Crime of the Week

This rambling Spanish Revival house at 6215 Holly Mont Drive in Hollywood is said to be the former home of Barbara Stanwyck. Since Stanwyck's residency, the place has taken quite a tumble.

An old pile on Holly Mont Drive, Hollywood

The house could be quite charming, even spectacular, if brought back to its original standards. Alas, it is currently a shambles, and the present owner—an international concert pianist, former child prodigy, spiritual recluse, and ping pong enthusiast (I'm not joking, folks)—seems bent on even further vulgarization.

Vulgarization in progress

In addition to various masts, flags, aerials, strings of lights, untrimmed palms, grates, chains, padlocks, metal fences, grass windscreens, and makeshift rooftop cabanas, he has recently installed a haphazard hodge-podge of cheap knock-off statues in front of the once-proud house. One expects self-indulgent follies in Hollywood, but this mess is completely without style.

"Sculpture garden"

The owner was also contemplating adding a water feature, requiring the removal of massive amounts of soil from the hillside, thereby potentially threatening the stability of the entire foundation.

A padlocked gate keeps the ghosts in.

Of course, the homeowner may have some excuse, considering that the house was reported to be haunted by a tenant who lived there in the 1970s.

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.

Paving news, good and bad

The war-zone-like stretch of Sunset Boulevard asphalt between Highland and La Brea was finally paved last month. Stretches on either side of this mystery strip had been resurfaced for miles in either direction just a few years ago, but this quarter-mile limbo segment was somehow forgotten in the process.

I wrote both Council member Eric Garcetti and Council member Tom LaBonge about this needy stretch in front of Hollywood High two years back, since the Council district map was unclear as to which pol was in charge of this borderline street.

To their credit, I got personal phone calls from both of them. I distinctly remember Tom LaBonge telling me, "We'll get it done." And they did. Two years later. I suppose I should be grateful. Neither Rome nor Los Angeles was built—or repaired—in a day.


Now the bad news. Today's L.A. Times reports that "drastic new budget cuts" will most likely include slashing funds for street resurfacing when approved. The front-end alignment shops are rejoicing.

Those beautiful L.A. freeways

" . . . the freeway system in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life."

That was Reyner Banham in his classic study of Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies (see link to the right), published in 1971. (Can it really be that long ago?) An Englishman by birth and Londoner by adoption, Banham said that he learned to drive so that he could read Los Angeles in the original. "Autopia," or the L.A. freeway system, is one of the four "ecologies" that he felt defined the city.

Recently I ran across a wonderful and wacky video of L.A. freeways, circa 2000, shot and compiled by YouTube user 101not5 (aka Mark Furqueron), with an appropriately electronic 1970s soundtrack featuring Kraftwerk's car-centric anthem "Autobahn."

"Interchanges," posted with permission from YouTube user 101not5

What I love about this video, aside from the sun-bleached L.A. colors, is the consistent pace it induces—the restless and relentless pace of Los Angeles. Banham, who died in 1988, would have wholeheartedly approved. By the way, the engaging 1972 BBC documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles be viewed online here.

One last word from the master: "You can build a city any shape you like, as long as it works."

Crime of the Week

There's generic ugly, and then there's very special ugly. Stop-the-car-and-take-a-picture ugly. This house on the Westside is that kind of ugly.

Just what were they thinking?

But am I more aghast at its ugliness or at its pretension to elegance and style? There is much to abhor here: those gigantic, misshapen "eyebrows" that burden the elevation; the paneless (and painful) windows that seem destined never to be opened; the half-round columns that support nothing, added in a vain attempt to lend some authenticity to the proceedings; the garage door that mars an already crudely conceived façade; the blotched (and botched) faux-patina of the paint job; the pathetic garden "bridge to nowhere"; the Beaux Arts lamppost stranded in the midst of a desert xeriscape.

What I most abhor, however, is the utter lack of historical—or, for that matter, futuristic—tradition in this monstrosity. It is a very sad building of breathtaking naïveté.

I can't offer the the architect (if indeed one was involved) an education, but I can at least point the perpetrator to the book What Not To Build (see link to the right), before he or she commits another crime of this nature.

Deconstructionism

In Southern California's high desert community of Victorville, they're tearing down recently-built model "homes" (i.e., spec houses) even more quickly than they built them, as reported with glee on YouTube by libertarian website www.visionvictorymanifesto.com. Reportedly, many more are going to meet the same fate soon, both there and in Temecula.

These monstrosites were built (and are now being unbuilt) by Matthews Homes. They exhibit the typical garage-with-house-attached plan that puts automobiles first and people second.

Who gave this designer an architecture degree?

The sight of the invincible metallic jaws of the great Caterpillar (invest now) chewing up these garage-forward McMansions is one of the few gratifying rewards of the current global economic meltdown.