THROUGH THE CITY UNPRONOUNCEABLE TO AN EXPOSITION BEAUTIFUL
Says Los Angeles, “Whatever you do, don’t call me Angy Lees”!
Laboriously E. M. wrote her name as she herself pronounced it, “Loas
Ang-hell-less.” With the piece of paper before me I can say it glibly
enough, but in coming upon it unprepared, my only hope is to follow his
flippant but very helpful suggestion and mentally dive through it. First,
get _hell_ as the objective plunge fixed in mind, then start on _loas_
(like a run-off), _Ang_ (hit the springboard), _hell_ (the dive), _less_
(into the water).
I am not very certain, though, that I want to call her at all. Perhaps
we had the spleen, but the meaning and beauty of the city was quite as
obscured to us as her name is to those having no knowledge of Spanish.
Another thing that is even more obscured is why Los Angeles calls herself
the City of Hotels? New York might as well call herself the City of
Mosques, or Chicago the Citadel of Fortifications, or Colorado Springs
the Seaside Resort! All the way across the continent in the various
illustrated information books that are strewn for the edification of
idle tourists around mezzanine writing-rooms, you read and read and read
of Los Angeles hotels. Not a word does any one of these pamphlets say
about the Southern capital’s gigantically growing industries, fertile
surroundings, automobile interests, millionaire mansions, peerless
parks, or even the height to which the June thermometer can soar. Each
advertising line acclaims it solely as the City of Hotels.
“Which shall be _your hotel_?” reads one eulogy. “You have only to name
your ideal, and choose whatever you like.” “If you care most for food
there is the restaurant of the Van Nuys; if you want a homey place to
stop at, you have a score of smaller hotels to choose from. But of course
if you want to find the most luxurious metropolitan hostelry on the
entire continent there is the Green and Gold lobby at the Alexandria.”
How the lobby in itself is supposed to so much contribute to your
happiness and comfort, you have no idea. But each and every advertisement
either begins or ends with a description and a full-page picture of this
imposing hallway. To test the peerless perfection of this Blackstone
rival is naturally irresistible and into its overwhelming gorgeousness
you go! The gorgeousness is there quite as in the pictures, also it is
in every way a perfectly up-to-date and luxurious hotel. You wonder,
though, is the cost of food inordinately high? Are wages prohibitive? Is
it merely monopoly or forces of circumstance beyond its control that
allows the only strictly up-to-date hotel in the place to charge such
prices? At Trouville, in the season, or Monte Carlo, your bill can be
rather staggering, but at least you get the quintessence of exotic luxury
and the most unlimited offerings in diversions that the purveyors to the
spenders of the world can achieve. When, however, a commonplace city of
extremest dullness asks you Monte Carlo prices, higher than the Ritz in
New York or the Blackstone in Chicago, you find a certain much-advertised
green with gold lobby illuminingly symbolical of the guests who would for
any length of time stay there.
[Illustration: THIS IS NOT A GALLERY IN A SPANISH PALACE, BUT A GALLERY
IN THE MISSION INN AT RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA]
To find anywhere else to stay is more than difficult. You run around to
“This” one and to “That,” and then to the whole advertised list, but
your own “ideal” is not among them. So either you stay on where you are,
and ignore the hole in your bank account or you go quickly on to the
next place; or, better yet, move out to the beautiful suburb, for which
one might say Los Angeles is famous and where half of the Los Angeles
fashionables live. In other words, Pasadena. Pasadena, besides having
many splendid hotels,[5] is a floral park of much beauty, a little too
neat, perhaps, for real allure and possibly a little over-obviously rich.
But its even squares of streets are splendidly bordered with palms or
pepper-trees. Here and there the center of the street is sentineled by
a superb tree that you are glad the street builders had not the heart to
cut down. Back of tropically verdant lawns are rows of homelike bungalows
smothered in vines and there are many important and beautiful places that
entirely compensate for the few crude garish ones that flaunt so much
wealth and so little good taste.
The Country Club is most charming, and in it a big room so appealing in
color and furnishing that you feel irresistibly like settling yourself in
the corner of one of the chintz-covered sofas and staying indefinitely.
