The Los Angeles Tennis Club, Modern Screen, 1931-32.

Long a favorite activity of high society, tennis has been a way to fashionably exercise and enjoy time with friends for centuries. Los Angeles “in crowd” flocked to tennis, especially in the 1920s when it began to rise in popularity around the world. Seeking to become a world class home for the game, the Los Angeles Tennis Club constructed an elegant Spanish Revival building and courts at its current 5851 Clinton Street location in 1920. Designed by preeminent Southern California architect Sumner Hunt, the refined location has hosted top athletes and motion picture stars for over 97 years.

The “popular” club itself seems to have begun in 1889, per listings in the Los Angeles Times and Herald, with its first courts opening Friday, September 20, 1889 at Ninth and Pearl Streets, per the September 22, 1889 Los Angeles Times. It hosted men’s singles and doubles, women’s singles, and even mixed doubles in its first tournament. While small, the club hosted teas, tournaments, and events through 1897, when all mention of it in the newspaper disappears until showing up again in 1919, when the Red Bluff Daily News reported that the newly formed club intended to build a $25,000 clubhouse with 20 courts, after talking about it for years.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

The Los Angeles Tennis Club, designed by Sumner Hunt, via Google Street View.

Officially incorporating October 28, 1920, the club began searching for a suitable location between Los Angeles and Hollywood, looking for a central spot near the two on which to construct an exclusive facility. Officials finally accepted member G. Allan Hancock’s generous proposition on five acres of land he owned near Melrose Avenue and Cole Streets and adjoining the newly constructed Wilshire Country Club. The Los Angeles Times described the property as near the West Sixth Street streetcar line and easy walking distance to the Santa Monica Boulevard line. Memberships would pay for construction and upkeep, with hopes to eventually build grass, clay, and hard courts for competition purposes. Sumner Hunt and his partner Silas Rease Burns were hired to design a graceful clubhouse suitable for the exclusive membership.

The club broke ground December 1, 1920, for construction of the first courts, with grounds later to include patios and pool for relaxation and entertainment purposes by members. The clubhouse would contain dining rooms, meeting rooms, locker rooms, an apartment for the manager, and balconies from which to view competition.

Lupe Velez and Johnny Weissmuller watch a match, Photoplay, 1933.

President Thomas C. Bundy announced via the Los Angeles Times on February 13, 1921, that the club had officially closed a ten year lease on Hancock’s five acres, “with an option to purchase the property outright at any time during the life of the lease at the rate of $2,000 an acre. The club would pay Hancock $25 a month in rental until purchase. At that time, they intended the two story Spanish building to face Melrose Avenue and contain both men and women’s wings, with a center show court surrounded by grandstands and balcony on the clubhouse. The eight concrete courts currently under construction would be four inches thick.

The club rushed to finish building courts in order to host the premiere Pacific Coast tournament July 2-4, 1921, hosting their grand opening June 18 with a grand exhibition. It soon hosted the Southern California championships as well as major Davis Cup players from Japan and Australia. America’s champion “Big Bill” Tilden also participated in exhibitions and tournaments at the club. While the organization had been able to complete six courts, they were still gathering enough members to cover costs for constructing their clubhouse. They did raise enough funds to open pool facilities June 16, 1923 with an entertaining exhibition by Olympic swimming and diving champions Eleanor Holcomb and Dorothy Poynton.

Andre Leeds and Frank Shields at the tennis club, Photoplay, 1936.

By 1923 the club had earned enough money to finance construction of their playhouse, moved now to Clinton Street and Cahuenga Avenue. The November 8, 1923 San Bernardino Sun reported that the $100,000 “magnificent” clubhouse would finally be dedicated on November 17, following several months of construction by the Schofield Engineering Company. Grand opening ceremonies on December 1 would salute the luxurious property, with an open house, exhibition, tea, and then lavish celebratory dinner and dance, smartly paid for by selling off frontage on Melrose Avenue just a few days before to pay off entire cost of acreage, courts, clubhouse, and furnishings, estimated to have cost $75,000 themselves. In 1925, Hunt’s design for the main building won the local American Institute of Architects’ Award for outstanding building, per Southwest Builder and Contractor.

The “premiere club of the Pacific” soon became the main Los Angeles location for large Southern California and western tennis championships, hosting such leading stars as Tilden, Helen Wills, and Molla Mallory, after constructing the largest slab of unjointed concrete on May 8, 1924 just north of the new clubhouse. Grandstands and balcony would allow 2,500 persons to view matches. Over the next several decades the club would continually update courts, locker rooms, grandstands, and balconies to continue its reign as one of the United States’ most outstanding tennis facilities. In fact, the June 1, 1924 Times reported that new courts had recently been constructed by Clark Cement and Construction company combining 70 pounds of Irish potatoes with concrete to ensure a smooth, hard surface and velvet finish.

Joan Bennett and Joel McCrea at a tennis match, Modern Screen, 1931-32.

By mid-1924, Hollywood discovered the peaceful, beautiful club, rushing to become members and watch popular tournaments. Newspapers and entertainment trades reported that such stars as Florence Vidor, Priscilla Dean, and Enid Bennett attended a tea at the location for swimming star Annette Kellerman. Within a few years, the club hosted a regular yearly tennis tournament for entertainment members, with such luminaries as MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, William Wellman, Constance Bennett, Gilbert Roland, Fredric March, Charles Farrell, Karl Struss, Richard Barthelmess, Ronald Colman, Warner Baxter, Ginger Rogers, and King Vidor taking parts. Stars such as Charley Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Paulette Goddard, William Powell, Milton Sills, Colleen Moore, and Maurice Chevalier attended tournaments featuring many of the world’s top players throughout this time as well.

While the upper crust enjoyed working out, attending tournaments, dining, and hanging out at the luxurious location, diverse “guests” visited the property as well. The March 21, 1940, Times reported that three young women had been arrested by a police raid at the club for performing strip teases, with one finishing an encore before feeling embarrassed to be arrested in her naked state by police. They were found guilty by a Los Angeles court in April.

Mary Bryan, left, and Carole Lombard and William Powell watch matches at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, Modern Screen.

The club survived a fire October 23, 1967, when a fire started from a smoldering cigarette on a couch burned the women’s locker room and was discovered by police at 3:43 am.

Over the years, some entertainment members moved their memberships to other clubs like the Hillcrest Country Club, Bel Air Country Club, and other luxurious facilities on the west side, and the institution finally abolished the entertainment tennis tourney. Upper class and entertainment industry stalwarts dominate member roles today, reveling in the understated, relaxed elegance of the sleek clubhouse and facilities, a gem from the early days of Hollywood.

Gary Martin, one of the members of the Brain Trust, writes to tell us that the Theatre Historical Society of America will meet in Los Angeles next week and offer tours of many theaters.

Further information is available here.

Theaters on their tour schedule:

Belasco
Bruin
Cameo & Arcade Exteriors
Cinerama Dome
Crest
El Capitan
Fine Arts
Fox Village
Globe
Grauman’s (TCL) Chinese
Henry Fonda
Leimert/Vision
Loew’s State
Los Angeles
Mayan
Million Dollar
Music Hall
Olympic exterior
Orpheum
Pacific
Palace
Pantages
Raymond (Pasadena)
Regent
Rialto/Urban Outfitters (Downtown)
Rialto (South Pasadena)
Roxie
Saban
Tower
Trinity/Embassy Auditorium
United Artists
Uptown (Pasadena)
Variety Arts
Warner Bros. Jewelry Mart
Westlake
Wilshire Ebell
Wiltern

A postcard of the Garden Court Apartments, listed on EBay as Buy It Now for $9.99.

Note: This is an encore post from 2014

For decades, the elegant Garden Court Apartments represented high-class living for both aspiring and successful residents of Hollywood. Located just west of the thriving business district at 7021 Hollywood Blvd., the neo-baroque structure featured regal caryatids holding up pilasters just above the first floor, a dramatic design showing the strength and integrity of the building.

The June 3, 1916, Los Angeles Times noted the beginning of construction for J. E. Ransford’s four-story class C apartment home, designed and built by the renowned Frank Meline Co. The classical structure would consist of 190 two and three room suites composed of hard wood and tile. An ad in the Jan. 1, 1917, Times proclaimed Hartwell Motor Co. President Ransford’s $500,000 building, “the Most Modern in the West,” and the paper called it “the most beautiful and complete apartment house” in a Jan. 22, 1917, story.

Mary Mallory’s “Hollywoodland: Tales Lost and Found” is available for the Kindle.

Via Archive.org.

Opening to the public in January under the management of Mrs. Maud V. Mills, the Garden Court Apartments offered residents such special amenities as its own garage providing car service, a commissary, two ballrooms, billiard room, beauty parlor, daily maid service, two tennis courts, pergolas, trellises, and gardens. By April, the building hosted dances, and on May 12, 1917, hosted a tennis exhibition benefiting the Belgian Relief Fund, featuring many top male and female tennis champions in round robin competition. Its swanky ballroom served as a meeting location for many large groups, including a committee attempting to organize the Motion Picture Home for Convalescent Soldiers in March 1918, led by Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille and Mrs. J. S. Blackton.

Reaching out to high-end residents, Ransford purchased a full page of advertorial space Jan. 1, 1920, in the Los Angeles Times, featuring lavish, hyperbolic prose describing the luxurious, tasteful and well crafted “Apartments de Luxe” and its harmonious blending with surroundings, “like a perfect jewel carefully fashioned and finished by the hands of some enthusiastic artist, and then placed in a setting of wondrous mountains carved in nature’s generous grandeur… enjoyed by some, admired by all.”

The flowery prose calling Hollywood “the wonder spot of the southland” described how the pergolas, gardens, and walks suggested Southern Italy with their stately beauty, and surrounded the playing fountain and pool in the inner court, a warm, simply elegant “House of a thousand wonders – the house of the heart’s desire.”

The dramatic architecture housed regal English Renaissance furnishings in a mahogany-lined lobby festooned with velvet drapes, with lounge room and banquet room outfitted in French walnut, art-glass dome, and wall decorations below, as well as tiled kitchen, a ballroom exactly duplicating that of Paris’ Petit Trianon, and a billiard room with Batchelder tiles.

Rich mahogany and ivory trim decorated each apartment, which included hard wood floors, plate glass windows, and period furniture, along with such special amenities as steam heat, telephone service, daily maid service, vacuum connections, sanitary garbage chutes, electric refrigerators, and circulating ice water. Apartment living rooms were furnished with overstuffed furniture, chaise longues, and Colonial rockers, while Old English dining rooms filled with William and Mary furniture were outfitted in dark blues and mulberry reds. Built-ins and beveled mirrors decorated dressing rooms outside tiled bathrooms containing alcove tubs and showers. Singles were furnished with Jacobean furniture in English oak, along with moroccan leather and tapestries.

A postcard of the Garden Court Apartments, listed on EBay as Buy It Now for $9.99.

Movie magazine Photoplay called it the “largest and most beautiful apartment house in Hollywood,” drawing movie folk and celebrities to its elegant surroundings. Sam Fox, sheet music publisher, vacationed for months at the property with his family. Director King Vidor played tennis on its courts. Actress Julanne Johnston, theatre impresario Sid Grauman, photographer Frank S. Hoover, and director Sidney Franklin lived there in the 1920s, enjoying the Pryor Moore Dance Orchestra, along with classical concerts and voice classes. Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd filmed on the street in front of it, as silent film historian John Bengtson points out. The luxurious meeting space lured the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to hold lighting demonstrations of Mazda lights in May 1928, to cinematographers such as Tony Gaudio, Hal Mohr, Victor Milner, and George Barnes.

In a surprise move, businessmen C. E. Toberman and S. A. Hartwell leased the building for 99 years on Feb. 19, 1926, per the Los Angeles Times, retaining all staff. The new managers made few changes, but opened meeting rooms to more diverse uses, including rentals by groups offering Bhagavad Gita and yoga classes. Entertainers performed in its banquet room, with vaudeville performer Virginia Sale headlining her own sketch show in May 1933, which garnered fine reviews in Variety. By 1930, however, Toberman was forced to turn over the structure due to financial difficulties.

Though celebrities such as Mack Sennett, Jed Prouty, and others lived there in the 1930s and 1940s, the building began a slow decline, renting space to an eclectic series of groups to pay the bills. The Church of Ataraxia held meetings there under the direction of Rev. Pearl I. Barnes, who offered flower readings and medium services.

An ad in the March 10, 1948, Los Angeles Times noted the building’s vacant corner was available for commercial development, a harbinger of things to come. By the 1960s, Useful Metaphysics taught classes in the building, as did the American School of Dance. A recording and meeting studio occupied a small part of the space in the 1960s.

