South Bay History

Felix Achilles Peano’s rich, fascinating life in the arts began in Parma, Italy, on June 9, 1863. As a young man, he studied sculpture under the tutelage of the then well-known Italian artist Odoardo Tabacchi in Turin.

Peano (pronounced pee-ah-no) emigrated to New York in the 1890s after earning renown for his art works in Paris. While in New York, he designed the Lipton Cup sports trophy for Tiffany & Co. and Scottish tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton.

IIn 1900, he accepted a post as an art professor at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching sculpture. While living there, he met writer Jack London while both were attending a public lecture. They became friends, and London ended up writing his most famous novel, The Call of The Wild, at Peano’s house in Oakland.

Southern California real estate developer Abbot Kinney contacted Peano in 1905, offering him a job as architect/designer for his new development along the coast south of Santa Monica.

Kinney called his seaside project “Venice In America,” and enlisted Peano’s help to design it. He originally was slated to craft as many as one hundred of the development’s villas, but ultimately Peano was responsible for one villa. He did design a dozen of the bridges that crossed the development’s canals.

Peano also built a distinctive home for himself at 128 San Vicente Blvd. in Santa Monica. Known as the “Pompeiian House,” it became something of a local landmark at the time.

In 1914, he shifted his attention to the South Bay. That year, he received a request from the daughter of Inglewood founder Daniel Freeman, Grace Freeman Howland, commissioning him to create doors for the entrance of the under-construction Holy Faith Episcopal Church at 260 N. Locust St. in Inglewood for a fee of $85,000.

Creating and executing the massive iron doors, 10½ feet tall and 7 feet wide, would become his life’s work. Inspired by the famed baptistery doors finished in 1453 by Italian Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti entitled the “Gate of Paradise,” Peano would spend the next 34 years of his life working on the project he called the “Door of Life.”

He moved from Santa Monica to Hawthorne after establishing a studio and foundry at 484 N. Hawthorne Blvd. in Inglewood where he could work on the “Door of Life” and other projects.

His eccentricity manifested itself in the new dwelling he built for himself in 1929 at 260 Freeman Ave. in Hawthorne. The lavish home became known locally as the “House of Surprises” for its ornate statues, carved marble columns and unusual features such as the underground tunnels connecting the main swimming pool to other smaller ones.

Passersby often stopped to gawk at the unusual edifice and its furnishings, some attempting to climb the fences and explore further. Police kept a close eye on Peano’s house for that reason. (Unfortunately, no overall photos of the house seem to have survived.)

The massive bronze doors that that Peano had made his life’s work were made of bronze and weighed two tons. Like Ghiberti’s earlier work, they were adorned with individual sculpted panels depicting biblical scenes. Following the style of the Italian masters, Peano’s depictions, such as of Eve in the Garden of Eden, contained unclothed human figures.

When the members of the church building council saw Peano’s work, they were outraged. He covered one such figure with long, cascading tresses, but that did little to mollify the committee. When they further demanded that he put some clothes on Eve, he flatly refused.

As a result, the doors were rejected. They never adorned Holy Faith Episcopal’s entrance. In fact, Peano never actually finished the doors. Discouraged and in poor health, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Hawthorne home on Nov. 25, 1948.

He believed in eugenics, the controversial process of improving the human race through genetic engineering, and left his Hawthorne home and $10,000 in his will to the Eugenics Society for  research “toward the creation of supermen.” 

Before he died, Peano had done much of his work at the Slauson Ave. foundry owned by his friend, Robert Haley. Haley enlisted Peano’s friend Jacob Pfeiffer, a bronze finishing expert, to help him complete the project after Peano’s death. 

The two of them worked on the “Door of Life” at Haley’s foundry, the Advance Aluminum & Brass Co. for several years before finishing the artwork in 1954, 40 years after work on it began. But the doors were so immense that no church could be found that would install them.

They languished in Haley’s foundry for years. They did go on public display, but only on rare occasions.

The doors were shown at the Los Angeles Home Show at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in L.A. in June 1955, at the Sanctuary of the Palms at Inglewood Park Cemetery in April-May 1971 and at the Inglewood Bank of America branch on Manchester later in the 1970s.

The last publicly reported appearance of Peano’s artwork was at the Hawthorne Diamond Jubilee celebration in 1982, and, when last sighted in 1996, the doors were gathering dust at a foundry in East Los Angeles.

Sources:

Cultural Arts Master Plan for the City of Inglewood, City of Inglewood Department of Recreation & Community Services, June 1996.

Find A Grave website.

