A First-Class Dwelling : A New Owner Discovers the Lively History of His House--and Los Angeles--in a Search of the Public Records
My house is my history book. Like a wise grandfather, this splendid relic of 1903 has been teaching me about the city that adopted me 15 years ago. The old place has watched Los Angeles grow from just over 100,000 to more than 3 million. It was here before the movies, before the aircraft plants, before the car dealers. It’s been through earthquakes and fires, freeways and race riots, even louvered windows and stucco.
And now, as the renaissance of downtown Los Angeles attracts new people to the nearby West Adams area, it may survive yuppies and gentrification.
My education began when I moved in early last year; I knew nothing about the place except that it was big, old and run-down, and that I loved it. But as I peeled away years of wallpaper and paint, the house nagged at me: Who built this place, and why? What was the neighborhood like then? Why did this elegant old house fall into such disrepair?
Finding the answers became my passion. For weeks, I spent lunch hours in the county Hall of Records looking over musty property-tax rolls and grant deeds. I stood patiently in line at City Hall to check turn-of-the-century building permits. I waded through local histories, city directories and old phone books at the downtown library. I searched newspaper files. Only bits and pieces emerged.
And then, finally, through voter-registration lists, I located a daughter of the original owner, born in the house in 1905 and still living in Los Angeles.
On a warm April morning, she came back to the childhood home she hadn’t seen in 56 years. The house was so different now, so dilapidated, she said; it was difficult to remember how things used to be. But gradually the details came back.
She still had a couple of old pictures of the place, and her father’s ledger, in which he had meticulously recorded the money spent to build the house: $4,087.75.
Just before the century turned, the area where Western Avenue now crosses the Santa Monica Freeway was a hilltop covered with wheat fields. Each hot summer afternoon, almost without fail, an ocean breeze cooled the hilltop. Real estate developers, eager to subdivide the wide-open spaces around Los Angeles, soon decided that West Adams Heights wouldn’t be for newcomers just starting out; this prized spot would be reserved for the grand homes of those already cashing in. Lots cost at least $1,500, and, according to restrictions placed on the deeds, one could build only a “first-class dwelling of two or more stories” worth “at least $3,500,” with its own private stable.
It was just the place for James Gordon Donavan. Born in 1865, Donavan had come from Illinois to visit Southern California for a few weeks in 1893 and, like so many others, never left. The tiny watchmaking shop he opened the following year on the site of the current Los Angeles City Hall became, by the second decade of the century, one of the city’s most successful jewelry stores. Now known as Donavan & Seamans, it’s still doing business in Newport Beach.
Late in 1902, Donavan and his wife, Rose, bought a lot in West Adams Heights and built a house that reflected their increasing wealth and optimism about the city’s future. The five-bedroom, 3,800-square-foot home stood proudly on Western Avenue at the corner of 22nd Street; directly across the wide, unpaved avenue was Berkeley Square, grandest of the turn-of-the-century real estate developments, with 20 giant “townhomes” behind a central gate.
The Donavans moved in by late 1903, the first to arrive on their block. They waited a few years for city sewers, street lights and dependable electricity. But by 1910, the area had become a tree-lined, manicured, upper-class neighborhood, linked to downtown by electric streetcars and dotted with magnificent churches.
In 1907, the Donavans’ daughter told me, the old coal-fired furnace in the cellar was converted to oil. In 1912, the family built a two-room addition; an earthquake knocked over a chimney sometime thereafter. The laundress used to come on Monday; the maid lived in a small upstairs bedroom. The older daughter was married in the house in 1920, and their younger son died there in 1926.
A severe recession just before World War I all but ended construction of new mansions in West Adams, though, and by the 1920s the area had become congested and commercialized. Smoky, noisy flivvers clogged Western, Normandie and other major thoroughfares. The houses came to be regarded as too big and too old-fashioned for the Jazz Age; some were torn down for apartments or stores. The original residents, their children grown, moved to the city’s new suburbs farther west, and newcomers--many of them Japanese or Jewish--took their place.
In mid-1929, Donavan leased the land to Shell Oil for use as a gasoline station. The home was given to a real estate speculator in return for moving it off the site to a lot three blocks away, and the family moved to Hancock Park.
As Los Angeles fell into the Great Depression, the relocated house became a rental unit until the property-management firm that owned it went broke. A husband-and-wife team turned it into a boarding house, often taking in the city’s poor and displaced. But they fell behind on mortgage payments, and in 1942 the house was sold at a sheriff ‘s auction.
World War II created an enormous housing shortage in Los Angeles as wartime workers and their families migrated to the West Coast. Even though the new owners were violating city zoning and safety laws, they divided the house into five small apartment units to help alleviate the wartime crunch. And because the housing situation only got worse after the war, the city never insisted that the dwelling be turned back into a single-family home.
Meantime, tracts of new houses, with new schools and shopping centers, replaced orange groves across the San Fernando Valley and drew residents away from older neighborhoods such as West Adams. Simultaneously, Los Angeles’ black community, for decades forced by legal restrictions and discrimination to live only in an area south and east of USC, began to move north. At first, just a few well-to-do blacks, including entertainers Hattie McDaniel and Ethel Waters, bought homes in West Adams. Then a growing number of black professionals followed.
My neighbors across the street, an accountant and his wife, were the first blacks to buy on the block. In 1947, they went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn deed restrictions that prohibited the sale of many West Adams homes--including their own and the Donavan house--to anyone “not 100% of the Caucasian race.” Once the High Court ruled that such covenants were unconstitutional, white flight accelerated, and by the end of the 1950s the area had become predominantly black. Many of the grand homes of West Adams are still occupied by the elderly black professional and business people who bought them during that decade.
The old Donavan place was sold in 1951 for little more than the $4,000 it cost to build in 1903. The new black owner, Frances Pride, was a caterer to celebrities such as actor Paul Muni, whose autographed picture I found in the house. She continued to live in what had once been the dining room, renting out the other four units, until she died three years ago.
When the Santa Monica Freeway was built in the early 1960s, it split the old West Adams community in half; all of Berkeley Square was razed, as were dozens of other turn-of-the-century homes. The gas station where the Donavan house first stood was torn down to make way for one of the freeway’s eastbound on-ramps. The damage done by the construction of the freeway was immense; property values dropped, the sense of neighborhood diminished and blight increased.
Yet in the last decade, a diverse group of newcomers--mostly immigrants from Korea and Latin America, and a few young middle-class whites, drawn by moderate prices, marvelous architecture and the proximity to downtown offices--have moved in. This influx has created a new demand for West Adams housing and has driven prices up nearly 50% in five years. There is some friction and misunderstanding between new and old residents. But that seems natural; this is a neighborhood achieving integration by the force of economics, not government mandate.
I still get puzzled looks and “you-live-where?” questions when I tell my white friends where I have moved. My black neighbors sometimes seem doubtful that a white professional moved into their neighborhood because he loves the area. But each hot summer afternoon when, almost without fail, an ocean breeze cools the hilltop, I smile. In a city notorious for anonymous neighborhoods, it’s nice to really know where I live.
