Rubel Castle, officially Rubel Pharms and Castle, was established in Glendora, California, by Michael Clarke Rubel, and is currently owned and operated by the Glendora Historical Society. It has been called "a San Gabriel Valley version of Watts Towers.”Rubel purchased a 2½ acre citrus orchard on which the structure resides in 1959. He and his friends completed construction in 1986. Rubelia is considered the first major recycling project in the United States.Rubel Castle was constructed partly out of concrete but also out of scrap steel, rocks, bedsprings, coat hangers, bottles, and other re-purposed materials that Rubel found.BackgroundIn 1959, Rubel bargained for the defunct Albourne Rancho property and took up residence in the huge citrus packing house, which he renamed “Rubel Pharm.” Rubel's father, Henry "Heinz" Scott Rubel, had been an Episcopalian minister and gag writer for radio comedians. In the 1960s, Rubel’s mother, one-time Greenwich Village Follies dancer Dorothy Deuel Rubel, moved into the packing house with her son. At 200ft long it was the perfect venue for her favorite hobby: parties. Well-dressed guests arrived weekly by the hundreds, strolling past old tractors, horses, poultry, buggies, and the gritty accouterments of the bucolic rancho period, to arrive inside a tin fruit packing house transformed into a giant dance hall. Inside, surrounded by art and antique furniture remaining from Rubel ancestors, they mingled in the smudge oil and orange blossom atmosphere and danced to a small orchestra.
