The architect who designed Rancho Cucamonga City Hall and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had it off in the time between President John Kennedy’s assassination and the former First Lady’s 1968 marriage to Aristotle Onassis, according to John Paul Warnecke’s recently published posthumous memoir.
When Rancho Cucamonga’s municipal officials in 1988 fully committed to constructing a City Hall from scratch rather than having its administration and various departments operate out of a business park on Baseline Road as had been the case over the previous 11 years since the city’s 1977 incorporation, it turned to architect John Carl “Jack” Warnecke.
As the designer of the Hawaii State Capital, the Joseph Mark Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, the Hannepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, the Nimitz Library, Chauvenet Hall and Michelson Hall at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the AT&T Long Lines Building in New York City the South Terminal at Logan International Airport in Boston, the Ventura County Courthouse in Ventura, the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington D.C the Thomas & Mack Center at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the post office and bookstore as well as Stanford University, the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. and the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame and gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery as well as the as the associate architect for the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., Warnecke was considered well-suited for the assignment.
Known for Bauhaus and Modernist styles as well as advocating a contextual approach in the structures and monuments he designed, in delivering Rancho Cucamonga’s center of governance, he deviated somewhat from what had been expected. Situated little more than a stone’s throw from the intersection of Route 66 and Haven Ave is the Kremlinesque Rancho Cucamonga City Hall, a building that incorporates elements he wanted to include but did not in the Soviet Embassy in the nation’s capitol.
Warnecke had a storied life, which ranged from being the tackle on the undefeated 1940 Stanford Indians football team to someone who had hobnobbed and rubbed shoulders with the nation’s elite.
He had captured much of that in a series of accounts, a memoir as it were, but that compendium had not been edited or delivered to a publisher at the time of his death in 2010, shortly after he had eclipsed his 91st birthday. Rather, he had requested that his daughter Margo Warnecke Merck, who leads the Warnecke archives, put the manuscript in the right hands and see that it be published once it was polished. That book is now ready as Camelot’s Architect: The Untold Story of Jackie Kennedy, Lafayette Square and a Secret Romance. It is to become available through River Grove Books on November 12. The Sentinel was entrusted with an advance copy.
Warnecke’s narrative is filled with a host of interesting, indeed some historically significant facts and a few salacious details.
Jacqueline Kennedy had doubts about marrying Aristotle Onassis before their 1968 union and apparently regrets afterward, according to Warnecke, who was close to the presidential couple as an advising architect before President John Kennedy’s November 22, 1963 assassination and then grew intimate with the president’s widow in the years after his death.
Despite Warnecke’s substantial success in the field of architecture, financial issues that dogged him in the mid-1960s appear to have prevented him from marrying Jackie Kennedy, as the financial demands she was subjected after President Kennedy’s death as a consequence of her situation and lifestyle could not be met by what was being provided to her by the Kennedy Family or the modest inheritance she received from her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, a once-successful Wall Street stockbroker whose wealth had been squandered through gambling and poor financial decisions by the time of his 1957 death.
If you want to read the rest of this article, find a hard copy version of the November 6 edition of the Sentinel.