Almost everyone welcome

Chilmark Farms was a residential community in Westchester County, just 44 minutes (as the ad enticingly claims) from Grand Central Station. More interestingly, this 1938 ad from "House Beautiful" magazine assures the querulous home-buyer that the area is "unsullied by encroachments, fully improved, wisely restricted".

"Wisely restricted"---no one of color, naturally, but also no one of the Jewish persuasion.

In its dim past Park La Brea was also restricted. The first Jewish family to move to Park La Brea in 1944 was the Bernard Lisker clan, and they were only permitted to do so after the B'nai Brith and other Jewish advocacy groups implored management to create an exception to standard policy. Lisker's Los Angeles business was vital to WWII and housing was in short supply throughout the city.

A few years later Lisker was even named Park La Brea's father of the year. He's pictured in the Parklabrea News in June 1952 outside his Ogden Avenue apartment with children Perry and Barbara.



But Park La Brea remained restricted. Former Park La Brean Ellie Greenwood remembered having her lawyer (who was not Jewish) obtain the lease for her and her family. They lived in their Third Street apartment for years without having the lease in their own family name.

Enlightened times forced Met Life's hand and in 1963 they announced that African-Americans would be allowed to apply for a lease---"Negroes and other non-whites", they said, if qualified for tenancy, were welcomed to apply. This article is from the August 1963 Burlington NC Times-News.



Today Park La Brea reflects a reasonably enlightened attitude toward applicants, and one is thankful for that.

The eighteen towers

Parklabrea took so long to finish the tower segment of their complex that you can almost sense the impatience in the Los Angeles Times, which announced about every six months that they were "nearing completion". But by 1950 lease applications were being accepted.

This is Burnside Circle soon after completion, I'd guess about 1952 by the looks of the cars. Then, as now, the landscape was overrun with palm trees, but that's life in L.A.

A typical ad from the local newspaper claims you get a bath for each bedroom. Not in the old part of the complex, you didn't! However heat, water and gas were free. Not so the rent. Click on the picture to see how much you'd be paying back in 1950.

Onward and upward

This photo was published in the Los Angeles Times in 1943 when the first phase of PLB opened for residency. The original concept was less vast than it is now. One, two and three-bedroom apartments were clustered from Fairfax to east Colgate and between Third and Sixth Streets.

At left an obliging young lady poses here with the first finished courtyard. The eucalypts are young but the buildings look the same, give or take a paint job or two.

The complex was built "under war conditions", i.e., with special permits intended to provide post-war housing for returning WWII vets. The National Housing Agency set rentals at $52 - $54 for one-bedroom apartments, $65 to $74 for two-bedroom, and $78 to $80 per month for three-bedrooms.

By 1944 there were 1,316 units available for rental...assuming you weren't African-American or Jewish. Like many communities in Southern California, until the nineteen-fifties Parklabrea was "restricted", using the euphemism popular at the time.

Foundations for more garden apartments were already under construction when Met Life, the
owners, switched gears and decided that vertical housing might be even more lucrative. By 1947 their plans included towers---a good cluster of them, no more than 13-stories high, something like this artist's rendition from 1947.

To accomplish this the existing foundations for unbuilt garden apartments had to be ripped out and cleared to make way for the towers. Leonard Schultze & Associates, the New York architectural firm responsible for jazz-age hotels in Manhattan, designed the towers, which explains why they have a bit of Art-deco aftertaste.

In addition to the towers, three courtyard groups were also constructed along the northeastern edge of the development. They were a little more sleek than their earlier brethren, using steel cabinetry in the kitchens instead of the wood found in earlier designs. Thomas Church, who landscaped UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Sunset magazine headquarters in Palo Alto, was brought in to design Parklabrea's gardens, which then (as now) were pretty much locked into midcentury themes.

By the time the Towers opened for residency in 1950 rents had gone up from $115 to $180 per month. Parking structures included 24-hour attendants and a trackless trolly system was extended to 3rd and Fairfax to enable Parklabreans to get around.

So far, so good....

Forward into the past

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.

It had to happen sometime

More than ten thousand people live here and nobody's thought to blog about it yet?

All right, I'll do it then.

Wikipedia has a lot of it right, historically speaking, though there's always the backstory. And it's the backstory that interests me, as an almost-three-decades resident. I'll try to cover some of the early stories of Park La Brea's creation, the scandals of its early days (yes, there were some), the current mood, photos, and such. Can't promise wild wit or deep philosophical excursions, but I'll do my best.