Historic-Cultural Monuments : L.A.’s Landmark Mix: Significant to Kitschy

On the list are such Los Angeles landmarks as the Hollywood sign, the Venice canals and the Watts Towers. But so are Bob’s Market, Bruno Street and the William Stromberg Clock.

They are among 368 sites, many of them little-known or long-forgotten, that have been declared historic-cultural monuments by the City Council during the past 25 years.

The list is an eclectic mix, indeed. Besides the expected assortment of adobe ranchos and Victorian houses, it includes two boulders, seven bridges, nine varieties of trees--including a 1,000-year-old oak and a stand of coral trees, the official tree of Los Angeles--and a tower built out of wooden pallets.

Discarded Wooden Pallets

“Maybe we were drunk,” said a former member of the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission, which unanimously recommended the designation for the 22-foot-tall “Tower of Wooden Pallets,” built by a Sherman Oaks man in his back yard from 2,000 small platforms discarded by a brewery.

The creation is joined on the list by a stagecoach trail, a cemetery, Los Angeles’ “only remaining winery,” a ship docked off the coast of Mexico and the church that once housed Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple. The birthplace of Adlai E. Stevenson, who lived in Los Angeles until age 6, is also on the list.

Often, people who live or work next door to a monument are unaware of its official status.

Consider Bruno Street. Located in an industrial area near downtown Los Angeles’ Union Station, another monument, it is the only remaining street in Los Angeles “with the original paving of hand-hewn granite block,” according to the city proclamation declaring it a monument in 1979. The block-long street was built in 1902 by Chinese working for the railroads, the proclamation says.

As with many of the monuments, there are no markers to alert passers-by to the street’s significance. And few people travel the roadway, which is potholed and littered with broken glass. Even city public works officials did not know the street is a landmark.

Los Angeles’ shortest street, 22-foot-long Powers Place, is also a monument. The red brick strip of roadway west of downtown built in the 1900s was recognized because it “recalls the era when horse power was prevalent in the city,” according to its proclamation.

Some monuments are not accessible to the public.

‘No Trespassing’ Signs

The wells that provided water to the San Fernando Mission, for instance, are at the end of a quiet residential street behind a fence posted with “No Trespassing” signs to discourage vandals.

Other monuments have been marred by graffiti or have fallen into disrepair. One of them--an old Pacific Electric station bordering Culver City--was illegally occupied by transients for a while.

Under city law, the special designation can be awarded to “any site, including significant trees or other plant life, in which the broad cultural, political, economic or social history of the nation, state or community is reflected, or which are identified with historic personages or with important events.”

Structures of architectural significance can also be recognized, as can “something unique in some other way,” noted Jay Oren, architect for the city Department of Cultural Affairs.

Take Monument No. 184--the pallet tower behind the home of 75-year-old Daniel Van Meter.

A visitor to the tower, which Van Meter built in 1951, will still find the “Schlitz” imprint on the side of the pallets. Van Meter, whose yard also contains half a dozen junked cars, an old bus, an outhouse and a turret from a battleship, said he built the tower so that he could have a place to escape the turmoil of big-city life.

In 1978, after the tower was declared a fire hazard by city inspectors, Van Meter appealed to the Cultural Heritage Commission for help. Shortly thereafter, his work was designated a city monument.

Members of the panel at that time do not recall the reasons for their approval. But, said ex-Commissioner Robert Winter, an architectural historian, “I think there is a tendency in Los Angeles to reward eccentricity, and I like that.”

The designation process usually begins with a nomination from a group or individual to the advisory commission, whose five members are appointed by the mayor.

The commission’s recommendation then goes to the City Council for a final decision. It takes a simple majority to approve a monument supported by the commission, but a two-thirds vote is needed when the commission objects to the designation.

Owner’s Support Not Needed

A nomination does not need support of the property’s owner. In fact, it is often sought by preservation groups opposing the owner’s proposal to tear down a building--a monument cannot be demolished for one year after approval by the City Council. Ironically, while monuments can be bulldozed after a year, they cannot be otherwise altered without city approval.

