Southern California Architectural History

The Auto Club of Southern California was founded in 1900 by a group of automobile enthusiasts with a mission of providing member services such as organizing social activities, sponsoring car races and lobbying to spend public money to improve roads. The house organ, Touring Topics, began publishing in February of 1909. (see premiere issue below from the Auto Club web site). The Club began installing sign posts to aid motorists and creating maps to guide tourists to the area’s beaches, mountains and desert resorts.

By 1920, Touring Topics had become the West Coast’s most popular periodical for motorists and a major force in local and regional issues impacting the driving public. Southern California’s dramatic growth in the 1920s and the editorship of Phil Townsend Hanna beginning in 1926 took the magazine in a new direction.

Hanna was born on August 24, 1896 in Los Angeles. He attended University of Southern California and worked for the  Los Angeles Tribune from 1915-16, was night city editor, then night editor for the Los Angeles Times from 1917-1919, manager of the Los Angeles Bureau of the Associated Press from 1919-20, editor of Western Highway Builder for six years beginning in 1920, and art editor in 1922 and editor in 1926 of Touring Topics (Westways after 1934).

Hanna was a regular at the salons, exhibits, and discussions centered around Jake Zeitlin’s bookstore and gallery in downtown Los Angeles (see below). He was also a prominent member of the  Zamorano Club, producers of the now legendary California rare book list, The Zamorano 80.

Once Hanna became editor he started commissioning works from among his literary and artistic friends from the Zeitlin circle including Paul Landacre, Edward Weston, Henrietta Shore, Will Connell, Grace Marion Brown and many others. During his 30 year tenure as a successful arbiter of West Coast taste, the magazine became culturally important in it’s own right and was deemed a reliable venue for art, photography, literature, food and wine while still effectively promoting automotive tourism.

LA’S Early Moderns by Victoria Dailey, Natalie Shivers and Michael Dawson, Balcony Press, 2003 (from my collection)

Victoria Dailey’s essay, “Art, Naturally Modern” from the above highly recommended LA’S Early Moderns covers this period of LA’s rich avant-garde past very effectively. She provides an excellent comparison of Touring Topics and California Arts & Architecture and both publication’s importance in bringing modernism in all its forms to a broader audience in 1930s Los Angeles.

Hanna commissioned painters such as Evylena Nunn Miller (see above), Conrad Buff, Carl Oscar Borg, Grace Marion Brown, Alson Clark, Millard Sheets, Henrietta Shore (see below), Alvin Lustig and Maynard Dixon (see later below) to produce Western landscapes for the cover in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Shore, a close friend and confidant of Edward Weston who advised her to travel to Mexico for inspiration and attracted her to move to Carmel in 1930 shortly after his move there, had her first group of lithographs exhibited at Zeitlin’s Bookshop in September 1928.

Photographer unknown (Edward Weston?), Henrietta Shore painting a Cypress Root, Carmel, n.d. Published in Touring Topics, December, 1929, p. 9. (From Henrietta Shore: A Retrospective Exhibition: 1900-1963, Monterey Peninsula Museum of Modern Art, 1986, p. 30).

Henrietta Shore, California Cacti, Touring Topics, December 1929. (From L.A.’s Early Moderns, p. 57.

Maynard Dixon was called upon to do all twelve covers of Touring Topics in 1930 with a theme of transportation in the American West. Hanna more than likely decided on hiring Dixon after viewing his exhibition at Zeitlin’s bookshop gallery in January of 1929. Dixon’s series for Touring Topics spanned centuries in a single year, starting with January’s Indian Burden-Bearers to December’s The Airplane. See the June cover with Pony Express below. Hanna’s sponsorship was crucial to Dixon during a slow period in his sales. The covers commission enabled Dixon and his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange, to relocate to Taos, where he produced some of his now famous images of American Indians. For more on the Hanna-Dixon commissions see From Packhorse to Packard by John Ott.

Henrietta Shoreby Merle Armitage, E. Weyhe, New York, 1933. (From Designed Books by Merle Armitage, E. Weyhe, New York, 1938, p. 116).

