Two artists, two visions, one courthouse

The administration of justice in Los Angeles took a pause in 1931 when a pre-dawn earthquake caused a huge chunk of stone to peel off a tower of Los Angeles’s main Red Sandstone Courthouse, crashing down into a judge’s chambers and rendering them unusable. Adding insult to injury, the trembler knocked out the elevators and even the judges had to walk upstairs to their courtrooms.

Two years later, at 5:54 a.m., on March 10, 1933, the massive Long Beach earthquake rumbled through Los Angeles and completed the destruction of the turreted Red Sandstone baroque bastion of justice. It was vacated and fell victim to a wrecking ball.

For the next quarter century, much of Los Angeles judicial business was conducted in the recently built Hall of Justice and temporary courtrooms, including the City Hall, Lincoln Heights jail and makeshift wooden bungalows majestically called the Plaza de la Justicia.

As Los Angeles County weathered the financially hard-pressed days of the Great Depression and the dislocation of civic life during World War II, cost-conscious voters rejected successive bond measures to build a new courthouse. Finally, in the post-war days of the late 1940s, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors began to cobble together funds to build a courthouse that later would be dubbed the “Dream Courthouse” that would “last for 250 years.”

In 1954, a courthouse site was selected on a mostly vacant hill to be leveled at First and Hill Streets. A design team led by award-winning African American architect Paul Revere Williams was selected to build a new main courthouse for Los Angeles.

By the mid-20th century, Williams had acquired a reputation as the “Architect to the Stars.” For several decades, his designs for public and private buildings had won acclaim for their fresh modernity and graceful originality. Williams had attained architectural renown based on his artistic genius and relentless diligence to succeed. This was particularly difficult in an era when African Americans suffered widespread racial discrimination, and few had broken the color barrier to enter the architectural profession.

By the time he retired from his half-century career in 1973, Williams’s numerous credits included public buildings such as the Shrine Auditorium, home of many Academy Awards ceremonies; the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the rich and famous play; the First A.M.E. Church, well-known for its articulate African American ministers; and the iconic theme structure at LAX. The roster of private residences designed by Williams included Hollywood names such as Frank Sinatra, Lon Chaney and Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.

Despite his renown as an architect, racial discrimination shadowed Williams throughout his illustrious career. Ironically, African Americans were not welcome at various hotels designed by him. Restrictive racial covenants precluded Williams from owning some of the very homes for which he had drawn the plans.

Williams worked hard for his extraordinary talent as an architect to be recognized. He told stories about certain prospective clients who visited him, but upon discovering that he was Black, never returned. When he had found that there were some Caucasians who appeared uncomfortable sitting alongside him as he sketched their building plans, he learned to draw upside down while sitting on the opposite side of the table from the client.

While the exteriors of Williams’s private residential designs were proper and yet inspired. The interior spaces were more innovative, offering striking circular staircases, imaginative curved walls and creative arched doorways. His clients often sought the unique and he was well-suited to satisfy their tastes.

In designing the new Los Angeles County courthouse, however, Williams sought to be faithful to his philosophy that public structures should be dignified and reflect their purposes. He once commented that “Los Angeles is striving for an image that is Los Angeles. We want more air and space in our buildings. We’re interested in architecture that will last, and not just gimmicks or a profuse use of ornaments that tend to date a building. All public buildings should be conservative in design.”

Thus, his Los Angeles courthouse design envisioned a contemporary building that was distinctly 20th century and forward-looking Los Angeles: linear in style with flat roofs, unadorned straight lines and horizontal bands of windows allowing light. Williams’s modern-day concepts avoided the ponderous marble columns, dumpy heavy domes and cramped hallways that had typified many past courthouses.

In planning the nine floors of the 100 courtrooms for Los Angeles’s new palace of justice, Willaims laid out spacious hallways that, if they were placed end-to-end, would span over three-quarters of a mile. He specified that the nine-foot-high walls of the voluminous wide corridors the outside courtrooms were to be lined with luxurious neutral toned beige Vermont polished marble.

Notwithstanding Williams’s lifelong deep respect for the visual arts, there was virtually no provision for the placing of sculpture or paintings inside the huge new courthouse. Some said that the architect’s intention in this regard was that works of art would distract from his vision that the design of a major courthouse should be consistent with the purpose of focusing on administering justice. Others emphasized that 20th century modern architecture embraced minimalism and eschewed ornamentation.

Thus, when built to completion, the only artistic indications anywhere at the new courthouse were reliefs above the two main outside entrances depicting Our Lady of Justice and four historical sources of Anglo-American law.

In dedicating the new County Courthouse on Oct. 31, 1958, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren proclaimed that it was fitting to praise its “most modern appointments.” However, he stressed, “The spirit and meaning of our courts do not lie in the material settings we provide, but in the living principles which they enshrine.”

Even while these moving remarks were still echoing down the gleaming marble hallways outside the stately oak-paneled courtrooms of the new courthouse, an unexpected conflict of visions arose about the placement of works of art in the courthouse. In competition were Willaims’s concept of unembellished smooth interior spaces and the wishes for more adornment by some members of the Board of Supervisors.

In 1958, shortly before the courthouse opening, Dr. Emil Seletz, a highly skilled Beverly Hills neurosurgeon and prolific amateur sculptor, had donated a colossal bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln to the County. It was decided that the sculpture would be placed in the new courthouse in honor of Lincoln’s legal career.

