Added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 23, 2013

What makes a building historically significant? According to the NRHP nomination form for the Great Hall/Long Hall in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park, the site’s two claims to historic-ness are: 1) the story it tells of how LA County and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) worked together to build infrastructure during the Great Depression and 2) how it’s a nice example of a public building in the Spanish colonial revival style. In other words, Great Hall/Long Hall was added to the NRHP because of how and why it was funded and constructed. 

No doubt, all that is meaningful when we consider the flow of LA’s architectural and civic development. But the human aspects of Great Hall/Long Hall’s history – how it’s been used by various communities over time – is way more interesting, and once enough years have passed, I’d wager they’ll become just as significant to future generations of historians. Like how this building has become a gathering space for LA’s Russian immigrant community; how the LA Audubon Society operated out of the Great Hall for decades; and especially how it provided a home for ACT UP, a group of grassroots LGBTQ activists who played a pivotal role in shaping the federal government’s response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.

LIGHTNING SPEED, INCREDIBLY REDUCTIVE PRIMER ON THE WPA

The Works Progress Administration was set up in 1935 as part of the New Deal program, a cornerstone of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s tenure as President of the United States. The goal of the WPA was to get the American economy back on track by giving paid jobs to millions of people left unemployed by the Great Depression. The federal government sponsored a staggering range of projects through the WPA and its subsidiaries, from library expansions to sanitation systems to support for the arts. But the bulk of the people employed by the WPA were engaged in building public infrastructure – roads, bridges, schools, parks, airports, etc.

In the years leading up to Great Hall/Long Hall’s construction in 1938, Los Angeles had experienced a huge influx of people migrating west, looking for work. There simply weren’t enough recreation options to satisfy the bulging population. So when WPA funding became available, the LA County Board of Supervisors spent a lot of it on converting underused land into park space. By 1939, over 30 new WPA-funded rec centers were either open, or on their way in Los Angeles. 

Great Hall/Long Hall was one of them. The federal government allocated $22,000 to turning four acres of open land into a proper park, with a clubhouse at its center. The County pitched in the remainder of the $65,000 it cost to finish the job. This dual-pronged approach was pretty typical of how the WPA worked on a local level: the feds split costs with a local “sponsor” (in this case LA County), and the sponsor would hire unemployed workers from the area and oversee the completion of the project. This particular project was under the supervision of LA County’s Department of Recreation, Camps and Playgrounds.

THE BUILDING

When it opened, Great Hall/Long Hall was named the “Community Clubhouse,” and intended as a multi-purpose recreational center. On the west was a large auditorium with a raised stage and space for socializing (Great Hall), plus a kitchen, dressing rooms, an office and a cloak room. On the south was the room now known as Long Hall, which was used as a library and game room. There were restrooms installed on the northeast; these three distinct segments surround an open-air patio, which is now covered with (non-original) tile. 

The building was designed in Spanish colonial revival style by LA County’s chief architect, Edward C.N. Brett. While there was no lack of stucco-walled, red tile-roofed, cast iron lighting fixture-bedecked buildings in LA at the time, the style wasn’t nearly as à la mode as it had been 10 years earlier. Spanish colonial was also pretty atypical of WPA projects. Many of them were designed in a streamlined art deco style, distinct enough that some historians call it “WPA Moderne.” Brett was purposeful in his choices though. The look of the Community Clubhouse offered an aesthetic connection to the long history of the land on which it stood. 

CAPTAIN PLUMMER

The four acres that house Plummer Park and the Great Hall/Long Hall represented the last bit of undeveloped land on a 160-acre parcel owned by Eugenio “Captain” Plummer, an old-timer whose family were among the earliest Anglos to settle in the area, back when much of what we call Los Angeles was undeveloped ranchland and citrus groves. Originally, their parcel was part of the 4,439-acre Rancho La Brea, a Mexican land grant dating back to 1828. The Plummers acquired it from Señora Francisca Perez in 1877, built a house and barn, and planted crops to sell to other Angelenos. 

While Captain Plummer was not Hispanic himself, he grew up in LA at a time when the majority of residents were. California had become a state less than 30 years before the Plummers moved in, and many of his friends and neighbors would have remembered what Southern California was like under Mexican rule. In his day-to-day, Plummer would have encountered many of the red-tiled adobes and ranchos that inspired the look of the Great Hall/Long Hall. 

