruling would be altered to ruling that demolition was incompatible with the Historic Preservation Guidelines, though I do not see that wording here, and the item was not sent back to us to decide again with new instructions. The long and short of it is that the Heyd Adobe is very significant structure (the other structures on site are not eligible even for the Contributing List, in my judgment as a historian and architectural historian, having no “original or attained historic and architectural character”). It would do everlasting discredit to the city and the SLO Rep to insist on demolition of the our rare and most important twentieth-century adobe in order to draw a chalk line around it, much like the demolition of the Murray Adobe in 1972, which Ken Schwartz was still upset about in my last conversation with him before he died. The city’s performance culture should not be set up in opposition to its continually performing architectural culture in a battle to the death; that’s a disgusting situation. We are valued as a community for both cultures. CEQA was not designed to allow a lead agency to claim it’s hostage to an incomplete EIR in preserving the significant built environment. Whether or not the city, in this EIR, is up CEQA Creek without a juridical paddle (as I believe it is), we have not just a legal but moral obligation to find a reasonable and feasible solution for the Heyd Adobe, whose demolition would be—unlike any delay for the parking structure or SLO Rep—irreversible. Yours sincerely, James Papp, PhD Historian & Architectural Historian Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualifications 3 THE HEYD ADOBE 614 MONTEREY STREET The 1939 Louis and Lucy Heyd Adobe is the first of only three twentieth-century examples from San Luis Obispo’s fourteen 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. James Papp, PhD Historian and Architectural Historian Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualifications Historicities, LLC 4 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 5 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 William Scott’s Pierce Adobe. The contemporary press discusses Bitudobe as a solution for the postwar shortage of materials and skilled construction workers. 1967 Construction of San Luis Obispo’s second known Bitudobe building, the Murray and Joan Smith House at 117 Longview Place. The building is designed by Murray Smith, a Cal Poly theater professor, and built by students. 1974 Construction of the city’s third known Bitudobe building, the Nelson, Nelson and Garris Commercial Building at 605 Santa Rosa Street at the corner of Walnut Street. Both the Smith and Nelson Adobes use bricks manufactured in Fresno. 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 6 • economy and environmental friendliness of building from an autochthonous material and benefiting from ambient solar heating • 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 7 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 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 8 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, 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 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 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 9 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 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., 10 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 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.” 11 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, 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, noted Pueblo and Territorial style architect, restored and added to adobes by the mid 1920s and built new adobes from the late 1920s 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- 12 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 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 13 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 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 described 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 wrote about a UC Berkeley scientist’s immersing a Mission San Luis Obispo 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. 14 Technological Advances in the Adobe Revival The inventions in 1936 of Bitudobe and in 1941 of Hans Sumpf’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). 15 • 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. 16 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. 17 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). 18 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 19 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 20 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 21 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. 