Crime of the Week

Hey, remember Post-Modernism?

While Gloria Estefan was on the Top 10 and Miami Vice ruled the Peacock Network, Kanner Architects were busy with their aqua-tinged 1988 makeover of this 16-unit Mid-Wilshire apartment building, originally constructed (I wouldn't say designed) in 1957.

686 S. St. Andrews Place, Mid-Wilshire.

Unfortunately, the statute of limitations has expired on this one, and in any case one can hardly feel pity for the "victim" building. My deepest sympathies, however, are extended to anyone who lives across the street from this forced study in the Architecture of Cool.

The perpetrator firm now bills itself as "a Modern design studio in Santa Monica, California" (Modern with a nice big capital M), disingenuously disguising its sordid Post-Modernist past. But the truth will out: Kanner continues its obsession with Swiss cheese in this much more recent gymnasium in Pacific Palisades.

Park Avenue on Wilshire . . . part II

"MacArthur Park is melting in the dark."

So sang Richard Harris in the highly over-produced but uncannily prescient Jimmy Webb song. Harris was staying at the Sheraton Townhouse on MacArthur Park when he took a walk one morning in 1968 and discovered a cake left out in the rain, "the sweet green icing flowing down." The rest is history.

The Sheraton Townhouse on MacArthur Park

All that was an age and a half ago, but today the Sheraton Townhouse still stands thanks to the preservation efforts of Rob MacLeod. When the Japanese owners of the building wanted to raze it in the mid-1990s and wait for a better economic climate (sound familiar?), MacLeod secured funding and turned the historic apartment house-turned-hotel into low-income housing for families and seniors. It re-opened in 1997.

The building, as stately as they come in Los Angeles or anywhere else, is a 14-story Georgian revival masterpiece designed by Norman Alpaugh. Originally an apartment house in the mold of The Talmadge, just down the street, it was transformed into a hotel in 1937.

Socialite hotelier Conrad Hilton bought it in 1942 for a cool million, and in 1950 his son Conrad Nicholson "Nicky" Hilton (great-uncle of future tabloid fodderettes Paris and Nicky) got married to Elizabeth Taylor there, the first of her seven-some husbands.

The hotel closed in 1993, as MacArthur Park was rife with drugs and crime. ("Someone left the crack out in the rain," as my friend Steve Silberman so eloquently put it.)

Someone left the crack out in the rain
(photo from you-are-here.com)

I haven't (yet) been inside this place, but sooner or later will do a blog on the wonders to be found therein. Perhaps I can divest myself of all my wordly possessions and plead poverty in order to qualify for residency at the Townhouse in my impending old age.

As for the architecture, Richard Harris puts it best: "I'll never have that recipe again."

Park Avenue on Wilshire . . . almost

The Talmadge, at 3278 Wilshire (official website), was built in 1924 by producer and United Artists president Joseph Schenck as a gift (read: revenue stream) for his then-wife, silent film star Norma Talmadge. The cost was an eye-popping $1.5 million.

The Talmadge, 1924

There is no evidence that Norma Talmadge actually lived here, but former residents do include Schenck protégé Buster Keaton, Captain Alan Hancock of Hancock Park fame, and, much later, television star Telly Savalas.

The Talmadge today, pride of Mid-Wilshire

Architects Aleck Curlett and Claude Beelman—designers of the Elks Club (later the Park Plaza Hotel), not far away, and several other large L.A. projects—chose to work in a Georgian revival style unusual for Los Angeles.

The red brickwork in American bond, the Ionic pilasters, the six-over-six sash windows, the neoclassical limestone friezes and roundels set into the façade, and the prominent balconies on the top floor with broken-pediment window surrounds all conspire to bring a healthy dose of East Coast sophistication to this once-glamorous strip of Mid-Wilshire.

God is in the details

The Talmadge would provide design cues to the stately Sheraton Townhouse just down the boulevard, built a few years afterwards and designed by Clarence Russell and Norman Alpaugh (blogged here).

The building's marquise—a lovely but incongruous Beaux-Arts element—is still in place but has been rather insulted and made redundant by a later burgundy canvas awning with crude lettering; this should be removed post-haste.

Like it rains in L.A.?

The ten-story Talmadge recalls the classic New York apartments of Park Avenue (which are generally a couple of stories taller but have no groovy palm trees waving outside) and was considered the finest apartment house west of Manhattan at the time.

Park Avenue apartment houses
(coutesy of Carter B. Horsley's excellent City Review)

The interior is perhaps not quite up to New York's finest snuff, but it's still serveral cuts above average, with entry halls in each apartment, delicate two-tiered crown moldings, and maid's quarters in the larger units.

Crown molding

Interior view

The Talmadge is a dream building in a dream city. And perhaps the best thing about it is that it is suffused with that gorgeous, indescribable Southern California light.