Anthony T. Heinsbergen, Restored The Interior Splendor Of Landmarks, 74
DGH
Anthony T. Heinsbergen, whose Los Angeles, California, firm restored
the interiors of the Wiltern Theatre, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
and other landmark buildings across the country, many of whose
interiors were designed by his father decades earlier, died, January
29, 2004, at the age of 74.
Heinsbergen, a lifelong Los Angeles resident, was found dead of
apparently natural causes at his weekend retreat in Ojai, California,
said his ex-wife, Dawn Heinsbergen. The results of an autopsy are
pending.
The career of Tony Heinsbergen was inextricably linked with that of
his father, Anthony B. Heinsbergen, who was known as one of the finest
muralists in the United States.
"I think he did an excellent job at restoring many of the murals that
his father painted or designed," said Linda Dishman, executive
director of the Los Angeles Conservancy. "It was a great testament
that the two generations were involved not only with creating these
great masterpieces but in restoring them to their glory."
The elder Heinsbergen was born in Holland. He apprenticed to a Dutch
artist and restorer at age 10, emigrated to Los Angeles with his
father at 13 in 1907 and immediately went to work for a local
decorating firm. By 1918, he had launched A.B. Heinsbergen & Co.
The company, which ultimately employed a crew of 185 decorative
painters, was known for its spectacular ceilings and wall decorations,
including those for churches, synagogues, hotels, banks, civic
buildings and 757 movie theaters around the country.
Early examples of the company's beautiful and ornate work can be found
in the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel,
the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills city halls, the Biltmore Hotel in
downtown Los Angeles, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco and
the U.S. Department of Commerce Building in Washington.
Tony Heinsbergen, who graduated from the School of Architecture at
USC, joined his father's company full time in 1951. He bought the
business after his father retired in the mid-1960s and renamed it A.T.
Heinsbergen & Co. The elder Heinsbergen died in 1981.
For more than seven decades, the company has operated out of a
castle-like building on Beverly Boulevard near La Brea Avenue that
Anthony B. Heinsbergen had built in 1927 with used bricks from the old
Los Angeles City Hall.
By the mid-1980s, A.T. Heinsbergen & Co. was still taking on new
design work — including banks, a country club and a sorority
house at UCLA — but it also had become heavily involved in
restoring the interiors of many venerable buildings across the
country.
It was part of a team that refurbished Carnegie Hall in New York City,
New York, and was involved in the restoration of the Mission Inn in
Riverside, California, the Los Angeles Central Library and the
Washington State Capitol Rotunda in Olympia, Washington.
Many of the company's projects involved restoring such work originally
designed by Heinsbergen's father as the ceilings of Los Angeles City
Hall, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Wiltern, which some
consider the finest example of Art Deco in the country.
"If you want to restore a historic theater, I would never think of
going to anyone else," said David Packard, whose David and Lucile
Packard Foundation purchased the run-down Stanford Theatre, a 1925
movie palace in Palo Alto, in 1987.
"We wanted to restore it to the way it was in 1925, and that's where
Tony came in," Packard, the son of the Hewlett-Packard founder, told
The Times.
Heinsbergen's father had designed the original interior of the
theater, whose vivid Assyrian and Greek ornamentation on the walls and
ceilings had long since been painted over.
Although the Packards had a 1925 black-and-white photograph showing
the auditorium's painted ceiling and other features, they didn't know
what the original colors had been.
But after going through thousands of old watercolor sketches in his
company's archives, Tony Heinsbergen found three of his father's
original watercolors for the Stanford Theatre and was able to match
the original hues in re-creating the intricate, vivid patterns of its
interior.
"What we try to do in our theater is re-create the experience people
had when they went to the movies in the '20s, '30s and '40s, of being
in a wonderful movie palace, and Tony helped us re-create that
experience," Packard said.
Packard remembered Heinsbergen as being "very old-fashioned and
elegant. He was always so well dressed and courteous. He just acted
like a person who should spend his life in these elegant interiors."
For the last 10 years, he lived in the penthouse of his company's
landmark building on Beverly Boulevard. An opera fan who supported the
Metropolitan Opera in New York, Heinsbergen also was an avid sailor
and classic car collector whose holdings included a 1925 Lincoln
Phaeton.
"He appreciated fine things," said Dawn Heinsbergen, who was married
to Heinsbergen for 16 years and continued working as the company's
vice president 10 years after their divorce in the late 1970s.
"He loved the quality of the old cars, he loved wonderful music, he
appreciated beauty and design and line, so he was a natural for this,"
she said of his life's work.
She said she and her daughter, Dawn Jr., who has been with the company
15 years, will continue to operate A.T. Heinsbergen & Co.