The Harden Estate gatehouse in Portuguese Bend was built to be the gateway to a larger house that was never built. For nearly 100 years, it has stood guard over a mostly empty parcel of land behind it.
Just across Palos Verdes Drive South from the gatehouse lies Narcissa Drive, the road that leads to Palos Verdes Peninsula land baron Frank Vanderlip’s Villa Narcissa mansion.
Vanderlip, who had purchased the Palos Verdes Peninsula in 1913, enticed his sister Ruth to move from New York to California by agreeing to her request that she get a parcel of land on the coastline.
In 1925, Vanderlip gave his sister and her husband, Edward Harden, a vice president for Vanderlip’s Palos Verdes Project, a large plot of coastal land at Portuguese Point. (They later would donate 46 acres to the city of Rancho Palos Verdes to create Abalone Cove Park.)
In 1926, they finished building the gatehouse, with plans to build a much larger home behind it for it to protect. The gatehouse certainly was comfortable enough in its own right, consisting of a four-bedroom home, along with a six-car parking garage and servants’ quarters in a separate wing.
Architect Gordon Kaufman based his Italian Renaissance design for the structure on a photo he’d seen of a building in northern Italy.
It was lavishly furnished, as writer Sandi Hemmerlein discovered when she was allowed a rare tour in 2019. Since it has had few different owners over the years, the buildings still have many of their original fixtures. Some of the furniture was sold off after Ruth Harden’s time, but has been reacquired since.
The Hardens had big plans for the land beyond the gatehouse. They hired architect Jacques Greber, who drew up elaborate plans for an estate house surrounded by cultivated grounds designed by landscape architects the Olmsted Brothers.
The arrival of the Depression in 1929 caused them to hold off on the building project, and it never came to pass. The discovery of the Portuguese Bend landslide in 1956 put a permanent kibosh on any further building on the land, which had become too unstable to support it.
The Hardens occasionally rented the estate out, sometimes to famous tenants. During the several months in 1939 when they were on a lengthy world tour, they leased the property to Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Hornblow. Mrs. Hornblow was much better known by her movie star name, Myrna Loy.
Another well-known couple lived in the gatehouse twenty-five years later. John Gregory Dunne and his wife, Joan, both were established magazine writers for national publications, he for Time and she for Vogue, when they married in early 1964.
The newlyweds decided they wanted a quiet, secluded place in which to continue their writing careers, having decided to quit their staff jobs at the New York-based magazines. Joan had just sold her first novel, Run, River which was published under her professional name, Joan Didion.
They placed an ad looking for a suitable home in Southern California, and selected the Harden Estate gatehouse from the dozens of offers they received. They would work and live there until May 1966, when they moved to Brentwood with their newly adopted daughter, Quintana Roo.
Didion’s lengthy career included co-writing several screenplays with Dunne along with a series of critically acclaimed books, including Play It As It Lays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album.
The Year of Magical Thinking, an account of the year of her life following her husband’s death, won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
The gatehouse also has become known in recent years as the site of the final scene of the 1963 film, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” The star-studded chase comedy culminated in a finale involving buried treasure located at the site of a giant W.
The giant W in question was formed by four palm trees planted by the film crew on the grounds of the Harden Estate. Fans of the film should know that the trees forming the W were removed decades ago and no longer exist.
In 1990, the Rancho de los Palos Verdes Historical Society designated the gatehouse as an historic building, installing a plaque to that effect on the structure’s facade.
The Harden gatehouse property is currently closed to the public. In 2014, its current owners, Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg, announced plans to convert the gatehouse into a public museum called the Palos Verdes Heritage Castle Museum. Work on the project is ongoing.
Sources:
–Daily Breeze archives.
–“A Heritage Castle for the Ginsburgs’ Future,” by Judy Rae, Easy Reader & Peninsula website, Nov. 21, 2017.
–Palos Verdes Peninsula News archives.