“But the question now is, is the city going to fund the project beyond that level which the state is going to fund it?” Phelps said. “The issue is that the trust was conditioned upon the city maintaining the house and its organ so long as it was able to do so. “The organ is part of a bigger problem,” Phelps said. 26, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the city and the renovation of the property as a public museum and recital hall.īecause of the costs involved, city officials will have to consider whether they are willing to appropriate municipal money or if they will rely on raising money from private sources.Ĭouncilmen Ed Phelps and Chris Valente, along with City Manager George Casewell, have suggested the creation of a nonprofit corporation to finance the Lanterman project. Wolf and eight other neighbors filed suit against the city, challenging the environmental impact report and conditional-use permit for the site. “What it boils down to is the issue of commercial use in a residential neighborhood,” said Leslie Wolf, who lives across the street from the 1.35-acre site. Since then, a number of expensive houses have been built near the estate. In 1965, the organ and recital hall were on a six-acre site.
The organ relay system occupies the master bedroom. Its current home is a economically constructed addition to the estate, with cement floors and no decorations. The gilded instrument occupies seven rooms in the Lanterman house. Others attest to the historic qualities of the estate and say the organ should remain. Neighbors near the Lanterman estate and elsewhere in the community say the instrument would be disruptive to the area and want it moved. Local organists and historians cite the historic value of the organ but criticize the acoustics inside the relatively small, cement-floored room.Īrchitect Jim Spencer, a city consultant on the project, said the Lanterman recital hall is inconsistent with the house’s design and should be torn down for the sake of architectural integrity. Some city officials and residents think the organ should be left where it is and played as Frank Lanterman probably would have wanted it played. Money was not appropriated to renovate the organ hall.
The grant from the State Office of Historic Preservation is designated for the restoration of the house as a museum. In this room, he played the organ and relived his earlier years as a theater organist, before his career in politics. To accommodate the musical purchase, the powerful assemblyman added a recital hall over the patio of his family’s Craftsman-style house. It was purchased for $15,000 by Lanterman after the theater was closed in 1963. The Lanterman organ was built in 1926 for the 4,651-seat Fox Theater in San Francisco. The Crawfords are among the largest and best organs built by Wurlitzer. A fifth organ in the original series, formerly at the Brooklyn Fox Theater, was dismantled in 1970. Louis Fox Theater and the Civic Center in Wichita, Kan. The other Crawford Specials are in the Detroit Fox Theater, the St. The organ, a Crawford Special, is one of four of its kind in the United States. When the late Frank Lanterman brought it home to La Canada Flintridge almost 25 years ago, it was quite a conversation piece: A 1926 theater organ, rescued from the defunct Fox Theater in San Francisco, built to carry the sound of a 90-piece orchestra to 5,000 listeners.
0 kommentar(er)
