by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As we commemorate the centennial of the construction of La Casa Nueva, carried out over a five-year period from 1922 to 1927, one of the challenges we face is the relative paucity of information about the project. There are some surviving blueprints and photos—left in the attic of the “Tepee” structure built adjacent to the house and saved by the Brown family, owners of El Encanto Sanitarium, which occupied the Homestead for about a quarter-century and who donated them to the Museum when it opened in the early 1980s.
The Temple family also provided, as a gift to the Homestead, some documents and letters referring to the building of the house, as well as photos, many of these taken by resident family shutterbug, Thomas W. Temple II as he provided an important level of documentation of the project. A couple of letters to Thomas from Roy Seldon Price, a Beverly Hills architect brought in to redesign elements of the house and oversee its completion, have also been donated by family members and one of these was the subject of a post here.
Yet, the blueprints aren’t a complete set, receipts for the purchase of tile or of payments to workers are scattershot, and the letters are piecemeal, giving us only the barest of glimpses into the project. Moreover, press references are pitifully few, perhaps a reflection of the fact that little Puente, as the area was the known, being twenty miles from Los Angeles, was “beyond the Pale” when it came to media coverage and interest.
This is unfortunate, because La Casa Nueva is, by any reasonable standard, a remarkable dwelling, filled with stunning architectural crafts, including intricately carved wood and plaster, colorful Mexican and American tile, and beautiful and compelling painted and stained glass windows. Even more impressive is the amount of thought and effort put in by the Temples and Price to place the family front and center in the house’s decoration, even if a great deal of what was represented was highly romantic in the depiction of historical concepts and themes.
A plaque, originally placed next to the front entrance and then moved to the northeast corner of the edifice when Price came up with a carved and painted plaster surround (“churrigueresque” is a term that might be applicable) that totally transformed the entry, dedicated the house to Laura González Temple, whose death at the end of 1922, during the early stage of construction, on the first anniversary of her passing.
The marker also memorialized key contributors to the house at that time, including Whittier contractor Sylvester Cook (who’d previously built the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum in El Campo Santo Cemetery); maestro de obra (master stonemason) Pablo Urzua, whose adobe-making crew built the bricks for the residence and the surrounding Mission Walkway, front wall, planters and Tepee, and who was hired from Guadalajara, Jalisco, México, likely because of the Temple family’s visit there in summer 1922; and Los Angeles architects, Albert H. Walker and Percy Eisen, who drew up the finished plans for the house.
The hiring of Price, however, brought dramatic changes, aside from his amazing front door surround. He was also responsible for rerouting the interior staircase, removing a bridge that connected the second-floor wings, laying out the tiled sun decks over the rear wings that made great use of otherwise wasted space, and a great deal more. While the Temples joked that the architect’s invoices more than matched his surname, there is no question that Price’s additions and innovations made La Casa Nueva far more distinctive and impressive than it would have been if the original plans had been carried out to completion.
Aside from those mentioned on the dedication plaque and Price, however, there were an unknown number of workers who labored, as construction workers usually do, anonymously. Obviously, there is a vast difference in perception between the architect, generally seen as creative and artistic as well as visionary in such projects, while the contractor is often publicly credited, though for reasons that are, of course, less aesthetic and more functional and practical.
When it comes to the brick-maker, plasterer, carpenter, painter and others, though, they usually toiled without recognition, though there can occasionally be exceptions. One such example with La Casa Nueva, is Juan Burgos, whose amazing wood carvings at beam ends in the Living Room, Dining Room and Courtyard include what look to be indigenous people and Conquistadors as well as whimsical representations of animals, including dogs “dressed to the nines” in the Dining Room and the Temple family’s three dogs and a cat in the Courtyard.
Some of us interpreting the house for visitors have taken to referring to Burgos as something of a “folk artist” because of the view that, while he was not recognized, so far as we know, any differently than any other laborer employed in the construction of the house, his obvious skill in carving takes his efforts beyond general craftsmanship. The only reference we have to Burgos is with some simple receipts, written by Walter P. Temple in 1925, showing that the carver was paid $30 a week for his work.
