I may never live on Park Avenue, but I'm still holding out hope for an apartment at The Talmadge, together with a complete upscale revival of Mid-Wilshire from MacArthur Park to Western. (I can't bring myself to call this corridor "Koreatown," in spite of the city's signage, although I'm willing to concede that moniker to the area just a couple of blocks south and north of Wilshire.)
There's certainly no dearth of Talmadge apartments to be had (they are rentals) and the regularity of vacancies appearing on craigslist.com makes me wonder whether there's not something drastically wrong with the management.
The building is not in the best of shape (how will you look at 90?) , but I would far prefer leaving it as is to giving it over to a conscience-challenged developer to gut and turn into "lofts."
Thank Zeus this hasn't happened yet. Each apartment has a formal dining room, and the galley-style kitchens still have their swinging doors, through which the "help" (some apartments have rooms for live-in maids) might once have bustled out pheasant under glass for a dinner party for six bon-vivants. There are some good things to be said about benign neglect, I suppose.
I've looked at several one-bedrooms in this building at various points, usually on weekends when the security desk will give "prospective tenants" free access to spend a leisurely hour pretending to live in the Los Angeles of Norma Talmadge, whose husband, producer Joseph Schenk, gave this building to her as a gift.
I snapped a few photos on the last visit, and used that amazing tool Photoshop to whip up a nice little pad for myself along what was once (and still should be) Los Angeles' chicest boulevard.
The renditions are far from perfect, but a guy's gotta dream . . .
Shall we say dinner at 8?
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