New owner E. H. Karz bought the building and performed some renovations in 1961, hoping for a turnaround, but none arrived. He purchased an ad in the April 4, 1967, issue of Variety announcing lease options on the Garden Court, stating that it “is suitable for the Hollywood Hall of Fame, museum, boarding consulate, school, office etc.” The building featured 180 rooms and 80 baths, 300 seat capacity meeting halls, carpets, drapes, 100,000 square feet, all with $60,000 annual depreciation. He also noted that $100 million in new buildings surrounded the property. Los Angeles Parks and Recreation considered the building as a possible home for its Movie Museum in August 1968, after plans fell through across from the Hollywood Bowl, but these ideas also failed to come to fruition.

Karz negotiated with Debbie Reynolds and her husband in 1970 about turning the building into a Hollywood Museum. He sued them for over $8 million in damages in December 1974 after the couple walked away, claiming they had reached an agreement in 1970 to share profits in a museum to house memorabilia furnished by Reynolds and renovated by her for $300,000. The Dec. 18, 1974, Variety reported that he stated she repudiated the agreement in January 1973, after secretly beginning negotiations with possible other locations. Soon the once glamorous apartment building became the decrepit Motel 7.

As the building grew shabby, film and television took notice, with Ed Lauter shooting a TV pilot, “Delaney,” about a 1940s-era “Bogart-like private eye,” along with other companies.

Tired of dealing with the decaying building, Karz sold out to C-D Investments, who intended to tear it down in the early 1980s and construct commercial property. Preservation groups like Hollywood Heritage, Los Angeles Conservancy, and Peter Gordon rallied behind the empty and desolate building, ensuring its nomination as Los Angeles’ Historic-Cultural Monument #243 on April 16, 1981. Hollywood Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson bypassed normal procedures to ask for immediate designation, but later shifted positions to support removing its historic designation and tearing it down. For years, owners had willfully neglected the building, allowing it to become dilapidated and an eye sore. The Dec. 29, 1981, Los Angeles Times noted the building’s historic nature and stated, “Dilapidation is no excuse for tearing down a building that may be of historic value.”

Preservation groups argued in favor of taking over the Garden Court and adaptively renovating it for other uses, but court battles and large public opposition failed to stop the city from removing it from the Monuments List and starting the process leading to demolition. Though the building was eligible for National Register Landmark status, C-D Investments denied any attempts to have it so named. As the building gained the name Hotel Hell, with transients, runaways, and drifters occupying it, a judge denied the last attempt by preservation groups to buy the building and restore it. Eventually the building was demolished March 15, 1984.

Since that time, the doomed location has hosted the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, Galaxy Theatre, and Knitting Factory, which all failed, and now serves as home for Fresh and Easy, DSW Shoe Warehouse, and others. What was once dramatic and outstanding architecture is now occupied by just another shopping center, a disposable commodity in this consumer-obsessed culture.

The Hollywoodland Sign, in a photo published in the Los Angeles Evening Herald, Dec. 8, 1923.

Note: Today (July 13) is commonly mistaken for the “birthday” of the Hollywood Sign. An encore post from Mary Mallory sets the record straight.

Originally constructed as a publicity gimmick and branding symbol to help generate sales for a real estate development, the Hollywood Sign is now a worldwide icon just as powerful as Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty, signifying a land of glamour and opportunity. Myths have always existed about it, from the date of its construction to how the city of Hollywood obtained it. After in-depth research by both historian Bruce Torrence and myself, we can conclusively say the sign was constructed in late November and early December 1923, and illuminated in that first week of December.

Like me, a California transplant involved in history, research, and writing since I was child, Torrence has always been fascinated by Hollywood history, perhaps because his two famous grandfathers contributed much to it. His paternal grandfather, Ernest Torrence, starred in many classic silent films such as “Steamboat Bill Jr.” and “Peter Pan” after a successful career as an opera singer. His maternal grandfather C. E. Toberman could be called the builder of Hollywood for his construction of so many iconic structures around Hollywood Boulevard. Bruce began a photo collection of Hollywood in 1972 with thirty photographs, which has blossomed into thousands. He employed these photos in writing one of Hollywood’s first detailed history books in 1979 called “Hollywood: The First 100 Years.”
Hollywood at Play: The Lives of the Stars Between Takes, by Stephen X. Sylvester, Mary Mallory and Donovan Brandt, goes on sale Feb. 1, 2017.

Both of us are dogged in searching out facts and details to get Hollywood history right, made much easier with the opening of newspapers through microfilm and now digital searching, along with such great digitized sites as the Media History Digital Library and Variety Archives at the Margaret Herrick Library. We look for multiple citations to back up evidence, and especially primary evidence, such as documents, building records, and films, and secondary sources like newspapers, magazines, and books. Getting history right often means correcting yourself, as I admit I fell into the trap of claiming the Hollywoodland Sign was constructed in July 1923. After years of research by both of us, we have discovered the missing pieces clarifying the history of the sign.

When I began writing my Arcadia Publishing book “Hollywoodland” in 2010, I began searching out the history of the development and its world famous sign. Few if any period sources could be found providing a detailed, accurate history of the Hollywoodland Sign, even the Los Angeles Times, owned by one of the five partners of the Hollywoodland development. No newspaper reported the actual day of the beginning or completion of construction, but thanks to discovery on the history of Hollywoodland publicity chief L. J. Burrud, I began slowly piecing the puzzle together.
L.J. Burrud, Hollywood Publicity Man

Hollywoodland developers Tracey Shoults and S. H. Woodruff announced the opening of the real estate tract in late March 1923 newspapers. They focused mainly on the newspapers of record for Los Angeles, like the Times and Examiner, attempting to appeal to upper middle class and rich businessmen and entertainers. Since Times publisher Harry Chandler was one of the partners, the newspaper provided ample free publicity of the site in multiple stories virtually every day of the week, often with photographs. With real estate booming all round the city, sales initially took off, but the real estate men realized they needed special publicity to help brand their neighborhood as the “supreme achievement for community building” for people of discriminating taste.

On September 7, 1923, Woodruff turned to Lake Arrowhead press man L. J. Burrud to devise unique ballyhoo gimmicks to land stories and photographs of the Hollywoodland development in newspapers and magazines across the United States. Copying tactics from his past as a newsreel cameraman, actuality and documentary filmmaker, Burrud conceived of one of the first mass media campaigns to brand the special nature of the community. Besides planting stories in newspapers, the publicity man shot a film documenting construction of the Hollywoodland demonstration home, arranged for sports motor cars to traverse the rough, unpaved hills, and even created a Hollywoodland Community Orchestra to play grocery store openings and radio shows.

In later years, advertising man John Roche claimed in interviews that Times publisher Harry Chandler asked him to design a gigantic billboard visible from miles away, but it seems strange that someone would wait decades to state such information. Unfortunately no paperwork from the Hollywoodland development exists, so until it shows up, there is no definitive proof of who conceived the look of the sign and when. While virtually all other major real estate developments built thin, red-colored name signs, Hollywoodland’s would be gigantic 45 foot letters spelling out the world Hollywoodland, making it much more visible all over Los Angeles. Falling back on his filmmaking experience, publicity chief Burrud conceived the brilliant idea for newsreel coverage documenting the construction of the sign, a gimmick to help announce the opening of their stupendous development to the world.

Holly Leaves, November 1923.

I discovered that construction of the Hollywoodland Sign began in November 1923, after finding a photograph taken from the Hollywood Athletic Club published in the November 16, 1923 Holly Leaves revealing a barren hillside above the development, devoid of any sign or construction equipment. Fox Movietone newsreel footage exists of the Hollywoodland Sign’s construction, revealing workers, mules, and caterpillar tractors laboring to carry sheet metal, telephone poles, pipes, and chicken wire up the precipitous slopes to build the giant sign in a jagged line on the steep hill.

Realizing that filmmakers usually employ a slate in front of their footage listing title, date, and running time, I contacted Greg Wilsbacher, director of the Fox Movietone Newsreel Collection at the University of South Carolina, to inquire about a slate or paperwork for the newsreel footage shot of this event. Wilsbacher revealed that cameraman Blaine Walker shot the Sign’s construction, stating that the undeveloped negative arrived at the Fox Movietone Newsreel office dated “November 27th-23,” with the punch record of the New York Fox office also showing a late November 1923 date. Train travel across the United States took approximately three days at that time, meaning the footage would have departed Los Angeles on November 27 and arrived at the end of the month. As Wilsbacher also stated, a newsreel cameraman’s job was to get unique footage first and rush it to production offices for immediate distribution to theatres, meaning Walker filmed it immediately before sending it off to New York.

Not only were the developers constructing an enormous billboard to advertise Hollywoodland by day, but also one to blaze its name at night. They hired Crescent Sign Company to devise a way to build the Sign on the hill, and Woodruff hired Electrical Products Corporation to illuminate it with electric lights, creating what the December 9 Los Angeles Examiner calls the “largest electrically outlined word in the world.”

Historian Torrence discovered the actual date of first illumination when investigating when the letter “H” was actually blown off the Sign after a question posed by a reader. He, I, and everyone else mistakenly believed the letter was demolished by winds in 1949, though his examination of Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Los Angeles Times proved it actually happened in 1944.

A worker stands in crossbar of the letter “D” in the Hollywoodland Sign, Practical Electrics, September 1924.

While there, he decided to peruse the November/December 1923 Evening Herald to find information on the final days of the Sign’s construction after my discovery of the November date for the newsreel footage. He discovered the missing link, connecting the Sign’s November/December 1923 construction to its first electric illumination. Torrence came across a December 8, 1923 Evening Herald story stating that the sign, “believed to be the largest in the world,…will be illuminated tonight.” The article includes photographs showing the full length of the sign as well as an image of a worker dwarfed by the gigantic letter “D” he stands in.

On Saturday, December 8, 1923, S. H. Woodruff and his crew flipped the switch turning on the illuminated lights which spelled out the words “Holly,” “Wood,” “Land,” “Hollywoodland,” with Woodruff stating in an article in the December 9 Examiner, “it was only fitting that the first blaze of electric lights to shine forth from the tremendous sign should be in commemoration of some important event in the development of Hollywoodland,” namely the opening of Unit No. 4 to sales. In an ironic twist, the Los Angeles Herald and Los Angeles Examiner note the first lighting of the Hollywoodland Sign, while the Los Angeles Times, owned and published by Harry Chandler, one of the major partners in the development, failed to report it.

An ad in the Dec. 12, 1923, Los Angeles Times notes the completion of the Hollywoodland Sign.

Paul D. Howse, president of Electrical Products Corporation, bought an advertisement in the December 12, 1923, Los Angeles Times with an illustration of the electrified sign. He congratulates Woodruff for completing the stupendous sign, declaring “You had the vision to undertake and accomplish the greatest realty enterprise in California…” and then stating, “…We thank you, Mr. Woodruff, for having given us the opportunity to engineer and install this great electrical sign. May your expenditure be appreciated by those who love to see Los Angeles lead in enterprise and really “big” things.

A description of the Hollywoodland Sign in Practical Electrics for September, 1924.

Further sealing the November/December 1923 construction date, the September 1924 issue of Practical Electrics provided me by another historian describes what it calls “the mammoth Hollywoodland Electric Sign” in detail, noting its eight months of display. The article employs some creative hyperbole to state that “the sign is over one-sixth of a mile long, and nearly 4,000 lamps are required to light it.”

It reports that the billboard is visible at a distance of more than twelve miles, supported by a framework of telephone poles 60 to 80 feet high. “Two by six inch timbers, placed 16 to 24 inches between centers, are the horizontal elements of the frame. To this the letters, made of galvanized iron, are nailed. Each stroke of a letter is 13 feet wide. To illuminate the 13 great letters 3,700 10-watt lamps are used, placed along the edge of each stroke….There are 55 outlets to each circuit and the wiring is all open on the back of the structure. Everything centers in a junction box near the center of the sign…Taken on a straight line, the sign is 975 feet long and the letters are 45 feet high.” While the letters were 45 feet high, it’s very doubtful the sign was that long.

While erroneously reported to have been constructed in July 1923, thanks to these discoveries, we now know that the Hollywoodland Sign was constructed in November/early December 1923, and illuminated for the first time on Saturday, December 8, 1923. Paraphrasing Electrical Products Corporation President Paul Howse, Hollywoodland not only conceived the largest electrical sign in the world in 1923, but one that now serves as the iconic representation of Hollywood and its film industry while also reigning as Los Angeles’ most popular tourist attraction today

“The menu is to the mood of a restaurant what the tie is to the dress ensemble…a small detail but the most noticeable of all!”

