Park La Brea: historic development has been a local landmark for more than 80 years
POSTCARD VIEW of Park La Brea, from the west, shows garden apartments, tower apartments and open spaces.
Every neighborhood has its share of quirky residents and bizarre occurrences that make for interesting gossip, but not many can claim a loping Roman charioteer, a ghostly apparition and a parade of elephants. Park La Brea can.
Over its 80-year history, almost anything could happen and usually did. The charioteer was Charlton Heston, who, while living in Park La Brea (PLB) in the 1950s, was cast as Judah Ben-Hur in the eponymous film. He apparently delighted his neighbors by periodically marching around the grounds in his costume.
The ghost? Park La Brea has at least two. One, a barefoot little girl, dressed in diaphanous white, lives in one tower’s basement. In another spirited example, Eve Lauricella, PLB’s leasing manager, was working in the complex’s storage area and heard high-heel shoes clacking behind her, but no one was there. “I ran out!” she says. “I won’t go in there anymore.”
And the elephants? Rumor has it that circus animals, including elephants, used to be part of Park La Brea’s Halloween festivities.
Park La Brea is known for its activities that regularly bring people together. To name a few, there are popular summer outdoor movie nights, coffee with a cop, and an Earth Day event with local environmentally friendly vendors. In fact, conservation has become a unifying interest of PLB renters and management. The complex won an Innovation Award in March 2023 from the Better Buildings Challenge of the U.S. Department of Energy for utilizing a moisture sensor to control watering according to need, resulting in a savings of 23 million gallons of water per year.
From the 1940s
Construction on Parklabrea, as it was originally spelled, began in 1941. From the beginning, the gardens and grassy areas were designed to encourage shared use. Over the years, other amenities were added in the interest of building community, including a fitness center, lap pool, recreational pool, cafe, dry cleaner and activity center. In the late 1980s, PLB was gated to eliminate the danger of speeding cars cutting through the complex.
The first renters moved into two-story garden apartments built along the Fairfax border of the property in 1944, a bit more than 80 years ago. Apartment towers were added in response to the critical need for housing after World War II. The development was completed in 1952 with the opening of the 18th 13-story tower, the maximum building height allowed in Los Angeles at that time, other than City Hall.
CONTEMPORARY photo above shows re-painted Park La Brea tower, activity center, cafe and theater and garden apartment townhouses. Photo by Bill Devlin
The public and the press lauded PLB’s mid-century take on Colonial Revivalism and modern, spacious interiors that lent themselves to gracious décor. One-bedroom tower apartments in 1952 rented for $115 to $140 per month; now the same (upgraded) apartments are $2,400 to $3,100. More than 10,000 people live in 4,250 units, making it the largest housing development west of the Mississippi River. The garden apartments and towers are spread over 150 landscaped acres; its footprint is about the size of the original Disneyland.
Multiple architects
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company developed PLB, as one of several of its apartment communities built across the United States, including Parkfairfax in Alexandria, Va., which was built to house Pentagon personnel, and Parkmerced in San Francisco. The Los Angeles Conservancy credits PLB’s design to architects Earl Heitschmidt (also known for designing the Wrigley Mansion in Phoenix, Arizona) and Leonard Schultze (architect of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles). Records from the Herald Examiner collection at the Los Angeles Public Library credit Gordon Kaufmann (who worked on Hoover Dam and who designed the Times Mirror Square / Los Angeles Times building and Santa Anita Park) and J. E. Stanton (architect of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse). Union Station’s landscape architect, Tommy Tomson, designed PLB’s grounds.
Rancho La Brea
Park La Brea’s land was part of Rancho La Brea, a 4,439-acre, 1828 Mexican land grant to Antonio Jose Rocha. Rocha allowed anyone who needed it to take tar from his land. After the Mexican-American War, the jurisdiction wasn’t Mexican anymore, but land grants were supposed to be honored if ownership could be proved. Rocha’s rights were proven in court, but his high legal fees led him to sell most of his land to his attorney, Henry Hancock, in 1860. The Hancock family initially mined asphalt and later leased land to oil companies. In 1924, when the oil was depleted, Henry Hancock’s son George donated land to Los Angeles County for what is now Hancock Park (the park, not the residential subdivision slightly to the northeast!) that now contains the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum. In 1940, Metropolitan Life bought 178 acres of the Hancock land north of the park, and Park La Brea was born. Current owner Prime Residential purchased PLB in 1995.
Today Park La Brea buzzes with a diverse group of residents. There are families, seniors (a dozen or so have lived in PLB since the 1950s), college students on semester-in-Los Angeles programs (for Boston University, for example) and young professionals. Several people who work for PLB’s management company or for Prime Residential prefer to reside where they work, some of them having lived at PLB for decades.
An astonishing array of celebrities also has lived in Park La Brea. In addition to Charlton Heston, other celebrities who joined the community include K-Earth’s “Shotgun Tom” Kelly, Michael J. Pollard (best known as the getaway driver in “Bonnie and Clyde”), Broadway actress Patricia Morison (“Kiss Me Kate,” “The King and I”) and “Moonstruck” actress Olympia Dukakis (who lived in PLB when filming in Los Angeles). Albert Von Tilzer, the composer of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” was a resident. Park La Brea has formed the backdrop to many a Hollywood scene, including for the television series “Bosch,” which used a two-bedroom garden apartment in some episodes.
LANDSCAPED GARDENS are a prominent part of Park La Brea.
With studios and one-to-four-bedroom apartments, two-story garden apartments and rooms with a view in the towers, plus all the greenery and upgraded amenities, Park La Brea continues to be relevant into its ninth decade. As Vice President, Property Management, for Prime Residential Aryn Thomez notes, “One of the great things about Park La Brea is there are so many options. There’s a home for anyone. Find your place at Park La Brea.”
Category: Real Estate