22 Murray and Joan Smith Adobe (1967), 117 Longview Lane, San Luis Obispo. The dramatic building, with entrance facade stretching the full depth of the corner lot, was designed by Murray Smith, a theater professor at Cal Poly, and built by students. The Nelson and Garris Commercial Adobe (Pacific Engineers, 1974), 605 Santa Rosa Street at Walnut Street, San Luis Obispo, with Bitudobe from the Hans Sumpf yard in Fresno 23 Relocating the 1939 Heyd Adobe Current Site The adobe is at 614 Monterey Street in San Luis Obispo’s Downtown Historic District, one house from Nipomo Street, surrounded on two sides by Lot 14. Above, street view; below, rear view with non-historic stucco addition at left Heyd Adobe ß 24 Construction The historic structure consists of a concrete perimeter foundation topped by a wall of 16x12x4” adobe bricks chiefly in header bond, though there are occasional variations, forming a 16”-thick wall whose thickness is a single brick. At the height of 23–24 bricks (depending on ground elevation) the entire structure has a perimeter concrete bond beam 6” high by 16” deep, which also forms the lintel of all doors and windows (apart from a small porthole window on the back). The wood rafters are presumably spiked or otherwise attached to this beam (as recommended by the Bitumuls Company), an update of traditional adobe construction, where a wood capping beam distributed the weight of the roof beams. Two courses of adobe bricks form a crown molding on the exterior above the bond beam; three courses top the beam on the interior. At least some interior walls are also of adobe, though these appear to be stretcher bond, hence apparently 12” thick. There is one central adobe chimney integrated into an interior wall and one corner adobe chimney integrated into the exterior wall. Delapidation at the base of this latter chimney reveals rebar in the adobe. Since the Heyd Adobe was built after 1933, the adobe is presumably reinforced throughout. Floors are of wood. 25 A later bedroom and garage addition on the northeast corner appears to be frame and stucco and not historically significant for either its material or architecture. The roof throughout is shake shingle, which may include the documented original redwood shakes. Material Bitudobe (bitumen+adobe) is adobe mixed with asphalt emulsion, a material patented in 1936 by the Bitumuls company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California. It was used widely in adobe restorations, public works projects, commercial buildings, apartment complexes, and houses from the late 1930s through the post–World War II period. It was advertised as having a quart of oil in every brick and being the only type of adobe approved for FHA loans. The asphalt emulsion serves both to waterproof and bind the material. Unpainted Bitudobe retaining walls at 614 Monterey are still functioning after eighty years. In San Diego County, where there were at least two Bitudobe manufacturers as well as architects, builders, and developers who specialized in the material, projects were built of Bitudobe into the late 1990s, when concerns were expressed for its earthquake resistance. The bricks in the Heyd Adobe, based on their size, probably weigh about 40 pounds each. There are approximately 4,000 exterior wall bricks in the structure and perhaps another thousand interior wall and chimney bricks, for a weight of about 100 tons, with 1,250 gallons of oil mixed in. For comparison, a loaded semi weighs 40 tons. Dimensions The original Bitudobe portion of the house—the part considered historic for its building method and William Scott architecture—comprises a main block with one full and one partial cross-wing with hipped roofs. By approximate exterior wall measurements, the west cross-wing is 16.5’ wide and 36.5’ deep, extending 13’ in front of and 6’ to the rear of the main block. The main block is 29’ wide and 17.5’ deep. The east partial cross-wing is approximately 14’ wide and 4’ deep, extending from the rear of the main block. The total square footage is approximately 1,150, within a footprint extending 45.5’ wide and 36.5’ deep. There is a rear entrance porch, concrete floored with an adobe base or edging and brick steps: 7.5’ wide and 12.5’ deep. Given that it runs along the rear stucco addition, it may have been built later, though the addition may have subsumed a once larger patio. A front entrance porch of concrete edged with brick is 8’ deep and 19’ wide and covered with a post and beam extension of the roof. Structural Integrity Apart from dilapidation at the base of the southeast chimney and peeling paint toward the top of that chimney, which may indicate water or structural damage, as well as a diagonal crack of several feet on the east front wall of the west cross- wing, there is no visible settling, cracking, or water damage in the building. Historic Integrity The Heyd Adobe currently retains its integrity in all seven aspects of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. The extent to which the addition on the northeast corner detracts from integrity of design is reversible, as the original exterior wall exists within it. Options for Relocating the Heyd Adobe On Site It would, of course, be as possible for the SLO Rep to be configured around the Heyd Adobe as it has been around the site’s trees. The part of the building proposed to displace the adobe consists of offices, workshops, and restrooms that could be extended 26 behind it rather than concentrated on top of it. This would also reduce stress and attendant risk for the oak. The next best thing would be to retain, as much as possible, the scale and content of this part of the historic district and the Heyd Adobe’s integrity of location and setting by the extant Hays-Latimer Adobe and now demolished Samuel Pollard Adobe. Theaters unavoidably present blank, boxy facades, unattractive in themselves