Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

20. HOW LEIGHTON KNIPE LEFT HIS MARK ON MARFA

+20+ HOW LEIGHTON KNIPE LEFT HIS MARK ON MARFA V I S IT O RS T O MARFA this past year (and there have been a lot of them) always comment on the four particularly handsome buildings along the west side of Highland Avenue: the First Christian Church, the Paisano Hotel, the Brite Building, and the Marfa National Bank. The Paisano was designed by the wellknown El Paso firm of Trost & Trost, but the other three buildings are the work of a much more obscure architect, Leighton Green Knipe. They are built in a style that is a combination of SpanishPueblo Revival and art deco, and they are very fine buildings indeed. Knipe came to the Big Bend in the mid-1920s and worked in Marfa under the patronage of rancher Lucas Brite for fifteen years, but he has proved to be an elusive fellow to learn anything about. Lee Bennett remembers him as a diminutive man with a little goatee who lived by himself in an apartment that he rented from her mother, and Jane Brite White recalls that he smoked little Between the Acts cigars, that she and her sister called him Uncle Billy, and that he had a scientific bent and helped her grandfather drill some oil wells on the Brite Ranch that turned out to be dry holes, but beyond that he did not make much impression on Marfa's collective memory. Both Bennett and White have small pewter statues that he made of them when they were little girls. Knipe died in Marfa in 1941 , and his body was shipped to California for burial. The odd thing is that when I started looking into his career, I discovered that he is something of a cult figure to architectural enthusiasts in Arizona and California, where he designed some important buildings, but no one I talked to there knew that he had left an architectural legacy in Marfa. It is as though he had two separate careers. Dr. Beverly Brandt, professor of architectural history at Arizona State University, has told me that Knipe designed some of the earliest campus buildings there, one of which, Matthews Hall, built in 1918, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Brandt also told me that in 1918, Knipe played a major role in the design of the Southern Cotton Company's model company town, Litchfield Village, outside of Phoenix. The hotel he built there is now a popular golf resort, The Wigwam. John Akers, curator of history at the Tempe Historical Society and another Knipe fan, filled in some biographical details for me. Knipe was born in Texas in 1878, went to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and called himself a structural engineer, rather than an architect. He built the Egyptian Revival Tempe National Bank, now being restored, in 1912 and became City Engineer of Tempe in 1913. Before coming to Arizona, Knipe worked for A. Prescott Fowell, one of the country's leading urban sanitary engineers. Another Knipe enthusiast is Gwilym McGrew of Los Angeles who with his wife Peggy is restoring a six thousand square foot Spanish Colonial Revival ranch house in Woodland Hills, California, that Knipe designed in 1928 for millionaire John Show. The McGrews (whose e-mail address is "ProudCelts") and I have entered into a spirited correspondence about Knipe, and they have identified the tile he used on the faryade of the Brite Building as being from the Claycroft Potteries in Los Angeles, an important art tile pottery in the 1920s. They also called myattention to a second large Spanish-style Knipe house in Los Angeles, the Orcutt Ranch House, built in 1926 for W. W. Orcutt, a pioneer California geologist and oilman. The Orcutt House is now a Los Angeles Historical Monument, owned by the city and open to the public. The Orcutt House was built the same year that Knipe completed the First C hristian C hurch in Marfa for Lucas Brite. Jane Brite White thinks that perhaps Knipe met her grandfather in Phoenix, because Brite owned a ranch near Phoenix and went there a good deal in the 1920s. However they met, Knipe's design for the First Christian C hurch was an eccentric expression of his own peculiar genius. It is the only church 1 have ever seen in which the sanctuary is not the most important room in the building . Knipe designed the church around an enormous octagonal community room...