No. 9 – Beaux-Arts and Architecture in Riverside, CA
The Inland Empire is a metro region distinct from the LA area we know and love. How did its own cultural model, built in the foothills and on the desert, come to be?
I went to Riverside, CA on a recent Sunday afternoon hoping to find some creation of the great turn of the century architect Julia Morgan. This I succeeded in doing, on the unhip corner of Mission Inn St and Lime Ave just a click off the rushing freeway, where since 1929 has stood her YWCA Building, now the Riverside Art Museum.
The Riverside YWCA was one of seventeen Ys Morgan designed and built in rapid succession in the 1920s throughout Southern California. She was a busy architect all her career, working up and down the California coast, most notably in connection with the Hearst family, but also on projects for other celebrities, churches, and universities. Her work on the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner building has been featured on this blog previously.
The RAM building is an exemplar of the ineffable handsomeness I find in each of her works, a real poise to the firmness with which their masses lay upon the earth. The cool sandstone nearly fades into the scenery of the boulder-laden hills surrounding the city, while the ruby tilework and delicate iron balconies leave room, as was her intent, for a feminine aspect to shine through.
This building and all the others which would form Morgan’s style were informed by her robust education – first woman graduate in civil engineering at Berkeley, then the first admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1899. Though the program was meant to last 5 years, the snooty French academicians wouldn’t let her study after turning 30, so take it as a sign of her excellence that on the strength of a design for a concert hall submitted before her birthday in 1902, they awarded her a certificate anyway.
Inside, the Riverside Art Museum has cannily converted recreational space into gallery rooms – large portraits from a Chicana artist, Sonya Fe, inhabit what was once the swimming pool, while sculptures from William Catling take up an old basketball gym. Many of the works on display come from the collection of Cheech Marin – yes, that Cheech.
Born and raised in East LA, he’s become a notable collector of Chicano art, landscapes and portraits both. In fact, the new wing being stood up next door to Morgan’s building will open this June as the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture.
Now allow me a minute to step back and motivate this post. The question of why I drove two hours to a town on the edge of the desert is a good one, as is the question of why Morgan and other notable architects of the early 1900s did the same thing without access to the I-10 freeway.
How much money would it take to attract the worthy builders of an earlier age to a Mojave suburb? What sort of culture could they have left behind?
In lieu of explanation, hold your breath – unsung as it may be, when taken in combination with the adjoining cities of San Bernardino and Ontario, the population of Riverside’s metropolitan area is bigger than those of both San Francisco and Detroit.
The three cities form the core of the Inland Empire, a contiguous region on the fringe of the Los Angeles megalopolis on its own larger than ten different states. It grows like a weed: from the end of WW2 to the rather underreported SoCal recession of the early 1990s (itself the fault of Bush Sr’s Peace Dividend) the IE quintupled in population to contain 2.5 million souls.
Retooling and creative destruction in the early aughts sponsored the logistics boom which led to another doubling – now some 5 million people live in and help run perhaps the nation’s most crucial artery for goods, trucked and trained from the Ports of LA and LB and destined for consumption at all points east and north.
Though the presence of the Chino Hills and Santa Ana Mountains helps to distinguish the Empire geographically from Los Angeles and Orange County, similar historical forces acted on the whole of Southern California – domination by Mexican latifundistas gave way to the orange magnates and then the railroad barons like Henry and Charles Huntington as the region took on its modern structure. Riverside in particular, however, had in the course of the early 1900s an aberrant episode where it came under the influence of one wildly successful hotelier – Frank Miller.
Miller was born in heartland Wisconsin but came to Riverside with his family as a boy. The Millers owned a block downtown on which they built a small inn, the management of which Frank took over upon his father’s retirement.
A story taking place 80 miles west is critical for the next step – Los Angeles civic leaders needed to figure out what to do with the 100,000-strong windfall of new residents who arrived in the pueblo during the 1890s. Ultimately, they seized on the westerly nostalgia invoked by the old Spanish missions – this was the start of the craze for Mission Revival architecture.
Cunning Frank Miller decided in 1902 to build something bigger for his boarding house catering to this enthusiasm and, on the credit of Henry Huntington, hired the architect Arthur Benton to build him a shiny 84-room hotel.
This seed grew into the deservedly famous Mission Inn, a behemoth of a hotel in four wings which anchors downtown Riverside. Presidents and princes came to Riverside to stay at Miller’s desert auberge; he hosted Booker T. Washington and put a bust of him on the entryway path.
Miller installed cannons from San Juan Hill next to a cage of tropical macaws; he collected overseas treasures and prized bells, including one dated to 1247 which claims to be “the oldest bell in Christendom”. You can stay at the hotel today; when I went the halls were full of red-faced snowbirds oohing over the fine interior decoration, or otherwise lunching near trellises of jasmine. A long table behind a rampart wall hosted a family of Riversiders picking at chips and salsa in the afternoon sun.
Success begat bigger dreams for Miller – he hired Myron Hunt, fresh off the designs for the Rose Bowl and the Huntington Library, to build another wing in 1914, and yet more wings followed into the 1930s. By then, Miller had built the biggest Mission Revival building in the country, becoming the fullest exponent of the elite consensus which powered early-century Californian exceptionalism – selling a hackneyed dream of padres and open desert to Eastern travelers, enjoying monopoly rents from railroad operations, and pouring that cash into grander and grander ambitions. Miller became famous in other realms for his interest in world peace – given that he died in the interwar period, you can guess how successful he was, but he did manage to build the interesting Peace Tower on Mt Rubidoux to the city’s west as a marker of his efforts.
While railroad money powered the efforts of the turn of the century Californians, postwar California danced to the beat of other drummers. Ever-creeping real estate speculation which expanded radially from central Los Angeles to valleys east, west, south and north is the famous muscle of growth, but as a cultural matter, the establishment of the University of California system meant more for Riverside than anything else.
UC Riverside has a long prehistory but for practical purposes was birthed by the stroke of Gov. Pat Brown’s pen in 1959 – his California Master Plan for Higher Education upgraded the campus to full university status, which enrolled 5,000 students in short order. It retains a historical focus on agricultural sciences, but I was intrigued most by the photography museum it runs downtown.
At present, two floors of the main hall were devoted to the exhibit California Stories, curated from the collection of Stephen White, a long-term fixture of the SoCal photography scene who opened one of LA’s first galleries devoted to the medium in 1975. Walking through the exhibit provides a survey view of the history we’ve discussed here – California lurching from decade to decade, building what the epigraph at the hall’s entryway describes as a “regional civilization…so haphazard, so bewildering in variety, that even its most devoted protagonists could not agree on one single interpretation.”
You might learn, like I did, that Eadweard Muybridge made his famous study of horse movement only on the prompting of Leland Stanford, or that we have news photos from the lead-up to a 1933 lynching in San Jose. You’ll run into Dorothea Lange’s Depression photographs around one corner and a photo of Einstein at Caltech at another. You will, after an easy hour spent with your nose nearly touching the photos’ frames, come to the conclusion that the epigraphist was right – this is a bewildering place.
I came to Riverside looking to see if it could go round for round with the cultural delights of San Francisco or Detroit. It cannot – it awaits its own Palace of Fine Arts, its own Guardian Building. But I wouldn’t bet against the place. As today’s economic paradigm ebbs, just as others before it, another shall take its place and the endless continuous throughline of American history – movement west – will fashion more wonders to come in this sleepy city on the Santa Ana River.