Friday, February 29, 2008 – Extreme Victorian

Wadsworth Chapel (J. Lee Burton, 1900) - the oldest building on Wilshire Boulevard, a Victorian hybrid – Colonial Revival with a touch of Gothic – located at the Veterans Affairs West Los Angeles Healthcare Center. The chapel once served both Protestant and Catholic veterans.  It is awaiting restoration.

A bit of history –

The Wadsworth Chapel, constructed in the early 1890s to serve the nation's veterans at the National Soldier's Home, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The structure actually contains two separate chapels: a Protestant chapel in the south half of the building and a Catholic chapel in the north half of the structure. Each chapel has a separate entrance, with a tower and belfry.  This place of worship was designed by Architect J. Lee Burton.

The chapel is the only principal structure remaining from the 19th century.  The first residents of the newly-constructed soldier's home arrived in 1889 after marching some 300 miles to get there. The century-old chapel building is a prominent representation of American turn-of-the-century Victorian architecture, giving the structure a major historical significance.  The Wadsworth Chapel is truly one of a kind.

The chapel has been declared unsafe due to repeated earthquake damage (see the Historic Structure Reports) – it's been closed for more than twenty-five years.  But it's all that's left from the days when the modern healthcare campus around it was the National Soldiers' Home – see the period postcards from that era.

If you wish to use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me. And should you choose to download any of these images and use them invoking the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, please provide credit, and, on the web, a link back this site.

Technical Note:

Most of these photographs were shot with a Nikon D70 - using lens (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300mm telephoto, or after 5 June 2006, (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. They were modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  Earlier photography was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik