Lummis House | |
Location | 200 E. Ave. 43, Los Angeles, California |
---|---|
Coordinates | 34°05′36″N118°12′25″W / 34.0932°N 118.207°W |
Area | 3 acres (1.2 ha) [2] |
Built | 1897 |
Built by | Lummis, Charles F. |
Architectural style | Rustic American Craftsman |
NRHP reference No. | 71000148 [3] |
CHISL No. | 531 [4] |
LAHCM No. | 68 |
Significant dates | |
Added to NRHP | May 6, 1971 |
Designated LAHCM | September 2, 1970 |
Lummis House, also known as El Alisal, is a Rustic American Craftsman stone house built by Charles Fletcher Lummis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [5] Located on the edge of Arroyo Seco in northeast Los Angeles, California, the house's name means "alder grove" in Spanish. [6]
The property is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and on the list of the National Register of Historic Places. [7]
Lummis purchased the three-acre lot (1.2 ha) sometime between 1895 and 1897 and named it "El Alisal" in tribute to the thicket of alder and sycamore trees that grew in the arroyo. The 4,000-square-foot home (370 m2) took 13 years to build. The exhibition hall has a concrete floor so that after a party that might include artists, writers and musicians, it could easily be cleaned with a bucket of water. Notable people who stayed in his guest houses included Clarence Darrow, Will Rogers, John Philip Sousa and John Muir. [2] The property was on the edge of the scenic Arroyo Seco and Lummis founded the Arroyo Seco Foundation in 1905 to promote recreational use and preserving habitat. In 1939, strong consideration was given to creating a theater and Spanish supper room at El Alisal since this was Lummis' wish. [8] In 1940 the Arroyo Seco Parkway, the first freeway, was built between the house and the newly constructed flood control channel in the arroyo.
In 1965, it became the headquarters for the Historical Society of Southern California and the house was opened to the public. By 2014, the city was concerned that visiting hours were too limited and that the historical group was not truly focused on a partnership with the Parks and Recreation Department. The Historical Society was concerned about the city's expectations that a tenant would invest in the house without committing to a long-term lease. [2] The Historical Society of Southern California left the Lummis House in January 2015. The Lummis House is now operated by the City of Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department.
The Lummis House is operated by the city of Los Angeles as a historic house museum. The exterior of the house is built of river rock and originally contained a stone tower, but that was later demolished. The interior contains some of Lummis's collection of artifacts, as well as copies of many of his books. The museum is open to the public for tours.
The drought-tolerant and California native plants predominate in the gardens and natural landscape around the residence, including namesake El Alisal California Sycamore trees.
California Historical Landmark Marker NO. 531 at the site reads: [9]
The Arroyo Seco Parkway, also known as the Pasadena Freeway, is one of the oldest freeways built in the United States. The parkway connects Los Angeles with Pasadena alongside the Arroyo Seco seasonal river. It is notable not only for being an early freeway, mostly opened in 1940, but for representing the transitional phase between early parkways and later freeways. It conformed to modern standards when it was built, but is now regarded as a narrow, outdated roadway. A 1953 extension brought the south end to the Four Level Interchange in downtown Los Angeles and a connection with the rest of the freeway system.
Highland Park is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, located in the city's Northeast region. It was one of the first subdivisions of Los Angeles and is inhabited by a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic groups.
The Arroyo Seco, meaning "dry stream" in Spanish, is a 24.9-mile-long (40.1 km) seasonal river, canyon, watershed, and cultural area in Los Angeles County, California. The area was explored by Gaspar de Portolà who named the stream Arroyo Seco as this canyon had the least water of any he had seen. During this exploration he met the Chief Hahamog-na (Hahamonga) of the Tongva Indians.
The Arroyo Seco Bicycle Path is an approximately 2-mile (3.2 km) long Class I bicycle path along the Arroyo Seco river channel and canyon in the Northeast Los Angeles region of Los Angeles County, California. It parallels the Arroyo Seco Parkway, which is also a part of the canyon.
