Doheny books go home to No. 8

Ned Doheny's bookplate showing No. 8, the "Ranch"
in Beverly Hills, the oil well Casiana and the family
yacht of the same name.

ESTELLE DOHENY WAS A WORLD-CLASS collector of rare books, something that may have rubbed off on her stepson, Edward L. “Ned” Doheny Jr. (1893-1929).

Ned left behind a run of collectibles printed by the Bibliophile Society that occupied a dozen feet of bookshelf in the Doheny Mansion, from the family’s first years there to Estelle Doheny’s death on October 30, 1958. In early 1959 they came to the Mount libraries’ Archives & Special Collections.

But now after months of planning they’re back in their original home of 100 years ago. To accommodate an influx of historic books in the Chalon Library, the decision was made to use Estelle’s glass-fronted bookshelves in her personal library at No. 8 Chester Place as a permanent place of honor for this collection of Doheniana.

The Boston-based Bibliophile Society was a sort of book-of-the-month club for well-to-do readers. Classics and new titles were issued in limited press runs of letterpress on handmade linen- or cotton-rag paper. The spines are almost all vellum with embossed gold, the various bindings made of leather, paper or cloth. Inside each cover is Ned’s personal bookplate, which depicts four of his five children and vignettes from the family’s history – including No. 8 itself, Edward Doheny Sr.’s first oil well and the Dohenys’ yacht, both called “Casiana.”

Estelle Doheny added her own bookplates opposite Ned's.

After Ned’s tragic death in 1929 the books remained with Estelle, who placed two of her own ex libris (from the library) plates opposite Ned’s. When the Mansion became a convent for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet shortly after Estelle's death at the age of 83, the books were given to the Mount's Charles Willard Coe Memorial Library. And there they remained for the next 56 years.

The relocation project wouldn't have happened without our excellent library volunteers Dianne Plou Schautschick ’65, Emily Deutsch Keller ’66 and Vivian Santibáñez, who did all the packing up at Chalon and shelving at Doheny. H/T to Mary Uganskis for her numerous rounds of inventorying and to Samantha Silver and Terri Fresquez of the library staff for quickly re-cataloging 139 volumes. It’s gratifying to see Ned’s books restored to their historic home.

Emily and Vivian critiquing the final arrangement.
(iPhone 6 photo by Dianne Schautschick)

Marble halls of the academe

Sr. Mary Helen Pettid, CSJ, teaches a U.S. government class in
the Pompeian Room of the Doheny Mansion, 1962.

STATELY BUILDINGS ARE, FRANKLY, A DIME A DOZEN even on utilitarian college campuses. But there is stately, and then there is spectacular.

Yesterday (Aug. 16) was the Convocation of the College, and high on the agenda was marking the 50th Anniversary of the Doheny Campus. Our colleagues in Student Affairs put together a slideshow of historic photos -- many from the College Archives -- pairing a shot from 1962 with the same view today.

The photo that got the most oohs and ahhs was the one above, which shows some of the inaugural class of Downtown Campus coeds crammed into the Pompeian Room in the Doheny Mansion. Amid the Moorish-Gothic Roman-Tiffany fantasy in marble is a prosaic blackboard and bubble-hairdo'd students on folding chairs. The lecture is on the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

In her book The Doheny Mansion: a Biography of a Home, Mary Ann Bonino '61 PhD describes the room thus:

...perhaps the most spectacular room in Los Angeles -- a breathtaking spectacle of gold, marble and colored glass, accented with bursts of Pompeian Red. A triumph of Beaux-Arts splendor, the Pompeian Room is a Mediterranean vision built in Los Angeles, the Rome of the American West.

The Pompeian Room was not original to the Doheny Mansion, built by the Posey family in 1899 and purchased by Edward L. and Estelle Doheny in 1901. It replaced a patio and was inspired by a lavish hotel ballroom the Dohenys visited in Chicago. It hosted many a prominent businessman, foreign dignitary or church official among the Doheny coterie, who dined on a mirrored table beneath the famous gold glass dome.

Sr. Mary Helen and Downtown Campus
students survey their ornate new classroom.

The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet were less interested in their spectacular new surroundings than they were in getting the Downtown Campus up and running quickly in the fall of 1962. The Pompeian wasn't the only grand salon to see the sudden influx of desks and blackboards -- classes were also held in Nos. 7 and 10, and No. 2 served as the library.