Captain Plummer was a living connection to the quaint myth of “Old California” that charmed the pants off of new Angelenos in the early 20th century. But Plummer also lived long enough to see the city change dramatically, from Mexican to Anglo, from a sparse patchwork of massive properties to a growing metropolis. Over the decades, Plummer sold off portions of his land until only a few acres were left. In spring 1937, he leased the remaining land to LA County, then sold it outright later that year when he risked foreclosure. As a condition of the sale, the County let Plummer stay on the property, in his old house. He was named the park’s “historical guide” at the Community Clubhouse’s official dedication on December 4, 1938. At that same ceremony, Plummer lit the first fire in the Great Hall’s fireplace.

Eugenio Plummer died in 1943 at the age of 91. The house where he lived for 65 years remained in Plummer Park until 1983, when it was moved to the Leonis Adobe property in Calabasas. You can go visit it today. 

ACTIVISTS, RUSSIANS AND BIRD WATCHERS

Since it first opened, the Community Clubhouse has been used nearly continuously by local organizations and community groups. The bird-loving Audubon Society of Los Angeles had its main offices in the Great Hall from 1984 (same year that West Hollywood incorporated as a city, and took over the park from LA County) through 2011, after four decades operating out of the Plummer House. The Long Hall was home to West Hollywood’s Russian Library, serving a large Russian-speaking population that the City of West Hollywood calls “the most concentrated single Russian-speaking region in [the] US outside of New York.”

But perhaps Great Hall/Long Hall’s most impactful phase was between 1987 through 1996, when the LA chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) held regular meetings there to raise awareness about the ballooning HIV/AIDS crisis which was disproportionately affecting the queer community. 

West Hollywood was (and continues to be) a center for the LGBTQ community in Los Angeles, and Plummer Park, right off a bus line, was a perfect place for them to congregate and strategize. Great Hall is where ACT UP planned actions at the Federal Building in Westwood to protest the government’s AIDS drug policies; where they organized a “die-in” at Los Angeles County Hospital, which eventually led to the creation of a unit specifically for AIDS patients. Through publicity campaigns and non-violent protests, ACT UP was able to compel the government to take the AIDS crisis more seriously in the crucial early years of the epidemic. On a national level, ACT UP convinced the FDA to adopt a faster model for experimental drug trials, and helped to expand access to HIV treatment among women and prisoners. 

Given the multiple layers of history embedded in Great Hall/Long Hall, I was surprised to learn that the City of West Hollywood considered demolishing it in 2011, as part of a $41-million redevelopment of Plummer Park. The new space would have added an underground parking garage, and left open space where the Great Hall/Long Hall once stood. Those plans were scuttled after an outcry from the community and the loss of redevelopment funds. Even so, in April 2013 the West Hollywood City Council voted 4-1 to oppose the building’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, on the grounds that NRHP status would prevent them from demolishing the building in the future. Which isn’t really how NRHP designations work, but ya know…I can breathe a little more calmly, knowing the decision wasn’t up to the WeHo City Council anyway. 

10 years later, it’s still unclear what’s going to happen to this historic building. Demolition? Renovation? Adaptive reuse? Who knows? In the meantime, I’m grateful it still exists. There’s so much to unpack at this one.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Branson-Potts, Hailey: “L.A. Audubon Society booted from its park perch” (Los Angeles Time, December 20, 2011)

+ Branson-Potts, Hailey: “West Hollywood neighbors strive to ‘Protect Plummer Park’” (Los Angeles Time, November 30, 2011)

+ Crimp, Douglas: “Before Occupy: How AIDS Activists Seized Control of the FDA in 1988” (The Atlantic, 2011)

+ Dominguez, Laura: “West Hollywood’s Plummer Park and Great Hall/Long Hall: Landmarks of HIV/AIDS Activism” (KCET.org, February 27, 2017)

+ Dunbar, Jennifer: Great Hall/Long Hall’s NRHP nomination form

+ “Plummer Park, Great Hall/Long Hall” (LAConservancy.org)

+ “Plummer Park, Great Hall/Long Hall: Issue Overview” (LAConservancy.org)

+ Preston, Jack: Senor Plummer: The Life and Laughter of an Old-Californian (Murray & Gee, 19943 – accessed via Google Books)

+ “The Plummer House” (leonisadobemuseum.org)

+ Waldie, DJ: “Re-Reading L.A.: ‘Señor Plummer’ from 1942” (KCET.org, April 8, 2015)