Tenants of apartment complexes, opposing their eviction to make way for construction of condominiums, have successfully argued that their buildings are architecturally noteworthy.

Recently, residents of Avocado Street sought--and won--monument status for eight 100-year-old avocado trees threatened by a street-widening project. Commissioners visited the site, as they always do before voting on a nomination, and sampled the fruit.

The trees were finally declared a monument because they were part of a grove that once stretched across the Los Feliz area. The residents’ argument was a simple one: How could there be an Avocado Street without avocado trees?”

At a recent meeting, an elderly Bel-Air couple asked the commission to give monument status to a pergola--a walkway under vine-covered latticework--that their neighbor proposes to tear down. They came armed with snapshots and a book on the history of Bel-Air to show that the pergola was part of the first estate built in the exclusive community. The commission has agreed to consider the matter.

Sometimes, a proposal to have a building declared a monument can develop into a high-stakes political battle, as when TV preacher Gene Scott last year packed the City Council chamber with supporters in a successful effort to have the downtown “Jesus Saves” church declared a monument. He overcame heavy lobbying by the building’s owner, another church, whose officials were worried that the designation would hamper their efforts to sell the property.

So far this year, 42 nominated sites have been approved as monuments, six declined and 22 are under consideration. One other site, a Victorian house in San Pedro, burned down the day the commission was due to act.

L.A.’s ‘Only Volcano’

The nominees rejected over the years include “Los Angeles’ only volcano”--it was a rock formation, not a volcano, the city concluded--and the long flight of stairs used by Laurel and Hardy while portraying bumbling piano delivery men in their 1932 film “The Music Box.”

“There was a guy in Highland Park who wanted the top of a hill declared,” Winter said. “He said that was where the rites of Aphrodite were performed. We didn’t declare it.”

The commission has been unable to act on a South Los Angeles neighborhood group’s nomination of a church because the pastor refuses to let commissioners inside to inspect the architecture, said commission secretary Nancy Fernandez. “I guess we’ll have to go on a Sunday.”

“We don’t mind anybody looking at it,” countered the Rev. Canon Lewis P. Bohler Jr. of the Episcopal Church of the Advent. But “we’re not interested” in becoming a landmark, he said, because the designation gives the city too much say over what can be done to the building.

A neighbor successfully nominated Bob’s Market in Angelino Heights as a monument. The owner at the time was notified, as required by law, but the market’s long-time managers, Bob and Keiko Nimura, did not even know the business was under consideration until after the commission acted and someone walked into the place and told them.

The market, recognized as “an example of a 1910 neighborhood grocery store with unusual Orientalized commercial architecture,” today includes a cluster of video games.

Most shoppers are unaware of the store’s status, said Keiko Nimura, who nows owns the business with her husband. “They just look at it and say it’s an old market,” she said.

Louis Fisch, a history buff, stumbled onto a monument to San Fernando Valley pioneer James B. Lankershim while researching the history of North Hollywood--a community that might still be known as Lankershim if the local Chamber of Commerce had not become fascinated with the aura of Hollywood and changed the name in 1927.

“Nobody seemed to know where the monument was,” Fisch said.

Not Visible From Street

The 15-foot-high stone memorial, built by the Boy Scouts of America more than 40 years ago, sits atop a steep incline at the end of Nichols Canyon near Mulholland Drive. Not visible from the street below, it can be reached only by a steep flight of 63 rickety wooden steps surrounded by overgrown shrubbery and weeds.

“The people who live in the nice homes around the monument don’t really like tourists coming to look at it anyway,” Fisch said. “They don’t want their privacy disturbed.”

But thousands of people each day see Monument No. 44--when they fly in or out of Los Angeles International Airport--with no idea of its significance.

The Spanish-style building is easily lost amid the huge cargo terminals around it. Hangar No. 1, as its known, was the first building at the airport, built in 1929 when LAX was nothing but a dirt landing strip surrounded by bean fields.

“Some of aviation’s famous early pilots, including Charles Lindbergh, used Hangar 1,” according to the commission files, which call the hangar “symbolic of the beginning of the aviation industry in Southern California.” Today, the building sits vacant. An air cargo business plans to renovate it into offices.

