A Long History of Home Savings in Torrance. Two Locations and Two Styles Worth Saving By Adam Arenson
A Long History of Home Savings in Torrance. Two Locations and Two Styles Worth Saving
By Adam Arenson
Howard Ahmanson bought Home Savings and Loan in 1947. By 1954, it was the largest savings-and-loan in the United States, a distinction it maintained until the 1990s, remaining a highly profitable company despite decades of change.
Ahmanson was successful in tweaking the rules around how savings-and-loans were run—before his generation, they were often set up more like nonprofits or mutual-aid societies—and by using the 19th-century charter of Home Savings to expand far faster and farther than his competitors.
Ahmanson and Home Savings invested in homeowners that were already prosperous, and they sought to facilitate their customers’ next successes. As I explain in my book Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets’s and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California (University of Texas Press, 2018), in the 1950s, in the first round of expansion, Home Savings targeted Arcadia, Glendale, Pasadena, and Torrance; in order, they were respectively the first, third, fifth, tenth, and fifteenth highest cities for median home value in the county.
The first Home Savings buildings were local icons – key buildings in prominent places, even before Home Savings hired Millard Sheets. In Torrance, Home Savings opened in the 1937 Art Moderne city hall building – its streamlined design and prominent location a show-stopper.
Once Millard Sheets was hired, the Torrance branch received a mosaic with a bird motif, and some interior sculptures that have since been removed. Birds, starbursts, and Millard Sheet’s favored Tree of Life design—interlocking branches, often with birds nestled inside—were common motifs in the studio’s designs for decades. We have no Sheets Studio records from this period, but the repeated designs— on new branches in Torrance (birds) and Whittier (starbursts), on the Sheets Studio building, in Dallas commissions (both birds and starbursts), and more — suggest that these were the studio’s mosaic training panels. Mosaic assistants learned how to cut the smalti and see whether the men and women had the patience and concentration that such work required. The irregular quality of the mosaic work on the birds in particular suggests that some sections reflect work done by a veteran, carefully crafted, while others are by a student, not quite accomplishing the same level of finesse.
The Torrance branch was the site of a protest in 1963, as the Congress for Racial Equality of California (CORE) took action against builders and financial institutions that they felt were still redlining. CORE targeted Don Wilson, a large builder in Torrance, who would not allow Lloyd Ransom, an African American chemist, to buy a home. They also picketed the Home Savings office in Torrance, since Home Savings was financing the development. Ken Childs, the president of Home Savings called a meeting of the largest Southern California builders and urged them to act together to integrate their developments, but he could not get enough agreement to make a deal. Ransom was eventually allowed to buy his home, and Home Savings officials worked to engage more and more diverse communities, opening branches in South Central Los Angeles and majority-Latino neighborhoods and sponsoring community programs across southern California.
Home Savings eventually moved out of the city hall branch, in the 1980s, and opened a new building, with another innovation in Home Savings art and architecture. For a new branch in Torrance (1980), Denis O’Connor, Sue Hertel, and Alba Cisneros—each of whom had worked with Millard Sheets before his retirement, and who continued to work in and expand Sheets’s style—designed mosaics and fabric wall hangings. On the branch façade, O’Connor and Hertel provided a triptych of local history, described in the shorthand in the Millard Sheets Papers correspondence as “Rancho San Pedro, Red Car maintenance, family living.”
The images draw on on stock characters — the vaquero, with his red bandanna and striped cape; a contemporary family at play—but it also shows a distinctive Red Car, one of LA County’s streetcars that shaped an entire era of the expanding suburban communities, just before the age of the automobile. O’Connor and Hertel linked the past and present, inviting an even greater sense of community identification.
While Home Savings is gone, these two buildings in Torrance provide important snapshots into the history of the Home Savings art and architecture over the second half of the twentieth century.
Sheets Studio, Historical Triptych for Torrance Home Savings, 1979. Frank Homolka, Architect. Photograph by Adam Arenson, 2013.
For my award-winning books — Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California (Texas, 2018), The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Harvard, 2011/paperback Missouri, 2015) — and my co-edited volumes Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (California, 2015) and Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (Penn, 2013), as well as current projects, see: http://adamarenson.com and http://manhattan.edu/faculty/adamarenson