Ethnic Diversity Gives District Distinction : Fairfax: A sense of shared community exists amid international restaurants and 36 languages in high school.
Hy Epstein figures he could have bought a mansion in the San Fernando Valley or moved to Beverly Hills for what it cost him 25 years ago to buy and remodel his Fairfax District home.
But when the 63-year-old attorney looks back he makes it abundantly clear that mansions had little claim on his ambitions and the thought of selling his home never crossed his mind. According to Hy Epstein, the $60,000 he invested in transforming his $37,000 purchase into a comfortable home for his family far exceeded the value of the house at the time.
But the three-bedroom, English Tudor house on a quiet street within walking distance of the synagogues and the yeshiva held another immeasurable advantage.
“We wanted a Jewish culture for our children,” Epstein said.
Located to the east of Beverly Hills and southwest of Hollywood, the Fairfax District has long been the heart of Jewish Los Angeles.
It is bounded by Santa Monica Boulevard on the north and Sixth Street on the south; La Brea Avenue forms its eastern edge with Sweetzer Avenue as its western border.
Like the Epsteins, many families find comfort, convenience and a sense of shared community within its urban swirl. In the last decade they have been joined by a resurgence of young families who have been priced out of the Westside real estate market.
The owners of a nearby apartment building where they lived for 10 years before moving to their present home, Hy and his wife, Debbie, have seen enormous changes in the Fairfax District.
They remember watching the Hollywood Stars’ baseball games at Gilmore Stadium, now the site of CBS Television City. They can recall when Pan Pacific Auditorium, destroyed by a fire in 1989, had an ice skating rink and hosted midget auto-racing.
Today, they fret about traffic snarls, especially fearing the gridlock that is expected when the Gilmore Co. builds a controversial 700,000-square-foot shopping mall at 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue, currently site of Farmer’s Market.
But their own block remains remarkably unchanged. “There have been three or four sales of houses since we’ve been here,” said Debbie Epstein. “My kids say that this is the only area that you can come back and still know the people who live a couple doors away. This is a neighborhood with deep roots.”
The seven blocks between Melrose Avenue and 3rd Street on Fairfax Avenue are a familiar symbol of the neighborhood. Here such local favorites as Cantor’s Delicatessen and Diamond’s Bakery, along with many kosher markets, eateries and small shops with Hebrew-lettered signs reflect the district’s time-honored ethnicity. At the corner of 3rd and Fairfax is the Farmer’s Market, which has evolved over the past 56 years as a unique shopping magnet.
Surrounding this epicenter are sheltered blocks of single-family homes that also shape the legacy of Fairfax. Most of these homes are between 60 and 70 years old and were built in the Spanish style of architecture, said Cecille Cohen of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate.
Cohen said that prices start at $300,000 and peak at $800,000. Two-bedroom homes at the bottom of the scale are around 1,800-square-feet. Although people are often charmed by architectural workmanship such as high beamed or curved ceilings, these homes often need work. Those at the top are over 4,000-square-feet and usually offer a remodeled kitchen or bathroom and sometimes a pool.
While condominiums are scarce, there are many duplexes, fourplexes and apartments in the community. Typically, a one-bedroom apartment rents for $900 a month while a two-bedroom costs $975.
Joyce and Steve Kleifield’s decision to buy a home in the Fairfax District began four years ago with a desire to live closer to their jobs. Then living in Valencia, the couple first explored areas west of Century City. But, said Steve Kleifield, a Century City attorney, “We thought we could buy a better house here in a neighborhood we actually liked more for less money.”
What they loved about their three-bedroom, Spanish fixer-upper was its sensible floor plan. They paid $260,000 and have added a 200-square-foot playroom.
The Kleifields feel that the move has made a tremendous difference in their lives. “Valencia is a lovely city,” Joyce Kleifield said, “but being suburbanites was not for us. Here the area is so eclectic. We can walk to 3rd Street with its wonderful restaurants of any nationality that you choose. You have younger people, older people. It’s a wonderful mix.”
About one-third of the Fairfax District’s heterogeneous population of 70,000 are senior citizens who are drawn by the availability of low-income housing, accessible transportation and social services. Additionally, a large concentration of Orthodox Jews, Soviet emigres, and Israelis fuel the area’s rich cultural tradition.
The cultural diversity of Fairfax is also found in its schools. At Fairfax High School 36 languages are spoken and more than 500 students were born in foreign countries, according to its principal, Dr. Warren Steinberg. The principal of Hancock Park Elementary School, Brenda Steppes, counts 19 languages at her multilingual school.
Although Fairfax is a predominantly renter community, its population is characterized by a high degree of stability. It is not uncommon to find children returning to live near the home of their parents.
