No. 134 - Crossroads of the World

Crossroads of the World
1936 – Robert V. Derrah
6671 Sunset Boulevard – map
Declared: 12/4/74

Screw Times Square! The real Crossroads of the World is right here in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. Granted, Times Square can claim the Coca-Cola Sign, the New Year’s Eve Ball Drop, One Times Square, and the Naked Cowboy, while our landmark today boasts primarily a bunch of boring offices. But our Crossroads of the World looks like a big boat.

The project was conceived by a woman named Ella Crawford and designed by (a man named) Robert V. Derrah.

Born in Salt Lake City, Derrah was apparently a brainiac, for he graduated from both MIT and Harvard before coming to the area in the mid-1920s. He served as president of the Southern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1945, only to die from a heart attack in October of the following year at the age of 51. Derrah was responsible for a couple of other city landmarks, too, the Coca-Cola Company Building, No. 138, and Southern California Gas Company Building on Flower, No. 789.

In this case, what Derrah designed was an international shopping center of shops and studios, “a beautifully housed, permanent world’s fair.” One of the keys to the success to the set of buildings was its open spaces where pedestrians could wander about.

The development’s general layout is that of a docked Streamline Moderne ocean liner surrounded by two-story cottages done up in a variety of architectural styles – English, French, Swedish, Spanish, Algerian, Turkish, Italian, Persian, Mexican, and, er, Netherlandish. Derrah also tossed in bits of colonial New England and early California for you xenophobes.

Early on, plans called for building a theater for foreign films, something I can’t find evidence of ever materializing.

The ship’s aft is crowned with a thirty-foot Art Deco tower capped with a lighted eight-foot world globe, a literal Hollywood landmark.

Crawford, who was extremely careful in her selection of tenants who would bring in high-class shops keeping with the international theme, somehow had an in with Universal Studios (this was right around when Standard Capital took over the studio from Carl Laemmle) . The day before Crossroads’ October 29, 1936, grand opening, a quartet of Universal starlets showed up for photo-ops for the mall (and for themselves). For posterity, their names were Marjorie Gage, Emily Lane, Mary Alice Rice, and Polly Rowles. I mention this only because I’m thinking these ladies’ careers could use a bit of a boost.

Opening night for Crossroads of the World was akin to a big movie premiere. Included in the revelries were a master of ceremonies, “colorful foreign musicians, groups of native dancers and folk singers.” To boot, Universal went on to provide a bunch of international “film players” to act as hosts and hostesses. Just look who was scheduled to greet you with Ciao!, Hola!, or whatever (and the countries they were representing):

Cesar Romero (Cuba)
Binnie Barnes, Wendy Barrie, Boris Karloff, and Jack Dunn (England)
Ella Logan (Scotland)
Tala Birell (Austria)
Henry Armetta (Italy)
Mischa Auer (Russia)
Peggy Ryan and George Murphy (Ireland)
Gertrude Niesen (Scandinavia)

Opening day, the Los Angeles Times reported the shopping center had “accommodations for more than a hundred shops, cafes, bazaars and studios. These units will feature merchandise and foods from the four corners of the earth.” Today, the designated city landmark houses businesses including design firms, a hair care shop, production houses, magazines, talent agencies, religious institutions, and at least one art gallery. The Sunday afternoon I was walking around, it was all but deserted. Lots of parking in the lot off Las Palmas.

This Seeing Stars page says Diana Murphy and Sid Hudgens had offices here in Indecent Proposal and L.A. Confidential, respectively.

Sources:

“Hollywood's Unique “Crossroads of the World” Project Makes Bow to Public in Premiere Tonight” Los Angeles Times; Oct 29, 1936, p. 6

“Stars From All Nations to Be Present at Opening” Los Angeles Times; Oct 29, 1936, p. 6

“Architects’ Ideas Vie” Los Angeles Times; Oct 29, 1936, p. 6

Southwest Builder and Contractor Oct 18, 1946, p. 5

Longstreth, Richard. City Center to Regional Mall MIT Press 1997 Cambridge, Massachusetts

Up next: Canoga Mission Gallery

continue reading...