–“Menu Profit Maker,”
Restaurant Management, 1936
–Josh Kun
“To Live and Dine in L.A.”

Menus reveal as much about a time and culture as they do about a restaurant, revealing not just demographics, food choices, and prices, but also cultural and social values of the period. As Kun quotes intellectual Roland Barthes in his book, “menus are media,” they operate as “a system of communication.” They are not just about eating at restaurant, but customs and beliefs of a community, and the way a society acts and thinks and how that changes over time.

The menu for Maxey’s Singapore Spa functions as a piece of history, revealing the sometimes overt and patronizing racism of the majority white culture, considered acceptable in the 1930s and 1940s. While promoting something exotic, it is also disparaged and demeaned.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

The Maxeys worked at a variety of jobs before opening their restaurant. Mr. Maxey sold Sherman Williams paint, hardware, and supplies at a Central Avenue store in 1914. He owned a rooming house at 1822 1/2 S. Main St. in 1924 that was shut down temporarily for violation of the rooming house ordinance. The city directory also shows Maxey selling second hand furniture on West 23rd Street in 1924.

Before the Maxeys acquired the property in 1936, 119 S. Fairfax served several functions. Frank S. Murray pulled a building permit June 19, 1929, to construct a brick market with gravel floors designed by architect Rex Weston. By December, Dick Ormsby is listed as owner of the market, selling the structure by 1932 to Mountain View Dairies, which added a metal roof sign in September. On May 1, 1934, owner Harris Dairy pulled a permit for alterations to the cafe.

The Maxeys perhaps purchased the building to take advantage of the Farmer’s Market across the street, opening a cafe/restaurant in 1936. Mr. Maxey altered the back room and sold liquor there in 1938 and 1939. The family also lived at the same address until 1941, per the Los Angeles City Directory. Mr. Maxey passed away October 12, 1941, at which time his widow Marie (Maree) took over managing the restaurant.

Josh Kun quotes from the Lord Printing Company’s menu printing catalog on page 65 of his “To Live and Dine in LA” book, describing how a menu should work. “A well-designed menu pays two ways. It works for you both inside and outside your restaurant. It not only serves as a menu but it also serves as an advertisement for your restaurant.”

Mrs. Maxey designed a provocative, colorful menu cover for her Singapore Spa restaurant, with what today would be considered a derogatory image of an Asian man possessing a Fu Manchu mustache. Walking the line between Orientalist flair and good taste, she appealed both to authentic Chinese tastes and American tourism with her hybrid approach of old and new, authenticity and fabricated, employing a bilingual menu appealing to both cultures.

Leading with the exotic, the top of page two stated, “Chinese Dishes Prepared By Chinese Chefs,” listing Chinese dishes and meals in Cantonese with American translations below. The No. 4 item, Won Ton, is translated as “Chinese Ravioli,” with No. 37 Hong Sui Ha Kin translated as “Chinese Chicken Roll.” The Chinese menu features a variety of dishes, including soups, noodles, rice, and specialties.

The very bottom of that page included American dishes such as hickory smoked barbecue sandwiches, hamburgers, frankfurters, salads, French fries, and the like, to those afraid or unwilling to walk on the wild side and sample another cuisine. Page 3 featured a full page of imported and regular alcohols and liquors, including their own Zombie, Singapore Sling and Spa, Sumatra Cooler, and rums listed as 151 proof.

Mrs. Maxey employed the back of her menu to play up the authenticity and uniqueness of the restaurant, revealing images of expertly carved teakwood furniture and and objets d’art under the title, “We Boast of the Finest Collection of Chinese Carvings in the United States.” One of the images shows the entrance facade to the restaurant, which replicates a Chinese temple with its elaborately carved roof with signs listing “Chop Suey” and “Liquor.” In hyperbolic language, each elaborate piece of art is described, noting its ancient history, gold, ivory, and jewel coverings, and delicate carvings.

Tourists obviously flocked to it, as the Corsair Mirror in both 1939 and 1941 lists it as one of the unusual and popular places to visit in Los Angeles, joining such restaurants and bars as Grace Hayes Lodge, Charlie Foy’s, Pirate’s Den, and the Zebra Room. The San Bernardino Sun also mentions the restaurant in print in 1953.

Even into the late 1950s, the Los Angeles Times reports on the exotic nature of restaurants around the city, noting how many nations of the world were represented in the metropolis, while at the same time often patronizing to those of other races. In a March 11, 1957 story entitled “Melting Pot Here Fuses Many Races,” the Singapore Spa is praised while at the same time the piece disparages the chef’s background. “Although England has ties with Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong there is nothing British about the cuisine or the atmosphere of Mrs. Marie Maxey’s restaurant at 121 S. Fairfax Ave. Built in the late 30s, it glitters with exquisitely carved Chinese antiques and East Asia shrines.

Mrs. Maxey’s husband, the late Warren Maxey, gathered the treasures in travels to Singapore and Hong Kong. But Mrs. Maxey’s treasure is Kim Lee, the chef, even though some of his dishes are exotically unpronounceable.”

While Mr. Maxey perhaps did obtain the exquisitely carved furniture overseas, there are no travel records that show him ever leaving the United States. In fact, the back of the menu claims that two of the pieces, a Chinese teakwood griffon and a cocktail lounge backbar, called “the largest piece of teakwood in the United States,” formerly belonged to actress Mary Pickford.

One photo displays an old Chinese cabinet which the caption describes as finished “in pure gold and red lacquer.” Another features the Buddha Throne Head Piece, listed as “an excellent example of the patience and dexterity of the Chinese Wood Carvers of the sixteenth century. This altar piece is carved of teakwood and inlaid with twenty four carat gold. It is seven feet tall and eight feet wide, weight approximately two hundred pounds.”

This back bar would form the center piece of Jerry’s Back Fence later that year, when Jerry Smith, a former press agent at CBS Television City across the street, took over operations. Friends with many actors, Smith gained newspaper write-ups for his celebrity clientele.

After decades of hard work, Mrs. Maxey decided to move on, selling the property to Thomas Barton in 1961. Barton would demolish the building to construct the Farmer’s Daughter Hotel, which still stands on the site, along with its restaurant Tart.

While Maxey’s Singapore Spa is long gone, its late 1930s menu acts as a sign of American culture at the time, trying for exoticism while falling into racism and

Feb. 2, 1924: Hollywood Dam under construction.

A virtually forgotten oasis located in what was originally known as Weid Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, the Hollywood Reservoir served as much as bucolic paradise as water supply when first constructed in 1924. The decorative concrete structure has survived storms of protests for more than 90 years to serve the many needs of Hollywood and Los Angeles residents.

As early as 1897, newspapers described Weid’s Canyon as a quiet, peaceful place for strolls and picnicking. Named after its original owner Ivar A. Weid, who owned a quarry nearby and died in 1903, the gentle bowl was first surveyed as a possible site for a dam in 1912. The little town of Hollywood found itself desperate for water to feed its many crops, asking the city of Los Angeles for annexation in 1910 in order to obtain its needed supply. The 1913 construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct provided an even greater source of water. By 1920, Los Angeles itself began looking for suitable locations throughout the metropolitan area on which to construct dams to service local communities, especially as it weathered a series of droughts.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

A safety spillway is bored through the dam, Popular Science, March 1931.

In 1922, Water Superintendent William Mulholland himself proposed the location of Weid Canyon as the most suitable site on which to construct Hollywood’s reservoir. Virtually the only large nearby canyon with little to no population, its closeness to both Hollywood and the aqueduct pipes on the San Fernando Valley side would also provide easier access and construction. Mulholland himself remembered quarrying rock in the canyon in 1882 for construction of Los Angeles’ new jail.

At the same time, a committee organized by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and led by leading resident Dr. Edwin O. Palmer, proposed that the canyon serve as location for a highway to connect Hollywood with the San Fernando Valley. The July 22, 1922 Holly Leaves reported that the committee considered it the best spot for a highway, even better than the road that already traversed the Cahuenga Pass, and that its height above the city rendered it a major threat to flood and destroy the area in case of an earthquake.The July 14 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor quoted Palmer as saying that it was “more important it should be used for a highway than for a reservoir.”

The Van Nuys News followed the dramatic ins and outs of the story, anxious for a large supply to serve Hollywood without touching water supplies in the San Fernando Valley. They reported on July 18 that no organization had ever surveyed the canyon and its hills as a possible construction site for a highway, only half a mile from the Cahuenga Pass Road.

Palmer organized a group of citizens to campaign for highway construction through Weid Canyon but the city overcame his protests. The Hollywood and Los Angeles Chambers of Commerce along with highway engineers found in August that the Cahuenga Pass with its road provided easy access to the San Fernando Valley, while construction in the deep and high canyon would be difficult and expensive. Mulholland turned to his trusted assistant H. L. Jacques for help in devising a beautiful structure to complement its gorgeous location.

Dirt is used to reinforce the dam, Popular Science, April 1934.

Construction on what was then called Weid Canyon Dam began April 1, 1923. The waterworks centered on a gravity-centered concrete dam 210 feet tall, 160 feet thick at its base, 16 feet wide at its top, and 933 feet long, arched inward towards the lake in order to provide greater strength and support against the force of the water.

Pouring of concrete began in September that year, with a wooden trestle built above Holly Drive on which trucks would pull up and dump their loads of concrete. The first concrete dam constructed in Los Angeles would hold 8,000 acres a foot of water. Impressed with the dam’s look and speed of construction, the Bureau of Water Works passed a resolution on December 28, 1923 to name the dam the Hollywood Reservoir at the request of William Mulholland, since it served the local community.

At the same time as work proceeded on building the dam, a beautiful scenic highway named for the illustrious water chief was moving forward. Hollywoodland developers, who supported the idea of building the road, which would lead through its tract from Griffith Park and on to the Cahuenga Pass, also suggested the idea of a roadway atop the dam, allowing views of dramatic vistas on either side. Hollywoodland developer S. H. Woodruff wrote a full page article in the Los Angeles Times March 23, 1924 plugging both the dam and his hillside housing tract, noting plans to build homes on the east side of the lake to take advantage of the gorgeous views. He described the “beautiful Mulholland High Way taking shape” and the striking dam soon to join it.

Construction concluded December 24, 1924, with the Board of the Public Service Commission passing a resolution December 26 to change the name of the reservoir to Mulholland Reservoir in recognition of Mulholland’s dedication to building Los Angeles’ infrastructure. Two days later on December 28, grand celebrations would salute the opening of the new Mulholland Highway, both scenic drive and real estate access road.

May 21, 1929: Mulholland Dam in the Sedalia (Mo.) Capital.

To celebrate Mulholland’s Irish heritage, the city of Los Angeles chose March 17, 1925 as the official dedication date, inviting all citizens to come and witness the grand ceremonies at 2 pm. Public Service Commission President R. F. Del Valle presided over the ceremony, attended by Los Angeles Mayor Cryer, movie dog hero Strongheart, and other city leaders. H. L. Jacques helped introduce the dedication of two bronze plaques, and William Mulholland himself spoke, acknowledging the work of Jacques and others in making the dam the most beautiful in Los Angeles’ system, decorated with elegant bear heads in honor of the state animal around its southern top.

The Van Nuys News reported that day that the 200 foot tall dam was one of the five highest in the country at over 700 feet above sea level, and that unlike every other large dam structure, it was situated in a thickly populated metropolitan area and at an elevation to overlook Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.

By April 14, 1925, the 16 feet wide road atop the structure was completed, allowing the passage of automobiles from the Cahuenga Pass and into the new Lakeside section of Hollywoodland before ascending into the full development. Publicists for the real estate tract employed the lake as a selling tool for the next couple of years, especially in late December 1926 when announcing oil man P. M. Longan’s purchase of the palatial $250,000 home designed by John L. De Lario atop a hill overlooking the new lake. Saluting Mulholland’s creation, the home was christened Castillo del Lago.

While building Hollywood Reservoir, Mulholland also began planning and constructing a new dam in San Francisquito Canyon, exactly copying his Hollywood plans. Situated with one wall on a landslide area, the dam gave way in 1928, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people and millions of dollars in damages. Mulholland decreased water levels in the Hollywood dam immediately for safety purposes following the St. Francis Dam destruction, but Hollywood residents feared for their safety.

Clare Woolwine, 63rd District assemblyman, requested that Gov. C. C. Young immediately begin investigating all Los Angeles dams, especially the Mulholland Dam, for any construction defects or leaks. The Chamber of Commerce considered draining and possibly emptying the dam to prevent any destruction to the residents of the movie capital of the world.

