The Avalon Casino: Why Catalina Island's Most Iconic Building Still Works

Avalon Bay

There is a moment, arriving by boat into Avalon Bay, when the Casino reveals itself. It sits at the northern tip of the harbor, a great white drum rising straight out of the water, and before you have set foot on the island it has already told you what kind of place this is. Most people photograph it and move on. I want to take it apart.

One

A Name Worth Explaining

Start with the obvious question. Why call it a casino if nobody ever gambled here?

The word comes from the Italian casa, house, and its diminutive casino meant a small gathering place or social club. The name has nothing to do with gaming and never did. When William Wrigley Jr. named his new building the Casino, he was using the older, more civilized sense of the word: a place for people to come together.

That is exactly what he built. A movie theater on the lower level, credited as the first building anywhere designed specifically for films with sound. A ballroom on the upper level with a dance floor a hundred and eighty feet across, claimed then and now as the largest circular ballroom in the world. Two programs that have almost nothing in common, stacked one on top of the other inside a single drum. The entire architectural interest of this building lives in that sentence.

Two

The Site Was Not Found. It Was Made.

Catalina Island History

Wrigley, the chewing gum magnate, bought a controlling interest in the Santa Catalina Island Company in 1919 and set about turning Avalon into a resort with an anchor. The Casino is that anchor, and it is worth saying plainly that the ground it stands on did not exist in its present form before he decided to build there.

The promontory was called Sugarloaf Point. It had been graded years earlier for a hotel that was eventually built somewhere else. Wrigley used the cleared ground for an octagonal dance hall, the Sugarloaf Casino, which also served for a time as Avalon's high school. In 1928 that building was torn down to make room for the one we have now, and Sugarloaf Rock itself was blasted away to open the ocean view. The steel frame of the old octagon was carted off and reused as the main aviary in the island's bird park, where it can still be found.

This matters because it tells you something about the client. Wrigley did not site a building. He edited a coastline.

Three

Spaulding and Weber

Catalina Island Casino

Casino Custom Lighting

Casino Architectural Drawings

The architects were Sumner A. Spaulding and Walter Weber, a Los Angeles team fluent in the Spanish Colonial Revival vocabulary that Southern California civic work was speaking in the late twenties. The Casino is usually filed under that heading, and it is not wrong, but it is not sufficient either. The exterior arcade, which Wrigley wanted after seeing the loggias of the Alhambra, is Moorish by way of Spain. The interior is Art Deco almost without qualification: stylized marine ornament, sterling silver and gold leaf, custom fixtures that belong to no catalog anywhere.

What holds the two together is the plan, and the plan is a circle.

A circle is a practical decision before it is a poetic one. It gives the ballroom above an uninterrupted floor plate with nothing standing in the middle of the dance. It puts every square foot of enclosure to work carrying load. And it happens to solve the site: on a promontory surrounded by water on three sides, a circular building has no back. There is no service elevation to hide, no hierarchy of facades, no bad angle from a boat. The building faces everything at once because it faces nothing in particular.

One correction to the usual telling. The Casino is frequently described as twelve stories tall, and the number is real, roughly a hundred and forty feet. But it contains two floors. The height is a section, not a stack. Read it as twelve occupied levels and you have misunderstood the entire building.

Four

One Shell, Two Rooms

Casino Structural Diagram and Description

The structure is a steel frame with reinforced concrete, and the whole scheme rests on one decision: put the load in the perimeter and keep the middle empty.

Contemporary accounts described the Casino as built on the principle of the coconut shell. That is a folksy line, and it is also a surprisingly honest structural description. A load bearing drum with nothing inside it. Everything the building has to carry gets walked outward to the wall and taken down through it.

The payoff is two column free rooms stacked on top of each other. Below, a domed theater with no interior supports. Above, a cantilevered ballroom floor spanning the full drum with nothing standing in the dance.

Casino Seating

The theater seats 1,184 under a domed ceiling with no columns interrupting a single sightline. Its walls carry John Gabriel Beckman's murals, and here is a detail almost every account gets backwards, including the one I used to tell. The famous underwater scheme, the kelp and the eighteen foot mermaid, is on the entrance loggia outside. The murals inside the theater are Catalina itself: the landscape, the galleons, the Franciscans, the flora and the birds. Beckman painted an island on the walls of a room where people came to watch the mainland's dreams.

Upstairs, the ballroom is a hundred and eighty feet of clear floor. Price that span today, with a program of three thousand dancers on it, and see what your structural engineer says.

Five

The Floor Is the Detail

Casino Ballroom

If you take one thing away from this building, take the floor. I would put this assembly in a set of construction documents tomorrow.

The finish is inlaid hardwood, maple and white oak and rosewood among others, laid over felt and acoustical paper. That assembly sits on a pine subfloor. The pine subfloor floats on strips of cork laid across the support beams. It does not touch the structure directly at any point.

Read that as a section rather than as trivia. Finish layer, resilient underlayment, floating subfloor, isolation strips, structure. That is a resilient floating floor, detailed in 1929, and it is doing two jobs at the same time with one move. It gives dancers enough spring to survive an entire evening upright. And it decouples three thousand pairs of shoes from the theater dome six feet below them, so that a film could run underneath a big band without either audience knowing the other existed.

That is what a good section does. The building has two incompatible acoustic environments stacked directly on each other, and the whole conflict is resolved in a layer of cork.

