Hometown Hero: John Byers, Santa Monica Architect

Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica
18^th and Arizona, Santa Monica
photo credit:  Carol Lemlein

SUSAN CLOKE

Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror

John Winford Byers, Santa Monica’s most important architect and builder in the period between WWI and WWII, told the LA Times, “Buildings of adobe are replete with a delicate and elusive charm and there is an easy plasticity about the material that makes it particularly suitable to the Spanish or California type of architecture.” (May 17, 1931)

Byers was noted for his work with adobe and was a leader in its use as a California building material.  Today we would label adobe “green.”  It’s local.  It provides great insulation – keeping buildings cool during the day and warm at night.  And it is an all-natural material.

Byers was a self-taught architect.  After receiving a degree in Electrical Engineering from of the University of Michigan he went on to do graduate work at Harvard University.  Byers also had experience as a teacher and had worked at the North American Academy in Montevideo, Uruguay before coming to Santa Monica in 1910 to chair the Romance Languages Department at Santa Monica High School.  It is thought that during his time in Latin America he became enamored with the architectural vernacular he called, “Latin Houses.” 

After his working day at the High School was over, Byers would work as a translator for the Mexican workmen on construction sites and through working with them he learned how to build with adobe.  His began his architectural career building residences for his own family and for his cousin.  His first commissioned design, in 1916, was a house for W.F. Barnum, the principal at Santa Monica High School.

Byers relied on the building traditions of Hispanic cultures, building in the Mexican Colonial the Spanish Colonial and the Monterey styles.  When he couldn’t get the curved, clay roof tiles he needed for these buildings he established his own workshop and employed the traditional technique where workmen used their thighs as forms to shape the wet clay for the curved tile shape needed for rooftops.  The workshop also produced decorative tile, wrought iron and woodwork.  He named his company the “John Byers Organization for the Design and Building of Latin Houses.”

By 1926 Byers was a licensed architect.  Among his clients were Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, Shirley Temple, Joel McCrea, Laurence (Buster) Crabbe and King Vidor.  He went on to design Ray Bradbury’s house, a ranch house at the Getty in Malibu, and the Club House at Brentwood Country Club, where he was a member and an avid golfer.

One of Byers important public buildings in Santa Monica is the Miles Playhouse.  Designed in 1929, the Playhouse was the vision of J. Euclid Miles who wanted a memorial for his daughter, Mary A. Miles, and Miles bequethed $25,000 to the City to fund the Playhouse.

Justin Yoffe, the Cultural Affairs Supervisor for the Playhouse said, “Three years ago we started “Fireside at the Miles”  We opened up the main hall so citizens could experience the intimate auditorium the way citizens did when it was first built.”  This January and February “Fireside at the Miles” will feature six weekends of music and dance at the Playhouse, located in Reed Park.  www.milesplayhouse.org

The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica is another important public building designed by Byers.  Restoration architect Ralph Mechur, talking about the Church, said,  “Its plaster exterior and dark wood ceilings and beams create a sense of early California.  The Church has kept the sanctuary building intact as the congregation has grown.  It was exciting to create a campus for the Church, knitting together the church building, a modernist addition and the adjacent 1914 bungalow.”

The Santa Monica Conservancy will meet in the Church on Sunday, January 29, 2012.  "We are pleased to be holding our Annual Meeting in the John Byers designed Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica. He is widely recognized as one of, if not the most influential Santa Monica architect of the first half of the twentieth century,” said Carol Lemlein, President of the Santa Monica Conservancy.  www.santamonicaconservancy.org

 

A third Byers’ public building is the office he designed and built, located at 246 26^th Street.  The building, a Santa Monica landmark, is currently being used as a restaurant.  He worked there with Edna Muir, also a self taught architect.  She  worked for Byers for 11 years before getting her license and then becoming his partner in the firm. 

“During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Byers became a major proponent in Southern California for the revival of traditional adobe construction, and in addition to designing his own houses, acted as consultant in this capacity for the development of Rancho Santa Fe and several other major projects in California, Nevada and Arizona,” said Ken Breisch, an architecture professor at USC.  “Much of Byers' and Muir’s early work exhibits traits of the Spanish Colonial Revival, while during their later years they also worked in other American Revival styles to produce some of the most beautiful and graceful adaptations of historic revival architecture in Southern California.”

At the time of his death in 1966 he lived at 2034 La Mesa, an elegant Montery Revival design and the third home he built in Santa Monica for his own family.  He was 91 years old.  John Winford Byers, architect and builder, designed some of Santa Monica’s most treasured residences and public buildings.

