Saved: Japanese House at Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

Japanese House & Pagoda.  Photo found at the Huntington Library's website.

The California Preservation Foundation and the Huntington Library announced that the Japanese House and related tea garden have been renovated and are now reopened to the public.  Originally built by Japanese craftsmen in Japan c. 1904, the house was then shipped to California and reassembled for a commercial art dealer during a time when Japanese tea gardens were all the rage...including one built for the 1894 California Midwinter International Exhibition in San Francisco.  When the dealers business failed, the Japanese House was bought by Henry Huntington and reassembled again at his estate in 1911 and completed in 1912.  With the house and garden in place now for 100 years, the Huntington Library is celebrating by announcing the completion of the renovation project.

Perspective: Siskiyou County Museum, Yreka, CA.

Siskiyou County Museum, Yreka, California.  Photo by Thomas Eddy

A gold mining town from its inception, Yreka still reflects how we envision the western frontier...providing visitors ignore the strip malls and big boxes south of downtown. Conifers protect themselves by growing only on the northern slopes of the surrounding hillsides while sage chaparral, juniper trees, and field stones scatter throughout the seemingly barren landscape.  Caught in the rain shadow of Mt. Shasta, its aridness is expressed in silvered wood of old barns and the rusted decay of farm equipment forever at rest.

Yreka is the Siskiyou County seat where I found the Siskiyou County Museum along the main drag just outside of downtown.  Inside, the museum is divided into three primary exhibits: Native Peoples and Anglo-American settlement patterns separated on the first floor, and vignettes of early interiors on the second.  Managed by the Siskiyou County Historical Society, the interpretation and displays succeeded in telling regional stories of people and place...complete with maps, photos, and artifacts in professional exhibits.  Despite this polished appearance, I left unsettled and confused by some of the interpretative materials.

Some of my discomfort was intended, as in the display showing how Americans have exploited First People's image for product branding. Greater emphasis was appropriately placed on innovations in Native design, spirituality, and social structures, to name a few, but it gave an appearance of being squarely set in the past.  To combat with this notion, visitors were reminded that "Native American cultures are alive and well today, and there is a resurgence of interest in and respect for their traditional ways," yet declined to interpret modern First People's lives balanced between traditional and American culture.

A similar but more brief exhibit on early Chinese settlement presented perseverance and ingenuity within the adverse conditions of a rural mining town, yet left visitors wondering what happened to Yreka's early Chinatown...short of a highly decorative, almost kitschy, Chinese restaurant on Miner Street.

Fair interpretation with not so subtle jabs at American capitalism, I felt the interpreters dodged a few political bullets while holding their subject in high regard.  Yet with all the innovation and genius of pre-contact people, why did the museums stakeholders usurp the narrative in the museum's interpretation of early trappers?  Here, "The Quest for Beaver" begins by stating the following:

The Mountain Man, in a very true sense, is a real American frontier hero who roamed the land still virgin and unpeopled in search of beaver?  No other country or period in history has produced such a distinctive breed of men.  America owes much to these trappers, for they opened the land to the pioneers and settlers who made it great.

The land was not "virgin and unpeopled," as clearly and previously exhibited.  Who indeed were the people who inhabited this land for over 10,000 years if not a "distinctive breed?"  We have a long ways to go in our interpretation of the people and places of California.

Remembered: Anti-Chinese Violence throughout California

San Francisco's Chinatown.  Photo by Tim Greyhaven and found at his website, No Place for Your Kind.

Cal-Tales highlights preservation stories throughout California, for the purpose of never forgetting our collective history.  As a preservation blog, Cal-Tales strives to tell the stories of California places saved, threatened, or lost...patterned after the National Trust for Historic Preservation's national listings...but also places forgotten and remembered. At the crossroads of preservation and history, we are sometimes reminded of places that represent a painful past that is not limited to European wars or Southern racial tensions. California too, has a racially charged past that is still relevant today.

The New York Times' Lens recently highlighted photographer Tim Greyhaven's online photographic essay, No Place for Your Kind, which highlights todays places where 19th century anti-Chinese violence occurred.  Chinatowns were well established throughout California where farm and industrial labor was greatly needed.  As Chinese populations grew, some Anglo groups became increasingly agitated and set fires to Chinatowns that all too often included outright murder.  The nation's legislation past laws making immigration difficult at a time economic stress or when labor forces were greatly in need.  Both the New York Times article and Greyhaven's project well capture this part of California's past that should always be remembered.  Greater detail can be found in Richard Steven Street's seminal history of California, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913.

To learn more about Asian preservation projects specific to California, check out the National Asian Pacific Islander American Historic Preservation Forum.

Reused: Mitchell Park Wading Pool, Palo Alto, CA.

Former wading pool turned biomorphic at Mitchell Park.  Photo found at The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Planned communities in the west often included community centers and pools.  A necessity of my childhood, I remember swimming at the Warm Springs Cabana Club in Fremont, California.  Then after a move to Palo Alto and meeting new friends, we would enjoy meeting at Rinconada.  I have vague memories of also swimming...rather wading because of its shallowness...at the Mitchell Park wading pool, designed by well-known landscape architect, Robert Royston.  The 1957 design reflects  Mid Century modern aesthetics, similar to Thomas Church's 1948 Donnell pool.

For most of my childhood, the wading pool was dark, dirty, and bone dry.  Thankfully, the pool has been transformed by Dillingham Associates as a low liability biomorphic water feature.  Translation: jets of water squirt onto a nonslip, walkable surface where kids and adults can get wet without fear of drowning.  The reuse as a modern water feature retains Royston's original design, so I can still visit it and remember the park of my youth.

Saved: Richmond Plunge, Richmond, CA.

The Richmond Plunge.  Photo found at Gogobot.

Two years ago this month, the Richmond Plunge once again opened to the public in search of the joyful pleasures of swimming.  Located within Pt. Richmond's Municipal Natatorium (a word not often used today), the site is located within Pt. Richmond's Historic District.  The public pool originally opened in 1926 to accommodate the community's growth in response to nearby rail and refinery success.  As The Berkeley Daily Planet reported, the renovation would ultimately cost $7.5 million, including grants and private gifts.  

Lost: Public Pools, San Francisco, CA.

Sutro Baths, San Francisco.  Photo found at the Cliff House Project  

Peter Hartlaub, public culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, just published a photographic slide show and commentary about San Francisco's historic and mostly lost public pools.  Unlike pools in planned suburban communities, urban public pools are constantly competing with redevelopment in high density places.  Older pools are also vulnerable due to outdated technologies in plumbing, but their renovation or repurposing is plausible with public support.