After more than two decades of careful restoration and thoughtful transformation, Rancho Los Alamitos/Povuu’ngna— a nationally significant cultural landmark and “sacred site” that reopened to the public with a new rancho center and restored historic Barns Area and Gardens, providing exhibition spaces that will greatly enhance its award-winning programs and free visitor experiences.
Envisioned and implemented by the Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation, the new Rancho Center and Barns Area Restoration Project was constructed in multiple phases over a period of five years. The $14 million transformation retained the authentic character of the former working ranch through careful restoration and reconstruction efforts of the entire site, guided by meticulous research using RLA’s extensive archive of historic photographs, drawings and oral histories from former ranch workers and the Bixby family, according to a press release issued by Finn Partners Arts, an LA public relations firm.
The completed transformation also addressed the need to move the Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation’s offices out of the historic Ranch House into new spaces. While the Foundation offices are to be relocated to the Rancho Center’s lower floor, a new bookstore and classroom have been built in the restored barnyard area and sited in the footprint of Fred Bixby’s old car garage. The Foundation will turn next to the restoration of the Ranch House areas that had been previously used as administrative spaces.
“The moment to unveil Rancho Los Alamitos’ new and rejuvenated incarnation is finally here, and we are so delighted to begin this new chapter that steps up our commitment to preserve this extraordinary place and offer visitors a unique learning experience,” said Preston Hotchkis, chair of the Rancho Los Alamitos Foundation Board of Trustees. “In addition to being a gorgeous site, Rancho Los Alamitos is a place where nature and culture are brought together by the passage of time to weave a tapestry of past, present and future.”
The new 13,000-square-foot Rancho Center is a blend of historic and contemporary architecture using a 1948 horse barn as the historic core for the new, larger structure. With new exhibition, education and programming space, this latest addition provides visitors new and engaging ways to connect with the story of the landscape and its inhabitants over time. Designed by the renowned historic preservation architect Stephen J. Farneth, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and co-founder of the Architectural Resources Group in San Francisco, the Rancho Center is the centerpiece of Rancho Los Alamitos’s transformation. It was born out of the desire to expand the capacity for public education and programming while also ensuring historic preservation of the site.
The Rancho Center’s interior environment, including the new innovative exhibition “Rancho Los Alamitos— Ever Changing, Always the Same,” designed by William S. Wells and Claudia Jurmain, offers visitors a first chance to learn about the story of the place and its inhabitants over time through personal narratives, photos, oral histories and reproductions of historic documents. Theater and History rooms are interwoven with themes that capture changes to the landscape and its culture across time: “Renewing Possibilities,” “Natives and Newcomers” and “Borders and Boundaries.”
In the Rancho Room, a 25-foot-by-25-foot floor map displays the changing borders of the Rancho within the regional context, past and present, while large-scale watercolor murals by the late renowned illustrator and graphic designer Dugald Stermer cover the multi-purpose Rancho Room’s walls and convey the relation between people and place, climate, and the vital role of water.
Both the History Room exhibition and the award-winning video Rancho Los Alamitos: An Island in Time screening in the theater feature an untapped archive of original source materials— ledgers, letters and oral histories— that describe those who lived and worked there over time, including Indian workers, Chinese immigrants, Mexican ranch-hand families, Belgian tenant farmers and Japanese lease farmers. The exhibition displays names and nicknames written in John Bixby’s 19th Century ledgers that offer a snapshot of the diverse rancho community more than 100 years ago. The ledgers show Augustine Old Basque, Old Charlie Swede, Black Frenchman, John Italian, Old Irishman, Manuel Portuguese, Old Glory Mexican, Foolish Boy, George Big Dutchman, Ah Yoon, Ah Fan, Chiyo Kawanami Ohira and Tom Elliot Texas herder.
The complete restoration of the historic Barns Area has reestablished the authentic working ranch look and feel of the early-mid 20th Century barnyard in an undertaking that included relocating, seismic retrofitting and restoring five agricultural structures to recapture the layout and character of the historic working Ranch. Working corrals, rabbit hutches and a duck pond were also restored to once again house the Shires and draft horses, rabbits, ducks and chickens who will return home to the ranch to stay.
One example of the foundation’s stewardship of the site and the conservationist ethos that guides its work is the fact that Rancho Los Alamitos is the first historic site on the West Coast to adopt geothermal technology. Hidden underneath the barnyard area, the geothermal system supports the heating and air-conditioning systems of the Rancho Center and the bookshop/classroom, minimizes the ecological footprint of the new structures and preserves the tranquility of the site. The geothermal project involved installing 22,000 vertical feet of piping in 30 bores, each extending to 350 feet below the ground. The piping is filled with water, and the earth’s constant temperature of 68 degrees is used to keep the water coming into and out of the building’s heating and air-conditioning systems at that temperature, thus requiring the use of very little energy for heating and cooling.
Rancho Los Alamitos’s four acres of historic gardens are a key contribution to invigorating visitor experiences. The 1920s and 1930s gardens invite visitors to meander among displays of native flora. The theme of “Natives and Newcomers” not only describes inhabitants and laborers at Rancho Los Alamitos but is directly tied to the vegetation, including native wildlife and additions to the landscape made by successive stewards of the property.
Rancho Los Alamitos is open to the public free of charge, Wednesday through Sunday, 1pm to 5pm, with school tours and cultural workshops scheduled for weekday mornings.