No. 133 - Minnie Hill Palmer House and Dynamite Shed

Minnie Hill Palmer Residence and Dynamite Shed
c. 1913, c. 1900
Chatsworth Park South, Chatsworth – map
Declared: 11/20/74, 11/20/07

Okay, there are two different halves to Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 133: the former home of Minnie Hill Palmer and a small dynamite shack. Both are located in Chatsworth Park South and are combined into one official landmark for the sake of proximity.

The Minnie Hill Palmer Residence is run by the Chatsworth Historical Society and is open the first Sunday – for just three hours – of every month. That is, it’s open when the park in which it’s located isn’t closed as the Environmental Protection Agency tests its soil for high levels of lead. Which it is. In other words, Chatsworth Park South has remained closed since Valentine's Day, thereby making the Minnie Hill Palmer Residence off limits. Sorry.

From the Department of City Planning website:

If you were allowed in the park, you’d see a redwood cottage (above), the second home built on what was once a 230-acre ranch homesteaded by James David Hill and his wife, Rhoda Jane, in the spring of 1886. Their daughter, Minnie, the seventh of their eighth children, was born later that year. Minnie, except for some time spent down in Hawthorne and up in Montana, lived most of her life on the homestead, a big chunk of it in this bungalow, built in 1911 or 1913.

Here’s a portrait of Minnie taken by Kevin Hass on May 4, 1980, about a year before her death. It's part of the collection of the Chatsworth Historical Society.

The Minne Hill Palmer Residence is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, when there’s not EPA soil-testing going on, the landmark is rented out for receptions, private parties, movie shoots, and small weddings (“I now pronounce you man and – hey, does anyone else smell lead?”).

Much closer to – and viewable from – the Chatsworth Park South entrance stands the Dynamite Shed, tacked onto HCM No. 133 thirty-three years to the day the Hill Palmer Residence got its designation. Built between 1890 and 1900, it’s a one-story structure built to house dynamite during the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Susana Pass Tunnel between 1898 and 1904. The picture of the shed at the top of the post was from when I visited the park back in December to visit HCM No. 92, the Old Stagecoach Trail, now also off limits due to that lead-testing in the park.

Today, the Dynamite Shed is rented out for receptions, private parties, movie shoots, and small weddings (“I now pronounce you man and – hey, can we can go easy on the lit candles?”).

Up next: Crossroads of the World

continue reading...

No. 132 - Stoney Point Outcroppings

Stoney Point Outcroppings
Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Santa Susana Pass Road, Chatsworth – map
Declared: 11/20/74

When taking pictures at Stoney Point in Chatsworth, I ran into a man who first scaled this prehistoric rock formation forty years ago. Since then, he told me, he’s climbed all over the world, and he’d bet that more rock climbers learned how to climb at Stoney Point than anywhere else on earth.

The Stoney Point page at Mountain Project says that many great climbers trained and practiced at the Los Angeles landmark early in their careers, climbers including Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, Bob Kamps, Ron Kauk, John Long, and John Bachar. The website also lists about thirty different Stoney Point climbing routes, including Beethoven’s Wall, Turlock, and Nabisco Canyon.

See a series of Stoney Point climbing videos on Jon McCartie’s Vimeo site.

If you’re ever in the area, even if you’re not a climber, you should still stop by Stoney Point, today a 76-acre Los Angeles city park. Even at its base, you can make out all sorts of caves, potholes, and dens throughout the formation, perfect for 19th-century bandit-hiding. When there, I saw not only boulderers but also strollers, taking in the site. Sadly, patches of graffiti were unavoidable.

I stopped by Stoney Point last Sunday afternoon. On any other day, I would’ve been following in the footsteps of Robbins, et al, scrambling up the cliffs and crags, but, unfortunately, I left my biners and grigri back in the car. In addition, it looked like a significant amount of work.

Up next: Minnie Hill Palmer Residence and Dynamite Shack

continue reading...

