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This postcard, postmarked July 13, 1909, was mailed from

the town of Nordhoff. By 1917, the village name had

changed to Ojai and a Mission-style stucco arcade fronted

the stores on the right, while the post office, arches,

pergola and park beautified the opposite side of the road.

Libbey proposed would be something new under

the California sun: an entire town remade in the

image of a Mission Era community.

Founded in 1874, Nordhoff had no historical

connection to the Mission Era, but that didn’t stop

Libbey. He hired San Diego architects Frank Mead

and Richard Requa, who created a Mission-style

stucco arcade to beautify the ramshackle wooden-

storefront businesses lining the north side of Ojai

Avenue. Across the street, Mead and Requa created

a park screened by a pergola flanked by Mission-

style arches, and a new post office with a Spanish

Colonial Revival bell tower 65 feet tall. Th se three

elements were in place by spring 1917, at which

point the town changed its name from Nordhoff

to Ojai. The new name was derived from the Chu-

mash word for moon and was thus a better match

for the town’s new look.

In subsequent years, Libbey added a Mission-

style church (which now houses the Ojai Valley

Museum); a new downtown hotel (today it’s called

The Oaks at Ojai); a residential development, the

Arbolada, featuring three spec houses by George

Washington Smith; and a country club with a club-

house designed by a young up-and-comer named

Wallace Neff (which has been incorporated into a

larger building at the Ojai Valley Inn).

Ojai’s makeover was widely publicized, espe-

cially in architecture magazines. In August 1918,

The Western Architect

ran a lavishly illustrated

article about Ojai’s new look, which (per the author)

had “pointed the way to civic improvement of a

more interesting type. No more charming street ex-

ists in all the state today where, yesterday, stood the

shanty town of the wild west…”

In its August 1919 issue,

The Architect and

Engineer

ran a cover story about Ojai’s inspira-

tional transformation. “Ojai’s fame as a village has

spread,” the magazine reported. “Committees of

citizens have visited it from various places in the

state, and already half a dozen small villages are

planning to do what Ojai has done.”

The town’s admiring visitors included a Mas-

sachusetts couple, Bernhard and Irene Hoffmann,

who eventually joined forces with Pearl Chase and

others to do for Santa Barbara what Libbey had

done for Ojai.

“We were impressed by two places in Califor-

nia—Ojai and Santa Barbara,” Bernhard Hoffmann

later told the Santa Barbara

News

.

A 2011 master’s thesis on Hoffmann written

for the University of Southern California School

of Architecture asserted that he was influenced by

what he saw in Ojai, especially Mead and Requa’s

Ojai Avenue arcade.

“A small-scale precursor to the larger transfor-

mation that lay ahead was demonstrated in tiny,

unincorporated Ojai,” wrote the researcher, Ellen K.

Knowles. The arcade “became an aspirational model

which Bernhard Hoffmann would soon strive to re-

alize in Santa Barbara.”

The Hoffmanns arrived in Santa Barbara in Novem-

ber 1919 and soon plunged into civic activism, join-

ing with Chase and local architects such as G.W.

Smith and James Osborne Craig to nudge people

toward embracing a unifying architectural vision for

the city. Th y focused on Casa de la Guerra as the

starting point. On September 19, 1921, Hoffmann

32

Montecito Magazine

Spring/Summer 2017

POSTCARD COURTESY JOHN FRITSCHE.