Library added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 7, 1995. Listing expanded to include Farnham Martin’s Park on April 16, 1996

In the April 1927 issue of Pacific Coast Architect, the redoubtable architect Myron Hunt penned an article called “Palos Verdes – Where Bad Architecture Is Eliminated” in which he extols the virtues of planning a community with good architectural design at its core: 

ARCHITECTS have long advocated that some means should be set up to stop the 93 percent of poor stuff—badly designed, badly proportioned and off-color— that goes into our cities, with consequent building depreciation and loss, not only to the owners but particularly to surrounding neighborhoods. 

It is therefore most encouraging to find at Palos Verdes Estates an area of 3100 acres (five square miles), eventually to be 16,000 acres, where nothing can be built that does not measure up to “a reasonable decency of design and color.” The protective restrictions for this great suburb of Los Angeles have from the beginning required that nothing be built, and that no color be put on or changed, until approved in writing by an Art Jury, which is permanently established…

After three years’ service as chairman of this Art Jury or Architectural Board of Review, as it might be called, I am glad to say that I think we have solved one of the greatest of our modern problems in cities…The design of many of the houses in the district are, as must be expected, distinctly better than others, and many of them are far and away above what would ordinarily be termed “good architecture.” 

–Myron Hunt, Pacific Coast Architect, April 1927

Hunt was a fine choice to helm the Palos Verdes Art Jury. He was a respected leader, a former President of the Southern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and had designed major LA-area projects like the Mount Wilson Observatory, Throop Polytechnic Institute (later known as CalTech), Occidental College and the Huntington Library, in addition to numerous residences for wealthy patrons. Just a month before the Art Jury held its first meeting in November 1922, another one of Hunt’s designs, the Rose Bowl, opened in Pasadena.

It was largely due to Hunt’s influence that the Art Jury selected a Mediterranean style as the design language that would define the buildings in the Palos Verdes Estates subdivision, once it opened for development in 1923. They wrote a book of “protective restrictions” that outlined the stylistic do’s and don’ts for new buildings on the peninsula. On the “do” list: light colors, adobe and stucco walls, low-pitched roofs topped with tiles. It’s a look that still dominates the area today. 

While he served as President of the Art Jury for 17 years, Hunt designed just two buildings in Palos Verdes himself: the home of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (more on him later), and the library just south of Malaga Cove Plaza.

A Library on a Hill

The Malaga Cove Plaza Library grew out of a small one-room library housed in the Gardner Building, the first commercial structure in Palos Verdes Estates. It was open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 5 pm, and operated as a branch of the LA County Library system. By early 1928, locals petitioned for their own library district. A bond issue was passed to raise the $60,000 required to build it (about $1 million in today’s money), and by 1929 Palos Verdes had a permanent library building in the works. 

When it opened on June 3, 1930, the Malaga Cove Plaza Library became the first dedicated library building in Palos Verdes. Originally it was known as the Palos Verdes Public Library and Art Gallery, and was only renamed in 1966, after the district built a larger facility in the middle of the peninsula designed by A. Quincy Jones & Frederick Emmons. Clearly this Art Jury knew what it was doing.

The Malaga Cove Plaza Library is ingeniously fitted into its steep lot. Viewed from its main entrance in the adjoining park, it reads as two stories, including a squat loggia around the tower-like top floor. From the streetside though, you can see it in its full five-story glory. With its plain cream-colored stucco walls, augmented by a wraparound balcony with a wrought-iron railing and scalloped corbels, the exterior presents like a combo of Spanish hacienda and Italian villa. It’s refined, unfussy, with most of the visual pizzazz coming from the stone terraces and fountains that usher you upwards toward the entrance. 

The inside reflects a Mediterranean revival vibe as well. The main reading room contains a high ceiling with exposed wood beams; walnut furniture populates the library, much of it based on Italian antiques owned by the Vanderlips (owners of the Palos Verdes peninsula), and hand-carved by a local woodworker named Meredith Watts. My favorite detail is the fireplace in what’s now the children’s section at the south end of the reading room. It’s surrounded by these charming built-in pine doors, stained dark brown.

Move away from the main reading room and you’ll encounter pleasant reading nooks, and cozy rooms lit by natural light. Especially wonderful is the tower room, capped by an angled ceiling of exposed beams, where Watts used to hold wood carving classes. Now it’s a study and reading room (a sign specifies “For quiet, individual study only”), with a killer view of the Pacific Ocean on the loggia just outside. 

Everyone loved this library from the beginning. According to the Art Jury’s minutes from April 10, 1929, “architect Myron Hunt was given felicitations of the Jury on the very lovely tower and simple design.” Southwest Builder and Contractor praised “the absence of stereotyped library ideas in the design,” and in their guidebook Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide, David Gebhard and Robert Winter describe it as “One of Hunt’s most successful designs.” 

The library was intended as more than just a repository of books. Back in the day, the large community space on the bottom floor was used for art exhibits, plus lectures, concerts, club meetings and formal dinners thrown by the Art Jury. And its role today is much the same. When I visited in summer 2022, they were about to open an exhibit of coastal landscape paintings in the gallery, and a book sale was winding down. 

