Note: This is an encore post from 2013.

Cats have nine lives. People often experience second or third acts in their lives or careers. Some homes have multiple lives as well, like Villa Aurora, which has experienced three diverse lives, bringing knowledge and refuge to those who come through its doors. Opened in 1928, the Villa began life as a Los Angeles Times Demonstration Home, later housed German Jewish expatriates Lion and Maria Feuchtwanger, and now serves as residence for fellowship artists from around the world to freely create new works.

In the Oct. 1, 1926, Los Angeles Times, Santa Monica Judge Arthur A. Weber, George W. Ley, Edward Haas, and other investors announced they had spent $3 million to acquire 847 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean over what was then called Beverly Boulevard (now Sunset Boulevard), not far from Ocean Highway, to establish Miramar Estates. Their development would offer homes reminiscent of the Mediterranean because of the property’s gorgeous panoramic views that resembled those of Naples or Nice. Mark Daniels, former assistant secretary of in the Interior, superintendent of national parks, and renowned Los Angeles architect of what is now Hotel Bel-Air, the clubhouse of Hollywood Riviera Beach Club, and many Bel-Air homes, was hired to design homes in the development.

While MGM director Robert Z. Leonard bought one of the $10,000 lots and constructed a home in Miramar, homes were slow to sell. In the summer of 1927, the developers persuaded the Los Angeles Times to come in with them and build a gorgeous $100,000, 6,700-square-foot demonstration home in the development, one to show off elegant Mediterranean/Spanish architecture and luxurious furnishings provided by local designers and businesses, to lure visitors and buyers to the area. In effect, The Times would provide more than nine months advertorial space to promote the beauty and exclusiveness of Miramar Estates to its readers, pushing the comfort, elegance, beauty, decoration, harmony and character of the building and site.

Elaborate groundbreaking ceremonies were held Aug. 28, 1927, with speakers like Seward Simons of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, acting Los Angeles Mayor William Bonelli, Santa Monica Mayor Herman Michel, Irving Smith, Los Angeles Times advertising manager, representatives from the Los Angeles Realty Board, and Pacific Electric, along with special performances by local music hall performers and Spanish dancers.

The Times announced that the purpose of the demonstration home was “to embody in every detail and appointment the best in material and workmanship that human ingenuity and artistic sense have been able to devise…. It will be a master dwelling especially adapted to the Southern California climate to California conditions and will be built on a typical California site.”

The paper began running weekly stories detailing the construction process of the 520 Paseo Miramar home, managed by contractor Ley Constructors, Inc.: reporting on everything from receiving permits, grading, laying foundations, raising the frame, adding sewers, electricity, painting, furnishings, etc. Besides updates in the paper, visitors could tour the site every Sunday during construction. The occasionally pretentious stories promoted the professional work by each vendor, designer, or provider, noting how middle-class readers could adopt or adapt each of these steps in construction of their own dream homes.

The double-thick walled house contained many elaborate and unique features: a “burglar-proof, insect-proof, fireproof vault” for furs, electric dishwasher and refrigerator, incinerator, three-car garage with an automatic door that could be opened inside the home as well as outside, and a $15,000 pipe organ built by Artcraft Organ Co. of Santa Monica with an echo unit across the living room. As The Times called it, “an ideal dwelling of pleasant surprises.”

Many of the rooms possessed original and distinctive painted wood ceilings copying those of chapels and cathedrals of Spain, overlaid with gold leaf and hand-applied colors. Handmade tiles and mosaics decorated outdoor walls and baths.

After construction was completed, developers opened the home for daily tours from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., on April 29, 1928, for three weeks, extended for a fortnight more. The home was filled with antiques provided by Beaux Art Antiques Shop, hand-carved furniture from Jack Rennick, paintings from the New House galleries, food in the pantry provided by Safeway Stores, and Cadillac-provided cars sitting in the garage. Visitors came from all 48 states, Paris, London and Vienna, totaling almost 100,000 in all. Special experts provided daily talks on decoration, landscaping, furnishings, etc., led by architect Daniels.

Unfortunately, after all the hype, hyperbole, and tours, no one stepped forward to buy the home. It sat empty during the Depression, before developer Weber finally stepped forward to purchase it in 1934. The family lived there for several years, before financial problems hit them in 1939.