Will Connell portrait of Merle Armitage and Jake Zeitlin, ca. 1930. (From L.A.’s Early Moderns, p. 45).

The Daybooks of Edward Weston, II Californiaedited by Nancy Newhall, Aperture, 1973. (From my collection).

 

Hanna changed the name of the magazine from Touring Topics to Westways in 1934, the same year he hired UCLA librarian Lawrence Clark Powell to start writing regular book reviews. (see Westways masthead below). In February 1935, the magazine ran an essay by a young M.F.K. Fisher, the first published work of a woman who would go on to become one of the country’s most influential food writers.

Barbara Lamont, author of the above article, “California’s Castles in the Air” featuring a Richard Neutra rendering of a proposed penthouse in the Hollywood Hills was a frequent contributor to Touring Topics and Westways on architecture and housing during the 1930s. (See my related Neutra’s “Skyline Apartments” Penthouse, Westways, 1934).

 

Paul Landacre, ca. 1934. Courtesy Willam Powell Clark Memorial Library. (From L.A.’s Early Moderns, p. 88).

Paul Landacre was an intimate of the Jake Zeitlin circle which included Carey McWilliams, photographers Edward Weston and Will Connell, architect Lloyd Wright, and writer-librarian Lawrence Clark Powell and Touring Topics editor Phil Townsend Hanna. Landacre had one of his first public showings in 1930 at Zeitlin’s bookshop, which at the time was one of the earliest venues in Los Angeles exhibiting modernist works. (See earlier).

From 1934 to 1939, Hanna hired another personality from the Zeitlin crowd, Carey McWilliams, a young lawyer and journalist, to write the new Tides West column. (see masthead below). For a nice piece on this see Tides West: The Coming of Age of Carey McWilliams by historian Kevin Starr at the following link.

Of course, McWilliams would go on to pen Southern California Country: An Island in the Land after cutting his literary teeth under Hanna’s editorship at Westways. McWilliams’ opus is one of the most cited books on Southern California written to date and is still a wonderful read. I finally got around to reading it a couple months ago and certainly recommend it to anyone with an interest in our rich and colorful history. The first edition in collectible dust jacket is very hard to find. McWilliams acknowledges the mentorship he received from both Hanna and Zeitlin in the foreword.

Even though Hanna paid increasing attention to the arts and literature, he continued to promote automotive tourism with photo essays of the Southwest and Mexico. Writers and prominent photographers, including Will Connell, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston documented their journeys for Westways. Together they created a historical photographic record of California. Hanna commissioned Weston, for example, to do a 21-part series, Seeing California with Edward Weston which was published in 1937 and 1938 (see below). Hanna paid Weston $50.00 per month for 8-10 photos while he was also on a $2,000 Guggenheim fellowship. The fee made possible the purchase of a new Ford V-8 sedan for the trip. Reenactment footage of Edward and Charis Wilson on their Guggenheim travels can be seen in the film on Edward and Charis’s relationship, Eloquent Nude: The Love and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson.

Seeing California with Edward Weston, a collection of the 21 Westwaysarticles from the Guggenheim travels, was published in 1939 by the Automobile Club of Southern California. (See below). (See my related “The Sands of Time: The Oceano Dunes and the Westons“).

Seeing California with Edward Weston, Automobile Club of Southern California, 1939

In the late 1930s Hanna hired Jack Courtney to write a monthly housing column, In and About the House.  Below we see the first published appearance of the C. H. Edwards House designed by Gregory Ain, another one of LA’S Early Moderns, who also worked on a house for Galka Scheyer while in the employ of Richard Neutra, both of whom were also in the Zetlin crowd. Scheyer commissioned Ain to design the second story addition to her house after he left the Neutra office and started out on his own.

  Farewells to Phil Townsend Hanna, by Members of the Sunset Club, the Wine and Food Society, and the Zamorano Club of Los Angeles, 1957. (From my collection).

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