Byers’ designs defined the architectural landscape of Santa Monica in the years between WWI and WWII and they continue to influence the architectural landscape of Santa Monica.   In many ways we are exploring and rediscovering how to express the respect for the landscape of California, the understanding and use of materials that adapt their buildings to the climate and, hopefully, the grace that was the Byers legacy to the City.

Honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.        January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968
Photo The Seattle Times

SUSAN CLOKE

Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror

The Civil Rights Movement captured the imagination of the Country.  It was 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King, working to get voting rights for African-Americans, planned to lead a 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  

It was, finally, the right time to do the right thing.  I wonder how that happens.  How is it that something intrinsically right can take so long to be possible?  The prejudice, segregation, and Jim Crow laws were always wrong.  How did they last so long?  For that matter, how did they ever begin?

Eight of us, all college students, drove in a University of San Francisco station wagon from San Francisco, California to Selma, Alabama to be part of the march.

We knew Alabama State Troopers had turned the marchers back each time they tried to cross the Pettus Bridge onto the highway to Montgomery.  Photographs of the marchers had been front-page news in papers across the country.   Now, students, teachers, religious leaders and civil rights workers, from all over the U.S., were coming to Selma to join the march, forcing the focus of the nation on the right of the marchers to proceed and on the issue of voting rights.

The trip across country was different from any other car trip I had taken in my life.  By the time we got to Texas it was clear to us that people knew who we were and many didn’t like us.  We drove straight through, stopping only when we needed to, quickly buying food in convenience stores and eating in the car.  We talked and talked - civil rights, philosophy, religion, the Vietnam War – in the way of college students everywhere. 

I talked about my father.  My family lived in Minnesota when I was in elementary school and we went to Florida for a winter vacation.  My father would hold the door for a black woman and say, ‘after you Ma’am’, he would address black men as “Sir”, he would tell a black person in a store that they were next and should go ahead.  I took it for granted.  It was just my father being his usual, polite self.  It wasn’t until I returned to the South as a young adult that I realized that his politeness defied the culture of the Jim Crow South where no white man ever held the door for a black woman and where all black people in a store waited until all white people had been served, even if those white people came in after them.  My father wasn’t a person for political action.  I never knew him to go to a rally or a meeting or write a letter to the editor.  But he was a man of personal responsibility.

After several days of driving we arrived in Selma and went to the Church that was the center of the Civil Rights movement.  We were expected and they gave us the name of the man who was going to put us up and cards that we could use for meals.  I still have my card.  It says, “Susan Cloke is a guest in Selma and is entitled to free meals.”

Our host seemed old to me, but I think that was because I was so young.  He lived alone and his house, really a cabin, was small.  He had cleaned the unpainted wood by washing the floors and walls with boiling water.  The stove was on the back porch and he had a pot of beans waiting for us.  I liked him right away for his kindness and his soft-spoken manner.  We sat on his front steps and talked with him until it was time to go back into town for the meeting at the church.

It was at the church that I first heard Rev. King speak.  I have long remembered, and thought about a particular speech, which I can’t find and so this is not an exact quote, but what he said, much more eloquently than I can, was “Morality is like a muscle.  If you don’t use it to make small decisions then, when you need it, it won’t be strong enough to do what needs to be done.  Don’t think, ‘well, I don’t have to do this right thing because it’s not important and no one will even notice I didn’t do it’ and then think you will be able to do the right thing when it is important.  That won’t work.  Do the right thing now and when you really need to act you will have the needed strength to see you through.” 

The Selma Montgomery March started at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.  The first attempt to cross the Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, was led by John Lewis of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and Rev. Hosea Williams of SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference).  March 7, 1965 became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ because Alabama State troopers beat and gassed and wounded the marchers. 

On March 21, 1965, on the third attempt, with a court order in our favor, we crossed the bridge and started for Montgomery.  On the fifth day of the march, near Montgomery, thousands of people joined with the several hundred marchers who had walked all the way.  To ‘give witness’ was the expression used.

King in his Montgomery speech said,  "I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” Somebody's asking, “How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?”  Somebody's asking, “When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?" Somebody's asking, "When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?" I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again. “How long? Not long, because “no lie can live forever."  How long? Not long, because "you shall reap what you sow.  How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

President Johnson, responding to the Selma Montgomery March took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Congress with these words, “Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Martin Luther King Jr. stood next to President Johnson as the President signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965.  Rev. King was the leader of the Birmingham Movement and his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a manifesto for the Civil Rights Movement.  He was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, a leader of all Americans and a world leader.  He was 39 years old on April 4, 1968 when he was assassinated.

Rev. King’s message of non-violence gave people hope and inspiration. He would interweave stories from literature, from the bible and from history into his sermons on the power of non-violence to change the world.  Rev. King, in his own words, “Speak truth to evil.  Speak truth to power.  But speak without hatred.”