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Building History

Harrison Gray Otis (1837-1917), beginning in 1882 as editor and after 1886 as president and general manager of the Los Angeles Times, polarized his contemporaries like few others in Southern CA. To Progressives of this time, Otis was a selfish impediment to progress and a more egalitarian society. To his defenders, Otis resisted unnecessary economic change and sustained time-honored social values. Otis has been widely credited with coining the phrase, "You are either with me, or against me," although a paraphrase of this can be found in many other sources, including scripture. If this attribution was true, it embodied the polarizing and paranoid nature of Otis's thought processes.

Clearly Otis was a complex figure, on one hand a tireless booster of Anglo-American Los Angeles interests and a supporters of the arts. On another, he profited handsomely from insider information to make real estate and other commercial deals. He was very conservative politically, particularly strident in his criticism of the organized labor moverment. As a result, he and his newspaper became the target of several efforts to bomb his residence and, on 10/01/1910, a bombing of the Los Angeles Times Building in Downtown Los Angeles, a blast that killed 21 people and destroyed the structure.

A year before his death, Otis donated The Bivouac to Los Angeles County, as a philanthropic gesture, to be employed “continuously and perpetually for the Arts and advancement of the Arts.” The Otis House and a neighboing one became the first buildings of the Otis Art Institute.

Building Notes

The Harrison Gray Otis House was located a block west of Westlake Park, renamed "MacArthur Park" in 1942. A statue of Otis in a general's outfit was placed in Westlake Park after Otis's death. His estate held a competition to design a memorial in 1918, a competition won by the Russian-born sculptor, Paul Troubetzkoy (1866-1938). The statuary group consisted of three figures, a full-length portrait of a stiff Otis as a general leading his troops; a more dynamic newsboy selling Otis's Los Angeles Times; and a separate soldier.

Over the years, the group has suffered various indignities. The two smaller, ancillary bronzes of the soldier and newsboy were stolen for their scrap metal value, the former in the twentieth century, the latter in about 2024. Only the Otis figure has remained. At least once, in 1938, a car traveling on neaby Wilshire Boulevard careened into the soldier damaging it. Around 2024, a vandal scrawled the word, "God" on the Otis figure. (See Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times.com, "Copper thieves strike again, mutilating a 100-year-old monument in MacArthur Park," published 04/12/2024, accessed 06/19/2024.)

PCAD id: 25266