How much does spite weigh? If you’re famed California architect Lloyd Wright, the answer is around 500 pounds of stone, minus the flecks lost when chipping out 66 words and a single year: 1970.
Fifty-five years ago, Wright — technically Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., son of the famed architect behind Fallingwater, though the younger professionally preferred Lloyd Wright — and developer Stanley Fann erected what amounts to an angry, quarter-ton tombstone behind a gas station in Orange County’s Huntington Beach. The landmark is a reminder that sometimes wealthy, important men don’t get their way. And that usually makes them very mad.
The monument, its epitaph still legible today, remains for all to see, sitting just across the asphalt parking lot from a Petco and a Rite Aid pharmacy. It’s a wonder that the acidic sarcasm dripping from the granite (metaphorically, not architecturally, speaking) hasn’t eroded the whole thing away.
More than half a century ago, Wright and Fann were scheming up what they figured was a Huntington Beach hit: a new art deco-toned strip mall plaza just inland from sandy Sunset Beach along the coast. The area was, by most accounts, a boomtown, growing rapidly thanks to its proximity to the water and its oilfield riches. Single-family home-seekers ready for a life in the suburbs found a lot to like in Huntington Beach. A Feb. 28, 1965, story in the Orange County Register noted that “the area is going to grow and blossom into one of Orange County’s greatest communities, and best place in which to live.”…