Many Hollywood citizens demanded steep decreases in water levels and the immediate decommissioning of the dam. Veteran Hollywood producer David Horsley spoke out against its location high in the Hollywood hills above the city as well as its concrete construction, claiming that it would suffer the same fate as the St. Francis Dam in case of earthquake. He advocated for the dam’s closure, and if the city took no action would take legal action to force it to comply. Horsley called the dam a “menace” due to bad design and location.

July 19, 1931: The Mulholland Dam may be a “psychological menace,” Athens Sunday Messenger.

On July 23, 1928, consulting engineers reported to the Los Angeles City Council that the dam was “a safe and permanent structure” per the Los Angeles Times. The three nationally recognized engineers noted that the reservoir’s construction “was a proved and conservative type,” comparing it to the city of San Mateo’s dam which survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake though only 500 feet from the San Andreas fault.

Horsley dismissed the reports, saying he failed to believe the dam safe, or built well, and he filed suit two days later against the city, demanding the Hollywood Reservoir be closed and drained. Over the next six years, multiple engineering studies and hearings would consider the safety and construction of the Mulholland Dam and Reservoir while Horsley and associates pursued legal avenues to force its closure.

On May 7, 1930, State Engineer Edward Hyatt approved the city of Los Angeles plans to retrofit and strengthen the dam by installing a spillway and constructing a berm of rocks, dirt, and trees adjacent to the Hollywood face of the dam in order to provide greater protection against earthquakes. Opponents dismissed the idea, claiming it would provide no further protection.

Horsley and his band of followers continued their loud denunciations of the dam and its location high above Hollywood. The Van Nuys News called the dam “a psychological menace” to these opponents in its July 16, 1931, edition. The group continued protests to the City Council and Water and Power Board, which both considered draining and emptying Hollywood Reservoir. The San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles advocated for keeping and restoring the dam, worried that their residents would lose water if forced to rely on fewer water supplies, putting a heavy burden on their residents. After new engineering studies confirmed the strong rock foundation and finally tired of the unceasing negativity, the city moved ahead on March 23, 1933 with its plans to bolster and hide the Hollywood face of the Reservoir, finishing construction in 1934.

Though complaints lingered through the end of the 1930s, most eventually came to accept the idea of a safe dam high in the hills above Hollywood, especially when they could no longer see the gigantic white wall looming above them in the canyon. It gradually disappeared from memory as well, almost forgotten as a place of beauty, though the city considered building a park adjacent to it in the 1930s.

The Hollywood Reservoir no longer serves as Hollywood’s water supply, superseded by the construction of two giant tanks in the hills above it following the events of 9/11, with the city fearing contamination and poisoning by terrorists. It stands in peaceful splendor, gracefully surrounded by trees, nature, and quiet, an oasis from the hustle and bustle of the city. Though the Hollywood Sign and the city of Hollywood can both be glimpsed from its path, the Hollywood Reservoir seems to float in its own Brigadoon-like atmosphere, an arcadian paradise almost lost in time.

“Aerodrome Replacing Country-House Garage,” Illustrated London News, Oct. 29, 1921, Courtesy of Mary Mallory

Note: This is an encore post from 2012

Unique thematic architectural homes stand out all around the Los Angeles area, like Yamashiro and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Barnsdall, Freeman, and Storer residences, just to name a few. Glendale possesses another exotic specimen, Leslie C. Brand’s mystical El Miradero, which is now known as the Brand Library. Built as the family residence in 1904, Brand deeded the estate to the city to become a park and library, a jewel in local area recreation spots.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

“Under the Crescent”: PRINCE TOUSSON INFORMS HIS WIFE HE WILL FEED HER LOVER TO THE LEOPARD UNLESS SHE CONSENTS.

Born May 12, 1859, in Missouri, Leslie C. Brand exhibited strong interest in real estate and title processing as a teenager, working in a Recorder’s Office and selling real estate before emigrating to Los Angeles in December 1886. Brand established Los Angeles Abstract Co. in 1887 to issue real estate insurance and prove titles. In 1893, the company consolidated with Abstract and Title Co. to form Title Insurance and Trust Co., the behemoth of Los Angeles title companies for decades.

Brand invested his profits in real estate speculation around the Los Angeles Area, buying up chunks of land. By 1902, he purchased 1000 acres in northern Glendale and decided to make it his home. He partnered with railroad baron Henry Huntington to bring the Pacific Electric Co. to town, helped establish the Home Telephone Co. in the city, and formed three utilities that provided power and services to the San Fernando Valley. Brand would go on to found the First National Bank of Glendale in 1905 and the Glendale Country Club in 1907.

Tycoon Brand settled on a lovely piece of ground near the top of the Verdugo hills to build an estate, providing magnificent views of Glendale and the surrounding basin. The home was designed and constructed by Nathaniel Dryden, Brand’s brother-in-law, in a Saracen style reminiscent of an Eastern Indian pavilion which Brand saw at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. The house regally sat at the top of a hill at the end of a old country road, now known as Grandview Ave., dividing lands of David Burbank and Rafaela Verdugo. Brand christened his home El Miradero, which means “vantage point.” Glendale citizens called it “Brand’s Castle.”

Like something out of a “Thousand and One Nights,” El Miradero mesmerized attention with its curved arches, decorated towers, and elaborate decorative elements. The inside, furnished with Victorian style furniture and dark curtains, reflected more conservative middle American tastes.

The dramatic estate, located at 1601 W. Mountain St., spread majestically over the hillside and presided over Brand’s citrus orchards, and consisted of a pool, clubhouse, personal cemetery, and private reservoir, surrounded by an elegant white plaster fence and elaborate Middle Eastern gate. Just outside of the gate and south of Mountain, Brand built a private aerodrome and hangar with harmonious style to reflect the Middle Eastern look of his residence. Brand flew in and out of his property in his private plane, but also hosted fly-in parties as well, such as one in April 1921 that attracted silent film actresses Ruth Roland and Mary Miles Minter.

Because of its striking looks, the estate stood in for exotic locations in several Hollywood silent films, like Nell Shipman’s 1915 “Under the Crescent,” set in Egypt, 1919’s “The Man Beneath,” in which it plays Sessue Hayakawa’s Indian home, and Hayakawa’s 1920 film “An Arabian Knight,” where it appeared as an Egyptian estate. It also made an appearance as the home of Helen Holmes in the 1925 railroad film “Webs of Steel.”

In 1925, for $10, Brand deeded 488 acres of land surrounding the home to the city of Glendale for use as a public park. He willed the remaining acreage and home to the city with the codicil that his widow Mary Louise would live out her life in the home before acquistion by the city. The will stipulated “said City and its successors shall use said property exclusively as a public library and a public park and said property shall always be known as “Brand Library and Park.” Brand also required that the city should maintain it in a state comparable to the best parks in Southern California, with the city providing police, maintenance, and library staff.

Mrs. Brand died in a car crash in Arizona in May 1945, at which time distant relatives of Brand sued to get the estate back. The courts ruled in Glendale’s favor in October 1945.

The city opened the grounds as a park while they considered how to adapt the home into a library. They decided that because of its unique artistic design, the home should operate as an arts library. After rehabilitation and construction work, the city opened the Brand Library and Art Center in February 1956. In 1965, the city built a large addition to the structure as a separate building, allowing art shows, concerts, programs, lectures, and the like.

In 2008, Cecilia Rasmussen of the Los Angeles Times discovered that Brand had illegally married his mistress, Birdie Gordon, in Mexico and fathered two sons while still married to Mary Louise.

The Brand family cemetery still survives north of the house, with one monument in the shape of a pyramid. The reservoir above the house collects floodwaters and deposits after heavy rains. There are hiking trails around the home, with a couple leading to the top of the Verdugos. Currently the library is closed while undergoing renovations, and is expected to reopen early in 2014.

Update: The library reopened in 2014.

Feb. 17, 1916: Thomas “T.L.” Tally in the Los Angeles Herald

Los Angeles has stood at the forefront of not only motion picture production, but the fields of exhibition and distribution as well. Former Texan T. L. (Thomas Lincoln) Tally pioneered in these fields, seeming to anticipate changes in the marketplace during the early decades of the Twentieth Century. Shrewd and risk-taking, Tally earned a fortune entertaining the citizens of Los Angeles, introducing several firsts to the city, including the first theatre built exclusively to show motion pictures and the first to cause a nitrate fire. As early as the 1920s, articles and books proclaim him as the pioneer exhibitor in Los Angeles, but “printing the legend” instead of the facts as to when he entered the moving picture business.

Little is known of his early life, save that Tally was born July 6, 1862, in Rockport, Texas (per ship passenger logs). By 1890 he resided in San Antonio per the March 26, 1890, San Antonio Daily Express and first visited Los Angeles in April, when the April 6, 1890, Los Angeles Herald lists him as a guest at the permanent exhibit of California on Wheels.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

July 17, 1917: Thomas Tally in the Los Angeles Herald.

Tally perhaps discovered his fascination with the mechanical reproduction of sound, film, and other products when he visited the 1893 Chicago World’s Exposition, perhaps seeing the demonstration of Thomas Edison’s Kinetophone, which married motion picture film and sound for the first time. At the same time, sounds emanating from the phonograph gave him a thrill, introducing famous singers and their world-renowned voices. Savvy and entrepreneurial and enamored of the new technologies, he returned to San Antonio as the city’s representative of Edison Phonographs, opening a Phonograph Parlor to introduce the new and exciting product to the state of Texas. Phonographs allowed average people to hear great singers and performers warbling the latest and greatest song hits, as well as providing a unique form of entertainment.

Over the next few years, Tally visited both Santa Monica and Los Angeles per news records, setting up Phonograph Parlors in Santa Monica and a business at 245 S. Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, focusing on businessmen and immigrants for his early business. Perhaps Tally visited Peter Bacigalupi’s Kinetoscope Parlor, falling in love with the visual presentation of moving pictures and the dreamlike world they offered. Bacigalupi, the sole California representative of Edison products like the wondrous Kinetoscope, was born in New York City and moved to San Francisco as a young man before immigrating to Peru and becoming prosperous promoting trade photos, acting as a Remington typewriter agent, and selling other products. He returned to San Francisco in the early 1890s and established Phonograph Parlors there before setting up his Edison Phonograph Parlor at 206 S. Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, and later a combined Phonograph and Kinetoscope Parlor as well, which allowed individual viewers to watch a short film by turning a knob and watching images on a small screen in a cabinet.

Bacigalupi purchased a December 24, 1894 ad in the Los Angeles Herald inviting citizens to come see Edison’s great invention, the first time motion pictures appear to be advertised and exhibited in the city. He advertised the first screening of a moving picture film in Los Angeles with his September 25, 1895 Los Angeles Herald advertisement stating that he is the sole California Edison representative for “enlarged and improved Kinetoscopes,” announcing “Corbett vs. Courtney prize fight, six furious rounds and knockout, will be on exhibition for a short time only at 248 S. Spring Street; 5 cents per round or six rounds 30 cents.”

Overwhelmed attempting to operate and manage Phonograph and Kinetoscope Parlors in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Bacigalupi sold his downtown Los Angeles parlor to the ambitious Tally and moved back to the City by the Bay. Showman and huckster Tally went all out promoting his new acquisition, buying an October 8, 1895, Los Angeles Herald ad stating, “Expert phonograph and exhibitor of east who has been located at 245 S. Spring St. bought Corbett fight to show at new parlor at 248 S. Spring.” Tally appeared to have acquired a Vitascope to add to his Kinetoscopes, Mutoscope, Phonographs, and peep shows, with a July 25, 1896, ad stating that images would be displayed on a “great screen,” just a week after the Vitascope’s first performance at the Orpheum theatre downtown. This would enable the huckster to promote both New York’s greatest song hits and amazing moving pictures to enthralled audiences.

Tally moved all his business to downtown Los Angeles by fall 1896, as the September 15, 1896, Los Angeles Herald reported that his parlors at Santa Monica’s Arcadia Hotel were “being removed to Los Angeles, where Mr. Tally will house his headquarters.” This business would be located in the basement of the Ramona Hotel at 311 S. Spring, a storefront operation. The observant and thoughtful Tally witnessed what attracted patrons and sought to satisfy their desires, thereby growing in success. Putting the patron first earned him a fortune.

Terry Ramsaye in his 1926 book “Million and One Nights” claimed that patrons were wary of entering the storefront, so that the sharp Tally created a partition with holes in it facing the screen, “so that patrons might peer in at the screen while standing in the comfortable security of the well-lighted Phonograph Parlor.” Events in September suggest otherwise, that Tally in fact operated an open projection room.

At this location, Tally appears to have caused the first nitrate film in the city of Los Angeles, as reported by the September 15, 1896, Los Angeles Herald. The story recounted Tally’s Vitascope catching fire in his operation under the Ramona Hotel, and causing $3,000 worth of damage, with wallpaper scorched off the upper walls and ceiling and the apparatus basically destroyed.

The story described the setup as follows: “On a platform built over the main front entrance was mounted the expensive machinery of the Vitascope, from the lens of which life size moving pictures were thrown onto a screen at the further end of the room. A powerful arc light was used here and it was from it the fire originated. A spark from the carbons of the arc lamp fell onto a roll of film used in the Vitascope and the inflammable material flashed up like powder. It was but a second until the fire had seized on everything on the little platform and spread down the room, carried by a cloth chute through which the rays of the vitascope were projected onto the screen at the end.”

Twenty of Tally’s Vitascope and Kinetoscope films were destroyed at a value of $1,200, and the apparatus virtually destroyed, all of which could be replaced by his insurance. Quickly replacing his stock, Tally reopened and continued his business success, with his wife Mary (M. A.) listed as proprietor in the city directory around this time. His brother Edward operated the Phonograph and Projectoscope Parlor at 339 S. Spring St. in 1899.

Some surrounding business owners, perhaps jealous of his success or peeved by his successful demonstrations of his product, appealed to the city on November 18, 1898, to halt his playing of songs audible to the neighborhood, which many found annoying. Tally found others supporting the music, claiming it brought happiness to the area. The two sides appeared to reach a truce, and business continued profitably for the smart Tally

.

Dec. 17, 1899: International yacht race at Tally’s Phonograph Parlors, Los Angeles Herald.

In 1901, O. F. Goodrich who managed his parlor at 137 S. Main Street and another operator were arrested for showing “lewd and obscene photographs of nude women in indecent attitudes” in their “nickel-in-the-slot” machines. While some obviously disapproved of the entertainment, the parlors were not closed, but continued to operate, dispensing entertainment for those of all persuasions.

By 1900, Tally owned two parlors downtown, the one at 339 S. Spring and one at 137 S. Main, larger than his previous stores. Business continued booming as he expanded his advertising reach beyond businessmen to housewives as well. He began dreaming of bigger and better exhibition practices, focusing solely on the exhibition of moving pictures for the general public, women as well as men, a first for the city of Los Angeles.

Eager to make more money, Tally took over the larger space of the Electric Theatre at 262 S. Main Street in which to conduct his experiment. Ramsaye reported that Tally purchased an ad in the April 16,1902, Los Angeles Times, but I only find one in the May 10, 1902, Times, where Tally proclaimed the Electric Theatre “a new place of amusement, providing up to date moving picture entertainment, especially for ladies and children. See the Capture of the Biddle Bros, New York, in a Blizzard,” and many other interesting and exciting scenes. An hour’s amusement and genuine fun for 10 cents admission, evenings 7:30 to 10:30.” An overwhelming success, Tally advertised afternoon matinees for children at 5 cents a piece.” He called his entertainment “a vaudeville of motion pictures lasting an hour.”

Tally quickly learned the power of hyperbole. On May 12, Tally ran an ad appealing to women, stating, “Ladies, bring the children to see the beautiful snow scenes.” By May 14, he tops that, announcing, “Ladies, bring the children to see the grandest MOVING PICTURE SHOW ever given.” Of course, this was the first motion picture show ever exhibited in the city, making his announcement slightly ironic.

Over the next twenty years, Tally would inaugurate many new practices in the exhibition and later distribution fields, making a fortune entertaining the masses with the grand new medium of motion pictures. A following post will describe his innovative practices in expanding the reach and output of the business.

To be continued.

The Hollywood Reporter Building at 6715 Sunset Blvd., in 2015, via Google Street View.

The venerable Hollywood Reporter building on Sunset Boulevard offers a striking salute to Golden Age Hollywood with its patina of class and sophistication. Designed by architect Douglas Honnold for industry power broker and Reporter publisher William “Billy” R. Wilkerson, the building served as the headquarters for Wilkerson’s real estate fiefdom and his powerful trade paper. A landmark building in the evolution of Hollywood as an industry and as a point of influence in architecture, the structure represents the epicenter of the Hollywood publishing industry and its impact on Tinseltown filmmaking.

The edifice represents the glamorous dreams of its owner, Wilkerson. Ambitious and driven, he rose from small town Tennessee boy to king maker by absorbing every facet of the film business in his rise to the top. Beginning as a local theatre manager, Wilkerson moved on to jobs as booking agent, publicity and exploitation chief, regional distribution manager, distributor, production manager, producer, and director before entering publishing when he became acting editor and publisher of Exhibitor’s Daily Review in 1928. This diverse and educational journey prepared him for a leading role in shaping entertainment production at the Reporter.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

In February 1930, Wilkerson purchased Moving Picture Review and Theatre Management, turning it into a daily magazine devoted to motion pictures called The Hollywood Reporter. The powerful trade debuted on September 3, 1930, surviving a rocky couple of years before becoming Hollywood’s go-to newspaper, publishing reviews, box office receipts, script sales, release dates, salary and labor issues, and gossip/travel items. Wilkerson himself penned “Trade Views,” editorializing on controversial subjects, prominent issues, and events affecting the film industry. The Hollywood Reporter could make or break careers and films as well as shaping entertainment trade views behind the scenes.

The publisher purchased the property in July 1931, moving his paper to the two-story building at 6715-7 Sunset Blvd. to combine production and printing at one location. Editorial took over the second floor of the office building, while the publishing department occupied a two-story plant in back.

Jan. 3, 1938: An ad for a reorganization sale at Sunset House in the Los Angeles Times.

By 1936, tycoon Wilkerson desired fashionable and luxurious office space reflecting his power and influence in the entertainment industry. He hired architects Arthur Hawes and Douglas Honnold to execute his vision of a sleek showplace. The two men worked to adapt the complex into a suitable publishing empire, as well as adapting the building into a combination office for the Reporter and specialty men’s haberdashery, Sunset House.

Hawes designed an expanded two-story printing plant in back, while in 1937 Honnold conceived a glamorous new facade for the office building in the Hollywood Regency style, reflecting the glitz and opulence of Art Deco motion picture production design. Honnold stood as one of Hollywood’s top architects in the 1930s for his clean, rich looks in the Gibbons-Del Rio home, the Samuel Goldwyn estate, and stars’ dressing room building at Twentieth Century-Fox.

Alan Hess in his book, “Forgotten Modern: California Houses,1940-1970” describes Honnold and his partner George Vernon Russell as two of the developers of the “Hollywood Regency style, which consciously slimmed traditional ornament to achieve a sleek modernity within the bounds of traditional imagery.” The cutting edge facade featured sexy curved ornament, clean horizontal lines, and cool marble walls, a sensual feast for the eyes.

Sumptuous but unostentatious, the look oozed affluence and fashion by remodeling existing buildings into a contemporary, modern, and architecturally significant design. The book “Regency Redux” describes Hollywood Regency as “the perfect amalgam of the old and the new and struck the perfect balance of tradition and novelty desired by upscale commercial establishments.”

The style merged Wilkerson’s concepts of old and new in business as he reinvented and branded himself as entertainment mogul in the mid-1930s. Pushing beyond publishing into high concept businesses and watering holes catering to the entertainment industry and wealthy, Wilkerson launched upscale gourmet specialty store Vendome Wine and Spirits Company and high end restaurant/nightclub Ciro’s, fresh takes on old concepts and up-to-date in every way.

Moving beyond restaurants into high-end retail, Wilkerson’s redesigned and luxurious space served as the setting for Sunset House, an exclusive men’s haberdashery and barber shop. The upper crust could enjoy lush, rich surroundings while shopping for stylish clothing or seeking out hair and beauty treatments.

Billed as “the finest men’s store in America,” Sunset House featured “carefully selected and complete stocks of men’s wearables and gift articles” in its classical yet up-to-date interiors such as intimate lounge with fireplace and fashionable barbershop. After only six months in business, the establishment folded, with Ben Bail liquidating the stock. The Hollywood Reporter offices gradually filled the entire space, with minimal remodeling or alterations of the interiors.

After Wilkerson’s death in 1962, his widow Tichi Kassel Wilkerson continued publishing the Hollywood Reporter, becoming one of the most powerful women in town. She established the nonprofit Women in Film in 1971 to provide women with mentoring and filmmaking opportunities and a voice in the industry. She later founded the Key Art Awards, honoring the best Key Art created in marketing and publicizing movies.

The Hollywood Reporter moved out of the building in 2005 after 74 years of operation, with the L.A. Weekly moving in shortly after and remaining until 2013. They employed both the front office building and the printing plant building behind to publish their paper as well. On December 12, 2012, the buildings were transferred to Gray Marble Front LLC.

The Hollywood Reporter Building stands as a significant example of Hollywood Regency architecture by master architect Douglas Honnold for industry powerbroker William R. Wilkerson, who operated the most important West Coast trade paper The Hollywood Reporter out of the building for almost 75 years. More than just a trade, the paper chronicles the industry’s business and social life for readers around the world.

On Tuesday, October 24, the Hollywood Reporter Building goes in front of the Planning and Land Use Management Committee as part of the process in becoming a Los Angeles’ Historic Cultural Monument. To write or attend in support, visit Save the Hollywood Reporter Building on Facebook.

Note: This is an encore post from 2012.

From its days as an elegant bank building to its abandoned and forgotten existence in the 1980s and 1990s, the former Security Trust and Savings Bank at Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga Boulevard has served as both a local institution and location setting for films and books. Not as beautiful as the empty bank building at Hollywood and Highland Avenue, the banking veteran still survives as an example of an attractive building for an utilitarian function.

Originally founded at Main Street in downtown Los Angeles as the Security Savings Bank by Joseph F. Sartori in 1888, the institution soon changed its name to Security Trust and Savings Bank. As the city and surrounding areas exploded with new residents, the bank quickly built new branches, extending tentacles all over Southern California.

The outlying area of Hollywood mushroomed in size from a tiny farming village in 1900 to a more fashionable suburban town in 1920, with new film studios seeming to open virtually every day. Security’s small branch at Hollywood and Cahuenga overflowed with customers, and the bank decided to build a fashionable, larger building across the street at 6385 Hollywood Blvd. that would allow it to grow over the years.

Established Los Angeles architects Donald and John Parkinson, who designed many of the bank’s branches, were hired in 1920 to design an attractive four-story building. After the basement was dug, the board of directors decided to expand the building to six stories, requiring a halt in construction until new plans could be drawn up, according to the Dec. 3, 1920 Hollywood Citizen. The paper went on to state, “The foundations, vault, and basement of this building are the most extensive that have been put in Hollywood. The contractor estimates that 1,500 square yards of concrete will be used in the work up to the first floor. In the vaults alone there will be 112 tons of steel, most of this being plate, four thicknesses of 1 1/4 inch each. The vaults will be capable of housing 8,000 boxes.” Safety deposit boxes would be located in the basement, tellers on the first floor, and the second floor for offices, later to become the bond department. Other floors would be leased to businesses. At six stories, the bank would be the tallest building in Hollywood.

Gregory Williams, in his book “The Story of Hollywood,” states that the grand opening of the bank occurred on June 3, 1922, with an open house and tours of the facilities to thousands of people, along with entertainment such as a performance from Orpheum artists, an orchestra playing in the lobby, and zithers and harp-guitar entertaining in the basement. The June 7, 1922, Los Angeles Times noted that the bank had published and was freely distributing an illustrated 52-page booklet called “In the Valley of the Cahuengas: The Story of Hollywood,” which included a photo of a little barn where the Jesse Lasky Film Company had produced “The Squaw Man” in 1913-1914. The bank continued to give away the booklet for years, a gift that Hollywood residents could send to friends and relatives across the country.

Almost as soon as it opened, the building and its surrounding area became a favorite filming location for comedians Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin. Film Historian John Bengtson notes that the area featured frequent filmmaking because of its close proximity to each comedian’s studio. He also points out that the building plays the publishing house in Harold Lloyd’s 1924 film “Girl Shy” and can be seen behind Charlie Chaplin when he is released from the mental hospital in the 1936 film “Modern Times.” Other films of the three great comedians shot all around the surrounding blocks.

Raymond Chandler’s world-famous cynical detective Philip Marlowe also took up residence in the building many people believe, from the description of his office in the novel “The High Window.” “I had an office in the Cahuenga Building, sixth floor, two small rooms at the back. One I left open for a patient client to sit in, if I had a patient client.” The street corner out front is now known as Raymond Chandler Square in recognition of the author.

