I found a photo of the Park La Brea site before the complex was a twinkle in Met Life's eye. You're looking north from an excavation pit at the La Brea tarpits, toward where Park La Brea is currently located. Instead of oil derricks there are multicolored brick buildings and towers today.
I'm not sure that Met Life ever considered whether situating a large apartment complex over a former petroleum field was in the best interests of the tenants, but no matter. With the growth of the neighborhoods around us it made sense to do something with the land other than let it sit. And there was all that nice potential income to consider.
Metropolitan Life, they of the life insurance, went on a building frenzy in the late nineteen-thirties and early nineteen-forties. Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town were adjoining facilities in New York; Parkfairfax in Virginia employed a similar small-village architectural style (albeit without the towers); and Parkmerced in San Francisco. Originally our place (the earliest of the bunch) was spelled Parklabrea, and that's how you'll find it indexed in the old records.
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