This is one of five historic homes I selected for a “Trail” guide I curated for Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles. Download the entire “Let’s Hit the Trail Kids!” guide for free here.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 6, 1971

I promised myself that I would focus this post on the history of the Lummis House, as opposed to Charles Lummis the man. With a character as colorful as Lummis, with his corduroy suit and multiple near-death experiences and Forrest Gumpian proximity to many of the most consequential events and people of his time, there’s always the temptation to recount his story and call it a day. He already has biographies and museum exhibits dedicated to his life and work, a festival named after him, even a song written about him. Besides, the Lummis House is a trip, a playful structure of stone and cement and wood and telephone poles (really) that’s utterly unlike anything else in Los Angeles, even if it’s rooted in many things that are quintessential Los Angeles. There’s plenty to discuss about who designed and built it, and how, and what to make of it architecturally, and the historical context for its existence. So – let’s ignore the man, and just talk about his house, cool?

Ehhh…upon reflection, maybe I should reconsider. The problem with leaving out Lummis’s story from any discussion of this house is that its uniqueness is a direct reflection of the man, his quirks and his history. So how about this, I’ll give you just enough of his background to give a sense of why the Lummis House’s idiosyncratic design makes perfect sense. Deal? Deal.

The Tramp 

“A man’s home should be part of himself. It should be enduring, and fit to endure…Something at least of the owner’s individuality (presuming him to have some) should inform it. Some activity of his head, heart, and hands should make it really his…The more of himself he can put into it, the better for it and for him…Every one knows that the thing he has made is more genuinely his than the thing he has bought.”

-Charles Lummis, as quoted by Alice J. Stevens in Harper’s Weekly, September 1, 1900

When Lummis gave the above quote to Harper’s Weekly, he was hard at work on his home, six years after he bought the land and 15 after the picaresque adventure that brought him to LA. Lummis had arrived in 1885, a Harvard dropout who had abandoned a promising poetry career to walk from Cincinnati to Los Angeles on foot, sending dispatches back to a small paper in Chillicothe, Ohio along the way. While he was tramping through the southwest, Lummis fell in love with the landscape and the indigenous people of New Mexico. 

The day after he arrived in Los Angeles, Lummis began a job as City Editor for the Los Angeles Times, reporting to its publisher/taskmaster, Harrison Gray Otis. He worked nonstop from 1885-1887, then suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. He moved to New Mexico by himself to recuperate, and in 1888 he settled in the Isleta Pueblo Indian reservation in central New Mexico. This was a formative period in Lummis’s life. He met his second wife Eva (and divorced his first, Dorothea) while in Isleta, and met the archaeologist Adolph Bandelier, who would take him on a 10-month sojourn to Peru from 1893-4.

Lummis’s time with the Native Americans of Isleta Pueblo inspired his writing, photography and ethnographic studies, and planted the seeds for his creation of the Southwest Museum in 1907. His stay in Isleta also forged in Lummis a sympathy for indigenous communities. You could certainly argue – and plenty have – that Lummis held a romanticized view of indigenous peoples, and that he trumped up his own ethnological “expertise” as a way of attracting new emigrants and capital to Los Angeles. But it is also true that Lummis pursued legit social reforms that positively impacted Native American communities. For example his advocacy helped to repeal a policy that allowed the government to send Native American kids to distant boarding schools for cultural assimilation, without their parents’ consent, and without being able to return home on school breaks.

By the end of 1894, a broke but at least no-longer-paralyzed Lummis was back in LA with Eva and their young daughter Turbese. Eva was pregnant again with their second child, and Lummis had landed an editor gig at the Land of Sunshine magazine, a regional rag devoted to California boosterism. New job, growing family – now all he needed was a place to call home.

El Alisal

Around 1895, Lummis bought three acres of land bordering the dry riverbed known as the Arroyo Seco, midway between Pasadena and downtown LA. He named it El Alisal, or “the sycamore,” after the grove of sycamore trees on the lot. Early on Lummis planted eucalyptus and fruit trees, and built a simple four-room “camp home” for the family to live in while he worked on the main house. That project would take up the better part of the next 15 years.  

From the beginning, Lummis envisioned this as a different kind of house. Its facade was made of boulders piled up and joined with concrete. The floors were all concrete, to make them easier to clean (“You can turn the hose on floors, walls and ceiling. Housecleaning has no terrors here,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1899). The entire 18-room compound surrounds a patio, such that every room faced the outdoors on two sides – in other words, no purely interior spaces. 

Lummis said he wanted “a house that will stand a thousand years.” And certainly the appearance of this place suggests solidity, ancientness even. The facade, with its rounded corner turret, recalls the medieval castles of France; that fortress-like double door could probably withstand a battering ram. There’s a dash of the Spanish missions in the arched windows and whimsical bell tower on the western edge, perhaps not surprising coming from the man that co-founded the California Landmarks Club in 1895 to preserve the crumbling missions (keep in mind El Alisal was built decades before “mission revival” style buildings caught on in LA). There’s also a clear sense of El Alisal’s rootedness to the land it occupies. The rocks that dominate the exterior were all sourced on-site or from the nearby riverbed, giving it a visual and spiritual connection to its surroundings.