Given the near invisibility of those who helped build La Casa Nueva, it is remarkable to contemplate an article in the 22 February 1925 edition of the Los Angeles Times that is a rare look into the work of Latinos in house construction—though the tenor of the piece strangely straddles a wobbly line between respect and admiration as well as racialized caricature. The article, titled “Mexicans Show Artistic Skill” has the subheadings of “‘Cholo’ Laborers Reveal Decorative Genius” and “Flair Comes From Indian Ancestors.”
The writer was Timothy Gilman Turner II (1885-1961), who came from a family of journalists and publishers, including his namesake grandfather who was a lawyer and judge, as well as a newspaper and gazette publisher of long residence in South Bend, Indiana. Turner, though born in Independence, Missouri, spent much of his youth in that city, best known as the home of the University of Notre Dame and was reportedly a cowboy in Colorado, Kansas and Texas. His father, Willis, followed in the trade, including stints in Chicago, St. Joseph, Missouri, Memphis and Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he died in 1906.
Turner and his mother soon ended up in El Paso, Texas, where they both worked for that city’s Herald. It was in that border city that he began to travel in México during the dangerous days of the county’s long revolutionary period and he covered the efforts of Venustiano Carranza, who became the county’s “pre-Constitutional” president in 1915 and constitutional leader two years later and who was assassinated in 1920. As early as 1914, it was reported that Turner covered Carranza’s role in Mexican politics and, the following year, he went to New York City to be a publicist as Carranza formed an opposition effort against Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Later, Turner worked for the president in Veracruz through a Pan-American news bureau.
Likely because of the continued danger in México, Turner returned to New York and worked for the Herald, with a 1919 piece on middle class Mexicans being published by it and then reprinted throughout the United States. Two years later, he, his wife and their daughter migrated to Los Angeles, where Turner was hired by the city’s largest and most influential newspaper, the Times. Much of his material dealt with Mexican topics, as well as local subjects that sometimes touched on the ethnic diversity of the City of Angels.
As an example, the 10 December 1922 edition of the paper featured his “Our Own Main Street,” which expressed Turner’s concern with grandiose plans for a new Civic Center that proposed massive changes to the downtown. Though this did not take place, the journalist fretted that it seemed likely, as he began his piece with,
Our Main street. Look at it, walk it, study it, love it or hate, but do not ignore it. Consider our Main street before it is too late. It will soon be no more. Forget the bright young man and his stupid book [Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, published in 1920] that told of the commonplace, American Main street. Ours has never been commonplace and never altogether American. Unlike the Main streets of back East it has never lacked color, and now its color, smudged as the old oil may be, was never so rich.
Turner went on to observe that the principal thoroughfare “is foreign, but it is not European, for in its color it is mostly Mexican” and he added that “our Sonoratown” was unlike the barrios of El Paso and San Antonio, concluding that “in old Los Angeles ours is a Mexican quarter with its own ‘down town.'” Notably, however, he wrote of the 19th century Bella Union Hotel as a place where “the old Spaniards used to make gay in it,” though it was actually a stronghold for Confederate-supporting Southerners in its heyday.
What he did observe as contemporary were aspects like Spanish-language movie houses like El Hidalgo and La Princesa, though he also noted theaters with “variety shows” as well as films and which were comprised of “poor, shabby, tired traveling troups [sic] of Spanish and Mexican players.” The 1880s Baker Block, a showpiece of its time, had “degenerated,” to Turner’s thinking, with tenants including “a Spanish-language newspaper” along with dentists, “a few musty old law offices” and “some old-timers of consequence” who would die there. Also described was a Mexican meat market, deemed “clean enough,” while, at a barber’s shop, someone played “El Borrachito.”