A small bronze plaque near Skid Row downtown marks the spot of Monument No. 104--Coles P. E. Buffet of the Pacific Electric Building, “one of the oldest continuously operating restaurants in Los Angeles.” It was established in 1908 in a terminal for horse-drawn, and later, for electric street cars known as Red Cars. Today, the terminal is an auto garage.

The bar and restaurant, declared a monument in 1972, are not as busy as “the old days” before the city’s financial district moved to the west, said 85-year-old Jimmy Barela, who worked there for 61 years. “The new generation, they don’t know much about it,” he said.

The plaque that hangs outside is often ignored or missed by pedestrians who rush by to avoid panhandlers on the street.

A plaque also hangs in the Alexandria Hotel marking the site of Monument No. 80--the Palm Court ballroom with a stained glass-ceiling that “symbolizes the best of the early hospitality of Southern California.” Recently, the downtown hotel was called a major drug-trafficking center by the city attorney.

At the site of Walt Disney’s first studio in Silver Lake, Monument No. 163, all that is left of the landmark is a rusty sign. It hangs on a street light--in front of the parking lot of a supermarket.

‘Nothing For Them to See’

“That’s one of the dumbest things that we ever did,” Winter said. “You drag people to a place, and there is nothing for them to see.”

Not all of Los Angeles’ monuments are in the city.

Manzanar, an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, is in Inyo County, 225 miles north of Los Angeles.

The SS Catalina, the “Great White Steamer” that ferried passengers between Avalon and San Pedro for more than 50 years, is docked off the coast of Mexico. Its owner plans to turn the ship into an “entertainment center.”

Some of the landmarks are not very old.

The USS Los Angeles Naval Monument in San Pedro was recognized in 1978--only a year after it was erected. It consists of the anchors and mainmast of the heavy cruiser Los Angeles, which gained a distinction in the Korean War--it became the first American vessel struck by enemy fire when its mainmast was nicked by a shell--and was sold for scrap in 1975. The city proclamation notes that the monument commemorates the only Navy cruiser that bore the name Los Angeles.

Many of the monuments have long since found other uses.

A cable car station for the Mt. Washington Railway is a private residence.

The La Reina, an 1938 Art Deco theater in Sherman Oaks, was recently converted into a shopping center. Its interior was gutted for shops, but the theater’s facade, including the marquee, has been preserved. Today, an electronic message board has been added to the marquee, and it flashes advertisements for the stores inside.

The church at Alvarado and Hoover streets, which once housed the Los Angeles congregation of the Peoples Temple, was declared a monument because of its Italian Romanesque architecture, not because of its connection to Jim Jones. It is now the Central Spanish Seventh-day Adventist Church serving the large Latino immigrant population in the neighborhood.

Just around the block from the church is another official landmark, Alvarado Terrace, a small oasis of turn-of-the-century mansions built between 1902 and 1906.

For people interested in finding such sites, the city Department of Cultural Affairs publishes a booklet listing the monuments, their locations and a brief description of their significance, along with an occasional black-and-white photo. The department receives about four or five requests a day for the booklet (for which it asks a donation of $2 or more), according to a secretary, and other copies go to city offices and libraries. Of 10,000 booklets printed last August, about 5,000 are left.

The booklet is out of date by now--not including the monuments voted in during the last year--so the department is updating the list, expecting to finish this fall.

Although it may be hard to understand today how many of the obscure monuments won their status, preservationists defend their inclusion on the list and say the city actually should recognize many more sites.

‘Story of Los Angeles’

“These monuments tell the story of Los Angeles,” said Ruthann Lehrer, former director of the Los Angeles Conservancy.

She is supporting a proposal, making its way to the City Council, for a $5-million block-by-block survey of the city to find other worthy landmarks. The measure would also strengthen the city’s 25-year-old preservation law by requiring owners to maintain monuments.

“For too long, Los Angeles has been a city which valued growth over quality of life, and it has lost much of its heritage as a result,” a city task force, which has been studying preservation efforts, said in a recent report to the City Council.

