Freeway Update

As I went through The Nickel Tour recently, I found a couple more freeway connections I had managed to forget over the years:

• The King Arthur Carrousel was available for purchase by Disneyland because of freeway construction in Toronto. It had previously been in Sunnyside Park, which sits on the shore of Lake Ontario. (I bet the horses like the warmer weather!) The Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway currently runs adjacent to (through?) the park, so that must be the freeway referred to in the book. If you can decipher their shorthand, you can learn a little more about the carrousel at the National Carousel Association's "Census of Classic Wood Carousels (Condensed)." For background on the "Sunnyside Beach Park" or "Sunnyside Amusement Beach," you can learn about that here. (My favorite part is where the author writes that the carrousel "supposedly opened with the park" in 1955.)
  
• "A Tour of the West" was shot mostly from the roof of a car, including travels "along the Los Angeles Freeways." If they had waited, they could have just taken the cameras over to the Autopia!
  

Disneyland and Freeways

One of my non-Disney interests is roads. Their planning, construction, and aesthetics fascinate me, and much of my academic writing has concentrated on opposition to and public problems with various road projects, including the Beverly Hills Freeway (to which Walt was opposed) and the road to Mineral King (oh, wait, did I say this was my non-Disney interest?). The history of Disneyland is intimately bound up with the freeway culture of Southern California, from its origins, to attractions found within and the Park's very success.

Walt's initial plans for an Americana kiddie park across the street from the Burbank Studio got paved over by the Ventura Freeway. That probably worked out best for us Disneyland fans; it was only a 16-acre site! (As an Orange Countian, I wouldn't have fought traffic to get there!) To determine the proper location for Disneyland, the Stanford Research Institute looked at a number of factors, including smog, future population growth, the prospect of government support--and freeway accessibility. The Park sits beside a freeway running from Mexico to Canada; I'd say that's accessible! It's also not too far from the Orange Crush spaghetti bowl (Disneyland in upper left):

The projections of future growth and transportation networks did nothing until such links were operational, of course. The Santa Ana Freeway (then US-101, now I-5) was literally under construction as the Park was opening and required valiant efforts from Disneyland people and local government officials to get it to a usable state. Van France recounts his role in getting the Harbor Boulevard off-ramp finished in Window on Main Street:

By the authority I give myself for doing this history, I'll also give myself credit for completing the Harbor off-ramp two days before opening. Cars would come down the freeway and hit a boulevard stop. Wood warned us, "Without that off-ramp, traffic will be backed up to San Francisco!" The problem was that the contractor's agreement stipulated that no overtime be paid by the state. I went to meet the Superintendent of the job. Fortunately, he was a young guy who understood our problem. Without any paperwork, except [C. V.] Wood's okay, I said we'd pay for any overtime involved. I also threw in a lunch if they could complete it before opening day. That off-ramp was completed two days before opening. A crisis had been averted. We celebrated over lunch and cocktails. I got my off-ramp, and a hangover to boot.

I recall a version of this story where liquor was used as an additional inducement to the construction workers, but I wasn't able to locate it. In an interview I have, Van France argues that there were a lot of things which came together in 1955 that allowed Disneyland to be a success. One such development was the growing freeway system.

It's pretty well known that many of the trees used in landscaping Disneyland for Opening Day were salvage operations from freeway construction projects throughout the Southland. In the words of Morgan Evans, Disneyland's landscape designer extraordinaire, "California's projected freeways, routed unavoidably through residential districts, afforded an unusual opportunity to salvage full-grown trees. Former owners can take some comfort from the knowledge that many fine specimens were literally snatched from the jaws of bulldozers, then packaged and transported to Disneyland for a new lease on life." His window on Main Street reflects this practice: "Evans Gardens / Exotic & Rare Species / Freeway Collections / Est. 1910 / Morgan Bill Evans / Senior Partner."

Evans himself later engaged in the landscaping of freeways. The State of California hired him in 1968 to act as a consultant in landscaping Pasadena's freeways. The one contribution I could find from Evans--oddly enough--was the suggestion that it would be cheaper to buy trees from nurseries for replanting along the freeway than to move and save trees in the freeway right of way. If only there were a Disneyland to take them in!