No. 131 - Dunbar Hotel

Dunbar Hotel
1928
4225 South Central Avenue – map
Declared: 9/4/74

“It was a hotel – a jewel done with loving hands… It was full of sunshine and low voices and the sound of human laughter and running water. The hotel Somerville was an extraordinary surprise to people fed on ugliness – ugly schools, ugly churches, ugly streets, ugly insults. We were prepared for – well, something that didn’t leak, that was hastily clean and too new for vermin. And we entered a beautiful new inn with a soul… Funny that a hotel so impressed – but it was so unexpected, so startling, so beautiful.” – W.E.B. DuBois

Alright. It was irresponsible of me to include the above quote, not knowing the source. However, I lifted it from a display inside the hotel’s museum. I see no reason why anyone would make up something like that, and it sounds something Bill would say, so there you go.

John Alexander Somerville, born in Jamaica in 1882, came to the U.S. around the turn of the last century. He graduated from USC’s dentistry program as the school’s first black graduate, then became the first black man to pass California’s State Dental Board. (Later on, his wife, Pomona-born Vada Watson Jetmore Somerville, whom he married in 1912, became USC’s first female black graduate and California’s first black female dentist.) Somerville began his profession in a pair of rented rooms at Fourth and Broadway. In 1913, he co-organized the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP.

The black and white postcard above is from USC's Digital Archive.

In the 1927, fed up with Jim Crow and segregation laws, Somerville successfully built a 26-unit apartment building, the La Vada, at Vernon and Central. Every unit was rented and the complex paid off.

Encouraged by the success of the La Vada, Dr Somerville managed a loan of $100,000 to go toward a new project, a first-class hotel to serve L.A.’s black visitors. “The Pullman Company had hundreds of colored employees coming to Los Angeles daily,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Most of these men, many of whom came from fine homes, had to sleep in the cars at the station because they could not find sleeping quarters during their stay here.” The Hotel Somerville was completed in June 1928 as “the finest hotel in America catering to colored people.” Located at the corner of 41st Place and South Central Avenue, the building was actually about thirty blocks south of the then center of the black community at 12th and Central. However, with the success of the Hotel Somerville, it was only a matter of months before the surrounding vacant lots were bought up with new buildings sprouting almost overnight.

More than 5,000 people stopped by the four-story hotel opening day. Visitors were met with a ground floor that contained stores, a barbershop, a beauty parlor, and a flower shop. The Somerville’s dining room, managed by Fannie Burdette (one of my favorite names, ever), could hold 100 diners and featured a balcony for an orchestra.

While the Hotel Somerville lettering above dates from the late 1980s restoration, the Dunbar sign below is pure 1930s.

Just after opening, the hotel, with its more-than-100 rooms, hosted the west coast’s first NAACP convention. Guests included Lincoln Steffens, Mary White Ovington, Arthur Spingarn, James Weldon Johnson, William Pickens, Charles W. Chestnut, and DuBois.

The following year’s stock market crash hit Somerville hard, and he would lose the La Vada and sell the hotel to gangster Lucius Lomax. Lomax renamed the Somerville the Dunbar in honor of the poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar. Lomax sold the hotel in 1934 to Father Divine’s (aka George Baker’s) Peace Mission Movement. The Nelson family took ownership by the late 1930s.

By the late 1920s, Central Avenue had become the “52nd Street of the West”, also drawing comparisons to Harlem’s 125th Street. The Dunbar was the major stopping place in L.A. for black entertainers, athletes, and writers. Guests included Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lena Horne, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Langston Hughes, Art Tatum, Cab Calloway, and on and on. I sure would love to get a glimpse of any old Dunbar registers.

Although you could hear live music in the hotel, like in the Turban Room bar, it didn’t hurt that one of the most happening clubs, the original Alabam, formerly the Apex, was right next door. Other clubs in the area included the Downbeat, the Memo, the Last Word, Dynamite Jackson’s, and lots more.

When looking back on the Dunbar as a meeting place and hangout, musician Jack Kelson, in Central Avenue Sounds, said it was his “… favorite spot on Central Avenue, that spot in front of the Dunbar Hotel, because that to me was the hippest, most intimate, key spot of all the activity. That’s where all the night people hung out: the sportsmen, the businessmen, the dancers, everybody in show business, people who were somebody stayed at the hotel.”