“I think you’re seeing the infancy of a historic preservation movement” in Los Angeles, said Councilman Joel Wachs, chairman of the council’s Cultural Affairs Committee. “I think you’re going to see increased consciousness as more and more people have roots in Los Angeles for longer time and have feeling and concern for the history of the city.”

But a council meeting this week showed that there is far from a consensus on the issue.

A vote Tuesday on a series of proposed monuments, including an apartment building designed by pioneering architect Richard Neutra, prompted Councilman Nate Holden to wonder aloud how some sites win the designation.

Holden, who is completing his first year on the council, recalled how he drove by one proposed monument last fall--also an apartment building--and found “the wrought iron rusted, the walls broken in and graffiti all over the building. . . .”

“What the heck is the standard around here?” he asked. “Who is this Nostros guy anyway?”

Holden was on the losing end of the debate--the Neutra building was approved by a 12-2 vote--but his comments infuriated Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who supported the nomination.

“A historical designation is not determined by whether a building is pretty, or whether it has graffiti on it, or whether it is run-down,” Yaroslavsky said.

‘What It Could Be’

“It’s determined by what it could be, and what it is. And only a mindless individual would make the kind of argument that says a building is run-down and therefore it is not historical. It’s as though you’re saying that the frame that surrounds this Rembrandt is broken, so let’s toss out the Rembrandt.”

Someone who saw a treasure in what others might view as a broken frame was Kris Dennison, a Hollywood chiropractor. An acquaintance of the William Stromberg family, he decided that the city should recognize the street clock installed in 1927 in front of the late jeweler’s Hollywood Boulevard shop. Located a few feet from one of the best-known city monuments, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, it is one of the few street clocks left in Los Angeles, Dennison noted in nominating the timepiece, which is enclosed by a metal fence because “it has been hit by a bus a couple of times.”

The City Council last year approved the William Stromberg Clock as Monument No. 316.

But one nominated monument that will not make the city list is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential yacht Potomac.

The file on the yacht, opened in 1976 when the vessel was docked in Los Angeles Harbor, still is in the “pending” section of the crowded cabinets in the Cultural Heritage Commission’s cubbyhole office on the 15th floor of City Hall.

The yacht was nominated by a former owner (not F.D.R.), but he never pursued the matter and the files are absent of any explanation--thus missing some of the boat’s most interesting history.

Unbeknown to the commission, the owner was jailed when the yacht was seized in a drug raid. Later, the vessel sank in San Francisco Bay.

It was recovered and purchased by the Port of Oakland, which is restoring the yacht as a floating museum. That city is also seeking to have the yacht declared one of its landmarks.

CITY MONUMENTS--Some that made it, some that didn’t and some that mightStone gates leading to Hollywoodland.

Among the historic-cultural monuments approved by the Los Angeles City Council:

Former home of William Grant Still--When he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1936, Still became the first black to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States. His house near Crenshaw and Pico boulevards was declared a monument in 1976. It is now in disrepair and up for sale. “I call it a hysterical monument because it is in such bad shape,” Still’s daughter said.

Old Stagecoach Trail--At the northwest end of the San Fernando Valley, it was blasted out of rock in 1860 and became part of the main link between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Rosedale Cemetery--Established in 1884, it is one of the oldest operating cemeteries in Los Angeles. Located at 1831 W. Washington Blvd., it was the first cemetery west of the Mississippi to build and operate a crematory. Two pyramid mausoleums within the cemetery are “classic examples of the late 19th-Century and early 20th-Century funerary architecture,” according to the city proclamation.

Stone gates--Built by European stonemasons in the early 1920s, they form the entrance to Hollywoodland, a residential subdivision that also gave Los Angeles one of its best-known landmarks. As an advertising gimmick, a huge HOLLYWOODLAND sign was erected high on the hills. The last syllable was removed in 1946 because it was in poor condition.

Finney’s Cafeteria--With wall tiles featuring scenes of Holland, it opened downtown in 1914 and was going to be the first of a chain of soda parlors depicting different European countries. But plans for additional shops were never carried out, and today it is boarded up. The owners are considering selling it.

Stairs used in “The Music Box.”