In 2017 the Malaga Cove Plaza Library completed an 11-year upgrade. A lot of it was infrastructure-related – the electrical system was overhauled, new computer carrels were added, an updated alarm system and energy-efficient lighting were installed. None of this altered the library’s look or layout. In fact many of the updates moved the library closer to its original appearance. Floors were restored, the ceiling and beams of the reading room were repainted to match old pictures (the hanging pendant lamps were replaced with replicas). Most dramatically, in the tower room, a low ceiling was removed to uncover those original wood beams. 

Aside from a new room added to the south end of the main floor in 1962, nothing substantial has changed about this library since it opened its doors in 1930. Which seems about right for an institution that has an entire wing devoted to Palos Verdes history (staffed by the very knowledgeable and helpful archivist/local history librarian, Monique Sugimoto). The stewards of this library are clearly proud of what they’ve got. 

Farnham Martin’s Park

Anyone who enters Malaga Cove Plaza Library through its main west entrance will have the pleasure of tramping through Farnham Martin’s Park. If you start from the main street bordering the library, you get the added bonus of a very dramatic entrance. Walk past the wall of stacked Palos Verdes stone, punctured by three canals spouting water into a basin, then up a staircase to a stone plaza surrounding a magnificent tiered fountain, stacked in concentric circles like an aquatic wedding cake. Walk up another set of stone steps and you’re greeted with the gentle sloping paradise of the park. Turn back around, and you’ve got a stunning view of the fountain’s top tier, framed against the blue sky, with greenery and red-tiled roofs expanding towards the Pacific Ocean on the horizon. 

Farnham Martin’s Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the heir to perhaps the most trusted landscaping firm in America at the time. His father designed Central Park in New York, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, the landscaping surrounding the US Capitol building, the fairgrounds for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and so many more. 

When the peninsula’s owner Frank Vanderlip was conceiving of his new “Palos Verdes Project” in the 1910s, the Olmsted Brothers were a shoe-in to map out how the land would be used. They had worked with him before, landscaping the 18-acre grounds next to Frank Vanderlip’s huge estate on the Hudson River in New York. Once WWI ended, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. moved to Palos Verdes and spent nine years living and working there. He planned out the 3000+ acres that would become Palos Verdes Estates, including 849 acres reserved for parkland – parks, golf courses, playground sites, pathways and intentionally undeveloped areas. Much of the progress on Olmsted’s plans was halted when the Great Depression hit. But Farnham Martin’s Park was completed in 1928, and continues to hold court as the one formally landscaped park in the city.

The park was named after Farnham Battles Martin, an employee of the Olmsted firm and the first superintendent of parks for the Palos Verdes Homes Association. If FLO Jr. was the ideas man, Martin was the guy that carried out those ideas, supervising plantings and landscaping at many of the outdoor locales around the peninsula. Martin died in a traffic accident in late 1928, and the park was dedicated to his memory in January 1929. 

According to the site’s NRHP nomination form, many of the Olmsted trademarks are evident in this small park: how the design is adjusted to fit the topography; how the plantings create natural scenery, as opposed to just ornamental beauty; the double sets of stone steps, which you see in many Olmsted parks; a single formal aspect (in this case the stone fountain), as if to add a transition space between the human-centric city and the naturalistic setting of the park proper; an air of subtle romance to the main shapes (this one is an ellipse); and a keen understanding of the social function of a park, reflected in its openness, its lack of a boundary and the many parts of it that can be used for community events. 

A final note – for 15 years, water wasn’t flowing through the park’s magnificent fountain due to electrical and safety issues. In October 2021 the Palos Verdes Estates Foundation began a fundraising drive to fix up the fountain. Work began the next month to sandblast paint off the nearly century-old stones and bring the whole thing up to code. Things move fast when there’s money to spend on repair work. When I visited in June of 2022, the water was flowing and it looked like it could have been installed yesterday. With recent restoration completed on both the Malaga Cove Plaza Library and the fountain that leads up to it, it’s a good time to visit.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Donnelly, Cindy: “The Farnham Martin Fountain: Yesterday and Today” (Palos Verdes Magazine, March 11, 2022)

+ Gebhard, David and Robert Winter: Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1994)

+ Gnerre, Sam: “Legislating Beauty: The Palos Verdes Art Jury” (South Bay Daily Breeze, April 29, 2017)

+ Hunt, Myron: “Palos Verdes: Where Bad Architecture is Eliminated” (Pacific Coast Architect 31, April 1927 – accessed via US Modernist)

+ Hinchliffe, Ann: Malaga Cove Plaza Library & Art Gallery’s NRHP nomination form

+ Lamar, Alice: Malaga Cove Plaza Library & Art Gallery | Farnham Martin’s Park (boundary increase) NRHP nomination form

+ “Malaga Cove Restoration” (pvldfriends.org)

+ “PVLD History” (PVLD.org)

+ “Why Palos Verdes Estates: A paradise on the peninsula with a vibrant history.” (Palos Verdes Homes Association website)