by Paul R. Spitzzeri
On the weekend of the 26th and 27th, the Homestead, for the fourth consecutive year, is happy to participate in the California Preservation Foundation’s Doors Open California program. As we did two years ago, we are marking the centennial of La Casa Nueva by offering a presentation about and tour of the Temple family’s remarkable Spanish Colonial Revival residence, this one focusing on the contributors to its construction, from the adobe makers, craftspeople, and architects.
This preview post highlights Sylvester Jackson Cook (1856-1950), who was the contractor for the project, but, first, let’s provide a little context to the origins of the building of the edifice. Nearly five years before work began in summer 1922, the Temples were the incredibly fortunate beneficiaries of the first of many royalty payments by Standard Oil Company of California, now Chevron, comprising their one-eighth share of revenues derived from wells drilled on their 60-acre ranch near Montebello.
From the bringing in of the first well in late June 1917, a string of producers, including a few gushers, followed and the proceeds often amounted to tens of thousands of dollars per month. For a family that had, at best, modest income from agricultural, as well as Walter P. Temple’s side work as an insurance agent and teamster, this boon, understandably, stirred dreams of private educations for the four children, finer houses, more luxuries and, for Walter, a move into his own oil prospecting and real estate development.
With the former this meant efforts in several locations, including Whittier, Huntington Beach, Signal Hill (Long Beach) and Ventura in greater Los Angeles, as well as in Alaska, Oklahoma and México in far-flung regions. Concerning the latter, Walter purchased his first commercial property in Alhambra, which saw major growth after World War I and into the Roaring Twenties and was where the family moved shortly after the oil money began flowing. At the end of 1921, he completed his first development, the Temple Theatre, which offered vaudeville and movies—the building and two adjacent structures were, however, razed in the late 1990s.
Then came 1922 and a flurry of projects were undertaken in multiple locations. In Alhambra, a short distance east of the new theater, Walter purchased the northwest corner of Main and Third streets, on which there were a pair of residences and which was recently acquired by the local chapter of the Elks fraternal society, of which Temple was a member and benefactor (the Elks enjoyed large picnics at the Homestead in this period), for a new lodge. Temple bought the property for future development, this being the multi-story Edison Building, which was his last real estate project when completed in April 1927 and which remains standing.
A key area was San Gabriel, which was of great personal importance to Walter because of his family’s long association with the mission. After buying a large tract across Mission Drive from the stone church, he built three business buildings along that thoroughfare, all still with us, including the single-story Arcade Building of shops, a two-story Temple Block and a single-level post office and library. He also donated a site at the east end of the property for a city hall, with a $50,000 bond issue approved by voters late in the year. This work was heralded as part of a San Gabriel growth spurt, which reflected a regionwide boom during the early Twenties.
While these were completed projects in the Mission City, Temple had others that did not pan out. This included the offer of a couple of lots behind the aforementioned structures for the Alhambra post of the American Legion, a recently established organization for veterans, but the post chose another site instead. To the north, along Las Tunas Drive between Mission Drive and Santa Anita Avenue, Temple bought 40 acres, which he intended to subdivide as Bradbury Park. Preliminary steps were taken in the fall, but he sold the tract to G.C. Harris, who continued that work by the end of 1922.
In Monterey Park, Walter bought the northeast corner of that town’s central intersection of Garvey and Garfield avenues (after the first oil was extracted from the Temple oil wells, the family briefly rented a house on Garfield before purchasing the Alhambra residence.) Thomas Berry, a realtor who had an office in the Temple Block at San Gabriel, built a structure at this junction and Temple contemplated building an adobe edifice and then a movie theater before transferring his lot to an Alhambra developer in a trade that yielded what became the Temple Hotel and the post office, this and adjacent single-story store buildings acquired by Walter also are intact, in the latter burg.
At El Monte, Walter purchased a lot at the southwest corner of Main and Lexington streets and began work on a brick structure that contained a movie theater and the post office and which still stands. Towards the end of 1922, he and a syndicate of investors, including his business manager (and former El Monte merchant) Milton Kauffman, his attorney George H. Woodruff, architects Albert R. Walker and Percy A. Eisen, Alhambra sheep rancher and business figure Sylvester Dupuy and Orange County oil producer, furniture manufacturer and life insurance company president A. Otis Birch, purchased the property between Main and Spring streets on the north side of 8th Street and formed the Central Finance Building Company.