Freeways plowed right through landscaping, but they also went through structures purchased by the state--and Walt was there to capitalize on it. In Disneyland's early days (to a much less extent today), there were mechanical music machines scattered throughout the Park. One of the few left is the Welte Style 4 Concert Orchestrion in the back of the Penny Arcade, pictured below:

A significant portion of these came from the collection of Albert Clifford Raney, who had a large assemblage of mechanical music machines. In 1953, California was building the San Gabriel River Freeway (I-605) through the Raney estate and Raney's widow, Ruby, decided to sell the collection. Walt was fascinated by the objects and bought thirty of them for the Park; Ruby felt they had found a good home. (Raney was also a collector of saloon art, which went to Knott's Berry Farm.) More can be found about the origins of this collection and the history of one specific piece of it here.

The Autopia's relation to freeways is almost too obvious to bear mentioning. The attraction, of course, re-created the Southern California driving experience for locals and tourists alike. One Guest--I wasn't immediately able to find the article in which this quote comes--was amazed Walt could get people to pay to park, pay to visit, and then stand in line to do what they had to do to get to Disneyland! The attraction's name--Autopia--suggested the idyllic possibilities of an automobile society, although at this time resistance to the freeway construction was growing and smog was choking Los Angeles. (And hey, Walt Disney later opposed the Beverly Hills Freeway!)

The Autopia has a fantasy element, to be sure, but there is also a very concrete link to reality. The James I. Barnes Construction Company, of Santa Monica, served as general contractors for the $6 million Disneyland '59 addition. This means that they not only oversaw construction of a Swiss mountain, an undersea adventure, and a futuristic transportation system, but also the reconstruction/expansion of the Tomorrowland and Fantasyland Autopias. They were well acquainted with road construction. In a linkage too perfect to make up, the Barnes Co. built the four-level interchange in downtown Los Angeles between July 1947 and July 1949--an icon of the Southern California car culture. Major Pepperidge over at Gorillas Don't Blog astutely opined that the Autopia overpasses and intertwined monorail track resembled a four-level interchange. Well, now we know why! What better way to interject a little reality into the fantasy by bringing in the very people who built the original? From the collection of the Historic American Engineering Record:

All of the above doesn't even get into the Monorail's perceived potential use as a solution for urban traffic ills--like the footage created for "Kodak Presents Disneyland '59" that shows a monorail paralleling US-101 through downtown L.A. Various officials toured Disneyland to see the monorail and they were proposed for use elsewhere in Southern California every few years, even connecting Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm! I may get into these monorail proposals in future posts.

The Shipley-Lydecker House

I don't remember what I was searching for back in September--perhaps information on Yale Gracey or Claude Coats and the Haunted Mansion. My search strategy brought me to a blog post on justinspace.com from 2006, provocatively showing the exact source upon which Ken Anderson's early rendering was based. The architecture was copied almost identically from that photograph. The book--a reference work found in Walt Disney Imagineering's Information Research Center--did not identify the name of the building, only that it was in Baltimore; apparently nobody had dug up any more information on the structure.

The confluence of circumstance, I modestly believed, made me the perfect person to ferret out information on the house. I had my obvious interest in Disneyland history. I am currently in Maryland for graduate school, so if need be I could drive up to Baltimore or consult with local historians who might know something. Additionally, for the past several years I had been working on a California gazetteer and was familiar with the types of sources that often contained information about geographic entities like the unnamed mansion. I set out with the premise that the house probably didn't still exist, or some Disney fan would have taken notice of it.

For my first order of business, I checked out the book, Decorative Art of Victoria's Era by Frances Lichten, 1950, from the library. It was with trepidation that I gazed at the page with the photo of the house--if there were no other identifying information, I wasn't sure where to turn! I was pleased, then, to find a citation: "Photographs, Courtesy, Index of American Design, National Gallery of Art." There was no further information to identify where in the collection this photograph might have come, but I nevertheless sought out information on the IAD. I grew a little confused to learn that the Index was mostly a project to record decorative artwork in watercolors; where did the photographs come in, I wondered? I did eventually find that the collection held a small number of photographs where it was felt watercolor renderings wouldn't do the items justice.