The journalist talked of the Pico House, then known as the National Hotel, and other old buildings near the Plaza, along with the long-distant memories of the Calle de los Negros, known by its crude nickname, and where “they used to have some wonderfully fine fights,” including one involving two Mexicans. Nothing was said about the horrific Chinese Massacre of just over a half-century prior, though. Also highlighted were “funny drug stores” with Turner asking “will this Mexican patent-medicine genius ever stop photographing lepers?” to sell products and the Latino photographer with his displayed image of “Master Antonio,” evidently a dishwasher, and his unnamed bride, a candy factory worker, in their wedding finery, with the statement, “God bless them, our children!”
Next, Turner wrote,
There is the Plaza, piece of the old day. How things will change with the new passenger terminal [Union Station, not completed until 1939].
An old Spanish plaza. Band concerts every Sunday night. The senoritas parading in one circle; the caballeros in another in an opposite direction—they may pass gardenias and looks, nothing more.
Next to the post office, this being where the Downey Block once stood at the northwest corner of Main and Temple streets, where Spring then terminated, was a newsstand with papers and magazines from all over the Spanish-speaking world, but the writer commented “strange who buys ’em. We shan’t.” Also referred to was the indigenous village of Yang-na, said to be on Commercial Street west of Main as well as Alta California Governor Felipe de Neve, of whom Turner wrote “God bless his good, solid old Spanish noodle” because he oversaw the founding of Los Angeles more than 140 years prior.
Mexican restaurants, a nickelodeon run by a Russian for Latino patrons, and a block of Main where “we shall find everything, but still the Mexicans [predominate]: getting shaved, drinking American soda pop, puffing cigarettes that smell like the Japanese incense you b[u]y of your druggist . . .” The article concluded with further ruminations on the diversity, ethnically and in terms of the businesses congregating on Main Street, all of this an oddly fascinating, almost stream-of-consciousness survey of a part of town that had obviously changed dramatically in recent decades.
The 24 February 1924 issue of the Times featured a shorter analysis of what Turner called “The Most Interesting Place In Los Angeles,” this being the Sonoratown district. This was so because “it is the shell of old Los Angeles, a historical relic few western cities can boast of” and that “it is unspoiled with modern-like improvements.” For the journalist, it was desirable that it not be changed and he proclaimed “God grant that progress never shall despoil” the aging structures that were “much richer in history” than those of New Orleans. He added,
Its old church and the Plaza bespeak the Hispanic Los Angeles, when all was dolce far niente here [“pleasant idleness”]; you can still taste it by lounging on a bench of a sunny noon . . .
But Sonoratown is not merely a shell.
It is the business and pleasure section of the descendants of those same early Mexicans, when California was provincial of New Spain . . .
Its language is still Spanish, its customs still Mexican, its soul still Latin.
It knows no pretense; its pleasures are ingenuous; its ways are not governed by fashion, being folk ways.
Sonoratown is the most interesting and at once the most honest place in Los Angeles because it is just what it is.
Turner’s background is helpful in understanding the attitude and approach behind his article featured here. He focused on the laborers hired by Price, then known for his “Dias Doradas” residence designed and built for Thomas Ince, owner of a film studio at Culver City now known as the Culver Studios and who died after sailing with media mogul William Randolph Hearst just a few months prior to the publication of the piece.
The writer noted that Ince hired up to fifty Mexican laborers through employment bureaus and had them engaged in digging trenches, mixing concrete and other basic manual work at the Ince site. It was, he reported, “by chance, [that] Mr. Price discovered that among these men were talented artisans, and the result was that most of the art work in the Ince house was done by these men . . .”
As learned by the journalist, the architect’s account, given to the West Hollywood Community Club “is astonishing” and so amazed the audience that, one of them, a Police Court judge, purportedly “is now sentencing the ordinary, begrimed Mexican laborers that appear before him with a certain respect, it not awe.” The basic point was:
Yes, it seems that the artistic skill of the ancient Aztec and Mayan is latent in the soul of the Southern California cholo. One architect has just discovered it, and is taking good advantage of it. And others are likely to follow his example.