The firm undertook the construction of the Great Republic Life Building, named for Birch’s firm and which was height-limit, meaning the maximum 11 stories permissible under Angel City ordinances, structure that later included offices for Walter Temple’s oil and real estate companies. Temple and others in the syndicate then purchased the property on the south side of 8th directly across from the Great Republic and undertook the construction of the National City Bank Building (Woodruff being a director of the financial institution). Both edifices are now loft buildings.
Unfortunately, while it was often identified in newspaper reports on new building construction who the contractor was, in addition to architects and owners, this was not the case for the aforementioned structures in the smaller San Gabriel Valley towns. When it came to La Casa Nueva, however, we do know that the builder or contractor was Cook, who was approaching some four decades of work in the region. As has been mentioned here before, the Temple family took a trip of just over a month to México in summer 1922, with Walter and Kauffman having some oil-related business there, but Temple and his wife, Laura González, took their children for their education—meaning, presumably, exposing them to part of their ethnic heritage.
While the Temples were in the Jalisco metropolis of Guadalajara, they met Pablo Urzua, a maestro de obra, or master stonemason, and they quickly conceived of a plan to use him and his crew to make adobe bricks for La Casa Nueva. Cook was then selected as the contractor and, according to Walter P. Temple, Jr., he assisted his parents in sketching out ideas for the residence on butcher paper. These were then rendered into workable plans by the firm of Walker and Eisen, which designed Walter, Sr.’s early business buildings. As we’ll see below, Cook was involved in at least one of Temple’s projects, but may have been part of others.
Cook hailed from Pulaski County, in southwestern Virginia, where his father farmed and the family resided for a time just over the state line in Oregon Hill, North Carolina, north and a bit east of Greensboro. It is not clear why he came all the way across the country to Los Angeles in the early 1880s, but it may well have been for his health, as this was a prime reason for many migrants to our region at the time. In any case, he worked as a carpenter at the port town of Wilmington and then in the Angel City, which, by 1883, was finally emerging from a long period of economic slump called the Long Depression.
In 1883, Cook married Guadalupe Garcia de Alba (1858-1940), a Los Angeles native of Mexican ancestry and who was born on the newly acquired property of Andrew Boyle in what was called Paredon Blanco (White Bluff) on the east side of the Los Angeles River. Boyle’s future son-in-law, William H. Workman, developed part of the estate with a pair of partners, John Lazzarovich and Isaias W. Hellman, into Boyle Heights. Guadalupe, though, lived in other parts of Los Angeles and in San Bernardino before marrying Cook.
The couple had seven children, five living to adulthood, including three daughters and two sons, while Cook continued his carpentry career, but also contracted. When the Boom of the Eighties transpired largely during the two mayoral terms of William H. Workman from 1886 to 1888, Cook undoubtedly found plenty of work, including residential construction, though he sometimes took on bigger projects, such as winning a bid for a city smallpox hospital, though it does not appear the edifice was built.
A smattering of examples of Cook’s work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries includes, in 1894, a two-story store and apartment building, no longer with us, at the southeast corner of 5th and Crocker street in today’s Skid Row; a two-story wood frame house, constructed two years later, near Venice Boulevard west of today’s Convention Center; a four-story frame apartment building completed in 1905 on Grand near 2nd in Bunker Hill; and a two-story, 16-room apartment structure on 23rd Street that was finished in 1911 and is the only of these edifices to survive the ravages of time.
Cook was involved in other enterprises, including part-ownership of a door and sash company, serving as a director of the Builders’ Exchange, a contractors’ association, as well as investment in land in Montebello. When the real estate firm of D.O. Stewart & Co. advertised for five-acre tracts there in 1905, Cook was quoted,
I have looked the country over and observed every locality closely. I found no place to compare with Montebello in soil, elevation, climate and water. I will soon begin the erection of a seven-room Mission [style] residence at Montebello.
Whether he built that house that soon is not known, but the 1910 census shows that the Cooks resided in downtown Los Angeles, but, within several years, they were in Montebello. Perhaps it was then that an acquaintance with Walter Temple took place, but, however they met, Temple’s sudden springboard to wealth with the newly established Montebello oil field provided him his first business opportunity.
This was the construction of two new edifices at the southeast corner of San Gabriel Boulevard and Lincoln Avenue, the former comprising the northern boundary of his oil property while the latter bisected it. Near the Basye Adobe, an 1869 structure formerly resided in by his sister Lucinda and her merchant husband Manuel M. Zuñiga and which was turned into Standard’s field office after the Temples headed to Monterey Park and then Alhambra, Walter hired Cook, with the South Pasadena Record of 19 July 1918 reporting that,
S.J. Cook, who recently completed a brick office building for Walter P. Temple on the corner of Lincoln avenue and San Gabriel boulevard, is now engaged in putting up a modern oil and gasoline station for Mr. Temple adjoining his office building. The ne station is being built primarily for the accommodation of the oil well workers, but will also be a great convenience to the general auto driving public.
