There are all kinds of weird urban legends, and thousands of weird artifacts and abandoned buildings and bits of American history, long forgotten in California, and across the U.S.A.. This is the only one I think I can claim credit for bringing back into public awareness. Thirty four years after I first found saw this tombstone, I'm still learning more about its story. Here's my part of this weird story.
In 1986, a zine I published about BMX freestyle in the San Francisco Bay area, landed me a job in Torrance, at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. They liked my work, but I was pretty uptight, and kind of bossy, and just wasn't the right fit for the small, family business. So I got laid off at the end of 1986, and they hired some 17-year-old BMX/skater kid named Spike Jonze to fill the spot. He was the right fit. And yeah... he's that Spike Jonze.
Meanwhile, I landed a job editing the newsletter for the American Freestyle Association, down in Huntington Beach. My boss, Bob Morales, was a 23-year-old BMX freestyler turned entrepreneur who started the AFA, put on the only BMX freestyle contests at the time, and also designed bikes, designed magazines ads for other companies, and did about 17 other things. He was a born entrepreneur.
I crashed on Bob's couch for a couple of weeks, then found an apartment on Springdale in Huntington Beach. I moved into my new room, and found it was a short, mile and a half ,bike ride to work each morning. I didn't have a car at the time. I usually ended up working a bit extra every day, it was a small place, there were only three of us at first, Bob, his sister Riki, and me. A really cool lade named Carmella started there shortly after. But it was a small business, and there was always more stuff to do. Usually around 6 pm or so, I'd ride home on my Raleigh freestyle bike (my only "factory" sponsor), grab some supper, and go practice my flatland tricks in a local parking lot. At the time, BMX freestyle was flatland, or ground tricks, and quarterpipe and wedge ramp riding. BMX street, park, and dirt jumping all turned into seperate sports later on.
I started practicing every night for a couple hours, in one of the shopping center parking lots at Springdale and Warner. Three of the four were kind of busy. But the shopping center behind the Arco gas station was kind of run down, and pretty quiet in the evenings. So that became my main practice area night after night.
I would usually practice for 1 1/2 or 2 hours, and then go get a Coke at Steve's Char Burger, across the street, or maybe at Arco. Sometimes I would go back to the parking lot, sit and drink my Coke for a while, then ride some more. That was usually when there was some trick I was trying that I could almost, but not quite, pull off. So I'd keep trying until I either landed it, or was exhausted.
One of those nights, I got my Coke, and sat on the curb on the side of the gas station, taking a break. I'd been riding there for two or three months at that point. But something caught my eye. Someone at the gas station had just trimmed the overgrown bushes at the back of the building. There was a rounded stone sticking up, something that I'd never seen before because the bushes were so overgrown. It looked like a tombstone.
OK, you saw the photo at the top of this post, obviously, that big black tombstone was what I saw. I pulled the bushes back so I could read the whole engraving. At first I thought maybe it was some landmark, or the grave site of some famous person in local history, buried there back in the 1800's or something. But the tombstone was built to commemorate a 94 foot high tower that "Lloyd Wright" wanted to construct at the shopping center, but the people of Huntington Beach shot the idea down, and "democracy" over-ruled the will of the architect. The stone is dated 1970, and was put there by the developer, not Lloyd Wright himself.
My first thought was "Man, that architect was one bitter motherfucker." That's when I sat there, and looked around at the shopping center. It was a bit different. I'd noticed that before, but never thought much about it. The corners of the buildings had these big, tilted diamond shapes on them. There were also decorative pieces along the top of the front of the building, they repeated across the span. It wasn't just your typical shopping center design. I knew nothing about architecture, but I'm the son of a draftsman/engineer. I realized that the architect definitely took some time to make this shopping center look different than every other one. But a 94 foot high tower? That's almost ten stories high? He must have had some really cool idea, or at least thought he did, to get that upset about it getting shot down. I went back to riding, and didn't think much more about it. That was in the spring of 1987.
Fast forward nearly 20 years. In the early summer of either 2006 or 2007, I was working as a taxi driver in Huntington Beach. I worked 70-100 hours a week from 2003-late 2007, and those years all blend together. I think it was probably May of 2007. There were 200 or 300 college age kids from Ireland that came to Huntington Beach to work and party all summer. I started picking up groups of them to take them to the bars on the weekends. They were cool, and they kept asking me local questions. Where's a department store to buy some cooking utensils? Where's the nearest drug store? What's the best part of the beach to have a bonfire? None of them had cars, so I kept driving different groups of them around. Each group rented a house or apartment, and had 8 to 12 people crammed in, men and women, to keep costs down. As an old zine publisher (A zine got me the magazine job years before), I decided to make them a "Guide to Huntington Beach" zine, with all the basic info they needed to have a fun summer.