Los Angeles Herald archives.

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Noirish Los Angeles,” SkyscraperPage website.

Wikipedia.

When I was working on the story on the origins of the name “RAT Beach” a few weeks ago, I noticed that some of the vintage photos of the area showed a striking-looking homemade structure built into the side of the cliffs on its northern end, near Torrance Beach.

A quick inquiry into its origin uncovered research by Dennis Piotrowski and Monique Sugimoto of the Palos Verdes Library District that told the story of the man responsible for the unique house. 

Louis Calvin Dart, the man who would become known as “The Hermit of Flotsam Castle,” was born in Missouri in 1859. He spent most of his early years in the Midwest, graduating with a law degree from an Iowa college and running a successful legal practice in Nebraska.

Illness struck him down, though, and left him unable to continue as a lawyer. He later said that he had been diagnosed with Bright’s disease, a kidney ailment now known as nephritis, but that doctors had stopped treating him after he ran out of money.

He became a drifter, eventually finding his way to northern California where he worked as a cook in mining camps in the early 1900s. During the 1910s, he moved down to Southern California, where the beaches of the Palos Verdes Peninsula attracted the formerly rootless wanderer.

The story goes that a Spanish woman who worked on one of the local ranchos was gathering clams when she encountered the increasingly sickly Dart on the beach. After hearing about his physical ailments, she told him to drink water from a spring at the base of the rocky cliffs on the north end of Malaga Cove, which she believed had special healing qualities.

Dart followed the woman’s advice, living for a time only on a broth he fashioned from the spring water together with sea snails that were plentiful on the rocky beach. His new diet suited him, and his health improved significantly. He was now able to climb up the rocks and gather wild tomatoes that grew on top of the cliff to eat as well.

He decided that the beach life suited him, and began fashioning a crude shelter up against a hollow in the rocks at what is now the north end of RAT Beach, just south of present-day Torrance Beach. Hard and fast dates as to when he did this are unclear, but he probably started building there in 1918 or 1919.

His project received a huge boost when the 45-foot yacht Genevieve, which had been moored in nearby Malaga Cove, broke free from its anchorage during high winds and wrecked on the rocky shore on Thanksgiving Day, 1920. 

Its owners paid Dart five dollars to guard the boat overnight, and eventually allowed him to take wood and other scraps from the ruins. He sold $85 worth of scrap as salvage, a small fortune at the time, and used the rest of it on his home.

From this raw material, Dart began to rebuild his seaside shelter into something that more resembled an actual house up against the cliffs. The new improved structure attracted attention from locals and beachgoers, and the impromptu local landmark became known as “Flotsam Castle.”

Dart lived there with two pets, both called “Baby”: a guinea pig and a gray house cat. His two-story handcrafted home had stairs to an upstairs living room. Downstairs, there was a lunch room with a kitchen and a stove where he baked pies, thousands of them, that he sold to tourists. 

A large empty cable wire spool that had washed up on the beach formed one of the tables on Dart’s patio where they ate the pies on the house’s patio. He even kept sodas and drinks cold in a recessed niche he carved out of the cliff near the spring, whose waters cooled the hillside enough to create a natural ice chest.

Dart’s fame began to spread, and visitors came from all over the world to see his home. Stories about his creation began appearing in newspapers and magazines in the early 1920s. 

Dart also fancied himself something of a homespun philosopher, adorning his “Castle” with bromides and and axioms. “This building cost but little money but much work, without which life affords no satisfying kick,” read a sign hung near its front door. He also had pamphlets printed up with more of his philosophical musings.

It’s not clear exactly when Dart moved out of his abode. It may have been as early as 1925, but he definitely was gone by the late 1920s.

Los Angeles Times reporter Florence Haines, who had written a feature story on Dart in 1922, revisited the Flotsam Castle in early May 1930. She found it deserted. A man living in a neighboring beach shack informed her that Dart had moved away.

He’d left the beach for the Arlington area of Riverside, where he built a less-famous shack on a hill, but was forced to move when it was looted while he wasn’t home.

On May 11, 1930, a development company building homes in the Hollywood Riviera area of Torrance finally burned the abandoned Flotsam Castle to the ground.

Dart ended up in a rooming house in downtown Riverside, where he refused all efforts by friends and his family in Idaho to help him. He lived there on support from the county welfare agency until his death at 72 on March 3, 1932. He was buried in Riverside’s Olivewood Memorial Park cemetery.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Find A Grave website.

“Flotsam Castle,” by Maureen Megowan, Active Rain website, June 24, 2016.