Illustrated advertisements in the Jan. 21, 1940, Los Angeles Times trumpeted, “It is one of the showplaces of the Palisades” in announcing the Jan. 22 and 23, 1940, auction of the $125,000 furnished home. Everything was for sale: home, Persian carpets, sterling, bronzes, furniture, the organ, a library of several hundred volumes and a large stamp collection – to cover encumbrances of $10,000. Mr. and Mrs. Morris Kaplan won the auction, but were forced to put it up for auction again on July 1 and 2 of that year, once again to pay the encumbrance. No one bid, and the house stood empty. Villa Aurora’s second life began when rescuing angels Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger stepped forward in 1943 to purchase it as their refuge from Nazi Germany.

Feuchtwanger, the son of a Jewish factory owner, had earned his doctorate before establishing the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1908. On the side, he wrote theater reviews, plays, and novels, becoming one of Weimar Germany’s most prominent intellectuals and prominent critics of Nazism. Nazis burned his home and confiscated manuscripts in 1933 while the author lectured in the United States. Unbowed, the Feuchtwangers moved to Southern France, where the Nazis caught up with them again in 1940, sending them to French concentration camps. Lion and Marta escaped from their separate prisons and were reunited in Marseille, from which they walked through the Spanish Pyrenees to Portugal, boarding a ship bound for America. The Feuchtwangers arrived in Los Angeles in 1941 and rented rooms until they acquired the lovely home in 1943.

After cleanup and renovations, the couple moved in, turning the property into a refuge for other German Jewish intellectuals, with Thomas Mann calling it “a true castle by the sea.” Such prominent artists as Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler, and Hollywood people like Fritz Lang and Charlie Chaplin regularly attended salons at the home. Feuchtwanger acquired another large library. Upon his death in 1958, Marta established a trust giving the home and library to USC, but allowing her to live on the property until her death at age 94 on Oct. 25, 1987.

USC professor Harold von Hofe contacted German journalists Volker Skerka and Ludwig Marcuse about organizing a drive to save the home when it appeared that USC wanted to sell it later that year. In an early form of Kickstarter, many prominent German elites and politicians joined the campaign. In 1988, the group merged with Tagesspiegel Federation in Berlin to preserve the home by founding the nonprofit group “Friends and Supporters of Villa Aurora, “ buying the home and restoring it with funds from the German Lottery Foundation and the Foreign Office. Later that year, the home earned a Cultural Heritage Landmark from the city of Los Angeles.

Villa Aurora started its third life in 1995, when it began serving as an artists’ residence for composers, writers, filmmakers and journalists on fellowship for several months’ duration. Journalists and writers threatened and forbidden freedom of expression in their own countries also won the opportunity to come practice their craft. More than 250 people have created works of art here, inspired by the gorgeous views of the Pacific and Los Angeles’ coast.

From time to time, the organization opens the home for special chamber concerts, poetry readings and film screenings, like the recently concluded Silents Salon co-sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Villa Aurora still radiates charm and beauty 85 years after construction, a refuge and inspiration for all who walk through its doors.

Long an entertaining trope for many a movie and stage play, the boarding house for theatrical performers offered an opportunity to gather together a colorful band of characters while at the same time providing them a supportive haven and family in times of trouble. Robert L. L. Warner and Pert Kelton constructed their own bohemian apartment hotel at 6326 Lexington Ave. for exactly the same reasons. Besides a great financial investment, it represented their own aims to create a home away from home for entertainers. Opening as the Warner-Kelton Hotel, the graceful building has operated under the name Hotel Brevoort for most of its existence.

Back in 1913, considered 6326 Lexington Ave. a lovely place at which to construct a home. When Warner and Kelton purchased the property in 1927, moved it to S. Figueroa, where it would remain for decades before being demolished.

Enjoying enormous success at the age of 23, Kelton looked for an opportunity to invest her growing wealth. Born 19 in Montana, Kelton began performing onstage at the age of 11, stealing scenes and quickly stealing hearts as a pint-sized comedienne. A natural talent, Kelton received enormous recognition starring in “The Five O’Clock Girl” on Broadway in 1926.

Kelton joined up with Dr. Robert L. L. Warner, a dental surgeon recognized for creating and inserting dentures turned upscale home builder in Los Angeles, to finance the construction of the 80-room, $300,000 hotel. Warner not only built but also designed the lush but cozy structure per news reports, something he had always dreamed of doing. He claimed that Kelton invested because she “knows well what is the life of a trouper, and she is trying to help these people…give these nomad people a home; the luxuries of a large metropolitan hotel; the coziness of their own homes, if they had any; the atmosphere they love, that of the stage itself,” as he revealed in an interview with the Hollywood Citizen News. In other words, an affordable home with high end taste.