A photo in the Museum’s collection, included here, shows the two edifices from Lincoln looking east toward San Gabriel crossing the Río Hondo (the old channel of the San Gabriel River) and close to 20 oil derricks with the Puente Hills in the background. Perhaps Cook took on other contracting projects for Temple over the next several years before he was hired to help put the ideas of Walter and Laura for their new house into form through the drawings.
A quartet of drawings also featured here are almost certainly sketches by Cook of the earliest iteration of La Casa Nueva and showing the in-concept dwelling as a decidedly Mission Style structure, clear from the front elevation, while its general form with the two-story main block and single-level projecting wings, as shown in the rear elevation, persisted, with the arched porticos on either side of the courtyard looking much as what was completed, if raised higher than the finished version.
As for the pair of interior drawings, the one of the first floor, though largely damaged from pest infestation, shows the main block close to the finished form with the central reception hall flanked by four large rooms, with the only major difference being that what became the Music Room was planned as a billiard room—the other three remained as the Dining Room, Living Room and Library, as built. The front porch was smaller than realized, while the staircase to the second floor was drawn in the center of the reception hall, while the completed version was a wrap-around.
There were other variations, such as where the Library fireplace now is was planned to be a bookcase—a pair of built-in bookcases in the wall shared with the Music Room were added later. While there are a pair of built-in window seats in the Library now, the drawing shows one of these in each of the rooms.
Also, open passages between the two sets of rooms on each side showed doors, though there is a reference to sliding doors between the billiard room and library. Moreover, a doorway between the latter and the west wing is depicted, while it is notable to see that the adobe walls were projected to be three-and-a-half feet thick.
It is the second floor drawing that reveals how much was later changed. Aside from the center staircase, which meant wide balconies around it, the front balcony, which is now quite small but with a dramatic wrought-iron cage, was to be the same size as the patio below. Glass doors at the south end were also to lead to a balcony or a stoop, given the words “Roof over” at this location, with a staircase about where the current one is though reversed.
Otherwise, the rendering shows seven bedrooms, which seems to mean that two were intended as guest rooms. The master is depicted in the southeast portion and included an adjoining and connecting bathroom and it was moved to the northeast section with a dressing room and walk-in closet and no bathroom within it.
That northeast area had two bedrooms with what appear to be closets in between—apparently the master bath was to be used for showering and baths by those using these bedrooms. The northwest portion was identical to this, but the southwest had two bedrooms with a full bathroom in between, though smaller than the one connected to the master.
Notably, most of the bedrooms even posited where the beds and dressers were to be placed, while interior doors, including some with mirrors, a radiator indicator and window locations were also indicated. The hallways were to be six-feet wide, more than what was built and, where the current bathrooms are at the ends were just windows.
As mentioned above, Walker and Eisen developed drawings that represented further work on the structure. At the end of 1922, as the main adobe walls were under construction, Laura Temple died from colon cancer and the project, naturally, was halted as her survivors grieved. Subsequently, Beverly Hills architect Roy Seldon Price was hired to work on the project and he made substantial and costly (his surname was a running joke for the family) changes that, however, transformed and vastly improved the edifice, which was not completed until late 1927, five years after work stated—even then furnishing and landscaping continued.
On the first anniversary of Laura’s death, Walter dedicated La Casa Nueva to her with a granite plaque placed to the right side of the front door—it was moved to the northeast corner under the Master Bedroom when Price had an amazing surround of raised carved and painted plaster added, elevating the house by historical reference, style and visual appeal. Along with Urzua and Walker and Eisen, Cook was listed, though it is not known if his work continued once Price was hired.
In fact, little could be found of Cook and his career during and after this period. The 1930 census lists the 74-year old as a general building contractor, but he appears to have retired soon afterward, as there was no occupation for him a decade later. When Guadalupe died in September 1948, another interesting connection was revealed by the Roman Catholic newspaper, The Tidings, which remarked that “active in Catholic welfare, she was identified with the founding of the Brownson House,” a settlement institution for immigrants of color founded by Mary Julia Workman, daughter of the former mayor. She was followed two years later by Sylvester, though an obituary in the Los Angeles News mentioned nothing about his career.
Learn more about La Casa Nueva and those involved in its construction during the Doors Open California tours on the 26th and 27th—for $20 you can visit an unlimited number of historic sites that have not been sold out in the remaining three weekends of the offering. We hope to see you then!