It's not known how long classes continued in the Pompeian Room, but one of the first additions to the Doheny Campus was the Classroom Building in 1965. That would suggest that students met in these rooms for at least three years before moving into modern quarters.

One has to wonder what a distraction that golden dome would have presented, at least for the first few class meetings. Did students get stiff necks staring at the ceiling?

One of the reasons for the oohs and aahs at Convocation, perhaps, is the Pompeian Room's current holy-of-holies status; most Mount students will graduate without ever seeing it. That is, unless they catch it in a movie like The Princess Diaries or one of the many films and TV shows that have been shot on location there.

Next month after the annual Mass of the Holy Spirit, the Doheny celebration will continue with tours of the Doheny Mansion. We're hoping lots of students will take advantage of them and get a firsthand look at their Pompeian treasure. And they won't be distracted by a U.S. government lecture.

Stimson House and the Mount

AFTER OUR TOUR the other day, Sister Judy Peters, CSJ, loaned us a precious record of occupancy of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in their Infant of Prague Convent, known to the public as Stimson House.

The photographic prints, included together in a spiral-bound booklet, are the work of famed architectural photographer Maynard Parker. They show the transformation of the mansion into a convent, with a new chapel and dining room with tables set for a crowd. The rooms don't evidence any sign of occupancy yet (even by the meticulous sisters), so perhaps the photos were taken to record the changes on the eve of the CSJs moving in.

The full album is available on our Facebook site. Take a look!

Stimson House/Infant of Prague has also served as a dormitory for Doheny Students, in the late 1960s and again in the early 1990s. Among the Parker photos is a room that matches up with one of our dorm photographs, including the bed frames. Those lucky students! 

A dormitory room for a pair of CSJs in 1948 ...

... is home to two fortunate Mount students almost fifty years later.

Magnificent Stimson

The Infant of Prague Convent (Stimson House),
owned by the L.A. Province of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. 
(V. McCargar photos)

WE HAD THE RARE PRIVILEGE last week of visiting Stimson House, a towering monument of early Los Angeles and since 1948 the home of some of the CSJs of L.A.

Even better, we were in the company of a trio of historians: Don Sloper, author of Los Angeles' Chester Place; Greg Fischer, a Downtown News columnist and former city planning official, and Jeffrey Malin, a business associate and friend of Greg's.

Rare pyramid-beveled glass
in the front door.

Visits to Stimson House (or the Infant of Prague Convent, as the CSJs refer to it) are rare because it is, after all, a private home. The five resident Sisters work in the downtown area, including Sister Judy Peters, principal of St. Vincent's School next door. The Sisters were kind enough to let us in for a look because Greg and Jeff are wrapping up a book about downtown building use, including the exquisite Douglas Building at Third and Spring, which was built by Thomas Douglas Stimson. Don, who helps organize the Doheny Docents, has seen the house a couple of times and came prepared with a history tour.

Stimson was a lumber baron from back East who is remembered as one of Los Angeles' foremost early developers. When he built his own home on fashionable Figueroa Street, he spared no expense nor architectural detail. The house, with its multicolored stone exterior and lush interior woodwork, would not be out of place in Chicago. A crenelated turret, on the other hand, is a little more alien in this city. But the overall effect is absolutely stunning, and that's just the outside.

Foyer woodwork. The whole house
looks like this.

The CSJs in Los Angeles received the deed to the house in 1948. According to USC and Mount legend, Countess Estelle Doheny was fed up with the antics of the USC architectural fraternity that occupied the historic home. (A section of parquetry flooring in the foyer was damaged by a pogo stick.) She purchased it out from under the frat boys and gave it to the Sisters. At one time there were a couple dozen nuns in residence, and in the early 1990s Stimson House/Infant of Prague served as a dormitory for Doheny Campus students.

The home has been beautifully maintained by the CSJs, who had extensive work done in the 1990s under the direction of Sister Jill Napier, CSJ. One of the many unusual features of the home is the graceful woodwork in the servants' quarters -- something wealthy homeowners typically didn't bother with. 

Sister Judy told me that she and the other occupants are aware that they are living in a national treasure. "We know this is special," she said. "We're thankful every day that we get to live here." 

We're thankful, too, that Mount St. Mary's College has such wonderful neighbors. If you'd like to see a few more pictures from our visit to Stimson House, consider connecting with us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/MSMUArchives.

The wraparound porch on the southeast corner of the first floor. 
Even the glass is curved. (V. McCargar photo)

'Reimagining' the Doheny Estate

Blanche Seaver gets the facts about the planned redevelopment of Chester Place
from Cardinal McIntyre as Sisters Rebecca Doan and Josephine Feeley look on. May 21, 1965.

TAKING A SHORT BREAK from the digitization project, we're starting to work on the 50th anniversary of the Doheny Campus, which opened to Associate of Arts students as the "Downtown Campus" in September, 1962. The planning committee has lots of good ideas for marking the date.

The campus' antecedents make for a fascinating story. The CSJs had a long history, starting in the 1940s, of living and working on the Chester Place estate, even in Countess Estelle Doheny's lifetime. But when the property went to the L.A. Archdiocese on her death October 30, 1958, the problem of what to do with it became a thorny one for then-Cardinal James Francis McIntyre. After much study and discussion his Eminence talked the CSJs into taking it and opening some form of educational facility.

We move ahead a few years to a proposed major redevelopment of the Downtown Campus. In those days of the Mercury Astronauts and Cold War, the thinking was that students wouldn't want to attend classes in old and somewhat dilapidated Victorian homes. (The upkeep wasn't nearly as pristine as it is today.)

The Cardinal brought in his favorite architects, the firm of Barker & Ott, which had built most of the Chalon Campus and a great deal of L.A.'s "Catholic infrastructure" as well. While the architects developed their master plan, Sister Rebecca Doan, Mount president, launched an ambitious $10 million fundraising campaign (about $70 million in today's dollars), a portion of which would go to the redevelopment of Chester Place. The campaign was branded, tellingly, the SPACE Program.

Ground was broken for what is now Building 4 on the Feast of the Epiphany, 1965. A few months later, on May 21, the completed master plan was unveiled to College benefactors at a reception held in the Doheny Mansion.

Seen today, the architects' drawings are a shock: Gone are the graceful homes 1, 2, 7, and 10, replaced by the up-to-date academic architecture prevalent at the time. Only No. 8, the Doheny Mansion itself, remains as a small, ornate island in a sea of modernity.

Fortunately, the master plan was never carried out. It's not at all clear why not. Did fundraising fall short? Or did someone argue that the buildings needed to be preserved? While the latter seems plausible to us now, it's far from certain that the CSJs and the Mount signed up for architectural preservation. They had a mandate -- go into the neighborhood and teach -- and a bunch of antique firetraps wasn't necessarily in the program.

An old contact sheet turned up this week that provides another clue. (The negatives, alas, are gone.) Dated the day of the unveiling reception, the ten frames show Cardinal McIntyre, Sister Rebecca, and Mother Josephine Feeley, L.A. Provincial, with a most prominent benefactor -- Blanche E. Seaver.  McIntyre is explaining the architectural rendering to her.

Mrs. Seaver wasn't just any benefactor, however. Her late husband, Frank, had been in the oil business with Edward L. Doheny, and ties between the Dohenys and the Seavers went back 50 years. Moreover, the archdiocese was now her landlord. She had rented 20 St. James Park, a block west of Chester Place, since 1927.

If you look at the contact sheet, it's obvious that Mrs. Seaver isn't smiling.

We can't read minds -- or much else -- from two-and-a-quarter-inch contact photos. Perhaps she was on board with the demolition plans. But we might more safely surmise that Mrs. Seaver was pleased with preserving the urban oasis that was, and is, Chester Place. When she died in 1994 at the ripe old age of 102, she had lived in No. 20 for sixty-seven years. Perhaps a word from her was all it took to put the rebuilding program on permanent hold.

Doheny connections

IT'S AN INTERESTING COINCIDENCE that in the past couple of weeks I've heard from not one but three different people who have a direct connection to the Doheny legacy at the Mount. We want to protect their privacy, of course, but we thought we could share a couple of pictures and dispense a little history in the process.

• Olive Kullgren, the well-dressed woman standing at the wheel, was the private secretary of Edward L. Doheny Sr. at one of his oil companies in Los Angeles. The picture was taken in the late 1920s aboard the Casiana, named for Doheny's first successful well. Olive's granddaughter sent this, along with photos of the Dohenys' "ranch" in the countryside -- way out in Beverly Hills.
• Another descendant of a Doheny employee contacted us about anything we might have regarding her great-grandfather, Pietro Capriuolo, an Italian immigrant who worked as a gardener at one of Doheny's estates in the 1920s. Alas, we don't have employee information. We suggested she try the excellent digitized city directories at the Los Angeles Public Library. Family history has it that Doheny offered to sell Mr. Capriuolo some real estate in Beverly Hills.
• Sara Posey, the force of nature behind the Doheny Mansion in the 1890s -- architect,interior designer, artist -- was also quite accomplished with needle and floss. We heard from the owner in Portland, OR, of a spectacular crazy quilt made by Mrs. Posey. The owner acquired it at auction when the two Posey great-granddaughters couldn't agree on who would have it. We received a few pictures that show its incredible detail and beautiful condition.

Information about the Doheny family in the last century is hard to come by; it's well known that Edward's widow, the papal countess Estelle Doheny, burned her husbands papers and records when he died in 1935. At the college, though, we're gradually accumulating quite a collection of secondary materials, thanks in large part to our friend Don Sloper, who turned over his research materials for his book Los Angeles' Chester Place.

Our Doheny connections called the right place. And when we hear from people like Olive's and Pietro's descendants, we always learn something, too.

Ode to safety film

A bottom drawer recently yielded some pictures that don't show up on our legacy inventories and appear to have been gathered by one of the Sisters who resided in the Doheny Mansion at some point in the last 50 years.

We have lots of photos of the mansion, known sometimes as No. 8 for its address on Chester Place. (This photo, taken by me, shows it undergoing a recent facelift.) You L.A. history buffs will know that Chester Place and its score of Victorian-era homes were once the private realm of Estelle Doheny, who lived in No. 8, and whose acreage was deeded to the Los Angeles archdiocese on her death in 1958. It became Mount St. Mary's College's downtown campus in the early 1960s and today remains a little Garden of Eden hard by the glass high-rises, Staples Center madness and urban grit of Figueroa Street.

The mansions--especially No. 8--have been extensively photographed, but most of what we have in the College Archives are either reproductions of turn-of-the-century prints, or pictures of the grounds after they became the college's.

Look, I'm a Lone Arranger, so forgive me if I squeal aloud with delight once in awhile. (No one hears me.) Finding these pictures elicited more of an exultant chortle -- more than a dozen 5" by 7" Kodachrome positives of No. 8 interiors and gardens. I've yet to encounter in our archives any color photographs of Countess Doheny's furnishings while she lived there, yet here were glossy-magazine images of the Great Hall, dining room, and a small reception room, in the rich, glowing colors and fine-grain detail of a really big film positive.

There were just scraps of information with the photos, literally: a torn, black-lined envelope with the date April 1950, and two small bits of paper, one labeled "Madonna/oil painting" and "Gellette [or Gillette?] wedding 1950." I got right on the phone to our local expert, Dr. MaryAnn Bonino, author of the definitive (to date) book on No. 8, The Doheny Mansion: A Biography of a Home. (Los Angeles: Edizioni Casa Animata, 2008).

The pictures, she said, are probably the work of Maynard L. Parker (1901-1976), a renowned architectural photographer whose work graced magazines like House Beautiful. The Huntington Library holds extensive Parker materials, including Doheny Mansion interiors.

I titled this post "Ode to safety film," because when a Lone Arranger comes across old color photographs that have been sitting heaven-knows-where for five decades, disappointment is often the result. Colors fade and emulsion glues itself to the contact surface--and that's if the pictures aren't bent, torn or moldy.

These were pristine, jewel-like, gorgeous. I carefully removed their 60-year-old sheaths, which, in spite of the presence of rips, grease pencil and black masking tape, had barely oxidized. The pictures got new heavy-gauge Mylar envelopes and should be good for another 60 years.

The thoughtful Lone Arranger always pauses to say "thanks" to her anonymous predecessors. Thank you Kodak, for making great safety film. Thank you, Maynard Parker, for your great skill in the darkroom. Thank you Sister, or Sisters, for managing to leave these pictures in a cool, dark, dry place. I hope I can do as well by them as you have.