Once completed, her mother, Susan Kelton, joined Warner’s wife, the former actress Olive Sherlock, to “make the Warner-Kelton a true home for all wanders who may have found their way to Hollywood, “as the Hollywood Citizen News wrote hyperbolically on November 29, 1927. With the assistance of actor Gladden James, they provided upscale interior decoration, such as elaborate seashore and seascape paintings in each hotel room’s bath, murals in hallways, arches and portals throughout, blue velvet draperies in the den with niches filled with paintings, and a lobby designed 17th Century Norman style with porcello stone tapestries, altar set, and the like. Completely furnished the hotel featured baths with each room, fresh flowers on the night table every day, afternoon receptions with fruit and confections, billiards, gardens and ahead of its time, gym and pool.

In their attempts to make it homey, the women arranged for all guests’ shoes to be shined if left outside their doors like the European custom, a den off the lobby to offer a cozy respite, barber shop and beauty parlor, and devised the Gypsy Grill, which offered programs and entertainment to guests on Fridays. Each room also featured its own radio with individual headphones connected to the lobby radio. Actress Belle Bennett, star of the wonderfully emotional “Stella Dallas,” even sponsored rooms for friends. The hotel even joined with sponsor Hollywood Dry to offer pale ginger ale as the main drink served to guests. All these special situations made it a paradise for “the romantic and of nomads who live in the land of make-believe during business hours.”

The pair offered a glamorous opening night November 29 like any elaborate movie premiere; Otto Oleson’s grand klieg lights illuminated Broadway performers, movie actors, and guests alike. Vaudeville performers crooned show and popular tunes as guests enjoyed refreshments. A few months later, the hoteliers hosted a Sunday frolic with comedians and other entertainment performing on the roof. In March, 1928, they welcomed department store B. H. Dyas Co. from Hollywood Boulevard to a small sales space in the lobby.

Such celebrities as Clara Bow’s stepmother-in law, early silent film actor Monroe Salisbury, and resided in the building. Some stories claim that Salisbury owned an interest in the hotel, while others state that he served as a concierge while living there. The California Television Society from UCLA and industry professionals operated a clubhouse in the hostelry. Actor Wallace McCutcheon, former husband of silent serial queen Pearl White, shot himself to death in his room at the complex just months after opening, despondent over his career.

Unfortunately the hotel attracted low-lifes as well, from burglars to hit and run drivers to even narcotic pushers, all before 1932.

Warner-Kelton Hotel succeeded its first seven years, before seeing bookings and reservations drop in 1934, leading to much advertising in local papers. By 1935, the partners booked more outside groups for lunches, meetings, and dances and even raised prices. Bleeding money, Warner and Kelton sold their lease later that year to F. A. Linck, who appears to have renamed it after New York’s Hotel Brevoort, which hosted many theatre and film events and guests. To increase bookings, all meals became free for those who stayed. While that brought in revenue, it wasn’t enough, leading to the dining room being opened to the public in 1938, even with free tea cupreadings at the end of the decade. Over time, day rates were added and weekly rates dropped, attempting to make a profit.

In 1939, Harry Ludwig, chief auditor of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, purchased the lease from Linck , planning upgrades and even bungalows. While he accomplished some improvements, Ludwig failed to render it as up-to-date as other new, lush apartments. New management took over in 1951.

The Hotel remained a prominent location for meetings about movie industry people.  In 1939, IATSE and Teamsters’ Union members met to negotiate connections. For a brief time, Elizabeth Short lived here in 1946. By the late 1940s, newer and more elaborate hotels and apartments lured away guests, and the hotel began a slow downward turn. The hostelry housed those struggling in their careers, leading to part of the building becoming a wing for seniors in 1968.

Still an apartment building, 97 years after construction, the Hotel Brevoort still maintains its lovely facade, a graceful ode to gentle living in the early days of Hollywood.

The Hollywood Storage Building as seen in Google Earth.

Note: This is an encore post from 2021.

Originally Los Angeles’ tallest building when opened in 1926, the Hollywood Storage Building at the southwest corner of Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard towered over the rapidly expanding film city. Today it ironically advertises entertainment programming with giant billboards on its edifice. The Hollywood Storage Building still serves as one of Hollywood’s premier storage locations, as beautiful as it is practical.

Los Angeles residents needed little to no extra storage space pre-1900, as few possessed many superfluous items. With the rise of department stores and the birth of credit, many began purchasing consumer products advertised in magazines or newspapers to keep up with their acquisitive neighbors. Most storage facilities began small, more for businesses to store records and documents, led by the Bekins family and their moving/storage business.

