The Huntington: The Railroad Baron's Private Universe

Henry Huntington made his fortune in two ways: as the largest private landowner in California at the turn of the twentieth century, and as the builder and operator of the Pacific Electric Railway, the network of electric streetcars known as the Red Cars that connected greater Los Angeles before the automobile remade the basin. He bought land, built rail lines to it, and sold the land to people who could now reach it.

In nineteen nineteen, Huntington opened his San Marino estate as a research library and art museum. The collections he had assembled were extraordinary. The Gutenberg Bible, printed in fourteen fifty-five, one of fewer than fifty complete copies known to survive. Audubon's double-elephant folio of Birds of America. Shakespeare's First Folio, the sixteen twenty-three collected works that is the primary text for roughly half of everything Shakespeare wrote. Gainsborough's Blue Boy, bought from an English country house in nineteen twenty-one.

Edwin Hubble's personal papers are also here. The documents from which cosmology rewrote the scale of the universe are in a reading room eleven miles from Mt Wilson, where the discoveries happened.

The Huntington is simultaneously one of the world's genuinely significant research institutions and the monument a Gilded Age industrialist built to legitimize himself with other people's cultural accomplishments. Both things are true, and the gardens are open to the public.