Last November UCLA announced plans to sell the UCLA Hannah Carter Japanese Garden. Never heard of the place? You’re not alone. The garden has two parking spaces for visitors. Reservations were required, and attendance was a mere 2000 a year.
Carter, an Olympic skier, was the wife of department store magnate and LACMA co-founder Edward Carter. The couple assembled the stupendous collection of 17th-century Dutch painting that they gave to LACMA. In 1965, the Carters donated a Japanese garden to UCLA on the understanding that the university would keep it open to the public in perpetuity. Designed by architect Nagao Sakurai and landscape architect Koichi Kawana, it’s considered the foremost West Coast residential garden of its period. You don’t have to be a garden expert to think so. The crowd-sourced review site Yelp.com has 21 reviews, and every single one is 5-star.
But cash-strapped UCLA hasn’t lost much time in selling it. When you consider that Hannah Carter died in April 2009, the university waited only 31 months to announce the sale. According to an L.A. Times article, none of Hannah Carter’s children were consulted.
UCLA has pointed out that that the Carter Garden costs about $139,000 a year to run. With only 2000 visitors, the cost comes to about $70 a head. That may sound like a lot, but it’s not off the scale. By my quick calculation, the L.A. County Arboretum’s budget comes to about $13 a visitor. The Huntington—which has expensive museum and library operations as well as a garden—spends $72 a visitor. But the Carter Garden offers something the Huntington’s Japanese Garden rarely does, which is contemplative solitude. For this kind of garden, that’s a virtue.
The Carter Garden was never cut out to be a mega-attraction. The parking issues in Bel-Air were known to UCLA in 1965. I can’t say whether it was a smart move for the university to promise to maintain a small, exquisite garden from here to eternity. But by its legalistic reneging, UCLA may be hurting its bottom line more than helping it. Universities are all about fund-raising, and fund-raising usually means promises to do something quote-unquote forever—to put names on buildings or endowed chairs; to maintain donated books, archives, and artworks. Every time the university goes back on a promise to a past donor, it loses credibility with the future ones.
There is an effort to save the garden as a public space. Should it somehow work out, that would be the best for everyone, including UCLA. Maintaining the garden would probably require an endowment of about $4 million. There are Westsiders who have that, but there are plenty of higher-profile causes out there. This would require a philanthropist who really appreciates gardens, Japanese culture—and solitude.
Tags: Edward Carter, Hannah Carter, Koichi Kawana, Nagao Sakurai, UCLA
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Mrs Carter told us she and her husband had donated funds with the Garden and then the house (which is stunning) to cover the costs of maintaining the garden in perpetuity. There really should be no need to obtain financial support. The Carters provided it. Something is wrong at UCLA!
It is with great sadness and dismay to learn that UCLA intends to sell the Hannah Carter Bel-Aire Japanese garden. As a young adult sansei, I lived in Kyoto from 1969-1971, and after returning to southern California to teach Spanish and English as a Second Language in Beverly Hills, I had the pleasure of teaching an after-hours class in Japanese culture to young students. A few parents chaperoned the class when I took the students to visit the Hannah Carter garden. At the time, the garden was still immature, but it was evident that it was an exceptional masterpiece, reminiscent of the beautiful Japanese gardens I had seen in Kyoto. After the many years of care, the garden has grown to be one of the best examples of Japanese design. It would be a travesty to allow such a work of art to languish and disappear, rather than allowing those people who could appreciate this treasure, continue to experience the wonder that it is.