Yet the same people whose own houses are so attractive will seriously
take you to admire a horticultural achievement that, in its magentas and
scarlets, purples and heliotrope, orange, Indian red and Paris green,
lacks no element of discord except an out-of-tune German band to play
among its glass globes. I don’t really remember whether I saw any glass
globes or not, but the disturbed visions that come back to me are of
silver globes, iron stags, sea-shell fountains amid a floral debauch.
They say that when people paint their faces they lose their eye and soon
put the whole paint box on. In the same way it may be that the brilliancy
of the sunshine has affected people’s sight and that they can’t perceive
color discords. All through Southern California you see combinations of
color that fairly set your teeth on edge. Scarlet and majenta are put
together everywhere; Prussian blue next to cobalt; vermilion next to old
rose, olive-green next to emerald. Not only in flowers, but in homes and
in clothes.
We dined the other night in a terra-cotta room hung with crimson
curtains; one woman in a turquoise-colored dress wore slippers of French
blue, another carried an emerald-colored fan with a sage-green frock!
The conversation—only some of it—was as queerly assembled as the colors.
A Mr. Brown, to convince me of the high moral tone of Pasadena men, told
me that, in Honolulu, a chief offered a friend of his two beautiful young
wives. He laid special stress on their beauty of “form” and sweetness of
disposition. Also he explained carefully that they were yellow in color,
not black. “But my friend explained to the chief that he was married.
The chief said, ‘What difference does that make? Do you want to insult
my brotherly love for you?’” But the friend “insulted” and refused the
little gold-colored wives. I waited for the rest of the story but there
did not seem to be any rest. So I said, “And then——?”
“Well, that was just to show you,” he answered proudly, “the high type of
men we have out here on the coast.”
I put this down as I heard it, although I myself don’t see much point to
it, even yet!
* * * * *
I am trying not to say so much about hotels any more, but there is one I
_must_ mention—particularly after the failure we had with them in Los
Angeles. Wanting to see the most famous orange grove in the country,
we drove to Riverside and found quite by accident the most ideal hotel
imaginable—the really most lovely place that ever was! So I must tell
you that the Mission Inn at Riverside is worth traveling miles to stop
at; a hotel of pure delight, in which the beauty of a Spanish palace and
the picturesqueness of an old mission is combined with the most perfect
modern comfort and at fair and reasonable rates. I don’t believe anyone
ever entered its hospitable doors without pleasure or left them without
regret.
From Riverside we made a loop back to Los Angeles and drove to San
Diego along the edge of the ocean all the way. The coast was one long
succession of big ocean resort hotels on a boulevard that seemed too
smooth and perfect to be true. We had forgotten that such road smoothness
existed for our poor long-tortured engine to glide over.
The Fair at San Diego was a little Exposition Beautiful! The composite
impression was of a garden of dense, shiny green. Great masses and
profusions of orange-trees and vines against low one-storied buildings
of gray-white. Across a long viaduct under an archway and down a long
avenue, there was no other color except gray-white and green until you
came into the central plaza filled with pigeons as in St. Mark’s in
Venice, and saw over one portico of the quadrangle of white buildings a
single blaze of orange and blue striped awnings—stripes nearly a foot
wide of blue the color of laundry blue, and orange the color of the most
vivid fruit of that name that you can find! Against the unrelieved green
and gray this one barbaric splash of color actually thrilled.
[Illustration: IN A CALIFORNIA GARDEN]
Down the next avenue hanging behind the balustrade of another building
was the same vivid sweep of blue. Over a building around the corner
was a climbing amber rose, and just beyond it some pinkish-purple
bougainvillea, that beautiful but most difficult vine to put anywhere.
There were gardens and gardens of flowers but each so separated and
grouped that there was not a note of discord.
And how things did grow! Some of the buildings were already covered to
their roofs with vines, and benches shaded by shrubs, that we treasure at
home in little pots!
The San Diego Exposition was a pure delight. Its simplicity and faultless
harmony of color brought out all its values startlingly.
A farmer—ought he be called a rancher?—said he thought it a “homey”
exposition. I doubt if the sentiment could be better expressed. It was
first and foremost designed to show by actual demonstration what could
be accomplished in our own land of the West. The citrus groves were full
sized; the fields of grain were big and real; instead of putting reapers
and harvesters in a large machinery hall, they demonstrated them on a
model ranch, so that anyone likely to be interested could see how they
were used.
