[Click on any picture for a larger image.]
The morning was bright and sunny . . . promising a good day for the camera.
Tuesday seemed a great opportunity to photograph Mission San Juan Bautista. Weekends, I’ve discovered, are not the best. On Saturdays and Sundays, the parking area in front of the old mission is full.
What I didn’t realize is that weekdays are for fourth-graders, learning California history first-hand. They were scattered in groups, in the plaza, along the colonnade, and in front of the chapel.
And a good thing, too. I remember when I was their age . . . intent on seeing for myself at least some of the twenty-one missions which began the European settlement of California, two hundred years ago.
So while I waited for a good photo opportunity, I enjoyed in a most leisurely way the grassy plaza, bordered by the old mission, the livery stable, the Plaza Hotel, and other buildings of the same era.
The mission — and the twenty other missions along the California coast — are the prototypes of much of California architecture . . . built without the slightest idea that they would have so great an influence.
If you were a Franciscan friar in charge of building Mission San Juan Bautista in the wilds of 19th-century California, your options would be limited.
You would have had little if any training in architecture beyond the rudiments of design that you’ve observed in the buildings that surrounded you growing up in your native Spain, or in New Spain, to the south.
Your building materials would be within eyesight: lots of dirt, and a few trees. So you’d fashion your building with bricks made of dried mud, with the walls four to six feet thick.
And above the walls, you’d slope the roofs at a low angle, covered with fired barrel tile, to protect the mud-brick walls from the rain.
You’d surround the buildings with arched colonnades, and pave the walkways with tile. You’d have a courtyard, perhaps with a fountain in the center. And that would be your mission . . . not intended to be a monument, but only to serve its immediate purpose.
How were you, the friar in charge, to envision that your building would become a prototype of California architecture . . . that houses, public buildings, hotels and restaurants would adopt your design elements a hundred, two hundred years later –
— or that a British emigrant named Alfred Hitchcock would one day use your mission, some 150 years later, as a locale in a story told not in a book but on celluloid, entitled “Vertigo,” with players yet unborn named Kim Novak and James Stewart?
In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia. The United States fought Great Britain in the war begun that year. Dr Joseph Lister was the first surgeon to use disinfectant during surgery. And here, Mission San Juan Bautista — named for John the Baptist — was built alongside the grassy plaza on which I took a slow saunter on a sunny weekday morning.
Mission San Juan Bautista sits on the northern edge of the village of San Juan Bautista. Of that village, more anon.
Here’s a mapquest to the mission:
