Dona Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker
Andrew Martin
Edna Ferber has long since hung up her jockstrap (d. 1968), but if she were still writing, and her agent would deign to take my call, I would suggest "Arcadia" for her next novel. "Edna Ferber's Arcadia" should tell the life of Arcadia Bandini and the world she floated upon -- a woman born beautiful…
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The Valley Village View
Edna Ferber has long since hung up her jockstrap (d. 1968), but if she were still writing, and her agent would deign to take my call, I would suggest “Arcadia” for her next novel. “Edna Ferber’s Arcadia” should tell the life of Arcadia Bandini and the world she floated upon — a woman born beautiful and rich, and raised to be feisty, haughty, contrary and ambitious; a Californio heiress, who became almost an American stateswoman; a senorita who embodied the Californios’ “Spanish fantasy past,” while marrying two wealthy and powerful Norte Americanos; who developed downtown Los Angeles and founded the City of Santa Monica.

Arcadia dramatizes the sweep of California’s Spanish colonial heritage — as well as that of the Mexican period, the Manifest Destiny era, and the modern-“LA-Wheel-Estate” epoch of our history. Behold, the Baker Block, which she developed in 1877 on the site of “El Palacio,” the downtown adobe she inherited on the death of her first husband, the Boston merchant Don Abel Stearns. It was the first steel-framed building in Los Angeles, and the first with tile floors.(Arcadia, for all her land and cattle wealth, grew up sweeping the dust off the hard-packed earth floors of her father Juan Bandini’s adobes.)

“If you seek her monument, look about you.”