So, I sent off an e-mail to the National Gallery of Art identifying my source and crossing my fingers that that meant anything to them. Meanwhile, I consulted about a dozen Baltimore architecture books, flipping through page after page, photo after photo, hoping to stumble upon a new view of that building. Nope. I also looked through volumes of indexes of the Index hoping to find something, but struck out there, too.

Charlie Ritchie of the NGA soon got back to me with as much information as I could have hoped for! Photographs were taken on May 26, 1937 by Christopher Schindele. The real subject of the documentation was the cast iron grillwork; who knows what the Haunted Mansion would look like if the ironwork had not caught the attention of somebody back in the 1930s! The house address was listed as 2550 McHenry Street, Baltimore, and the owner as Mr. Phillip Leydecker. The grillwork was dated to 1805. He provided a photograph reference number of MD-ME-I-59 for the overall house and MD-ME-I-61 and MD-ME-I-62 for close-ups of the iron work. (Though I have not done so, reproductions can be ordered from the National Gallery of Art.) I let Charlie know the reasons for my inquiry and he said the staff was "delighted and amazed" at the local connection to the Haunted Mansion.

Upon receiving this information, I first went to Live Search Maps to see an oblique aerial photograph of the address... and found no Haunted Mansion. This is the area as it exists today in the western part of Baltimore, with the previous location of the Shipley-Lydecker house within the white box:


Now that I had a name and an address, I could try to answer some additional questions. Who built it? Who was the architect? When was it torn down? Google Books allowed me to find several guidebooks that gave brief mention of the house, and the descriptions are charming and humorous in light of the completely different context the house's architecture has at Disneyland.

Maryland, A Guide to the Old Line State, compiled by workers of the Writers' Program of the Works Project Administration in the State of Maryland, had the following to say on page 251:

The SHIPLEY-LYDECKER HOUSE, McHenry St. and Franklintown Rd., is a pretentious three-story, square, brick structure built by Charles Shipley in 1803. It has a two-story addition at the rear and a flat hipped roof surmounted by a cupola with a gilded weathervane and three round-arch windows. The typanum of the two-story columned portico is decorated with rays radiating from a half sun. The elaborate cast-iron grillwork of the two-story gallery porches, extending around three sides of the house, is notable.

Hulbert, Footner, author of Maryland Main and the Eastern Shore (Hatboro, PA: Tradition Press, 1942) couldn't make up his mind about the structure (pp. 70-71):

One of the butcher's houses standing in a plot at the corner of McHenry Street is without doubt the quaintest, the most absurd, and the most picturesque dwelling in Baltimore. It is said to have been built in 1802. Originally a plain, square dignified structure of that good period, some later owner of a taste less pure, has embellished it with a double gallery all around, decorated with cast-iron work more fantastically elaborate than anything in Baltimore, which is famous for its cast-iron balconies. All this iron lace-work is painted white, and the effect is dazzling.

The architectural evaluations were interesting, but I still wanted more on the history of the house. There was very little information turned up with a general web search, but I did find that the West Baltimore Post 476 Veterans of Foreign Wars had converted the house into a living memorial to the dead of World War II. I have not contacted them to see if they have any records concerning the house or know when it was torn down.

A classmate of mine, Megan Dwyre, put me in touch with the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Jeff Korman graciously pulled some things together from their files in a PDF which you can download here. This is what he was able to find:

...a photo of the house as it appeared in The (Baltimore) Sun Magazine, March 27, 1949. A history of the mansion that was given to me for our files by Isabel Shipley Cunningham. A portion of the 1914-1953 Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas for Baltimore showing the block the house was situated on and its orientation with regard to the surrounding streets, and a few pages from the 3 volume family history, The Shipleys of Maryland showing Charles Shipley and his issue- and a drawing of the house.

There must be more information out there; I imagine the Baltimore Sun would have had an article when the house was finally torn down, but I have not looked. (The Washington Post did not.) I wonder if the two buildings existed simultaneously.

Note: Not every post will be like this! I had just done quite a bit of digging in this particular case and thought it a good story with which to kick off my blog. I hope the story of my research didn't come off too tedious--I want to include some information like that in some future posts. If I've overlooked something, someone can step in and point it out!