“The Hermit Philosopher of  Malaga Cove and His 20-Cent Castle,”  by Dennis Piotrowski & Monique Sugimoto, Palos Verdes Library District website.

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Sea Furnishes Material for Queer Dwelling,” Popular Mechanics, August 1922, Page 222-224.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

The Chincha native tribe lived high in the Andes Mountains in South America. When Spanish explorers came upon them in the 1500s, they were intrigued by the robes they wore, which had been crafted from the skins of small furry animals found only high up in the mountains of Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina.

The Spaniards named the animals, who were slightly larger than chipmunks, “chinchillas” (little Chinchas). They quickly realized the potential value of their pelts, which became highly desired once garments made from chinchillas were introduced into European high society.

Unfortunately for the chinchillas, it took as many as 150 of them to fashion a coat. As the demand for the expensive fur increased, the supply of animals began to be depleted. By the late 1800s, the animals hovered on the brink of extinction.

Chile, Peru and Bolivia finally signed a treaty banning the trapping of chinchillas and the exporting of their pelts in 1910, but by then, the cute little rodents had mostly disappeared from their native habitats.

In 1918, an American mining engineer, Mathias F. Chapman, traveled to Chile while working for the Anaconda Copper Co. While staying in a mountain camp, he purchased one of the now-rare animals from a Chilean man who had captured it.

Chapman was immediately taken by the chinchilla, and the idea of raising a herd of them to sell as pets appealed to him. Others had tried to get permission to take some of the animals out of Chile and failed, but Chapman was persistent and the Chilean government eventually allowed him to do so.

He formed a hunting party and went up high into the Andes in search of chinchillas for the next three years. He was able to keep 11 of them alive, eight males and three females. He’d studied other unsuccessful attempts to transport the animals, and determined that they had been removed too quickly from their high-altitude habitat. 

Instead, he brought them down from the mountains gradually, allowing them to adapt to lower and lower locations before finally taking them onboard a steamship for transport. During the trip, one chinchilla died and two were born. Chapman and the 12 chinchillas landed in San Pedro harbor on Feb. 21, 1923, the first colony of the animals to be brought into the United States.

He initially brought them to Los Angeles, where they stayed while a farm was being prepared in  Tehachapi, where he thought they might thrive. However, conditions in Tehachapi turned out not  to be ideal; among other problems, thieves stole half the new herd there, so he sought a new farm site back in Los Angeles.

He built the farm on Los Angeles County land just southwest of the Inglewood city limits in the unincorporated area now known as Lennox, at 4957 W. 104th St. He custom-built their cages, experimenting with their type and size in order to find their most suitable living conditions.

His efforts were successful, and the farm thrived. The chinchilla population began growing fairly rapidly in size. Some of the animals were sold as pets, generally for around $100 each, but many were sold to breeders who were raising them for the production of the very profitable chinchilla fur products. 

Chapman died on Dec. 28, 1934 at 52. His son, Reginald, took over the operation, and opened it up to visitors, calling it the “World’s Original South American Chinchilla Farm.” It became not only a popular local tourist stop, but also the largest chinchilla farm in the world at the time.

Chinchilla farming began to catch on, especially in the years following the end of World War II. The value of the animals skyrocketed, with a pair of breeding animals selling for as much as $3200. Chinchilla shows became regular community events, and, in 1952, El Camino College even began offering classes in chinchilla raising.

Farms started springing up all over the Los Angeles area. Several opened up in the South Bay and Harbor Area, including the Palos Verdes Chinchilla Ranch operated by Ardis Stagner in Walteria beginning in 1940, the Fur Farms (later Allied Furs)  in north Torrance, The Harbor District Fur Farm, Cherry’s Chinchilla Ranch in Lomita and many others.

In fact, by the early 1950s, chinchilla farms had become something of an investment craze, like uranium hunting. For every successful farm, though, there were many more that couldn’t make it work. 

The fad died down during the 1960s. By 1970, the Federal Trade Commission began issuing warnings about unscrupulous promoters selling the animals, falsely telling buyers they could be bred and raised at home easily for fun and profit. 

Buyers often found that chinchillas weren’t as easy to raise as they had been led to believe, and require considerable time, money and facilities in order to thrive. In addition, zoning regulations in most cities prevent the raising of animals for commercial sale.

Chinchillas continue to be raised on commercial farms for the fur industry, and, despite restrictions and their scarcity, poaching of them in the wild continues.

Chapman’s original Lennox chinchilla farm closed in the late 1950s, and an apartment complex now stands on the site. 

