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Critic’s Notebook
The historic ranch house of Will Rogers and an important residence by Ray Kappe were destroyed by the fires, which threaten L.A.’s spectacular design legacy.
By Sam Lubell
Reporting from Los Angeles
Jan. 9, 2025
To live in Los Angeles is to be regularly reminded that much of what surrounds its residents is fleeting. That pertains, most essentially, to human life and the natural world, as the deadly fires reminded us this week. But also to both the vital everyday structures and the cultural monuments that helped mark this place’s stunning achievements, told its citizens’ stories and embodied its startling confluence of talent, originality and freedom.
Several cherished landmarks ranging from the city’s early history, to its experimental, midcentury modern period and its contemporary era, have fallen victim to the deadly wildfires that have ravaged the region.
On Wednesday news arrived of the loss of the historic ranch house that once belonged to the beloved Hollywood cowboy and comedian Will Rogers, who in the 1920s bought up hundreds of acres in the foothills of the Pacific Palisades.
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This land, now a California State Park, is a place where you can hop on a trail and find a glowing, majestic overlook of the ocean in about 10 minutes. Rogers’s rustic clapboard home from 1926, with its wide porch and open courtyard standing on a slight rise, was like a walk into a rural time warp; a hybrid of authentic country life and Los Angeles-style enhancement. There was the wagon wheel chandelier, the barnlike rafters, the heavy stone fireplace with a mounted prize longhorn head, and endless Western paraphernalia, including saddles, Navajo rugs and sepia family photos.
Rogers hosted Walt Disney here, along with Clark Gable and Charles Lindbergh. Just as wondrous were the adjacent timber stables right off the courtyard. Rogers’s visitors went there to saddle up their horses on their way to the adjacent riding area and, below that, the polo field.