This was consistent with Dr. Seletz’s philosophy that “public spaces demand public art.” He had sculpted busts of many famous persons and his favorite hero was Abraham Lincoln, who, in his opinion, symbolized the rule of law.

Dr. Seletz’s three-foot high bust of the late President, named “Lincoln the Lawyer,” was placed in the lobby of the main entrance on the Hill Street side of the new courthouse. It presents a solemn Lincoln with a tired and weary expression. He is portrayed without a beard, as he was in photos taken during the quarter century when he had practiced law.

While everyone is familiar with Lincoln’s trademark beard - as he is depicted on the shiny bronze-colored penny bearing his visage - he did not always have one. As a presidential candidate in 1860, Lincoln had received a letter from eleven-year-old girl Gracie Bedell from New York, suggesting that the gaunt and worry-lined Lincoln might improve his looks and presidential prospects by growing whiskers. Lincoln took her advice.

When he visited her on his way to Washington to become president, he told her, “Gracie, look at my whiskers. I have been growing them for you.” Lincoln had a full beard by the time he was inaugurated on March 4, 1861.

But it was not the lack of the signature Lincoln beard that generated a firestorm of controversy soon after the bust was installed in the newly opened courthouse. For some years, Dr. Seletz, head of neurosurgery at Cedars hospital, had testified in trials as a respected forensic expert on medical issues. Word quickly spread that his Lincoln sculpture, conspicuously situated at the front door of the courthouse with the artist’s name prominently displayed, could be a factor influencing jurors’ decision-making when he appeared in court.

Some alleged a scheme to enhance Dr. Seletz’s stature and credibility as an expert witness. Protests by the powerful Los Angeles County Bar Association and the public demanded removal of the sculpture.

A letter to the Board of Supervisors by interested citizen Mrs. Blanch Berry summarized the argument for the removal of the recently installed bust: “Early this year I served as a juror and couldn’t help but note the weight this doctor’s evidence gave. Some of my fellow jurors felt that the words of a man who could make so fine a piece of art could hardly be doubted.”

Mrs. Berry suggested that the sculpture might be better “placed in a less prominent place – where the symbol of LINCOLN would be dominant but the name of the sculpture less obvious.”

Superior Court Judge William J. Palmer responded to the uproar by siding with Dr. Seletz and against removal of the sculpture. In a letter to Presiding Judge Louis H. Burke, he stated, “May I toss out the suggestion that Dr. Seletz should not be punished because of the indiscretions of lawyers. Any judge of our court, I am sure, can handle those indiscretions wisely.”

Judge Palmer further commented, “The bust contributes a great deal to the corridor of the courthouse. Indeed, it may be the one saving factor… In like manner we deal with an architect and other experts. I find the names of architects embossed in stone on this very building. Shall we destroy the building lest an architect called to testify be unduly enhanced [in] prestige? Let lawyers answer for their own sins.”

Presiding Judge Burke got in a final word in response to his colleague’s plea for reason, “I am certainly in accord that the bust of Lincoln is an excellent one and I was delighted to see it in the lobby [of the courthouse]. As you say, I believe it adds a lot to the rather cold and impersonal décor of the courthouse entrance.”

Despite Judge Palmer’s confidence that trial judges were perfectly capable of controlling any potential juror bias favoring Dr. Seletz, the clout of the Bar Association and the public outcry won out against the Lincoln bust remaining in place. “Lincoln the Lawyer” by Dr. Seletz was removed from the courthouse main lobby and relegated to an obscure corner location in the County Hall of Administration.

Thus, for a completely unexpected circumstance, the interior of the cavernous new courthouse was, for the moment, back to what Presiding Judge Burke had described as the “cold and impersonal décor” greeting lawyers and clients arriving for the hearings of their cases.

Within a short while, however, the Board of Supervisors made a concession to appease those who believed that Dr. Seletz’s work of art had been unfairly banished. A plaster cast of a Lincoln bust by USC art professor and sculptor Robert Merrell Gage was installed on a pedestal where the Dr. Seletz bust had been placed and, after a short while, was replaced by a bronze casting. In 1988, this Lincoln bust by Professor Gage was mounted outside the courthouse at the corner of Grand Avenue and First Street, where it still resides today.

Following the passing of Dr. Emil Seletz in 1999, his son, lawyer James Seletz, donated one of the many bronze Lincoln busts crafted by his father to the Los Angeles Superior Court. By that time, there were few who remembered the hubbub regarding the first Lincoln bust donated by Dr. Seletz.

Today, “Lincoln the Lawyer” by Dr. Seletz is the sole work of art anywhere in the vastness of the main Los Angeles courthouse, named for the late California Supreme Court Justice and former Superior Court Judge Stanley Mosk in 2001.

There are dozens of other monumental Lincoln busts by Dr. Seletz on exhibit across the United States. The locations include Fords Theater in Washington, D.C., site of Lincoln’s assassination; Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, a city where Lincoln tried and argued many cases; one outside the Temple University Law School in Philadelphia, which is prominently featured in promotional materials; and another donated to the Santa Clara County Superior Court and now located at the County Hall of Administration.

Both architect Paul Revere Williams and sculptor Dr. Emil Seletz had strong, but differing, concepts about how their artistic creations should be viewed in context. It is ironic that, in the end, the visions of each of these remarkable men accommodate one another in one Los Angeles courthouse.