Among the sites nominated but rejected by the Cultural Heritage Commission or City Council. J. R. Toberman residence--This large Colonial Revival house was home to the man who served as Los Angeles’ mayor from 1872 to 1874 and from 1878 to 1882. The house was recommended as a monument by the commission, but rejected by the City Council in 1985 “inasmuch as the property owner and the councilman of the district object.”

Laurel and Hardy stairway--The long flight of stairs was used by the comedy team portraying bumbling piano deliverymen in the 1932 film “The Music Box.” The commission declined to recommend the site as a city monument, saying the stairway “was not significant.”

Venice City Hall--Built in 1907, the building served as Venice City Hall until the community was annexed to Los Angeles in 1924. Commissioners rejected the request for monument status, noting that the building had been “drastically altered to the extent that it is now totally devoid of its California Mission-style architecture.”

First United Methodist Church--In 1982, preservationists got the Cultural Heritage Commission to recommend the 60-year-old Renaissance Revival downtown church for monument status. But the City Council declined to give final approval because of opposition from the church and the councilman from the district. The Southern California Gas Co. at the time wanted to buy the land at 8th and Hope streets for a new building. But the building was never constructed and the site now is a parking lot.

Tail ‘o the Pup fast-food stand.

Some nominated sites that have not completed the process: Tail o’ the Pup--In 1980, the commission recommended monument status for the well-known fast-food stand shaped like a hot dog that was threatened by development. But the operator of the stand found a new location, near Beverly Center, easing the immediacy of the matter. The recommendation has been listed as pending before a City Council committee ever since.

Edison steam plant--Nominated by the Los Angeles Conservancy, the power plant, built in 1903 on the edge of downtown, was the first in Southern California to use steam turbines. Today, it is a warehouse. Recommended for landmark designation by the commission last year, it is awaiting action by the City Council.

Feuchtwanger house--The former home of novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, the 22-room, Spanish-style mansion overlooking Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades served as a meeting place for anti-Nazi intellectuals, including playwright Bertolt Brecht and novelist Thomas Mann, who fled Germany during the Hitler years. The nomination by Councilman Marvin Braude won the approval of the Cultural Heritage Commission and is pending before the City Council.

Gas station--The 1938 Mission-style station on Sunset Boulevard near Barrington Avenue was nominated by the Brentwood Homeowners Assn. after a developer proposed building a mini-mall there. “Besides being special architecturally, the building is culturally important--as it is customary to see your neighbors at the gas station,” says the application.

OTHER HISTORIC SITES

The city of Los Angeles isn’t alone in recognizing historic sites. There are county, state and national landmarks--dozens of them in Los Angeles County.

Some may come as a surprise. The county’s list of “Historical Sites in Los Angeles County,” for example, includes Disneyland, which is in Orange County.

The county has:

11 national landmarks (including the Space Flight Simulator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena; California’s “first commercially productive oil well,” which is in the Santa Clarita Valley, and the carrousel at Santa Monica Pier, which was dedicated as a landmark this month) along with 266 entries on the National Register of Historic Places. A national landmark must have national significance, while sites on the National Register can be significant merely to a region. Both must be approved by the U.S. Interior Department.

89 state landmarks and 39 state “points of historical interest.” These are often marked by signs along freeways--describing, for instance, a skirmish between American and Mexican forces--or by bronze plaques on buildings. They are recommended by the state Historical Resources Commission to the state director of parks and recreation for approval. Among the state landmarks is the Whittier grave of George (Greek George) Caralambo, a camel driver who came to the United States in 1857 with the second load of camels purchased by the War Department as an experiment to open a wagon road through the West. Because of the Civil War, the experiment was abandoned.

About 50 county landmarks. There is no precise number because the county has not kept a complete list, according to Violet Varona, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles County’s Historical Landmarks and Records Commission, which recommends sites to the Board of Supervisors for approval. “I never had a request for it before,” she said.

Some landmarks, such as the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, are on several of the lists.

Unlike city-designated historic-cultural monuments, county, state and national landmarks cannot be declared without the approval of the property’s owner. They are largely honorary, but listing on the National Register can provide tax breaks.