Finding Lost Voices: Esther McCoy, the Architectural Critic that Put Los Angeles on the Map
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
If you are a writer like myself, you’ve likely had a writing group. You may have many. Writing groups offer safe places to generatively write or workshop your work with an audience that knows you and is cheering your project on. My writing groups were vital to my book Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb. (You know who you are, and I love you.) Each week, as I would return from research trips or after spending hours processing documents, trying to find a thorough line through Babb’s life, I would gather on Zoom with my peers, and we would make a space to write. It meant everything to have that space.
Given that Sanora Babb was a writer, it makes sense that she also had a writing group. In fact, she had a writing group that met for over forty years. The group included several steady members: the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, the writer Dolph Sharp, and Esther McCoy (an author and architectural historian); as well as others who would come in and out like Joseph Petracca (novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and television writer); Wilma Shore (writer and teacher); Elliot Grennard (song writer and author); Bonnie Wolfe (author of the novel Love in Atlantis); Peg Nixson (author); Richard Bach (author); Ray Morrison (author); and Dan Greenburg (author).
Writing group sessions were scheduled twice a month on Tuesday or Friday evenings and were held alternately at various members’ homes. During sessions, the person being workshopped read their story aloud, and the others sat around the living room, offering encouraging and productive feedback. As Dolph’s daughter, Elizabeth Eve King, remembered it, whoever hosted would provide a plate of cold cuts from Canter’s Deli. After reading each other’s work aloud and giving feedback, they’d laugh over drinks and sandwiches until late in the night.
This writing group saw almost everything Babb wrote, and when she traveled, Babb would often write a single letter to the group recounting her adventures. Babb was extremely close to Bradbury (you will have to read about that relationship in my book!), but she was also close to a woman in the group named Esther McCoy (1904-1989).
When Babb met McCoy, they immediately connected because they were both from the Midwest. McCoy was born in Arkansas and raised in Kansas. After attending several universities (including the University of Arkansas and the University of Michigan) in 1926, McCoy moved to New York City to pursue a life as a writer, which she did until she became so sick with pneumonia that she moved to Los Angeles initially to recover for six months. But, she never left.
In the 1930s, she found a bungalow in Santa Monica, purchased it, and lived there for the rest of her life. Perhaps her outsider’s view enabled her to see the architecture of Los Angeles differently and appreciate its differences and innovations because, in just a few decades, McCoy would write the first of six books that would change how the architecture of southern California was perceived worldwide.
As Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for the New York Times, wrote when a new edition of her 1960 work, Five California Architects, appeared in 1975, ''It was she, almost single-handedly, who awakened serious scholars to the extraordinary richness of California architecture,'' Her book focused on the work of five almost-forgotten architects - Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, R. M. Schindler and Charles and Henry Greene - in such a way that it brought them back from obscurity.
But, before these seminal works were published, McCoy was a fiction writer who published her work in magazines such as The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar, as well as in small magazines. Her short story "The Cape" was featured in The Best American Short Stories of 1950 alongside Babb’s story “Wild Flower.” She often counseled Babb on her writing and Babb did the same for her.
McCoy always pursued two paths—the path of becoming a creative writer and the life of being an architecture critic. Along with stories, McCoy began writing architecture reviews for various publishers. But, when McCoy applied to the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, she was told she was too old and a woman and wouldn’t be accepted. So, in 1945, she abandoned that pursuit and became a draftsman for the Austrian-born Los Angeles architect R.M. Schindler.
It was a close-up piece about Schindler’s practice and the use of space and movement in his architecture that started to gain her success in the critical world. When reading it, one sees how McCoy combined her sense of craft as a fiction writer with her deep knowledge of architecture. A combination that was as fresh and modern as the houses she was writing about.
“His houses are wrapped around space.... a Schindler house is in movement; it is becoming. Form emerges from form. It is like a bird that has just touched earth, its wings still spread but at once part of the earth.” —from"Schindler, Space Architect" Direction (1945)
McCoy would go on to write six books about architecture, but she also continued to write fiction. (She even wrote detective novels.) Below is a list of her major architectural works.
Five California Architects, 1960
Richard Neutra, 1960
Modern California Houses: Case Study Houses, 1962
Craig Ellwood, 1968
Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys, 1979
The Second Generation, 1984
I first got to know McCoy as someone who was not only a good member of her writers’ group, who cheered on her work, but also as a good friend. The letters that span their lifetime are filled with shared moments and counsel. When Babb was overwhelmed by having to take care of her sister Dorthy’s mental health care, Babb wrote to McCoy for advice about what to do because “J[ames Wong Howe] loves me, not my whole family, and he has always said that tho D[orthy] may be ill from various family problems in the past. . . she dominates me beyond all reason by her invalidism.” Esther was also someone who helped Babb with revisions to her stories. She sent Babb comments on her short story “Reconciliation.” The last recorded outing I found was on April 23, 1983, when Babb and McCoy attended the screening of her friend Ray Bradbury’s film Something Wicked This Way Comes at the Main Theater in Walt Disney Studios.
Given the careers she made, it seems impossible that McCoy is not better known. I feel lucky to have found her while I was in the archives recovering Babb’s life.
The Book Launch of Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb
My book releases on October 15! See below for a list of places I’ll be visiting (so far!) I hope to see you at one of the readings!
October
October 4th 3:15 - 3:30 PM - 58th Western Literature Association Conference The Hilton Resort of El Conquistador, Tucson, Arizona.
October 15 - Vromen’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with The Lost Ladies of Lit Co-hosts Kim Askew and Amy Helmes,
October 16 - 6:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Bookmine in Napa.
October 18 - 7:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Copperfield’s Santa Rosa, CA - Register here.
October 23 - 5:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Readers’ Books 130 East Napa Street, Sonoma, CA
October 26 -10:00 AM - 3:30 PM Creative Writing Retreat at Dominican University
Sign up to take the workshop, “Mini Biography as an Act of Revolution, a creative nonfiction workshop with Iris Jamahl Dunkle” and attend my keynote talk, “Taking Back History, One Story at a Time: Why I Write About Forgotten Women's Lives”
October 30 - 7:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Harry Stecopoulos at Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, IA
November
November 1 - 6:00 PM 7:30 PM - Catamaran Lit Chat with Iris Jamahl Dunkle - Catamaran Literary Reader - 1050 River St., Studio 118 Santa Cruz, CA 95060
November 7, Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, Tulsa, OK
November 13 - Book Club at Pasadena Heritage
November 18 - The Book Club of California
November 19, 4:30 PM UC Davis Manetti Shrem Museum in conversation with Matthew Stratton
November 20, 5:00 PM UC Berkeley, English Department (Room 300)
November 22 -23, University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK and Author Talk at Full Circle Bookstore, Oklahoma City. OK
December
December 1, 2:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Kristen Hanlon at the Alameda Library, Alameda, CA
January 2025
January 24 - Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
January 25 - Reading with Jan Beatty at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh, PA
January 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Donovan Hohn at Literati in Ann Arbor, MI
January 28 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at Morgenstern Books, Bloomington, Indiana
February
February 26, 6:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at King's English, Salt Lake City, UT
February 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at American West Center, Salt Lake City, UT
March
March 5 - The Bill Lane Center for the American West: Stanford, CA
March 13- 5:00 PM Garden City Community College, Kansas
March 14 - 17 Books and Books in Coral Gables, FL and Key West, FL (Exact date TBA)
March 21 - 2:00 PM New York Public Library, New York City