Youth Movement at Park LaBrea : Huge Complex Losing Its Retirement Community Image

It was dubbed “Menopause Manor” in the late 1950s, and the name stuck.

But Park LaBrea, the country’s third-largest apartment complex and the biggest west of the Mississippi, has outgrown its dubious reputation. New cars, baby carriages and joggers are the most visible signs that its 4,204 units are increasingly occupied by younger tenants, many of whom work in new office towers on Wilshire Boulevard.

Kristina Birkmayer, 23, moved into a garden apartment unit two years ago partly because of its central location. Growing up in the Fairfax District, she used to think of the 176-acre complex as a retirement community. Now that there is a mix of old and young tenants, she sees it differently.

“There’s a real core here of community feeling that you wouldn’t get anywhere else in the city,” said Birkmayer, a production assistant. “It’s like having 18,000 grandparents.”

“It’s so convenient to be able to walk to work,” said Howard Bodenheimer, a 36-year-old attorney who works for a Wilshire Boulevard law firm, just a short distance from his garden apartment in the complex bounded by 3rd and 6th streets and Fairfax and Curson avenues.

Gigi Gibbs’s commute to her downtown office takes about 30 minutes at rush hour, but she’s not complaining about the drive. What bothers her about living in Park LaBrea is her friends’ reactions. “They ask me what I’m doing in a place for old people,” said Gibbs, a 27-year-old information systems consultant who recently renewed her annual lease for the third time. “I don’t know how to tell them it’s not like that anymore.”

Soon, even the familiar look of the complex, which was started before World War II and was hailed for its innovative plan, will be updated by new management. The garden apartments will be painted in pastels--or as one tenant says, “yuppie colors.” And security gates and fencing will be built to give it “a little class.”

For years, Park LaBrea did attract more than its share of senior citizens. In 1960, eight years after the last of its 18 high-rises and 26 two-story garden apartments were completed, half its residents were 60 or older, according to U.S. Bureau of Census data. By 1970, the percentage had jumped to 67%. Age categories in the 1980 Census are grouped differently, but the data shows that more than three-quarters of Park LaBrea’s tenants were older than 55 in 1980, the same as in 1970.

Francis G. Heavey, general manager of the complex, now estimates that the population--between 8,500 and 10,000 people--is equally divided between those older than 55 and those younger.

“Every time they put up 1,000 square feet of office space along Wilshire, it brings in at least three working people,” Heavey said. “The whole area is enjoying a tremendous revival of interest.”

After years of decline, half a dozen large office and retail projects, valued at more than $400 million, are nearing completion along the boulevard in the mid-Wilshire area. The $35.3-million expansion of the nearby Los Angeles County Museum next to the La Brea Tar Pits has also contributed to the area’s appeal.

“Evan loves the dinosaurs,” Ned Hiza, who grew up in the South Bay, said of his 5-year-old son. “And I like being close to the Melrose theaters and UCLA instead of being out in suburbia. Let me tell you, life in the city is much better.”

The complex’s growing popularity is another sign that Los Angeles is coming into its own as an urban center, city planner Michael Davies said. The Wilshire Corridor, which at one point was seen as a place for retired people, is now viewed as ideal by “the new gentry,” Davies said.

“Los Angeles grew up with the dumbbell life style in which two hubs--home and the workplace--were connected by a commute,” Davies said. “It was almost a city in spite of itself before. Now, being close to the center, as in Park LaBrea, is considered more desirable.”

It’s a trend that Park LaBrea managers are happy to promote.

“It’s not like we’re about to run out and cancel bingo and put in aerobics,” said David J. Garber, executive vice president for the West Coast division of Forest City Management Inc., which bought the majority of units in November and manages the entire property, valued at an estimated $350 million, which includes a shopping center. May Department Stores still owns part of the complex.

“But we are replacing those signs that say ‘Park LaBrea--Community Living,’ ” Garber said. “People see those and think this must be a retirement community.”

The company is also painting the garden apartment buildings gray-blue and pink as part of a $5-million to $7-million rehabilitation plan, which includes creating a fenced, guarded community.

Park LaBrea obtained ownership Nov. 1 from the city of all the streets that wend their way through the complex except Hauser Boulevard, Heavey said. The property’s confusing layout--three circles form centers from which the streets radiate--is responsible for a second nickname, “Puzzle Town.”

By next March, a 2 1/2-mile wrought-iron fence will ring the perimeter, and at least three guarded kiosks will be built to screen visitors and prevent non-residents from parking inside, Heavey said.

“If you’ve ever gone house hunting and seen a home with a fence around it, you know it’s got a little class,” Heavey said. “At Park LaBrea, the fence will set the community apart and let people know this is something a little bit better than average.”

Company officials said rents will not be raised to pay for the improvements. But even without a rent increase, most senior citizens can no longer afford to move into the complex, Garber said. He estimated that 80% of the people who have moved in recently were between 30 and 55.

Park LaBrea’s lowest rents are about average for Miracle Mile, said Gary Wallace, a Merrill Lynch Realty agent in the area. Depending on its location, a one-bedroom apartment, including utilities, rents for $680 to $775 per month. Two-bedroom units rent for $890 to $975.

Park LaBrea residents who have lived there for years pay less because of rent control. For instance, Seama Crocov, 83, and her husband, David, 89, have lived in a two-bedroom tower apartment for 25 years. They pay $600 a month.