Buildings, sites, districts, and objects in California listed on the National Register of Historic Places:
Sumner P. Hunt was an architect in Los Angeles from 1888 to the 1930s. On January 21, 1892, he married Mary Hancock Chapman, January 21, 1892. They had a daughter Louise Hunt.
Charles Fletcher Lummis was a United States journalist, and an activist for Native American rights and historic preservation. A traveler in the American Southwest, he settled in Los Angeles, California, where he also became known as a historian, photographer, ethnographer, archaeologist, poet, and librarian. Lummis founded the Southwest Museum of the American Indian.
Cypress Park is a densely populated neighborhood of 10,000+ residents in Northeast Los Angeles, California. Surrounded by hills on three sides, it sits in the valley created by the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco. It is the site of the Rio de Los Angeles State Park, the Los Angeles River Bike Path and other recreational facilities. It hosts one private and four public schools.
Southwest Museum station is an at-grade light rail station on the A Line of the Los Angeles Metro Rail system. It is located near the intersection of Marmion Way at Museum Drive in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. The station opened on July 26, 2003, as part of the original Gold Line, then known as the "Pasadena Metro Blue Line" project.
Garvanza is a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles. Fourteen Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments are located in the neighborhood.
Heritage Square Museum is a living history and open-air architecture museum located beside the Arroyo Seco Parkway in the Montecito Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in the southern Arroyo Seco area. The living history museum shows the story of development in Southern California through historical architectural examples.
Judson Studios is a fine arts studio specializing in stained glass located in the Highland Park section of northeast Los Angeles. The stained glass studio was founded in the Mott Alley section of downtown Los Angeles in the mid-1890s by English-born artist William Lees Judson and his three sons. It moved to its current location in 1920 and remains in operation as a family-run business. The Judson Studios building was named a Historic-Cultural Landmark by the City of Los Angeles in 1969 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
This is intended to be a complete list of the properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places in the city of Pasadena, California, United States. The locations of National Register properties and districts for which the latitude and longitude coordinates are included below, may be seen in an online map.
Northeast Los Angeles is a 17.18 sq mi (44.5 km2) region of Los Angeles County, comprising seven neighborhoods within Los Angeles. The area is home to Occidental College located in Eagle Rock.
Lummis Day is a signature community arts and music event in the neighborhoods of Northeast Los Angeles, showcasing the community's considerable pool of musicians, poets, artists, dancers and restaurants representing a kaleidoscope of ethnicities and cultural traditions. Since 2014, Occidental College's Institute for the Study of Los Angeles has partnered with the Lummis Day Community Foundation to support cultural programming.
The Santa Fe Arroyo Seco Railroad Bridge in Highland Park, Los Angeles, is more than 710 feet (220 m) long and crosses the Arroyo Seco Parkway at an elevation of over 56 feet (17 m). It is the tallest and longest railroad span in the city of Los Angeles, and most likely the oldest such structure still in use. The bridge crosses the lower part of the Arroyo Seco, a watershed canyon from the San Gabriel Mountains.
The Ernest and Florence Bent Halstead House is an American Craftsman style home built in 1912 in Los Angeles, California.
Alisal, or El Alisal, was a Californio settlement located on the lands of the Rancho Santa Rita near the site of an Indian ranchera, around the Francisco Solano Alviso Adobe, called El Alisal, one of the earliest houses built in the Livermore Valley in 1844. Note that even though the database and plaque use the word "sycamore", the English translation of the Spanish "aliso" is "alder".
The Arroyo Seco region has been home and inspiration to artists from Los Angeles' boom years of the 1880s to present day. This region of Northeast Los Angeles that borders the Arroyo Seco and the Los Angeles River encompasses Pasadena, Altadena, Highland Park, Garvanza, Mount Washington, and El Sereno. Historian Kevin Starr defines Arroyo Culture as "a collective designation now given to a loosely defined, scattered movement, many of whose protagonists lived, like Charles Fletcher Lummis at El Alisal, along the Arroyo Seco.