I was confused by the 75th Anniversary sign above, until I realized it was from five years ago. That means 2008 marks the 5th Anniversary of the 75th Anniversary!

Bernard Johnson bought the hotel in the late 1960s with hopes of rehabilitating the structure and incorporating a museum. While the old Somerville was declared a city landmark in 1974, followed by its placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, it wasn’t until 1988 when the non-profit Dunbar Economic Development Corporation was formed with the purpose of restoring the landmark. After a major rehabilitation, the Dunbar Hotel Apartments opened in 1989 with 73 low-income apartments, four commercial spaces, a museum, and senior center.

For a detailed report on the late eighties restoration, see this relative section in Affordable Housing through Historic Preservation. And click here to see adodom’s five-minute video tour of the Dunbar.

Don’t underestimate the importance of this building. During the Jazz Age and Depression, the Somerville/Dunbar played a major part in marking Los Angeles as the place where many African-Americans believed they could live better than anywhere else in the country. I’m not going to lie and say this is an area you want to sight-see around late at night, but I was there early Easter morning and was greeted by passersby, at least one friendly shopkeeper, and the Dunbar’s helpful security guard. And while any glimmer of Central Avenue’s glory days of 75 years ago are long gone, standing inside the hotel itself, it’s hard not to get the smallest sense of what it was like when the Dunbar was the center of life for so many people.

Sources:

Somerville, J. Alexander. Man of Color Lorrin L. Morrison 1949 Los Angeles, CA

Delvac, Esq. William F., Susan Escherich, and Bridget Hartman. Affordable Housing through Historic Preservation: A Case Study Guide to Combining the Tax Credits U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, Preservation Assistance Division, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Department of Public Policy 1995

Editorial Committee, Clora Bryant et al. Central Avenue Sounds University of California Press 1998 Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA

Flamming, Douglas. Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America University of California Press 2005 Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA

Up next: Stoney Point Outcroppings

continue reading...

No. 130 - Samuel-Novarro House

Samuel-Novarro House
1928 – Lloyd Wright
5609 Valley Oak Drive – map
Declared: 7/17/74

Lloyd Wright was Frank’s eldest son, born in 1890. Trained as a landscape architect, Lloyd came to Southern California in his mid-twenties to help plan San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition for the Olmsted Brothers. Afterwards, Wright stuck around Los Angeles, serving as construction manager and landscape artist on his dad’s area projects, the Barnsdall, Storer, Ennis, and Freeman Houses. City landmarks, all.

Wright met Louis Samuel through actor Ramon Novarro who had asked Wright to build him a Spanish Revival home (it was never realized). Samuel and Novarro met in dance class years earlier, and, by the middle of the 1920s, the former had become the actor’s personal assistant and business manager. By then, also, Novarro was Hollywood’s first Latin-American superstar, with his most popular role being the lead in 1925’s Ben-Hur.

For Samuel and his wife, Wright created an Art Deco/Mayanesque masterpiece, one that McGrew and Julian write “may be the most beautifully sited home in Los Angeles.” The four-level home was built into the side of a hill with concrete and oxidized copper throughout (even the floors are concrete). Nearly everything was incorporated in the first floor: dining room; living room; kitchen; the home’s sole bedroom; and the lounge which lead to the outdoor swimming pool.

In 1930, Novarro discovered Samuel had been embezzling from him. Not only was Samuel using the money to play the stock market (not a great move in the fall of 1929), put he was also using his client’s money to pay the mortgage on his Los Feliz home. Now, Novarro wasn’t the type of guy who needed the press digging around in his private affairs, so he quietly opted not to press charges. However, he did take over ownership of the Wright house. (Louis Samuel, in 1934, hired Lloyd Wright to design this home in Brentwood.)

As its new owner, Novarro hired back Wright to renovate and enlarge the house. The architect added a pergola, a music room, a bedroom suite, and performed some overall remodeling and embiggening. (Interestingly, a vintage shot of the home used in Sam Watters’s Houses of Los Angeles shows the left side of the front façade completely flat and bare – no window or archway leading to the wrap-around staircase.) Rather than incorporating Wright-designed furnishings into the renovated house, Novarro brought in MGM art director Cedric Gibbons to redecorate the home (mostly with stuff bought at Bullock's Wilshire).