The Hollywood Storage Building in 1928, showing the radio antennas on the roof.

Bekins brothers John and Martin founded their family moving company in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1891, eventually helping many Midwesterners transport their goods westward to the expanding western boom town of Los Angeles. In 1906, they constructed a concrete storage warehouse downtown to store company business records and homeowners’ worldly goods, with the solidly constructed businesses offering consumers reassurance their items would remain safe and sound. Other companies followed suit, building storage facilities around the city, including the Hollywood Fireproof Storage Co., erected at 1666 Highland Ave. in 1915 by Charles E. Toberman.

Hollywood construction magnate Toberman decided to compete head-on with Bekins in 1924 after purchasing land at the corner of Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, conceiving of a massive structure at the site, one as attractive as it was dominating. Newspapers trumpeted his plans to build a 12-story, storage warehouse costing $300,000 for the Hollywood Storage Co. in 1924. Not until May 1925 did Toberman pull permits, however, for a 14-story facility designed by the renowned Los Angeles’ architectural firm Morgan, Walls & Clements to be constructed of steel and concrete. Unlike other monumental storage buildings around Los Angeles, this would feature Spanish design throughout, along with an elaborate lobby and other public spaces.

At 217 feet deep, the structure would include three large freight elevators and two passenger elevators along with office space. The May 3 Los Angeles Times said the company’s offices would be on the first floor, with a giant ballroom to host 1,000 located on the top floor. Individual floors would be assigned for rug storage, piano storage, silver, furs, and jewelry, and even one devoted to automobiles. Half of the allotted space in the building would be leased to outside businesses. Manager Charles A. Reinhart told the Times on September 27, 1925, that the building would house not only storage “but will afford a vast amount of space for offices, showrooms, and warehouse facilities for manufacturers’ agents… .” Unlike other storage facilities, the Terminal Storage Building featured railroad spurs allowing easy movement of large materials.

Los Angeles Times artist Charles Owens drew a cutaway of the building, showing KTTV on the 14th floor, March 24, 1949. 

Starting construction a few months later, the William Simpson Construction Co. finished the building in early 1926, with a final cost of about $500,000. Trussless Architectural Roof Co. pulled a permit on January 8 to finish the interior roof. Adding an unique touch, KMTR radio outfitted the 12th story as a studio and broadcasting facility, opening June 18. One studio would host the work of solo performers, while the other would allow orchestras or other large groups to perform. Two antennas 150 feet tall on top of the structure would provide the strongest broadcast signal of any station in the Los Angeles area. After confusion with the Pacific Electric Terminal Building downtown, the facility was officially renamed the Hollywood Storage Co. building.

Morgan, Walls & Clements’ outstanding design won awards; the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded it a certificate of honor, while the American Division of the Pan-American Congress of Architects honored the firm with a medallion.

The staid storage structure sometimes played risque as well. In 1930, the 14th floor, leased out for meetings, special events, and parties, hosted a fraternity-sponsored Prohibition event leading to a massive vice raid. Over 500 fraternity men faced arrest December 5, 1930, after a blow out “fraternity benefit stag smoker” featuring four topless dancers, gambling, and plenty of illegal alcohol in the top floor ballroom, rented by a group of men claiming to be with the Sigma Rho fraternity. Glenn C. Mapes provided the gambling tables, which he rented from Hollywood studio prop rooms. Mac D. Jones, millionaire ex-policeman recently appointed to lead the city’s vice squad, headed the raiding party of 12 officers dressed in tuxedos. At the height of the women’s dance, they locked the elevators and doors after identifying themselves. Looking to escape arrest, partygoers threw bottles, smashed chairs, and flipped over dice and card games. Six men eventually pleaded guilty to conducting illegal gambling and received short jail time.

In 1932, Toberman and associates sold the building for $385,000 to Bekins, with California’s Railroad Commission approving the sale on February 1. Not until May 5, 1939, did Bekins switch the facility’s name from Hollywood Storage Co. to Bekins, however. In 1949, the 14th floor was remodeled into the Los Angeles Times-CBS Television Station, lasting for a short time. For the last few decades, however, the entire structure has operated as Iron Mountain, an entertainment-related storage facility for records, film and photographic materials. At the same time, its exterior serves as giant billboards for other entertainment projects and companies. Monumental as well as attractive, 1025 N. Highland still serves as a storage facility 95 years after its construction.