The inside of El Alisal is just as eclectic. Smooth stucco walls rise up to tall ceilings with exposed rafters, a combo that’s mother’s milk to every Spanish mission enthusiast (though the Spaniards never used telephone poles for roof beams, as Lummis did). There are echoes of pueblo architecture styles inside too, especially in the kitchen and dining room, where rounded corners and decorative corbels recall the kind of rooms that Lummis must have encountered in Isleta.

Beyond the mishmash of traceable architectural styles, there are innumerable details at El Alisal that couldn’t have been dreamed up by anyone else. Grotesque mascarons (perhaps depicting mythic Incan figures? Hard to tell) are carved into the edge of a fireplace mantel, right above a quote scrawled into the relief sculpture that forms the fireplace (“A casual savage struck two stones together–now man is warmed against the weather”). There’s an exterior door to nowhere on the second floor (the intended balcony was never built) that has a small meteorite serving as its doorknob. My favorite Lummisism by far is the complex network of window frames in the sitting room, embedded with transparent photographic negatives that Lummis took during his travels. They’ve only grown more powerful over time, as light and weather have inscribed almost decorative splotches on the negatives. 

Working on a Building

As if walking halfway across the country weren’t enough of a herculean feat, Lummis built much of El Alisal himself, even sawing and carving doors and window frames by hand. He had invaluable help from a steady stream of children from Isleta Pueblo who would stay with the Lummises, working on the house 6-8 hours a day before returning to their tribes after a year. “We do not keep servants,” Lummis told the San Francisco Chronicle of the arrangement. “These children are of my family while here.” 

As for the design: there’s no doubt that Lummis himself spearheaded the creative vision of El Alisal. It’s just too funky, too personal to believe otherwise. But Lummis did have ties to architects that may have helped with the more technical aspects of the design. Historian Jane Apostol suggests that Lummis’s good buddy Sumner Hunt, who founded the California Landmarks Club with him, may have contributed to aspects of the design; Hunt would later design the Southwest Museum for Lummis on Mount Washington. According to the Lummis House’s docent Christian Rodriguez, the young Isleta Pueblo Native Americans who helped to build El Alisal deserve design credit too, especially for the portions that show the clear influence of pueblo-style architecture.

The Arroyo

In many ways, El Alisal exists outside of time. It references so many architectural styles of the past, but they’re all connected through the backbone of Lummis’s lived experience, which still pokes through every square foot, over a century later. At the same time, the house’s hand-hewn character was right in line with the burgeoning arts and crafts movement that was gaining steam in southern California around the turn of the century. Artisans of all stripes, from architects to painters, woodworkers to stained glass makers, were returning to an older form of craftsmanship. They emphasized hand-crafted products using traditional techniques, quality materials, and an emphasis on nature and our connection with it – a conscious response to the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the day. 

Many of the arts and crafts adherents lived and worked in the Arroyo Seco in the early 1900s, and El Alisal became an important social hub for bohemians from LA and beyond. When Lummis wasn’t building or writing, he was throwing one of his “noises” – all-night parties full of food and music and boisterous conversation that attracted an eclectic assortment of artists and thinkers and influential folks from all walks of life (plus at least one camel driver). John Muir and John Philip Sousa, Will Rogers and Sarah Bernhardt, Helena Modjeska and Carl Sandburg – all of them signed his guestbook as did many more. Some guests even stuck around for extended periods, as long as they didn’t wear out their welcome, like this guy did.

El Alisal Today 

When Lummis was living there, El Alisal’s surfaces were chock-a-block with Native American rugs and pottery. Photographs hung everywhere and books covered the walls. And between Lummis’s wife and four kids, the Isleta Pueblo youths that were often there to help him build, the parade of secretaries (one of whom he later married, after a protracted divorce from Eva) and the lingering house guests, quiet and solitude must have been rare commodities at El Alisal. 

These days it’s a much quieter place, despite the freeway that has run through the Arroyo Seco since 1940. The Historical Society of Southern California ended a 50-year occupancy of the house in 2015, and since then the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation & Parks has run it as a house museum and maintains the surrounding garden of native plants. The relative calm means that you can ramble through the grounds at your own pace, and appreciate El Alisal however makes sense to you: as an architectural oddity, as a piece of the fascinating history of Charles Lummis, as a prism for understanding turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. Or all of the above. 

The Lummis House is open Saturdays & Sundays from 10am to 3pm. Admission is free. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Lummis House’s NRHP application 

+Discovery Center: Lummis Home (Friends of Residential Treasures: LA)

+Boba, Eleanor: “A Historic House through the Years: El Alisal”  (Photo Friends, 2014)

+Deverell, William: “Who Was Charles Fletcher Lummis?” (KCET, 2016)

+Meares, Hadley: “Lummis House: Where Highland Park’s Herald of the Southwest Reigned over his Kingdom” (KCET, 2015)

+Simpson, Kelly: “What’s on a Mixtape from Highland Park in 1905?” (KCET, 2012)

+Spitzzeri, Paul R.: “No Place Like Home: Charles F. Lummis’ El Alisal in “Harper’s Weekly,” 1 September 1900.” (The Homestead Blog, 2022)

+Thompson, Mark: The Life and Times of Charles Lummis (1859-1928) (charleslummis.com, 2001)

+“El Alisal: Built Stone by Stone” (KCET, 2011)

+Lummis House (California’s Gold with Huell Howser, KCET) +Down the Line: Lummis’ Building (Los Angeles Herald, 1898, via NewspaperArchive.com)