This film, produced by architectural historian Esther McCoy, documents the Walter Luther Dodge house in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, and the life of its architect, Irving John Gill. The film was made to advocate for its preservation during a 7-year battle to save it fropm the wrecking ball. The campaign failed, and the house was destroyed in 1970.
This film, created to help save the house, now serves as the building’s best surviving visual record. For more information on Dodge House and Esther McCoy, see her papers at the Archives of American Art (http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/esther-mccoy-papers-5502/more).
By 1963, the Los Angeles Board of Education declared the Dodge House “surplus” and the County Board of Supervisors re–zoned the area from R–1 to R–4, from single–family homes to apartment buildings.
While the street underwent a radical condominium–ization, the Dodge House was slated for the wrecking ball.
Unannounced, on a February morning in 1970, the entire property was demolished. A neighbor who witnessed the destruction reported: “I went out in the morning and when I came back two hours later the wrecking crew was there. They beat it and beat it and it wouldn’t go down. It was like an animal being beaten. They kept beating and beating and it finally cracked up. The trees didn’t want to go either but they beat them until by late afternoon everything was gone.”
Gill believed that a “house should be simple, plain, and substantial as a boulder.” The Dodge House, with its serenely unadorned surfaces and eight inch thick reinforced concrete walls, was the fulfillment of that vision. Then, in a single day, it was gone forever.
*boggle*
While watching this, I was thinking to myself, “Surely they harvested some of the materials from the house. The woodwork in the hall alone would be worth preserving, even as raw materials.”
But they just smashed it to bits?
I hesitate to ask what’s sitting on the plot now…