Film noirs loved the location as well. The 1947 Fox film “The Brasher Doubloon” employs the building in an establishing shot demonstrating that it is the office of detective Marlowe, played by actor George Montgomery. In 1954, the bank acted as a bank for the film “Loophole.” Bank examiners can be seen entering on the Cahuenga Boulevard side at the beginning of the film, and later teller Barry Sullivan looks straight ahead from his position serving customers out the front window at Green Dentistry across the street, at what is now a Popeye’s Chicken.

The lower floors of the building remained a bank for decades. In the 1950s, citizens could pick up their license renewals and tags there, as well as other bank locations. A bandit robbed the establishment of almost $1,200 in February 1963. Another attempted robbery occurred in 1971 but failed, because a cashier was able to press the alarm button and the guard captured the suspect at the window before he could get away.

Other businesses operated out of the building as well. Bond’s Department Store occupied upper floors in the 1950s, using the address 6383 Hollywood Blvd.

Two arson fires occurred in the 1970s. In 1974, a fire causing $450,000 damage started suspiciously. The next year, a six- alarm blaze required 16 firetrucks before it was extinguished, gutting a storeroom and hallways to over $200,000 in damages.

By the 1983, the Hollywood Cleanup and Restoration Council’s poll called it the worst cared for building in Hollywood. It sat abandoned for years. Blog CurbedLA reported in 2010 that the building was supposedly going to be converted into a 180-room boutique hotel with a rooftop pool, and a nightclub in the old bank vault. What was old can be brought back to life in dramatic and elegant ways, as many of the downtown loft buildings testify.

The Studio Club in Photoplay, 1917.

Note: This is an encore post from 2013.

T he advent of the 20^th century offered the possibility of more freedom and opportunity for women. For decades, women had advocated for the right to vote, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Others clamored for more work opportunities beyond teaching, librarian, and secretarial positions.

The relatively new medium of motion pictures also tantalized audiences with many new possibilities beyond their hometowns: exciting new cities, novel hobbies and recreations, and modern employment opportunities. In fact, many people considered the growing film industry itself an excellent field to try their luck, especially movie-struck, naïve young women.

ALSO BY MARY MALLORY
Magic Castle
Mack Sennett
Brand Library
Auction of Souls

Innocent young girls descended on Hollywood in the mid-teens from Midwestern farming communities, small Southern towns and large cities, hoping to be discovered by film folks. For the first time, many young women independently traveled west to California with their meager savings seeking out opportunity in glamorous Hollywood. As their money slowly dwindled, many hung around libraries and other respectable locations.

Mrs. Eleanor Jones of the Hollywood Public Library began noticing many young women staying until closing time. Many had nowhere to go and no friends or family to spend time or live with. Jones began befriending them and trying to help them. A young girl whom Mrs. Jones regularly noticed sitting alone in the library disappeared one day, and then reappeared more than a month later. When Jones asked where she had been, she replied that she had spent a month in the hospital with no visitors. Soon after, as she realized that she had no prospects in Hollywood, she returned home.

Jones approached Mrs. W. Richmond, Mrs. William De Mille and Lois Weber and they started a drama club in the library called the Hollywood Studio Club. When the Young Women’s Christian Assn. heard about the club, it offered a dancing teacher, with many new classes quickly added. Attendance soon outgrew the small space. The large attendance convinced local businessmen to advance $1,500 for a year’s rental on a large two-story Colonial building at 6129 Carlos Ave., the former home of the Hollywood Military Academy, as a clubhouse offering classes and get-together opportunities. Any girl connected with the film industry could join as a member and take classes, but when a few of the young women mentioned that they had no place to live, they were invited in.

In 1916, the YWCA International Institute leased the home, and the Hollywood Studio Club officially became a residence hall with 80 paid members, with many more hoping to get in. The Nov. 14, 1916, Moving Picture World noted in an article that it was the third YWCA Club home for girls after ones in New York and Paris, and the “only one in existence for motion picture girls.”

Celebrities such as Lois Weber, Dorothy Davenport, and Tsuru Aoki, Mrs. Sessue Hayakawa, visited on Sundays, and studios held regular teas for the girls. Many classes were offered beyond acting and dancing, including scenario writing, makeup, pantomime, gymnastics and first aid. Girls could enjoy the large gardens, sitting on the front porch or welcoming guests.

T he YWCA quickly struggled to pay the bills. It offered dances on Friday nights with young men welcomed to attend. Entertainers and studios presented theatrical productions, musical performances and other fundraisers. In December 1916, the Lasky Feature Play Co. players presented the first fundraising performance, giving many more over the years. Lasky players Helen Jerome Eddy, a former resident, Lillian Leighton, Laurence Tibbett, Mabel Van Buren, Clarence Geldart and George Hackathorne presented “The Tragedy of Nan” in February 1918 in the building’s auditorium. A live nativity was presented Dec. 22, 1919, in an amphitheatre arranged on the front lawn, with Frank Keenan as narrator, Eddy as Mary, Walter Long as Herod, and Lionel Belmore as one of the Wise Men.

Film journalist Rob Wagner in his 1918 book “Film Folk; Closeups of the Men, Women and Children Who Make the Movies,” spoke with an industry leader who called the Hollywood Studio Club a “godsend to the kids who have no place to go except to bat round the town. We have teas, garden parties, studio dances, and all kinds of stunts that bring the bunch together, and if a girl gets down on her luck, she can stay at the club until she lands on her feet again.”

The local YWCA approached studios and film folk like Mary Pickford for help in purchasing the property in 1919 to provide additional living space. In newspaper stories, residents mentioned that it was basically a sorority with film atmosphere, giving them a sense of home life, protection and assistance. There were few rules beyond living and acting with good taste and manners. Girls paid membership fees of $5, $10, $25, $50 and $100, allowing them a place to live and access to the dining room, gymnasium, classes and the like. The club offered additional classes as well: art, embroidery, exercise, remodeling clothes and dramatics, along with the Sunday teas, monthly dances, and camping and beach trips.

During these early years, actresses such as Helen Jerome Eddy, Carmel Myers, Mildred Harris, Marjorie Daw and Louise Huff lived at the club, along with writer Sarah Mason and Paramount secretary Anne Bauchens.

Demand quickly outgrew the space, and by 1923 a group led by Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille, Mrs. Jesse Lasky, Mrs. Charles Christie and others bought property from Seward Cole at 1215 Lodi Place and Lexington Avenue on which to erect a new home at a cost of $150,000. Famed Hearst Castle architect Julia Morgan designed a building along “Spanish, Italian and French lines, with some of the warm colors of the Moorish,” with central patio, library, two reception rooms, private dining room, large dining room, stage, practice rooms, writing and makeup rooms, and 66 single and double bedrooms with their own lavatories.

The YWCA sold the Carlos Avenue property to St. Stephens Episcopal Church for use as a parish hall to buy the Lodi Place property and began a fund drive to construct the new building. They also sought pledges for furniture, equipment and other necessities.

During the next two years, every studio donated funds. Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson and Jackie Coogan gave $1,000 each, Florence Vidor, Lucien Littlefield, Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, Will Hays and others gave large sums, Charles Ray allowed paid tours of the Mayflower reproduction at his new studio benefiting the club, and the gate from a special performance of “Robin Hood” at the Egyptian Theatre would benefit the club. Norma Talmadge donated the last $5,000 to reach the campaign target.

The YWCA held a grand dedication May 7, 1926, of the lush new facility, with each bedroom named for a contributor. The building quickly overflowed with residents; some were actresses, but most were affiliated with the motion picture industry in support or behind the scenes roles. An average of 93 lived in the 105-capacity home at one time. Most girls stayed for approximately six months, and many received assistance while unemployed.

Residents in the 1920s included future writer Ayn Rand, along with actresses Mae Busch, Janet Gaynor and Zasu Pitts.

Rates were lowered in 1932 during the Depression, from $13 a week to $7 a week for women ages 18-35. A June 11, 1932, ad in the Hollywood Filmograph noted, “Free use of lounge, patio, library, piano, radio, laundry, typewriter, and sewing machine.”

During World War II, the girls employed the empty lot next door for the “back-to-the farm” movement, raising fruit and vegetables they sold for funds to buy the property, aided by donations from Louis B. Mayer, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, George Cukor and Harry Warner. In May 1944, the USO constructed a building housing 1,000 servicewomen, operated as a guesthouse by the Hollywood Studio Club.

Costs continued rising after the war, with the YWCA needing help paying the bills in 1947. Donations coming from Joseph Schenck, Mae West, Joseph von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Mitchell Leisen and Budd Schulberg, among others, helped ease the burden. Thus began a several decade fight to earn enough money to keep the facility open. Former residents formed an alumni group in 1953 to help support the club, holding fundraisers and offering support.

Changing times and mores added financial pressures to the Hollywood Studio Club, with young women free to live independently and come and go as they pleased. Extramarital sex became more accepted. Governmental assistance and unemployment became available.

Though the club struggled financially, waves of girls continued flooding the building. Future celebrity residents included actresses Maureen O’Sullivan, Gail Patrick, Linda Darnell, Donna Reed, Evelyn Keyes, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Marie Windsor, Barbara Britton, Barbara Hale, Janet Blair, Dorothy Malone, Barbara Rush, Gale Storm, Rita Moreno, Nancy Kwan, Barbara Eden, Donna Douglas, Yvonne Craig, and Ann B. Davis, along with editor Dede Allen.

By 1970, the YWCA considered selling the Hollywood Studio Club, but residents fought to save it by holding fundraisers, asking for pledges, and the like. The YWCA allowed paying groups to hold meetings and classes in the rooms. It opened a small thrift shop to sell items. Former resident Rosemary Breckler wrote a March 3, 1975, letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, speaking to how the building nourished young women. “The thing I remember most is the wonderful feeling we had of being cherished, loved, protected, guided, and assisted in our aspirations.”

After the club closed in 1976, the YWCA put some furnishings up for auction with Sotheby Parke Bernet in July 1977, and sold others in its thrift shop. In 1982, it donated some materials from the club to Cal State Northridge.

The lovely building stands forlornly at 1215 Lodi Place, ready to welcome eager new Hollywood residents.

“The Great Corbett Fight” at Tally’s theater.

Former Texan T. L. (Thomas) Tally pioneered early film exhibition practices in the film metropolis of Los Angeles, catering to the needs of his audiences. Always enamored with technology, he seemed to anticipate and lead trends in advancing both the presentation of films as well as their selling and distribution. Though Tally was recognized as an innovator, his history has been promulgated with repeated errors that distort history.

In my first post, I presented the first part of the factual history regarding Tally’s life. Born in Rockport, Texas in 1862, he established his first phonograph parlor in San Antonio in 1890 and first visited Los Angeles that year. Fascinated with engineering and mechanical marvels that produced sound and images, he began seeking out these products.

Mary Mallory / Hollywood Heights: T.L. Tally – L.A.’s Pioneer Film Exhibitor, Part 1

T.L. Tally in “Moving Picture World”

Tally established his first phonograph and kinetoscope parlors in Santa Monica and Los Angeles in 1895, a full year before any other historian puts him in Los Angeles, announcing on October 8, 1895, that he had purchased Peter Bacigalupi’s downtown parlor and was continuing the exhibition of the Corbett fight. On July 25, 1896, he announced his acquisition of a Vitascope and exhibition of films in the Los Angeles Herald, and later caused the first nitrate fire that September.

Leading the way for other exhibitors, Tally took over the Electric Theatre at 262 S. Main Street and turned it into the city’s first film-only theatre, opening on May 10, 1902, with an ad in the Los Angeles Times, not in April as other historians claim. One of his later advertisements that month stated, “a vaudeville of moving pictures lasting one hour,” thereby elevating film to the realm of theatre. Tally promoted his business with side screenings in Oxnard, per the Oxnard Courier. The savvy businessman attracted big crowds, advertising off and on in the newspaper through the summer of 1903, never going out of business and never going on the road. In fact, Tally first exhibited Melies’ “A Trip to the Moon” at the Electric Theatre on June 17, 1903, per an ad in the Los Angeles Times that day.

On July 19, 1903, Tally elevated his program, refining it for a better class of patrons. The Los Angeles Times ad revealed a new name for the Theatre, the Lyric, featuring “refined vaudeville, and will still continue to keep the lead of all other show houses with our fine programme of moving pictures.” Admission remained 10 cents with continuous performances. Perhaps his screening of better pictures rubbed off on the newspaper, for it gave its first review of the motion picture “Fairyland” playing at his theatre on October 11 of that year, going on for nine paragraphs about its wonders.

