Ennis House & Ahwahnee HABS (An Honor)
With the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Angeles, 2010–2011 proved to be great years for HABS projects.
This was the period when we composed full documentation of these two buildings, built in 1924 (Ennis) and 1925–1927 (Ahwahnee). It has been an honor. Both buildings were worthy of documentation in the 5×7 format, and color digital images with GPS locations were also captured at the same time. The Ahwahnee project alone required over 200 photographs, documenting the main hotel and its cottages.
The negatives and prints will be released into the public domain upon acceptance at the Library of Congress; they will then be available for public upload and research at the LOC HABS/HAER/HALS collection.
Most importantly, the negatives should still be in fine condition well into the 2400s, when the Ahwahnee and Ennis House will have met the Library of Congress’s LE500 standard — a 500-year life expectancy for HABS/HAER/HALS archival negatives. (With California’s earthquakes, fires and termites, I hope these amazing buildings still exist then too.)
Stephen Schafer is a HABS Photographer based in Ventura, California. | 805-652-1000 | www.habsphoto.com
Note: The Ennis House and Ahwahnee Hotel links above point to the general Library of Congress HABS catalog records for these structures, which include earlier documentation dating to 1933. Our 2010–2011 photography is part of the same ongoing catalog record but is not yet digitized and viewable online.
Addendum (2019): The Ahwahnee Hotel’s tennis courts, added as HABS No. CA-2830-D, were documented years after the main hotel and cottage survey (CA-2830, -A, -B, -C), adding 8 more photographs to the collection. As with that earlier documentation, the tennis court photography is not yet digitized in the Library of Congress catalog — consistent with the Library’s typical processing backlog for HABS/HAER/HALS photography from after 2006. The catalog records should list Stephen Schafer as photographer once digitized.