Victoria McAlmon

Victoria McAlmon (1879-1969) was in her mid fifties when she commissioned architect, Rudolf Michael Schindler to build this house. At the time, Spanish Mediterranean architecture dominated Silver Lake and I was curious to how and why this woman would hire a modern architect.

I’ve done some digging around and what I have found are bits and pieces of information, leading me to believe that Victoria McAlmon was an extraordinary woman, who devoted much of her life to fight for civil rights, equality, education and a beloved brother.

Victoria graduated with a Ph.B. in 1912 from University of Chicago at Minneapolis Minnesota within the field of teaching and she did graduate work at Columbia and University of Minnesota. She must have gotten involved in politics on a local level, in Minnesota, probably before women gained the right to vote nationally. She became the first female President of the Minnesota Woman's Trade Union League, ran for office with the Farmer-Labor Union and Minnesota’s Supreme Court.

On a personal level, was close with her family and especially her brother, Robert Menzies McAlmon, a writer, poet and publisher, who never found his footing in the U.S. but spent the years between the wars in Paris, publishing early works of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Victoria was a ”fiscally responsible bohemian.” She visited her brother in Paris and was clearly drawn to literature and art, which is apparent in her correspondence with his biographers and fellow poets, including Carlos Williams, but rather than move to Europe, she came to California, where she found employment as a vocational and Placement secretary at Los Angeles Junior College and got to be part of the social transformation. She wrote and spoke on the subject of education, functioned as an AFT organizer, and was a member of the advisory council of the State Employment Service. Somewhere along the way, Victoria most likely crossed paths with R.M. Schindler’s wife, Pauline Gibling Schindler, who hosted salons, lived a bohemian life but was interested in social change and pushed her husband to take it into account, so with the sense of change in the air and some help from The Housing Act of 1934, a collaboration evolved.