As moving pictures improved and grew more popular, exhibition grew more profitable and advanced as well. Seeing a steady rise in attendance, Tally soon realized he needed a larger space to accommodate higher-class patrons and to put on a more elaborate show. He acquired 554 S. Broadway, the Broadway Theatre, which possessed 500 seats. Tally renamed it the New Broadway Theatre and upgraded his presentations. By 1909, moving pictures were becoming a growing business not only in Los Angeles, but in towns large and small throughout California. Seizing on opportunity, Tally established a film exchange on the upper floor of his theatre, selling all manner of product to other exhibitors, growing his business and his acumen.

Staying ahead of the curve, he spent $600,000 to purchase a 50-year lease on land at South Broadway and Eighth Street between Hamburger’s Department Store and the Majestic Theatre on which to construct an even more elaborate theatre, and one to hold 900 patrons. The March 16, 1910, Los Angeles Times reported that Odemer and Homeyer would construct the two-story $25,000 theatre designed by Train and Williams, a lass-A building constructed of steel and concrete.

Located at 831-835 S. Broadway, the theatre originally had been conceived as an eight- to ten-story building, with mostly offices on upper floors, but only the two-story theatre was constructed. It featured marble corridors, mahogany paneling, two high-speed elevators and one freight elevator. Tally went high-tech, adding the first electrical orchestra pit, which lifted the group from the basement to stage level at the start of the show, called a “disappearing orchestra.” The September 1, 1910, issue of Nickelodeon magazine also noted his elaborate program,” five reels of licensed pictures, two illustrated songs, and either vocal or instrumental specialties… .”

Smart and observant, Tally catered to the wants and desires of his patrons. Once he discovered their interests, he focused on films to continue luring them in. He screened early Biographs and other major companies’ product, and on September 18, 1913, signed a contract giving him exclusive rights to exhibit Famous Players Film Co.’s moving pictures in his theatres. On August 20, 1914, Tally consolidated his power and position by inking a deal to control the booking of most big features in Los Angeles and the Southwest, looking for ways to make more money.

When Famous Players merged with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Co. and formed the distribution arm Paramount Pictures, Tally negotiated a contract on September 5, 1914 giving him the exclusive right to exhibit their films. To fill out his schedule throughout the year, he also booked Selznick, Goldwyn, Fox, Metro, and Hodkinson pictures. Refusing to raise prices, Tally hosted eight shows a day featuring musical accompaniment, with 22 employees serving the needs of the public.

Always looking for ever more elaborate ways to upgrade presentations, Tally enhanced his theatre’s musical capabilities by installing what some call the first moving picture theatre organ. The July 10, 1915, Moving Picture World stated that Tally paid $17,000 to the Johnston Organ and Piano Music Co. for a four manual echo organ, the largest of its kind in the world, for his house. Built in Los Angeles, it consisted of a swell organ, great organ, choir organ, and echo organ, housed all around the building. Jean de Chauvenet served as the first organist, with special concerts on Sunday. Besides the magnificent organ, the theatre featured four stained glass panels in the ceiling, large windows flanking the screen, and green plush curtains framing the screen.

By 1917, Tally and other major exhibitors across the country chafed at the idea of paying studios for a program of pictures in order to get the few blockbusters starring mega stars like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. On April 20, 1917, he joined with J. D. Williams and others to form the First National Exhibitors’ Circuit, buying films outright from major producers to distribute on their own, cutting out the middlemen. The group met in New York on May 12, 1917, electing S. L. “Roxy” Rothafel president and Tally as vice president. First National’s Los Angeles office was housed in Tally’s theatre.

Tally took an active role, negotiating on his own with Sydney and Charlie Chaplin for exclusive right to Chaplin films, finally signing Chaplin to a $1-million contract for eight pictures plus a $75,000 bonus after cigars and coffee at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, per the August 1, 1917 New York Clipper. Members would pay a pro-rata share of Chaplin’s contract. The paper reported that Tally had never shown a Chaplin film in his theatres and failed to find him funny, but realized his enormous popularity with audiences. Tally pursued talks with Mary Pickford as well, arranging an exclusive deal with her in September 1918 in which she would make four films for $250,000 each. At the same time, Tally purchased the Kinema Theatre on Grand Avenue in September 1919 for an additional outlet.

First National was none too thrilled when Chaplin, Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith formed United Artists in 1919, requiring Pickford and Chaplin to fulfill their contracts with the company. Pickford completed her films but Chaplin failed to deliver the vast majority of his product.

By 1920, Tally yearned to return to his first love, exhibition. He resigned from First National and sold off his interests in the company. He also joined with Sol Lesser and the Gore Brothers in exhibition in a company called Fox West Coast. He turned the Broadway over to them for several months, before taking it back in 1922 and turning it into a second-run house.

Tally continued in the exhibition business until he sold the Broadway Theatre to the May Co. in 1929, which demolished it in May to construct a 10-story addition. The smart businessman began looking for new challenges, helping finance the creation of a Three Dimensional film camera by a Mr. De La Garde in 1931. He took over the Criterion Theatre and operated its house for several years after Fox West Coast went through reorganization. By the mid-1930s, Tally was suing multiple people for bankruptcy, and financing deals gone bad, though he needed no money.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1945, Tally passed away at his Beverly Hills home at 703 N. Palm Drive, gaining mention in the papers as the founder of Los Angeles first exclusive film theatre. As early as the late 1910s, film trades played up Tally’s background in exhibition, recognizing the wrong dates he entered the business and founded the first film theatre, errors passed on by newer researchers who failed to check facts.

Thomas Tally stands as one of the pioneers of film exhibition in the United States, establishing ever improved theatres and presentations to lure customers and provide outstanding entertainment. He organized practices trying to establish some separation between producers, distributors, and exhibitors, giving major stars opportunities to establish their own production companies and to control their own destinies. Virtually forgotten today, Tally helped lead the way to make film screenings a magical night out, where the “show” starts on the sidewalk.

A vendor on Craigslist has listed what is claimed to be a display case from the Oviatt Building for $12,500.

Note this disclaimer: “Updated glass shelves and lighting have been added.” So it’s not in original condition.

The display case appears to echo the theme of the building’s Art Deco design, presumably supporting its authenticity.

As with anything on EBay or Craigslist, an item and vendor should be evaluated thoroughly before submitting an offer.

Note: This is an encore post from 2011.

I picked up “The Big Picture,” Melba Levick and Stanley Young’s 1988 book about Los Angeles murals, not realizing what a terribly sad book it would be. As Young notes: “Most artists are aware that, exposed as it is to the elements, both human and natural, there is a limited life-expectancy for any mural.”

I wanted it for one picture, specifically.

“The Big Picture” is listed on Amazon and Bookfinder.

The picture I wanted was Kent Twitchell’s “Freeway Lady,” a destroyed artwork that was one of my favorites. Unfortunately, the book is a catalogue of murals that have either been blotted out or badly damaged by vandals and the elements.

More important, as we are debating super-graphics on large buildings, the book serves as a reminder of the enormous murals that were painted in downtown Los Angeles and in Hollywood as ads for Nike in a campaign by the Chiat-Day agency.

A gigantic mural titled “Baseball” by David Larks covers what was then the Bekins Building. The building is, of course, blank today.

3614 S. Grand Ave., via Google maps’ street view.

And here’s John McEnroe by David Larks and Adam Lustig, looming over the Pantages Theatre.

6246 Hollywood Blvd., via Google maps’ street view.

And even the murals that survive are in terrible condition:

Here’s how Ruben Brucelyn’s “Sports” looked in 1988.

604 Glendale Blvd. via Google maps’ street view.

Here’s a particularly annoying example. I see Twitchell’s “Bride and Groom” and East Los Angeles Streetscapers’ “El Nuevo Fuego” every day because it’s on the Victor Clothing Building (formerly the City Hall Annex) next to The Times parking structure. Only now it looks like this:

I’m sure Levick and Young intended “The Big Picture” as a celebration of one of the great things about Los Angeles and instead it serves as a requiem for what is no more. Even “Ed Ruscha Monument,” which is on the cover, has been destroyed.  (Twitchell sued the U.S. and 11 other defendants for $1.1 million in 2008.)

It’s important to note that “The Big Picture” also documents vernacular artwork found on the Eastside and Judy Baca’s famous “Great Wall,” in the San Fernando Valley, which has suffered its own type of destruction.

Is there any hope in all the gloom and doom?

After all, Baca told Patt Morrison last year: “We’re in the most destructive time ever in the history of murals in L.A.”

“Nino y Caballo” by Frank Romero is peeling and has been vandalized.

Well, I bought “The Big Picture” at the Last Bookstore, which just opened at Spring and 5th streets. So far, the shop seems to be popular. Is it too great a leap to see a connection between downtown’s rebirth and a renaissance in murals? I suppose so. Then again, I wonder what “Freeway Lady” would look like printed as a super-graphic and hung on the Hotel Figueroa.

Note: At last report, “Freeway Lady” is to be repainted on a section of the Student Services Building at Los Angeles Valley College.

A Trip to Oxford Avenue

Note: This is an encore post from 2007.

Here’s an interesting contrast: Oxford Avenue between Washington Boulevard and the Santa Monica Freeway and Oxford Avenue north of Washington.

South of Washington, Oxford seems a bit wider and the land between the curb and the sidewalk is fairly generous. Not so, north of Washington and the lots seem a bit smaller. Wide strips of land between the curb and the sidewalk (more than the 5 feet that is common in much of Los Angeles) were one of the points urged by Charles Mulford Robinson in his “city beautiful” proposal.

Bonus fact: Robinson also said Angelenos should plant lots of jacaranda trees along the streets, so you can thank him for all those purple blooms. First of all, here’s our featured house at 2045 S. Oxford Ave. from 1907.

Note the stucco.

And here are some of the neighboring homes:

Note: More stucco!

All things considered, I’d have to say this stretch of Oxford is a one of the more interesting areas that I’ve visited. The neighborhood is mostly intact and there’s a 1920s-style church at the end of the block next to the Santa Monica.

Now for one of the homes in the 1700 block of Oxford Avenue, which is a little funkier. Recall that the precise address listed in The Times couldn’t be located.

And for the vehicle of the week, here’s a stretch limo I saw at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia:

The Carlton Motor Lodge, via Google Street View.

The evolution of a community can often be acknowledged through the types of businesses along its main streets. Simple buildings from its days as an unpretentious neighborhood or small town often give way to more elaborate and ostentatious facades as the surrounding area gentrifies and grows more wealthy.

In the same way, accommodations evolve, demonstrating the area’s change from rural outpost to suburban bedroom community. Mom-and-pop auto courts from one-highway days develop into chain or upscale inns, or perhaps even disappear altogether, as high-end restaurants or boutiques take their place.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

Ventura Boulevard from Vineland Avenue to Laurel Canyon illustrates the evolution of a community from its days as farming area in the 1920s through rural pass-through and finally successful enclave, with quaint motor courts often giving way to higher-grossing properties. In the area’s earliest days, it served as the incoming highway from Santa Barbara and the far western areas of the San Fernando Valley, a perfect spot for tired travelers looking for a night’s lodging before completing their long journeys.

On March 3, 1928, owner Fred Rushton pulled a permit to construct a Class-D four-room auto court for two families at 10980 Ventura Blvd., designed by architect Roy L. Jones. He added a permit for two additional rooms for his Rushton Auto Court within days, and on January 8, 1929, applied for a permit to construct a cafe. Somewhere along the way he built a service station as well.

In 1933, an ad refers to it as the Tower Auto Camp, but within a few years ads call it the Tower Auto Court. This matchbook from the late 1930s shows its name as the Tower Motor Hotel, an official AAA approved motor court. The inside lists amenities such as “steam heat, air cooled,” along with the Cruze Inn Cafe offering “appetizing food.”

By 1938, Stephen Treadwell purchased the property from the Rushtons, pulling permits June 8, 1938, and September 20, 1939, to relocate the service station to the rear of the property and convert it into a sleeping room with bath and garage, and then build another service station. Earlier that month on September 7, Treadwell asked for a permit to move the 11’ x 11’ tower sign 50 feet east.

Union Oil Co. owned the property by August 3, 1949, when it pulled a permit declaring interest to turn most of the property into a beauty parlor, and add a steel canopy on the front exterior. By February 1966 the company had converted the property into a duplex, when it demolished and cleaned the lot. It appears that possibly the Shell Gas Station now occupies the former site of the hotel.

The Happy Valley Motel, 11514 Ventura Blvd., courtesy of Mary Mallory.