The Indian exhibits were very complete—especially those of the Hopis.
There was a life-size model of the pueblo of Taos and miniature models of
the other more famous pueblos, and examples of their arts and crafts.
Otherwise the general impressions of the exhibits were much alike;
bottles of fruit in alcohol, sheaves of grain, arches of oranges, and
school children’s efforts in art.
Of all the buildings, we liked Kansas best. We liked it from its three
stiff clay sunflowers raised and painted over its plain little front door
to its unending varieties of grains. And all because the old Kansan—not
that he was so old either—in charge of it so loved his state and was
so unaffectedly proud of it, that we caught the infection from him. We
couldn’t help it.
“Of course,” he said, “I’ve only samples here but there’s nothing that
can grow in the soil that we can’t grow in Kansas! These people out
here talk about beautiful California, the ‘ever-blooming garden of
California,’ and her ‘sublime mountain scenery,’ ‘ocean-kissed shore’ and
what not. Now, for _my_ taste, give me a land that is as flat as the pa’m
of your hand—give me Kansas!”
An old woman came in while we were there. She poked all around, sniffed
at the kaffir corn, at every variety of grain that could be stored in
glass-fronted bins or arched into sheaves.
“Land sakes!” she said. “Y’ain’t got nothin’ in here but chickin feed.
Ain’t yuh got nothin’ t’eat?” And out she switched again.
“I suppose that old woman’d like me to keep a nice crock of doughnuts
ready to give her, and a cup of tea, mebbe. Chickin feed, indeed! Well,
when it comes to hens, I like the feathered kind. You can put them in a
pot and boil ’em! Chickin feed! And it’s mighty fine chickin feed, I tell
you, that a man can grow in the state of Kansas!”
Coronado Beach, the famous winter resort, is across the bay and reached
in a few minutes by ferry from San Diego.
In San Diego itself a new apartment house, the Palomar, offers a
novelty in automatic and economic living that is quite original. Single
apartments, for instance, rent for $65.00 a month and consist of a large
living-room, a small dressing-room, a bathroom, and a kitchenette. No
bedroom! You dress in the dressing-room, and sleep in the living-room
in a disappearing bed, not a folding one, that in the daytime is rolled
into an air chamber large enough to hold it intact. You can rent a room
for your personal maid, or valet, but all of the service is furnished as
in a hotel. Only instead of ordering your food in a restaurant, you do
your own marketing and have it prepared in your own kitchen. Instead of
paying your cook by the month, you hire one at twenty-five cents an hour
whenever you want a meal cooked. No meals at home, no cook!
From the point of view of the stranger glancing about the streets, the
chief diversion in San Diego seems to be moving pictures. The square
which appears to be the central point around which the city is built, is
lined with electric arched doorways displaying every lure of lithograph.
Besides the picture palaces are two drug-stores, and a funeral director’s
window, proffering the latest novelties in caskets. But the most
lingering memory of San Diego, outside of her harbor, is of her school
buildings. They are the last word in construction and equipment, Tudor in
design, and very imposing.
When we left San Diego and all along the ocean the weather was
deliciously cool, but as we went inland toward Pasadena it became hotter
than anything you can imagine. It was a case of 116° in the shade and
there wasn’t any shade!
“How can the orange-trees remain so beautifully green?” I heard Celia
muttering. Twenty miles north of Los Angeles I looked at the unburnt
hills and crisply standing live-oaks in wonder and amazement. I could
actually see blisters forming on E. M.’s nose. Finally we panted up a
big winding hill, a branch of the Coast Range of mountains, I suppose it
was, and as we dipped over on the other side, such a gust of cold sea
wind greeted us that in five minutes, we, who had been gasping like dying
fish, were wrapping our now shivering selves in coats!
[Illustration: UNDER SANTA BARBARA SKIES]
Besides the life-giving coolness of the sea air, never, never was there
a more beautiful drive than the one to Santa Barbara. Not the Cornici of
France—not even the Sorrento to Amalfi of Italy. Mountains on one side,
the ocean on the other, curving in and out of bays each more lovely than
the last, and on a road like linoleum. I thought I should like to live
where I could drive up and down that road forever!