Family Built Dynasty as It Changed Face of Los Angeles
Shortly after he arrived in Los Angeles in 1893 to establish a medical practice, Dr. Peter Janss had a hunch that real estate development would be far more lucrative than mending bones. He was right.
With his two sons, he formed the Janss Investment Corp. and over three generations the family business developed an estimated 90,000 acres of Southern California property. After housing developments in Boyle Heights, Monterey Park, Yorba Linda and Van Nuys, the father and sons began building homes in the Sawtelle area.
And in the early 1920s, in a move that would have a dramatic effect on West Los Angeles, the family set the stage for its development of Westwood by donating hundreds of acres for the establishment of UCLA. The bold stroke also boosted the Janss fortune, according to Edwin Janss Jr., at 72 the oldest surviving family member and chairman of Janss Investment Corp.
Expansion to Ski Resorts
The business that started with Dr. Peter Janss and his two sons, Edwin Jr. and Harold, expanded its interests beyond Los Angeles into Thousand Oaks in Ventura County and then reached outside the state to take in two ski resorts--Snowmass in Aspen, Colo., and the town of Sun Valley, Ida.
In recent years, the operation has been run by managers as the interests of younger family members shifted away from development. Only Dr. William Janss Jr., 36, of West Los Angeles is now active in development. Even he admits it would be nearly impossible to duplicate the feats of his father, uncle, grandfather and great-grandfather.
Belvedere Gardens, which later became Boyle Heights, was one of the family’s first development projects. As a sales incentive, the Janss Investment Corp. offered one of the first payment plans for “as low as $5 down and $5 a month,” ads for the housing tract said.
The company then developed Ramona Acres, now Monterey Park, and converted 3,500 acres of orange groves into Yorba Linda. In 1910, the Janss Investment Corp. became the chief sales agent in a deal concerning 47,000 acres of San Fernando Valley property in what is now Van Nuys, according to newspaper accounts at the time.
But it was the 1911 marriage of Harold Janss to Gladys Letts, the daughter of Broadway department store founder Arthur Letts, that sent the Janss family fortune skyrocketing, Edwin Janss Jr. said in a recent interview at his home in the Sawtelle area.
The marriage ensured that Janss Investment Corp. obtained first rights to purchase nearly 3,300 acres owned by the Letts family in the West Los Angeles area that would later become Westwood Village.
The Janss family bought the land in 1922 and began building homes in the Sawtelle area between Santa Monica and Pico boulevards.
About the same time, Dr. Edwin Janss Sr. proposed that part of the land be used for the site of UCLA, Edwin Jr. said.
Before the University of California regents visited some of the sites under consideration in the Los Angeles area, Edwin Sr. arranged with the owner of a chauffeur service to have several Janss employees pose as drivers to hear firsthand the pros and cons of each, Edwin Jr. said. Edwin Sr. and others later used the information to point out the disadvantages of the other sites during negotiations.
Built Westwood Village
The ploy evidently worked. The Janss Investment Corp. donated 385 acres for the university, a gift estimated to have been worth $3.5 million, and then designed and built surrounding Westwood Village. The company built its Spanish-style corporate headquarters at the three-way intersection of Westwood Boulevard and Broxton and Kinross avenues, which it occupied until the mid-1930s.
After construction began on UCLA in 1927, the Janss Investment Corp. started development of homes in Westwood Hills, Holmby Hills and Holmby Hills Estates. Ads for the developments said prices ranged from $800 lots near Pico Boulevard to $150,000 in Holmby Hills Estates.
Edwin Sr.’s two sons, Edwin Jr. and William, began to battle their uncle, Harold Janss, for control of the family firm. Harold was the father of three daughters who were not interested in joining the family business. The power struggle resulted in the Janss family splitting its holdings, with Edwin Sr. and sons retaining about 10,000 acres of land in Ventura County’s Conejo Valley and Harold keeping Westwood.
Harold sold his Westwood holdings shortly afterward and retired.
The conversion of the 10,000 acres of Ventura County ranch land into Thousand Oaks housing was the last major Janss family development.