and incompatible with a historic residential district. The SLO Rep site plan presents two large open areas of limited utility that are likely to become vacuums in between performances and thus magnets for homeless people. Placing the Heyd Adobe in one of these areas would not only mitigate the environmental impact on the historic district and the adobe itself, it would utilize an underutilized area; potentially provide a buffer for Monterey’s remaining residential section; and, with the adobe reinhabited, provide eyes on the street and much needed downtown housing, perhaps as an artists’ live-work space as previously envisioned for the cultural corridor. Placing the Heyd Adobe on an open area of the SLO Rep project would also present the cheapest relocation cost; allow the adobe to be relocated intact, which a road trip would not; and obviate finding an additional lot. Electrical, plumbing, and communications connections could be installed as part of the larger construction project. Off Site to City Property The Heyd Adobe would fit on the lot of the Rosa Butron Adobe, but its presence there would interfere with the historicity of that building, and, out of sight, it would likely suffer the same neglect as its neighbor. The Heyd Adobe would fit in the History Center parking lot (Lot 9) or next to SLOMA, but these locations would go against the expansion desires of both institutions. It might accommodate the expansion of the History Center, but it’s doubtful the institution could maintain it. The Heyd Adobe would fit in Lot 15 at the corner of Monterey and Broad, where the Downtown Concept Plan envisioned a park and Chumash hut. Siting on Mission Plaza would be politically problematic and historically inappropriate, though no less inappropriate than the current mismatched structures and more useful and potentially lucrative than the pergola. There appear to be no other available and compatible sites within the Downtown Historic District. Off Site to Private Property The city could give the adobe to a private party willing to move it, with conditions of preservation. A site outside the city would require a demolition permit. A site within the city, assuming a willing lot owner could be found, would sacrifice integrity of location and setting and probably of feeling and association. More significantly, off-site relocation would go against the city’s precedent with private developers to pursue relocation of historic buildings on site, as with the Norcross House, 71 Palomar, Bonetti Ranch, Froom Ranch, Dalidio Ranch, and the Pinho House. In each of these cases, the city demanded substantial redesign. By relocating the historic Heyd Adobe within the SLO Rep site, the city has the opportunity to set a good example and not appear hypocritical by flouting the practices we demand of others. 27 Heyd Adobe currently, to the scale of the SLO Rep site plan Heyd Adobe in its current position superimposed on the SLO Rep site plan 28 The Heyd Adobe in front of the black box theater, preserving both trees and hiding a two-story blank wall. The black box could be moved farther toward the rear, as it’s main function in being thrust forward seems to be to break up the façade. The vehicular loading door could be moved to the Nipomo side. The Heyd Adobe positioned at the southwest corner of the project, displacing one tree but anchoring the corridor of the historic district between Monterey and Dana Streets, partially screening the two-story blank wall, and allowing vehicular loading. Again, the black box theater could be shifted toward the rear. 29 The Heyd Adobe at the southeast corner of the project , where it would provide a buffer for the remaining residential neighborhood of Monterey Street, integrate with the Hays-Latimer Adobe, and help to block the looming parking garage from pedestrian view while providing human and historic scale. The SLO Rep could be shifted to the west in the site plan and the large projecting stairwell modified. The Heyd Adobe in line with its current location and the Hays-Latimer Adobe and where the Samuel Pollard Adobe stood till the 1950s. This assumes the theater shifts to the west and the stairwell is modified. In both placements east of the theater there would be an area hidden from street view, though that could be solved with lighting and video surveillance and is true of parking garages anyway, which is why so many people dislike using them. 30 Contractors The sole building mover in the area recommended by architects and developers is Brandt of Santa Maria (brandthouseandbuildingmovers.com; 805-922-0575). I talked by phone to Eric Brandt, the company owner, who confirms they can do the job; it would be cheaper to move on site than off; costs would involve factors like the space available around the adobe; they would excavate below the foundation and jack it up on steel beams; an off-site move would involve cutting the building into two parts; and he would need to do a site visit for an estimate. The building at 610 Monterey Street, which does not appear to be eligible for the Contributing List, would presumably be delisted and demolished, allowing room to work on the Master List– and NRHP-eligible Heyd Adobe. James Papp, Historicities LLC Historian and Architectural Historian Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualifications