No. 63 - McGroarty Home

McGroarty Home
1923 – Arthur B. Benton

7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga – map
Declared: 2/4/70

The present, landmarked home that’s HCM No. 63 is the last of four Verdugo Hills homes built by John Steven McGroarty – poet, journalist, playwright, historian, politician, and Tujunga's first mayor. (His niece later claimed McGroarty was even responsible for naming Tujunga.)

J.S. McGroarty was born in Pennsylvania in 1862. He earned his teaching certificate by the age of 16 and was elected Justice of the Peace when he 21. Before he turned thirty, and right around the time he married Ida Lubrecht, he was also elected County Treasurer. Finally, he was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar when he was 32.

In 1896, he went west to Montana to work on the legal staff of copper king Marcus Daly. Five years later he made the move to California.

McGroartys’ first house in the Verdugos was a cabin he called the “Little High House”. After he built his second home down the hill, the cabin became McGroarty’s study.

Moved by the apparent suicide of German munitions-maker Friedrich Alfred Krupp, McGroarty wrote the poem “The Dead Gun Maker”.

Death and blood and disaster
Spoke his great name in dread;
And now, in his shroud, the master
That fashioned the guns lies dead.

Click here to read the whole poem.

It caught the eye of Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, who printed it on the editorial page. It was the start of McGroarty’s long journalism career with the paper, most notably with his column, “From the Green Verdugo Hills”.

In 1903, Teddy Roosevelt visited San Buenaventura Mission, inspiring McGroarty to compose the poem “Just California”.

Sun and dews that kiss it,
Balmy winds that blow,
The stars in clustered diadems
Upon its peaks of snow;
the mighty mountains o'er it,
Below, the white seas swirled--
just California, stretching down
The middle of the world.

Click here to read all of "Just California".

McGroarty and Mission Play cast members.

All in all, McGroarty was most famous for writing The Mission Play, based on the history of California’s coastal missions. First performed in the summer of 1912, the play was performed more than 3,200 times over the course of decades.

A 1941 performance of The Mission Play, in Riverside, California.

The indefatigable McGroarty was hired as editor of West Coast Magazine in 1906, editing it until 1914.

On Easter Sunday in 1922, the Cross of San Ysdiro, patron saint of homes, was raised on the hill behind McGroarty’s house. It didn’t help a whole lot: his second home burned down the day after Christmas, 1922.

The charred remains of either home #2 or #3.

Fire destroyed the third home less than a day after a huge housewarming party and less than a year after home #2 was also destroyed by fire. The fourth home, called Rancho Chupa Rosa (Humming Bird Ranch), was completed in 1924.

The view from the porch.

In 1933, declared California’s third Poet Laureate by act of state legislature. It was a title he held until he died.

The three colored-glass windows were given to McGroarty by Frank Miller. Miller owned the Riverside Mission Inn where the playwright wrote The Mission Play.

McGroarty was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in both 1934 in 1936. His tenure was marked by his about face on the New Deal (from pro to con) and his work on an early version of Social Security.

He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for California’s Secretary of State in 1938.

That's Ida above the fireplace.

Where California's Poet Laureate made his sandwiches.

John Steven McGroarty died on August 7, 1944. Ida had died in 1940.

Besides The Mission Play, his plays include El Dorado, Babylon, and La Gitan. Among his books are California: It’s History and Romance, California of the South, Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea, and Just California and Other Poems.

The items in the site's John Steven McGroarty Memorial Archive-Library were donated to the city by Margaret McHale, McGroarty's niece, who inherited the property from her uncle.

In 1955, the home and a dozen acres were purchased for $30,000 (or, “In 1953, his home and sixteen acres…” or "1953/12 acres, as I’ve also seen reported). The home became the McGroarty Arts Center in 1974. Twelve years ago, the city gave up responsibility of running the Center. Since then, general management and raising operating funds has been taken up by volunteers. The organization’s website says the center offers “affordable, ongoing eight-week classes for adults and children in many varieties of fine, literary and performing arts, as well as many cultural and community events throughout the year.”

McGroarty's desk

Up next: Plaza Park

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No. 2 - Bolton Hall

Bolton Hall
1913 – George Harris
10110 Commerce Avenue, Tujunga – map
Declared: 8/6/62

Nearly a century ago, developer Marshall Hartranft hired editor/idealist William E. Smythe to publicize the section of Crescenta Valley’s Rancho Tujunga called Glorietta Heights. Partly inspired by the book A Little Land and a Living, Smythe had already formed, in 1908, the Utopian movement “Little Landers”. The decision to create a farming cooperative under this banner outside Los Angeles seemed natural. Too bad the Landers were unaware the area’s rocky terrain would rule out any serious attempts at agriculture. (There were ultimately four Little Lands communities. The others were near San Diego, outside of San Francisco, and in Idaho.)

George Harris, also known as “Nature Builder”, designed this, the community’s meetinghouse, using stone quarried locally. Besides all those rocks (and there are A LOT of them), there’s an immense fireplace (more rocks) and a wooden-beamed ceiling. Outside were originally three fountains on the corner. The lowest one to the ground was for dogs, the middle one was for horses, and the highest one was for people. Those fountains are long gone.

Dedicated in 1913, the building became the center for community activities. Originally known as “The Clubhouse”, the building was soon named Bolton Hall after the author of A Little Land and a Living, a Socialist/writer/reformer/philosopher whose name was actually Bolton Hall.

Bolton Hall in 1932 (yep, that's snow)

Following a brief ownership by the American Legion, the structure served as Tujunga’s City Hall with a two-cell jail upon the community being incorporated in 1925. (Tujunga bought the jail cells for $1 a piece. After officials realized the cells couldn’t fit through the hall’s doors, another twenty feet or so were added onto the back of the structure for accommodation.) Once Tujunga became part of Los Angeles in 1932, Bolton Hall housed L.A.’s Department of Building and Safety and its Health Department.

The Fireplace (The desk and lamp were handmade by the architect, George Harris)

The structure was vacated in 1957 when a new municipal building was put up. Talk of demolition began in 1959 and, despite being among the first monuments certified in 1962, Bolton Hall’s future was touch and go until 1967. That’s when a federal fund matched restoration money raised by The Little Landers Historical Society. However, it took another thirteen years before rehabilitation work actually began, by which point the structure was in pretty shoddy shape.

Northside

Southside

Bolton Hall re-opened June 27, 1981, and is now the home of the Sunland-Tujunga Little Landers Historical Society. It’s open Sundays and Tuesdays from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Admission is free.

Up next: Plaza Church

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