Further west down the street at 11514 Ventura Blvd., Samuel A. Weinstein constructed a Class-D motor court per the November 21, 1945, Los Angeles building permit. The matchbook prominently plays up mention of the fact that the motel stands adjacent to the burlesque Zomba Club. The inside of the matchbook calls it “Sammy’s Happy Valley Motel – the motel of Tomorrow To-day!” Amenities include 24-hour room service, refreshing tile showers, soundproofed rooms, beauty rest mattresses, and attractive rates.

By 1952, A. Charles De Rosa pulled permits to repair fire damage, perhaps caused by unruly tenants. Transient residents run scam businesses out of the property through the 1970s, some arrested per newspaper stories. The May 9, 1957, Star News reports that two men checked in and when they left the next morning they absconded with the television, TV stand, chair, mirror, and ash tray, all valued at $150. No word if they were ever captured. That year police made a narcotics sting at the motel as well.

The Hand Car Wash, via Google Street View.

A March 2, 1962, permit reveals John Gasporini as owner of the motel, cafe, and laundromat, and in 1964 the motel is now called the Valley Palm Motel. In the late 1980s, owner Hossein Forat operates Forat Electronics there. In 1991, he requests a permit to demolish the structure and construct a carwash. A carwash remains to this day, the Hand Car Wash, known for its giant hand beckoning customers.

The Carlton Motor Lodge, courtesy of Mary Mallory.

To take advantage of his property near the busy Republic Studios, owner Carl Mandel builds the class D, 30-room Carlton Motor Lodge at 11811 Ventura Blvd. in 1941. Architect L. G. Scherer adds some nice attractive touches, particularly the two-story entrance sign built by contractor Homer Toberman. By 1952 the motel offered 28 rooms and provided matchbooks promoting its business, listing such amenities as beauty rest mattresses, free radio service, individual private garages, private baths or showers with each room, 24 hour room service, automatic heat, and soundproofing.

During the 1950s, Mandel converted the linen room into a small kitchen and by 1956 sold to L. B. Blair. Duncan Hines Lodging guides list the property as a suitable resting stop for years, stating in its 1959 edition that single rooms cost $4, and two rooms cost $5 to $8. In 1962, owners added neon around the two-story Carlton Motor Lodge decorative sign, making it an attractive beacon with which to lure customers.The motel remains to this day, spiffed up but unfortunately the lustrous neon look has been replaced by a typical but plain marquee sign.

As Studio City evolves into a more prosperous community, these quaint small mom and pop roadside inns are slowly giving way to commercial enterprises or more hip accommodations, and losing a bit of innocence in the process.

A Brainerd home at 1158 E. 41st St., Photograph by Larry Harnisch/LADailyMirror.com

Note: This is an encore post from 2007.
Los Angeles
Jan. 20, 2007

What we do know about H.J. Brainerd is that he built a fair number of “portable homes.” What we don’t know, except in one case, is exactly where he put them.

Brainerd was active from 1906 to 1911, building homes throughout Southern California. His ads appealed to people like sportsmen, ranchers, oil executives and anyone else who might need a no-frills building put up in a few days in a relatively remote area.

In 1909, for example, Brainerd sold a three-room house to the Cerritos Gun Club, a three-room bungalow to Horace M. Dobbins for a ranch near Arcadia and a bungalow in San Diego, The Times says.

A Brainerd home at 1158 E. 41st St., Photograph by Larry Harnisch/LADailyMirror.com

The only example of a Brainerd home that I’ve located can be found at 1158 E. 41^st St. Although it appears to have some sort of masonry facade, the house is of the proper vintage and resembles the few photos I have located of Brainerd homes. Of course it has a big palm tree in front, the telltale sign of a home from this era.

 If anyone has information on other Brainerd houses in the Southland (or anything about Ducker’s Patent Homes), let me know.

Oct. 16, 1917: An architect’s rendering of Chaplin’s studios in The Times

Note: This is an encore post from 2013.

Ninety-five years ago, comedian Charlie Chaplin constructed the first beautiful studio lot in Hollywood, the first to offer style to filmmaking. What had been merely an industry housed in utilitarian structures soon blossomed into one that featured elegance in its buildings.

 Filmmaking was exploding around Los Angeles in the 1910s as filmmakers moved west for the sunlight, varied landscape and freedom from patents. Early studios were merely converted buildings; Nestor Film Co. converted the former Blondeau Tavern into a working studio in 1911 and in late December 1913, Lasky Feature Play Co. rented a little barn at Selma Avenue and Vine Street as their filmmaking site.

Soon, film companies began building their own plants, mostly plain, functional buildings. Actor/comedian Charlie Chaplin decided to join the building boom in 1917 and constructed his own studio in Hollywood. His would evoke class and beauty.

The Oct. 16, 1917, Los Angeles Times reported that Chaplin would construct his own studio where “the plant will be at once a workshop and a home for the movie idol….” Chaplin and his brother Syd acquired the R. S. McClellan estate at Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue as the site for their facility. The estate, constructed in 1914, consisted of five acres of lemon and orange trees and the “sightly ten-room colonial house set in the midst of lawn and gardens.” This house would become their home, while the lower acreage would house the studio.

Architects Meyer and Holler’s plans, featured in the paper, presented a picturesque little English Tudor village of buildings lining La Brea Avenue, to be constructed by Milwaukee Building Co. for approximately $100,000. Meyer and Holler were recognized as one of the top architectural teams in Los Angeles, designing Ince and Goldwyn Studios, and later designing Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the Montmartre Cafe and the Hollywood Athletic Club.

Per the newspaper, obstructionists originally mistakenly believed the studio would be erected adjacent to and behind Hollywood High School, disrupting students from learning. Businessmen spoke out to the City Council supporting construction. Banker Marco H. Hellman and other businessmen spoke out forcefully in favor of the project, noting the importance of the film industry in providing jobs to Los Angeles. He also stated, “Mr. Chaplin has done more in the way of advertising Los Angeles than probably any other man.” The council voted 8 to 1 in favor of construction proceeding.

The Jan. 20, 1918, Times noted that the new lot opened for business on Tuesday, Jan. 15. Writer Grace Kingsley described the special tour a happy and jolly Chaplin himself gave her of the new facility. Chaplin told her, “See, here’s a lemon orchard back of the stage. Think lemons must be my lucky fruit – can’t escape ‘em – had a lemon orchard back of us at Essanay and one at the Lone Star – hope they keep the lemons in the orchards, though.” Chaplin stated that “the fellow that couldn’t be happy here would be the fellow that would write a want ad in heaven.”

Kingsley found the comedian charming, especially in his description of his uniform of baggy old clothes as his “salary.” She understood the exacting nature of his work. “Charlie’s comedy seems entirely spontaneous – that’s its wonderful charm. But beneath it all he has the mathematics of merriment, the logarithms of laughter, at his finger’s ends.”

Chaplin spent many happy years making films at 1416 N. La Brea Ave., before being denied reentry to the United States in 1952.  The studio stayed busy, however, appearing in the film Hollywood Story in 1951, and acting as the home for many filmmakers. Stanley Kramer employed the location in 1954, American International in 1960, Red Skelton in 1962, and A & M Records in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, Henson Productions occupies the site, and a giant Kermit the Frog adorns the roof, clad in oversized clothes and bowler hat, an homage to the Little Tramp.

The Du Barry Apartments via Google Street View.

S. Charles Lee’s design for the Du Barry Apartments, March 10, 1929.

Still attracting admiring looks after 89 years, the classy Du Barry Apartments located at 458 S. Catalina St. transports viewers into a delectable fantasy world, all thanks to the talents of renowned theatre architect S. Charles Lee. Following his famous boast, “The show starts on the sidewalk,” the striking architecture of the building serves as an advertisement for luring potential renters and garnering attention from those walking or driving by.

In the early decades of the 1900s, a one-story possibly Craftsman home stood at the site, built in late 1912 by attorney Edmund B. Drake and designed by architect Arthur R. Kelly, who later designed such homes as William S. Hart’s Newhall Ranch and what is now the Playboy Mansion, as well as the Hotel Christie on Hollywood Boulevard. Around 1924, Drake sold to entrepreneur Jacob Kalb.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

Dec. 8, 1929, the Du Barry Apartments are featured in the Los Angeles Times.

Born in 1875, Kalb immigrated with his wife to the United States from Austria in 1898 and settled in New York, where he worked first in ladies’ wear and then became an exporter. They decided to retire to Los Angeles in 1924, becoming active in a variety of social and religious organizations, with the congregation of Temple Emanuel electing him first vice president in 1928. Deciding to capitalize on his investment, Kalb hired the celebrated S. Charles Lee, born Simeon Charles Levi, in 1929 to fashion a luxurious apartment building appealing and catering to upscale tenants.

The March 10, 1929, Los Angeles Times played up its stunning look, calling it a “style suggestive of the French architecture which was in vogue during the romantic period of Cardinal Richelieu.” This article reported that the $400,000 seven-story, Class A building would contain 80 apartments, electric heat, electrical refrigeration, a vacuum system, high speed elevators and garage. Maggie Valentine in her book, “The Shows Starts on the Sidewalk,” describes Lee, just gaining fame for his fanciful designs for such movie palaces as downtown Los Angeles’ Tower Theatre and the El Mirador Apartments, as employing “innovations in planning, layout, technology, and efficiency,” with these and other details such as underground parking highlighting his modern and up-to-date touches.

A June 9,1929, story in the Times listed Herbert M. Baruch Corp. as supervising contractor, a respected company which had served in the same capacity for such buildings as the Wilshire Temple, Brentwood Country Mart, Hollywood Bowl, and Beverly Hills City Hall. On June 28, Kalb applied for a permit to erect a rooftop neon sign by Electrical Products Corporation to advertise his residential complex. Lee conducted many load tests that summer and fall to verify the safety and suitability of constructing an underground garage. Permits show that 215 tons of steel and 4,500 pounds of concrete were employed in construction

By December 8, the paper reported that the newly finished building contained 69 units of 234 rooms at a combined cost for construction, land, and furnishings of $750,000 and would open in a few days. The structure contained 15 4-room apartments, 54 3-room apartments, and 12 bachelors, financed by the American Mortgage Company. Besides underground parking, the facility featured storage rooms, boiler rooms, linen rooms, incinerator, two elevators, steam heat, and Kelvinator refrigeration, with furnishings by Karpen Brothers.

Kalb began advertising the building by early January 1930 with ads noting it opened December 28, 1929, though it did not receive its Certificate of Occupancy until February 20, 1930. Ads promoted its 24-hour switchboard and garage service as well as daily maid service. By 1934, ads list its “home-like” atmosphere.

The building attracted attorneys, stockbrokers, and executives, such as Marius F. Johansen, Vice President of Gladding, McBean, and Co., as residents, though at a slow rate because of the Depression. By May 8, 1935, Alexander Investment Co. on behalf of Kalb sold the building to John E. Owens, owner of several luxurious apartment complexes around the city, for only $190,000 in cash.

Owens, who later served as president of the National Apartment House Owners Association, and the building gained notoriety in 1949 when Mrs. Agnes Garnier, Owens’ secretary and manager of the building, shot and killed him at his Riverside Ranch on April 22, 1949, after their long time affair went sour, he fired her, and she grew jealous of his attentions to actress Irene Rich. Though she claimed a quarrel between the two, the jury found her guilty of manslaughter. Widow Owens owned the building until at least 1963 before finally selling.

Still a majestic beauty at 89, S. Charles Lee’s sleek Du Barry Apartments stands as a monument to high-class design and construction.

Jan. 30, 1947: An ad in the Sentinel announces a preview of a model home in Carver Manor, a housing development designed by Paul R. Williams at 135th Street and Avalon Boulevard.

Stanford Avenue in Carver Manor, via Google Street View.

The Rev. J.L. Caston, a Baptist minister; attorney Lucius Lomax, publisher of the Los Angeles Tribune and the father of civil rights attorney Melanie Lomax; dental technician Albert Patrick; and attorney Vince M. Townsend Jr. announce that they are running in the City Council 7th District race against the incumbent, Rev. Carl C. Rasmussen, a Lutheran minister. Rasmussen, who was white and endorsed by the Los Angeles Times, was reelected.

Caston was endorsed by the Sentinel, which noted that he was an official of the NAACP, was active in the YMCA and was an honorary member of the Dining Car Workers Union. He placed third in the election after Rasmussen and Don A. Allen.

Note: We’re rebooting the concept of the 1947project (founded by Kim Cooper and Nathan Marsak) by going day by day through 1947 – but using the Los Angeles Sentinel, an African American weekly, rather than the very white and very conservative Los Angeles Times. We promise you an extremely different view of Los Angeles.

(The historic Los Angeles Sentinel is available online from the Los Angeles Public Library. We encourage anyone with a library card to delve into the back issues and explore the history of black L.A.