When I make zines, I go all out, and I wound up going to the library and doing some research on the history of Huntington Beach, not just online, but actually reading little books written decades before on H.B.. The more I learned, and the more weird little things I could think of to put in the guide, the bigger it got. A week or two later, I had a 48 page zine I called "The Very, Very Unofficial Guide to Huntington Beach." It had all kinds of little known and obscure facts in it, including a paragraph about the Lloyd Wright tombstone to the tower idea, behind the Arco station at Springdale and Warner. I had fun, and learned a lot about Huntington Beach, making that zine. I made a bunch of copies, and handed them out to all the Irish kids. They loved it. I gave them out free, as promotion for my taxi. Pretty much all the Irish kids in H.B. that summer called me whenever they needed a taxi ride. Their taxi rides alone more than paid for the zine, several times over.
I made more copies, and handed them out to a bunch of other taxi passengers. After a couple of weeks, people in downtown H.B. started walking up to my cab when I was parked, and they would ask, "Are you the cab driver that made that book about H.B.?" I'd say, "Yeah," and hand them a zine. That turned out to be the most popular zine I ever made, and I gave out about 250 copies of it. They cost me about $2 each to make, but it was fun, and well worth it for me.
What I didn't know is that the weird tombstone came to the attention of other people who liked the weird little urban story of the tombstone to the tower that didn't happen. Until two days ago, when I took the photo above, I thought Frank Lloyd Wright, the world famous architect, was the guy who designed that shopping center, and got so mad about the tower, that the developer put up the tombstone. But there was more to the story I never tracked down. What I didn't know was that OC Weekly newspaper did this article on the Lloyd Wright tombstone in 2012... that I first saw in 1987, and wrote about in my zine in 2007. Yes, the gas station owners knew it was there. But I think I was the first person to write about the tombstone since 1970. So my zine brought it back into the attention of some locals, and later OC Weekly wrote their article, and did the research to figure out it was Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. who designed the Westfair Shopping center. The son of the world reknowned architect, successful in his own right, wanted to build the 94 foot tower at the shopping center. And then, looking up to see if I could find any more info on it a couple days ago, I found this video..
Local H.B. writer Chris Epting took up this idea for some YouTube videos in 2020, and dug further into the story. The legendary architect, Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr., designed this shopping center in 1969. He designed that gas station as well, originally a Richfield station, now an Arco.
He went by the name "Lloyd Wright," during much of his life. He was a successful landscape designer and architect in his own right. He designed much of the huge sets for the Douglas Fairbanks Robinhood movie. He worked on some of the L.A. area houses his father designed. He designed two of the early canopies for the Hollywood Bowl, and many other projects. As it turns out, this shopping center, the Westfair Shopping Center in Huntington Beach, was his last job, when he was nearly 80 years old. So at the end of his long career, the local citizens of Huntington Beach shot down his idea to add a 94 foot tower to the project. Chris goes into more detail in the video above. He even has a copy of the only sketch of the tower, and it's far different than the "oil derrick" that people thought it was supposed to look like.
It's weird how obscure little things, like the story of this tombstone, that I first saw 34 years ago while riding my bike, and then wrote about myself 14 years ago, keeps evolving. While my 2006 or 2007 zine seems to be what got a few people checking this oddity out, I never dug up the whole story. So now, 13-14 years after the zine, another researcher helps me, and now you readers, learn why there's a big tombstone behind a gas station in Huntington Beach.
The Arco gas station is at 5981 Warner (at Springdale) in Huntington Beach. The tombstone is behind the station, right by the pole for the big Beef Palace sign. The bushes are really cut back these days, so it's easy to read the tombstone, and take photos. You can learn more about Lloyd Wright (aka Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr.) on his Wikipedia page.
There are several videos about Frank Lloyd Wright (senior), and he had one crazy life. At one point, a disgruntled chef locked all the windows and doors at his house, while Frank was away working, then set it on fire, and took an axe and killed 7 people, mostly members of Wright's family. Seriously, it's a crazy story, the most tragic part of a really unusual and interesting life. Wright came back form that horrible tragedy, and eventually rebuilt that house, and his career. Here's the documentary I watched about his life.
One last note about Frank Lloyd Wright. In the last post, about Haunted Hollywood, the first video, the one by Jessica Chobot, has two Fank Lloyd Wright houses in the Hollywood area that are said to be haunted. That's just a weird coincidence.
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