But the rapid development of the Conejo Valley site was a fluke, said Edwin Jr., who lived on the family ranch there from 1932 until 1964. He said he was not very interested in development when his father, Edwin Sr., handed over control of the firm to him in 1954.
Raised Horses
“My interest was in having a good time,” Edwin Jr. said. “I excelled at that.”
He had spent the previous 20 years raising thoroughbred horses at the ranch. At one time, he had 300 horses in his stable and 25 horses training at Santa Anita race track.
Although Edwin Jr. had already developed land near Camarillo into the Las Posas Country Club and Estates, he said he took over the family business reluctantly.
“I ended up converting a harness shop into our office,” he said. “I made my dad so nervous--he was constantly looking over my shoulder--that he died of a heart attack four years later.”
When Edwin Jr. began building four houses for his employees on Thousand Oaks Boulevard in 1955, passers-by started asking the price of the new homes, he said. At that time there were still fewer than 2,500 people living in the area, he said.
“After about 100 people stopped to ask how much they needed for a down payment on the houses, my accountant said, ‘You better start selling houses,’ ” he said. “Up until that time it was pretty primitive out there.”
He purchased 96 acres for the Conejo Oaks housing development and, before the tract’s three model homes were finished, all 98 lots in the development were sold. Over the next 25 years, the Janss Investment Corp. was involved in the development of about 20% of the land in Thousand Oaks.
‘I Was Lazy’
As demand for housing grew, Edwin Jr. hired sales and finance experts to oversee the day-to-day development of the Thousand Oaks area properties. “I was basically lazy. What I wasn’t interested in, I turned over to somebody else,” he recalled.
In fact, Edwin Jr. spent much of the 1960s protesting the Vietnam War and collecting wild pop art. “At that time we had a damn good team working for us, so I had the time,” he said. His anti-war activities earned Edwin Jr., who once had been asked by President John F. Kennedy to serve on a Third World development committee, a place on President Richard M. Nixon’s notorious “enemies list.”
Meanwhile, brother William was supervising family cattle holdings in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs. In 1964, William, a former alternate to the U.S. Olympic ski team, moved to Sun Valley.
Later that year, the Janss Investment Corp. bought the 4,300-acre Sun Valley ski resort from the Union Pacific Railroad. In 1968, the two brothers split their holdings, with Edwin Jr. keeping the Conejo Valley area properties under the Janss Investment Corp. name. William formed the Janss Corp. and maintained the ski resorts, which by then included Snowmass.
‘A Big Watermelon’
“Eventually we just got too big for a one-family company,” Edwin Jr. said.
Managing the family’s assets in recent years has been the job of Joseph Leggett, president of Janss Investment Corp. since 1972 and trustee of several family foundations. He began working for the company in 1962 as an accountant.
The family corporation, Leggett said, “was like a big watermelon with a dozen straws, everybody sucking on a straw. My job was to keep them all sucking at the same pace.”
In 1981, after the death of Edwin Sr.’s wife, Florence, the family company was divided again, with the fourth Janss generation trading in their shares of family stock for family assets.
“Now,” Leggett said, “everybody has their own little piece.”
For Larry Janss, 36, who grew up on the family’s Conejo ranch, his inheritance is the bowling alley, nightclub and coffee shop on Thousand Oaks Boulevard, across the freeway from the old family home that was donated to the city. He laments that his two children don’t have the same “10,000-acre backyard” that he enjoyed while growing up.
‘My Father Did It Right’
“I’m not interested in development,” he said. “When I was born here, the population was 3,500 and now it’s more than 100,000. . . . You can’t stop development, and I’m glad my family did it because my father did it right, with a balance of residential and commercial. But when I grew up here, it was just beautiful hills and open valleys.”
But Larry’s cousin, Dr. William Janss Jr., now head of the Janss Corp., said he decided that there were even greater opportunities working for the family business than in the field of medicine, the same decision made by his great-grandfather nearly 100 years earlier.
William Jr., who completed his medical education and residency in internal medicine at UCLA in 1980, has built several commercial and residential developments in Santa Monica, Salt Lake City and Boise, Ida.
“Everybody says that finally there is a doctor qualified to run the family business,” he said.