Casino Ballroom Disco Ball

The dome downstairs is working the other side of the same problem. The theater's acoustics are the reason the building exists: this was the first house designed from the start for sound film, and the room was tuned before the loudspeakers ever arrived. A speaker standing on that stage today can be heard clearly, unamplified, anywhere in the house. The acoustical design was studied by the people who went on to do Radio City Music Hall.

Think about the sequence. Sound film was barely two years old. Nobody had built a room for it yet. Spaulding and Weber had to design the acoustic envelope for a technology that did not have a track record, and they got it right the first time, on an island, in fourteen months.

Six

The Island Built Its Own Casino

Casino Under Construction

The usual telling of this building is a logistics story. An island, twenty two miles of open water, every last thing barged across from the mainland. It is a good story and it is only half true, and the half it gets wrong is the interesting half.

Start with the concrete, because that is the building. In 1928 nobody imported concrete. Ready mix delivery scarcely existed, and you cannot barge wet concrete twenty two miles across open water. Concrete in that era was batched and mixed at the site or beside it, always. So the question is not whether the concrete was shipped in. The question is where its ingredients came from, and the answer is split.

The cement came from the mainland. There was never a cement works on Catalina, and there is no plausible way there could have been. Sacked portland cement crossed the channel, as did the steel frame, as did the chandeliers.

The aggregate is another matter. By the early 1920s the Santa Catalina Island Company was running a rock crushing plant on the hillside above Pebbly Beach, fed by a gravity conveyor that ran down the mountain to a loading dock. Barges left that dock carrying crushed rock from the Pebbly Beach and Empire Landing quarries to the mainland. Read that again. Catalina was a net exporter of aggregate. An island shipping crushed rock across the channel did not turn around and import crushed rock to build its own casino. I have not found a document that states this outright for the Casino, and I will not pretend otherwise, but the same quarry is directly credited for the Wrigley Memorial a few years later, built by the same client and the same builder.

The rest of the local half is documented cleanly. Wrigley founded a brick and tile plant at Pebbly Beach in 1924 to work island clay, and by 1927 it was in full production making brick, hollow tile, patio tile, pavers, drainage tile and Mission roofing tile, running seventy thousand to a hundred thousand bricks a day by 1928. The hundred and five thousand roof tiles on the Casino came off that line. The black walnut paneling in the lower foyer came out of the Catalina Furniture Factory, also on the island. In a decade of this kind of development the island's population roughly tripled.

Wrigley did not eliminate the barges. He shrank the manifest to the things nobody can make on a rock: cement, steel, and chandeliers.

That is the correct way to describe this building's construction. Not heroic importation, but a client who spent ten years building the supply chain before he built the building. It is why two million dollars of reinforced concrete went up in fourteen months with crews working around the clock. The man running those crews was David M. Renton, Wrigley's construction chief and the island's master builder, and his name belongs next to Spaulding's and Weber's every time this building is discussed. At the opening it was Renton who was handed the golden key.

One more piece of received wisdom worth retiring. The Casino is often called an act of defiance in the teeth of the Depression, because it opened in 1929. Construction began in February 1928 and the doors opened on May 29, 1929, five months before the crash. This building was not defiance. It was the absolute top of the boom, poured in concrete. The Depression arrived afterward and found it already standing, which is a different and in some ways better story: the building outlived the economy that produced it.

Seven

Up the Ramp

You do not take stairs to the ballroom. There are none for the public. You reach the dance floor by walking up one of two long ramps, housed in enclosed towers that push out from the drum like handles on an urn.

The reason is pure crowd logic, and it did not come from an architect. It came from Wrigley, who owned the Chicago Cubs and had watched the ramps at Wrigley Field move thousands of people quickly without a bottleneck and without anybody turning an ankle in the dark. Stairs are a queue. Ramps are a flow. He wanted the ramps, and he got them.

A circular building. A domed room. A continuous ramp carrying you up into it. In 1929, on an island, for a chewing gum magnate who got the idea from a baseball park.

Wright arrives at that same figure at the Guggenheim thirty years later, and it is treated as a revelation. I am not claiming influence. I am claiming something more interesting than influence, which is that the spiral and the drum are a solution that architecture keeps rediscovering whenever it needs to move a crowd through a round room. Parallel discovery, then validation. It is the same pattern I have written about elsewhere on this blog with Lautner and the shell builders, and it shows up here first, in a building nobody files under the word organic.

That is a post of its own, and I intend to write it.

Eight

What Makes a Building Iconic

I keep coming back to the same idea. A truly successful building eventually stops being a building. It becomes part of the identity of a place, so embedded in how people picture that place that removing it would feel like an act of violence against the landscape.

The Casino has done that. You cannot picture Catalina without it. It organizes the bay, it gives every arriving visitor their first impression and their last memory, and it is the image on every postcard anyone has ever sent from Avalon. That inseparability is not automatic and it is not luck. It is scale, siting, material and form working together, and underneath all four of them is a section that solved a hard problem cleanly.

It helps that the building has no competition. Roughly eighty eight percent of Catalina is held as open space by the Catalina Island Conservancy, which was not established until 1972, long after the Casino was finished. So the Conservancy did not create the Casino's setting. It ratified it. The hills behind stayed green, the bay in front stayed open, and Avalon's low roofline kept framing the drum instead of crowding it. Put this building in a normal coastal town and it would be a large white object. Here it is unmistakably itself.

By any measure I know how to apply, the Casino is not merely a successful building. It is a great one, and it is great for reasons you can draw.

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