Environmentalists and animal rights activists since have questioned whether his motives weren’t more strictly financial and exploitative than animal-friendly, but there’s little dispute that he was the first to bring the animals to the U.S. and breed them successfully in captivity.

Sources:

“Chinchillas,” Humane Society of the United States website.

Daily Breeze archives.

Find A Grave website.

“History of the Chinchilla,” Darren’s Chinchilla Haven website.

Los Angeles Times archives.

Palos Verdes Peninsula News archives.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

Explanations abound regarding the source of the name for the stretch of beach south of Torrance Beach commonly known as Rat Beach. 

Among the theories: “Rat” stands for “Redondo and Torrance.” Or it means “Right after Torrance.” The beach was named for the pet rat a surfer brought to the beach while he surfed, or for rats gathering at a drainage outfall near the beach, or rats who came ashore when the Dominator sank off the Palos Verdes Coast in 1961.

All of them have been posited as possible origins of a somewhat scraggly stretch of Los Angeles County beach just north of the Roessler Pool and the popular Haggerty’s surf spot.

Before we get into the particulars of the name, let’s establish Rat Beach’s location. It’s often confused with Torrance Beach, a lovely white-sand stretch of beach that extends from Miramar Park on the north for just under a mile south to the northern edge of Malaga Cove.

Its location makes one of the explanations, that “Rat” means “Redondo and Torrance,” a less likely one, since Rat Beach, which extends south from Torrance Beach to Malaga Cove, does not adjoin Redondo Beach, almost a mile to the north. Torrance Beach lies between the two.

For years, the city Palos Verdes Estates claimed the area, referring to it as Malaga Cove Beach. A Dec. 31, 1937 editorial from the Palos Verdes Peninsula News demanded that the city take strict control of the beach in order to make it “an exclusive part of the Palos Verdes shores for the residents of Palos Verdes only.”

The editorial bemoaned the incursions of rowdy outsiders onto the beach, and reported that boats near the Palos Verdes Swimming Club, located at Roessler Point, had been broken into and vandalized. It went on to demand that police step up patrols in the area.

The Rat Beach name came about decades later. 

Perhaps the most colorful story concerning the name involves professional surfer Rick Irons. Irons, a member of the Haggerty’s Surfing Club in the 1960s, owned a pet rat that he used to bring with him when he surfed. He would leave it on the beach while carving up the waves, and his fellow surfers began calling the area Rat Beach in its honor.

Irons later moved to Hawaii, earned his degree, and served as the editor of Surfing magazine for several years.

Another taller tale involving the name came about after the SS Dominator ran aground offshore near Rocky Point in Palos Verdes Estates on March 13, 1961. The freighter, which carried a cargo of meat and grain, had to be abandoned.

According to legend, after the wreck, a large colony of rats living on the cargo in the ship’s hold made their way ashore and infested the nearby coastline, resulting in the name. Rats are survivors, but this batch must have been excellent swimmers to make it onshore, and hearty travelers to make it from Rocky Point north to Rat Beach, a distance of more than three miles.

A third rat origin story has to do with Malaga Creek. The stream terminates with an outfall at the southern end of Rat Beach, in the rocky area near the present-day Palos Verdes Beach and Athletic Club. As the beach wasn’t always meticulously maintained, a colony of rats supposedly thrived in the brushy, rocky area where the stream met the beach. This led to the area being called Rat Beach.

Other explanations claim the name refers to the “ratty” nature of the beach, which was the object of regular clean-up efforts during the 1960s and 1970s, though this is also difficult to substantiate.

Okay, so what’s wrong with just calling the beach Rat as shorthand for “Right After Torrance”? Absolutely nothing. It makes perfect geographical sense. There’s just no clear origin story for that explanation, which seems to have derived from popular usage in recent decades.

The Manhattan Beach Brewing Company created an ale in its honor in the early 1990s called Rat Beach Red Ale. The microbrewery discontinued production of the beer in 2009, but another brewery in Torrance, Buzzrock Brewing Co., has since introduced a new Rat Beach Red Ale in tribute to the original.

Rat Beach made the news twice in 2022. On Sept. 7, the beach was closed for about three weeks after a 10,000-15,000 gallon sewage spill near the Malaga Creek outfall. Then, on Dec. 9, a 200-foot section of hillside collapsed onto the beach. 

The landslide, part of a larger, unfortunate recent trend of land movement on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, resulted in the closure of the beach and the evacuation of several hilltop houses.

