Curious Traveler

Los Angeles in Three Great Houses: Part 1

by Jerry Camarillo Dunn, Jr.

Cities and civilizations leave enduring footprints. Think of Egypt’s Pyramids, the rows of statues on Easter Island, the white columns of the Parthenon in Athens. But Los Angeles has an unhappy habit of knocking down its past, its iconic buildings and houses – paving paradise to put up a parking lot and leaving no trace in the dust.

Yet there are a few footprints to follow, if you know where to look. They lead to remarkable houses, starting with the city’s oldest, the Avila Adobe, built in 1818 and still standing downtown on Olvera Street. Wealthy Californio rancher Francisco Avila built adobe walls three feet thick and sealed the roof with horsehair, rocks, and tar from the La Brea Tar Pits. His home was a social center in the early days of El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Ángeles, and reminds us that today’s multicultural city was once solely Hispanic.

Three other remarkable houses sum up the story of Los Angeles. One was the home of a flamboyant writer and regional booster of the late 1800s who drew dreamers to Southern California. One was the mansion of the lucky man who drilled the first oil well in Los Angeles, striking it rich and living the California Dream. The last is a staggeringly modern residence that shows how L.A., even while guilty of erasing much of its past, perpetually turns its face toward the future.

The Lummis House

A writer, editor, and activist for historic preservation and Indian rights, Charles Lummis arrived in the Southland in 1884. He had walked 3,500 miles from Ohio – in his street shoes – writing a weekly travelog on the way for the Los Angeles Times about his tramp through new and strange lands. The prejudices of his New England upbringing and Harvard education fell away, and he developed a deep love for the natural beauty and cultural diversity of the Southwest.

Lummis’s colorful articles earned him a national name, and after 143 days on foot, he arrived in Los Angeles to become the first city editor of the Times. A sort of pioneer of personal branding, Lummis dressed in flamboyant western style with buckskin leggings, a Navajo sash, a sombrero with a rattlesnake hatband, and an ammunition belt. His boss, Harrison Gray Otis, observed that Lummis’s garb “was not reassuring to the mind” and may have been “calculated to excite the curiosity of the police.”

Lummis’s work ethic and long hours as an editor led to a mild stroke that left him partially paralyzed, so in 1888 he moved to New Mexico to recuperate. There he freelanced articles about the Southwest, but when his exposé of corruption in his adopted town of San Mateo put his life in danger, Lummis decamped to the Native American pueblo of Isleta. (An assassin followed and shot him, though not fatally.)

By 1895 he was healthy and living again in Los Angeles, advocating for the n t a B a r b a r a C h a r i t y

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