As related by Price, a Mexican concrete mixer wielded a trowel when talking to a co-worker and with a few strokes of the tool created a design that the architect felt was so well executed that he “seized on it as part of a scheme of decoration.” Price, in pondering what he’d seen, determined that “the way that cholo made that design, the movement of his wrist astonished him more and more.”
Asking the laborers some questions, Price found that “among those laborers he found sculptors, wrought iron workers, and men that could use the brush and colors” so that their efforts culminated in “wrought-iron lattices, carved wooden statuettes, and . . . remarkable clay vases” which were specimens of “that noble school of art that developed in Spanish-America.” In one of those rare examples of press attention to La Casa Nueva, Turner added,
Mr. Price is now building another house for Walter P. Temple, a house of pure Spanish-colonial architecture with adobe walls thirty-eight inches thick. It is located at Puente on the old Workman place. And on this job the architect is begging all of his artistic talent from another gang of Mexican laborers from the employment bureau, and so he finds that his first experience was not accidental.
Notably, Price offered that, whereas a Mexican worker earned $4 a day, a white skilled artisan would earn at least triple that but possessed “the mind of a savage child.” When he brought in a potter’s wheel, he found the products finished by the Latino laborers to be “marvelous” and that “their wood carving was equally good.” With basic instructions as to what he wanted, the architect noted that these workers “did it to perfection,” citing an example in which with a little clay and a quick movement of the fingers, a flower was created—”and these by hands that were calloused from using the pick and shovel.”
When Price desired a certain tint for a plastered wall and found professionals to demand too much money, “one of the Mexican laborers said he could do it—’tal vez’ [maybe],” and, after mixing a thin adobe material, brushing it on the surface and washing it, the architect was amazed to find not only what he wanted but that the result was what “he had never seen except on old California mission walls.” Moreover, he stated that “he had discovered talent that eventually will be employed by architects generally, for the vogue for Spanish architecture is at its height in Southern California.” These Latino laborers “know tricks that will avoid the garish coloring and dollhouse sculpting of American hands.”
What should have been evident because of how close México is to greater Los Angeles was that “the popular arts of Mexico, the clay and wax modeling, the stone cutting and wood carving, are the wonder of the universe, especially since Mexicans of the lower class practice them so generally.” Opining that there was a connection to the skills of Italians and “Latins” in Europe, Turner asserted that “the dexterity of the Mexican workmen seems to be accounted for in his Indian blood, plus the Latin culture.”
Cited was the view of “Dr. Atl,” the signature of painter Gerardo Murillo Coronado, an associate of Carranza, who said the indigenous people of México possessed “a greater manual skill than any man in the world, with the possible exception of the Chinese.” What separated the two, apparently, was that the Mexican was creative and Turner continued, strangely, that “the Mexican as a rule is not a good physician, but he is a remarkable surgeon.”
Alas, we learn at the end of the article that Price determined that the “Benvenuto Cellini” workers on his projects “cannot stand prosperity.” It was given as an example that one Latino potter engaged in his work “happily at $5 a day,” but, on learning what Americans were paid, asked for incremental dollar increases “until he got to thinking so much about money he couldn’t work and they fired him”—as if this could only happen to one ethnic group.
More bizarre is the alleged instance of “Pepe” Sánchez, found working in a lumberyard at San Gabriel, where he made $4 daily carrying wood, but who was a wood carver whose sample at Price’s office was deemed “almost pure Aztecan in its motif and better cut than any American carver would do it.” Yet, the money being paid was too much for “Pobre Pepe,” who, the article concluded, was found dead in a little shack near the Ince site as “he had died in a fit from smoking too much marihuana.”
This piece by Turner, who left the Times in 1929, worked as a manager of a Los Angeles trade group, and then returned to the paper after a half-dozen years, contributing pieces until 1954 when he spent five years as publicity director at the Biltmore Hotel, is a strange one. It reflects a certain amount of appreciation, as others of Turner’s writings did, for some qualities of Latinos, but through a lens colored by paternalism. By the standards of the time, though, Turner might be viewed as more enlightened than most of his peers, even as our perspectives have necessarily evolved.