Rat Beach remains popular among local surfers and beachgoers, despite not having the scenic ambience or quality waves of other spots. It may not be beautiful, but it’s ours, with crowds kept low due to it being accessible only by a path leading down from a parking lot near the former Malaga Cove School.

We may not have been able to pinpoint the exact source of Rat Beach’s name, but it’s clear that the name itself is here to stay. I think I’ll go with “Right After Torrance,” which is as good an explanation as any.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Palos Verdes Peninsula News archives.

“South Bay locals: Do you know where RAT Beach is?”, by Blake Lane, NewsBreak website, Aug. 26, 2023.

Note: Special thanks to Toni Sciacqua, SCNG Managing Editor, Digital, for the story idea.

The South Bay History blog is taking Thanksgiving week off. It will return with its next new post on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Harbor Area and the Palos Verdes Peninsula must’ve felt hard done by the 1961 announcement that a new Los Angeles County Courthouse branch building would be built in Torrance.

The entire South Bay/Harbor Area had been bereft of a large-scale courthouse for years. For major cases, attorneys and other involved persons would have to schlep themselves and their documents to the downtown L.A. courthouse, with some cases able to be handled at the county courthouse in Inglewood.

Ground was broken for the new courthouse in Torrance in 1964, and the building was dedicated on June 23, 1967.

Fortunately, L.A. County Supervisor Burton W. Chace, who represented the Harbor Area, took note of the judicial deficiency. In late December 1966, he convinced the Board of Supervisors to give the green light for construction of a new satellite courthouse in San Pedro.

At the time, the only courtrooms in town were two small ones located in the San Pedro Municipal Building at 638 Beacon St.

Eight bids were submitted for construction of the two-story facility to be erected on 1.75 acres at 505 S. Center St., between Fifth and Sixth streets. Coast State General Engineering Co. of Long Beach won the job with a low bid of $1.16 million.

Funding for the project came from the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association, with the county set to repay the debt over a 30-year period under terms of a lease-purchase agreement.

In addition to three municipal courtrooms, plans for the 42,655-square-foot facility included offices for the municipal court clerk, district attorney, public defender, probation department and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Two of the three courtrooms were circular in design, the first such rooms in Southern California.

Supervisor Chace officiated at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new building, which was held on July 7, 1967. “The battle to bring modern, more efficient municipal court facilities to the San Pedro area has been difficult, but now the job is only a year away from reality,” he told attendees at a post-ceremony luncheon at the Pacific Trade Center building in San Pedro.

In reality, costs would rise to $1.3 million, and the courthouse would not be completed until early 1969.

Its grand opening ceremony on Feb. 28 of that year included speeches from California Supreme Court associate justice Marshall McComb, as well as from local pols John Gibson of the L.A. City Council and California State Senator Ralph Dills.

The court would go on to conduct its business without major incident until 1986, when reports of allegedly scandalous actions of its chief supervising judge, David M. Kennick, brought tension to the court.

According to San Pedro News Pilot reporter Russ Britt, “During 1986, Kennick was accused of favoritism in handing out court-appointed cases to private attorneys with whom he had financial and personal ties. Other accusations surfaced that Kennick sought sexual favors in exchange for judicial influence and asked a California Highway Patrol officer to ‘lose the paper work’ in a drunken-driving case against him.”

Kennick resigned on Jan. 1, 1987, and morale at the courthouse improved markedly.

The building remained vacant during the rest of the 2010s as the community debated what to do with the prime real estate on which it stood.

But by 2003, the court was beset by a new threat: county government budget cuts. Rumors about the cuts began spreading in late 2002. On April 14, 2003, adjudication of all criminal cases shifted to the Long Beach Superior Court, with San Pedro handling only civil cases.

The money saved came from the shuttering of the lockup facility at San Pedro, but the LAPD was angered because its officers had to spend more time commuting to a court further away from the area they patrolled.

Rumors also began to circulate that the county would close the courthouse entirely in order to further cut costs. The facility limped along for several more years until the budgetary ax finally fell in June 2014, when the county closed it permanently. All of its functions were transferred to Long Beach.

In February 2021, Supervisor Janice Hahn and Pasadena development company Genton Cockrum Partners announced plans for the construction of an eight-story mixed-use commercial-residential structure on the site.

Demolition of the old courthouse began on Feb. 9, 2022. Construction of the new project, named Acqua Via, began in Fall 2023, and is expected to be completed in late 2025. It will include 300 apartments and ground-floor retail establishments, along with 500 underground parking spaces.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Los Angeles Times archives.

Palos Verdes Peninsula News archives.

San Pedro News Pilot archives.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.