Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village
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Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village
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Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, September 2008
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| Location | 4595 Cochran St Simi Valley, California |
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| Coordinates | 34°16′45.24″N 118°42′16.75″W / 34.2792333°N 118.7046528°WCoordinates: 34°16′45.24″N 118°42′16.75″W / 34.2792333°N 118.7046528°W |
| Architect | Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey |
| Architectural style | Other |
| NRHP Reference # | 96001076 |
| CHISL # | 939 |
| Added to NRHP | October 25, 1996 |
Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, also known as Bottle Village, is a folk art piece, located in Simi Valley, California.
This assemblage is one of California's Twentieth Century Folk Art Environments. In 1956, Tressa Prisbrey, then 60 years old, started building a "village" of shrines, walkways, sculptures, and buildings from recycled items and discards from the local landfill. She worked for 25 years creating one structure after another to house her collections. Bottle Village is California Historical Landmark number 939. It is also a Ventura County Cultural Landmark, and has historic designation from the City of Simi Valley. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.
It was officially closed in 1984 and severely damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. In 1979 Bottle Village was named a Ventura County Cultural Landmark. In 1981 it was declared a California State Historical Landmark National Register. In 1996, two years after the Northridge earthquake and still in ruin, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Tressa Luella Schaefer was born in Easton, Minnesota in 1896. She attended school until the age of twelve and studied mostly politics in North Dakota. At the age of 15, Tressa married the ex-husband of her sister, Theodore Grinolds who was 37 years her senior (52 years old). The marriage with Theordore only lasted 14 years and within those years she bore seven children. After Theodore's passing at age 72, Tressa and her seven children moved up to Seattle where she married an unnamed and unemployed man. Their marriage was very short lived. Over the course of her life, she had witnessed the passing of six out of her seven children (4 boys, 2 girls).
In 1946, Tressa made the move to Santa Susana, California, now known as Simi Valley, California. Ten years after the big move, Tressa met her husband, Al Prisbrey who bought one-third of an acre located on Cochran Street. Both brought in a trailer to live in and removed the tires and hid them in an effort to stay grounded on the lot. When Tressa first moved to Santa Susana, she had a large collection of 17,000 pencils which had previously been her hobby. In an effort to find a place to put them, she decided she wanted to make a house for her pencils to stay. At the age of 60, she began looking around to buy cinder-blocks to build with but came to discover the prices were way out of her range. Tressa stumbled upon a dump where she realized that bottles would be perfect to build with. When she returned home, she realized with her were 1,000,015 bottles. She began going to her sister, Hattie's house and made cement by hand and built her first bottle house by hand. This is when Bottle Village began to take form. Grandma Prisbrey mentioned she did not begin this project to gain attention but as an outpost as well as a place to keep all of her things. She was very much a collector as well as a recycler. She was interested in the fact that everything has a purpose and is special and unique and that is exactly what she brings to bottle village. Not just in the visuals but the overall feeling you receive from being present.
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