Later addition.

Novarro lived in the home until the late thirties. Andre Soares, author of Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro, says “In 1944, Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green rented the Los Feliz Hills house, where they worked on the Broadway musical On the Town.”

Flash forward to another famous owner. In the early 1990s, Schweitzer/BIM’s Josh Schweitzer remodeled the landmark for preservation-minded Diane Keaton, although she went on to sell the home later that decade. Actress Christina Ricci wound up buying the house in June 2005, but sold it just a year later for about $2.8 million.

Yeah, I know these pictures look more or less the same (because they are more or less the same). However, lucky Flickr member srk1941 has a terrific set of photos of both the exterior and interior of the Samuel-Novarro House, taken while Ricci had the home on the market. Great shots of the pool, gardens, and what appears to be a bathroom for convicts.

Sources:

Watters, Sam. Houses of Los Angeles 1920-1935 Acanthus Press, LLC 2007 New York, NY

McGrew, Patrick and Robert Julian. Landmarks of Los Angeles Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated 1994 New York, NY

Up next: Dunbar Hotel

continue reading...

No. 129 - Leslie Residence

Leslie Residence
c. 1903 – Oliver P. Dennis and Lyman Farwell
767 Garland Avenue – map
Declared: 6/19/74

Man, you really need to keep your eyes open when you’re looking for this place, about a block away from the 8th Street exit off the Harbor Freeway. I mean, just compare the two pictures below, the first (from the Department of City Planning website) taken probably in the mid-1970s around designation, the second from a few weeks ago.

I’m all for trees, but this is out of control. Also, you figure it gets even denser in the summer months. But, trust me, there’s an old, gorgeous building hiding in there.

A 1994 listing put out by the L.A. Cultural Heritage Commission reports oil executive Charles C. L. Leslie had architects Oliver P. Dennis and Lyman Farwell design this Queen Anne mansion for him around the turn of the last century. (The boys are also responsible for a couple of other city landmarks, including Hollywood Boulevard’s Janes House, No. 227. And Dennis designed No. 406, the Magic Castle.) However, Gebhard and Winter, in Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide, say the firm actually created 767 Garland for Oliver P. Dennis himself.

What’s clearer is that while 767 Garland was home to Charles C. L. in 1929 per the city directory, the 1936 edition has a Charles S. C. and Catherine Leslie living there, giving his occupation as a rancher. Charles C.L. Leslie died in January 1937.

There’s a Los Angeles Times article from February 1896 which lays out a lawsuit between Charles C.L. Leslie and his partner, George M. Bobst (the partnership, said the Times, had “turned to gall and bitterness”). It sorta looks like Charles may’ve tried to screw over George after an oil strike, but the whole thing was too tedious for me to get into.

Gebhard and Winter give 1910 as the construction date for the home. ZIMAS says the 1,100-square-foot structure was built in 1903. The former’s got to be wrong, as a 1906 Sanborn map shows the house along with what must’ve been a whole row of mansions. (I would’ve liked to have seen the house that once stood next door at 749; it was even bigger on a substantial plot of land.) One more thing ZIMAS says about 767 is it’s a single residence today, which I have hard time believing.

I stopped by the landmark twice. The first time, an early Sunday morning, two homeless guys, Tom and Greg, were there to greet me. Greg was more than happy to give me a quick tour of the exterior. Not only did he point out where folks would make deliveries around back, but he also revealed the cement pit he said was once a moat filled with alligators.

Greg and the moat.

I handed Greg a few bucks for him and Tom to grab some pancakes or something. However, I ran into Tom there the following weekend. He let me know Greg bogarded my handout. Still, a friendly docent, that Greg.

Sources:

“A Little Hogging Game” Los Angeles Times; Feb 28, 1896, p. 9

Los Angeles Times; Jan 26, 1937, p. A20

Up next: Samuel-Novarro House

continue reading...