“We could not under any circumstances afford what they’re charging today,” David Crocov said. “Like many people here, we’re on a limited income.”

For the last 11 years, Seama has been one of several older residents who play bridge twice a week at the Park LaBrea Bridge Club. The youngest person at a recent weekday meeting was 56.

Park LaBrea’s older tenants appear to be in the majority during the week when younger residents are at work. Elderly people stroll along the labyrinth of streets, some toward the bridge club, some to and from nearby Farmer’s Market and the shops on Fairfax Avenue. Others sun themselves on benches or practice on a putting green.

This leisurely weekday scene has been the same for decades. Within 10 years of being completed in 1952, the complex had begun to attract older tenants, many of whom, like the Crocovs, moved in shortly after their children left home.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., which built Park LaBrea between 1941 and 1952, never intended to build a senior-citizen housing project, according to the company’s archivist, James Mann. The complex was part of a $300-million investment in building seven apartment projects, of which Park LaBrea is the third-largest.

All seven--Park LaBrea, Parkchester in the Bronx, Riverton in Harlem, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, Parkfairfax outside Washington, D.C., and Parkmerced in San Francisco--were based on the “urban village” model inspired by Le Corbusier, the late French architect and city planner. Le Corbusier envisioned cities of high-rise buildings surrounded by parkland, and many of his concepts won worldwide acceptance during World War II, when housing was at a premium.

The original plan when Metropolitan Life bought the property from USC in 1941 only called for two-story buildings with about 3,000 units. Progress was slowed during the war because of a shortage of building supplies.

In 1948, the company announced that it had revised its plans and would build 18 towers. Mindful of the criticism it had gotten about Parkchester, its largest project with 12,272 units in high-rise buildings, Metropolitan Life directed architect Leonard Schultze to leave plenty of open space around each tower. (Parkchester had been criticized because “its tall buildings cast tremendous shadows upon one another, darkening many windows for long hours of the day,” according to a 1946 article in Fortune.)

The result is a complex dotted with green belts. Joggers of all ages can be seen making the rounds very early in the morning.

One early writer rhapsodized about Park LaBrea’s design in an article titled “At Last, Houses That Fit People,” which appeared in a 1949 issue of Colliers: “Nothing in the blueprints takes precedence over the human need for light, and air, and elbowroom, and play space and gardens . . . and walks, and beauty and a chance to commune with God and nature.” Today, the apartments are bright and pleasantly laid out, and many have spectacular views.

‘An Urban Nightmare’

But social critic and historian Lewis Mumford criticized the company’s entire concept, particularly Stuyvesant Town, the second-largest complex, as “ . . . an urban nightmare . . . of impersonal regimentation, apparently for people who have no identity but the serial numbers of their Social Security cards.”

Many Angelenos apparently agreed. Vacancy rates rose as high as 15%, according to former resident manager Jack Rowley. Although the city had its share of apartments in the late 1940s, multiple-unit dwellings were not considered the norm, said Bill Mason, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

“It was a disaster,” said Carl Earn, 66, former manager of Park LaBrea’s 16 tennis courts and a resident for 30 years. “At the time, land was so cheap, who needed to go up?”

Despite the fact that more than 600 apartments were vacant at one time, the management of Park LaBrea continued to advertise the complex as “A Place of Distinction in Southern California,” managing to convey the impression that there was a long waiting list to get in. Each applicant was personally screened by the late Alice Newbery, the complex’s resident manager between 1946 and 1962.

Newbery was known to be particular. Children were housed in just two towers, and Burnside Circle was reserved for the rich. “I almost didn’t get in because I was Jewish,” Earn said.

Baron and Baroness von Deesten had no trouble getting accepted. Arthur, a 94-year-old German nobleman, moved into a 13th-floor penthouse apartment 33 years ago, after Newbery held one of her balls for the residents of Hancock Park mansions. The Von Deesten’s “little castle,” as Margaretha, 62, likes to describe the spacious apartment filled with antiques, framed telegrams from President Reagan and sterling silver and gold leaf wallpaper, is known as a “cut-through.” There are about 40 cut-throughs--units that have been joined by knocking out dividing walls--that rent for at least $2,000 a month.

Across the way from the Von Deestens, in a far more modest garden apartment, lives Margie Oppel with her husband, a former architectural historian, and 3 1/2-year-old daughter. Oppel, 40, helps run a baby-sitting co-op recently formed by Park LaBrea parents.

“This is the best place we could find for kids in the city,” she said, mentioning the abundance of open space. “And there are more and more of them moving in all the time.”

The mix of older and younger people keeps him feeling young, said V. G. Dunnington, a resident for 13 years. “No way would I want to live in a retirement community like Leisure World,” he said.

But some Park LaBrea residents, old and young, chafe at having to co-exist with the other generations. Sherry Shaw, a 30-year-old nurse now living in West Covina, said she moved out because she did not get along with her neighbors.

“This nosy old lady would come up to me and say things like, ‘I heard your telephone ringing last night, . . . “‘ Shaw said. “The final straw was when I was lying on my stomach sunbathing with my top undone, and the security guard came up and told me a lot of people were complaining about the way I looked.”

Older residents had their own horror stories to tell, especially about wild parties and increased congestion as a result of two-car couples.

But none of the older residents talked about moving out. “They’ll have to take me out feet first,” vowed Marcia Ford, 77, a tenant for 32 years.