Ceil Tarlow, 80, has lived in her home on Colgate Avenue since 1942. “It seems the only time they sell is when they take them out feet first and then a young family moves in,” she joked.
Tarlow, a widow, says that the $21,500 she and her husband paid for their 1,700-square-foot Spanish home seemed like a lot at the time. But she has no regrets.
“We had a wonderful block,” she said. “I named it Colgate Gulch because we had a lot of family parties. My children look back with a lot of good feelings about their childhood.”
Close to the intersection of Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, Dick Flatkin and his wife, Rochelle, live in a spacious, two-bedroom, rent-controlled fourplex. The 60-year-old Spanish Colonial Revival structure lies within a corridor crowded with such buildings that extends east for a half-mile.
And while the Los Angeles city planner, who has lived in his apartment since the mid-70s, acknowledges that in some ways it would be easier to raise his two small children in a single-family home, he readily describes the advantages that the neighborhood offers:
“You can do almost everything you need to do on foot. Within two blocks there is a supermarket and drugstore. Banks and post offices are here. We have one of the best Jewish bakeries in the whole metropolitan area. There are large numbers of fruit and vegetable shops, lots of delis and restaurants.
“It’s one of the few neighborhoods in the city which functions as a neighborhood.”
But all that local historian Bob Ritterband can recall of the Fairfax landscape in 1923 were oil fields. Fairfax Avenue was a street then called Crescent and an airfield occupied the corner of Wilshire and La Brea where a World War I Jenny awaited takeoff, said the 80-year-old retired printer.
In the following year an empty stretch of land identified on the map as Sherman, Calif., and RFD (rural free delivery route) No. 10 was annexed to the city of Los Angeles. It became known as the Fairfax Addition, a name calling forth the Colonial Virginia family.
There were few Jews living in the thinly populated region. Most Los Angeles Jews had settled on the Eastside, in the communities of Boyle Heights and City Terrace.
But in the 1930s downtown realtor A. W. Ross recognized opportunity. Sensing the promise of a motorized city, he purchased 18 acres of land along Wilshire Boulevard for $54,000. After subdividing the tract, he sold business lots to buyers for $100 a front foot. This transaction set the stage for the Miracle Mile shopping district between Western Avenue and La Brea Avenue.
Another dreamer of the time was Roger Dahljelm, the bookkeeper of land owner Earl Gilmore. In 1934 he talked his employer into letting Depression-stricken farmers sell their produce on his West 3rd Street property. The 17 farmers who participated in the venture launched the beginning of today’s colorful Farmer’s Market.
After World War II upwardly mobile Jews with a desire for better and more affordable housing began moving to Fairfax.
The 1980s have transformed the community as development has grown along its major traffic arteries. Protests among residents reached a crescendo with the proposal in the early 1980s by the A. F. Gilmore Co. to build a 2.1-million-square-foot regional shopping center at Farmer’s Market.
Recently scaled down to 700,000 square feet and approved by the city, the open-air mall will include two anchor stores; a 150-unit senior housing facility is also planned. Still, the battle lines between residents and developers remain drawn.
Contends Diana Plotkin, president of the Beverly-Wilshire Homes Assn.: “When you analyze the fact that the Gilmore project started out at 2.1 million, I think they think that what they have come down to is quite reasonable. It might be reasonable from the point of view that they own the property. But it certainly isn’t reasonable when you think of it in the context of the cumulative effect it will have with every other project on the residents of the area.”
Chief among these projects are the substantial hotel and office development planned by Forest City Development for the Park La Brea Towers. The expansion of the home to 10,000 tenants calls for three additional residential structures; the construction will also entail the rise of two 25-story office towers and a 500-room hotel on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, the current site of a May Co. store.
David Hamlin, president of the Park La Brea Tenants’ Assn., is worried about the size and scope of the project.
“The draft Environmental Impact Report contemplates 33,000 additional trips a day in the neighborhood, without taking into account the specifics of the Farmer’s Market development. It was not quite approved when this EIR was completed. There are some real concerns about what it is going to be like to walk across streets, never mind what it is going to be like to arrive in and out of this neighborhood.”
The pressures from overcrowded streets, however, have hardly dimmed Wendy Sukman’s view of the neighborhood where she purchased a 2,023-square-foot, 65-year-old Spanish home with a pool in 1987.
The 31-year-old investment executive who owned a Westwood condominium said that she had always been “Brentwood, Westwood, and West oriented.”
“When I got here I thought, ‘Where am I moving to?’ ” said Sukman. “But there is value here. It is a very active community. And now I think for people who want to live in L.A. proper, this is one of the last great neighborhoods left.”
At a Glance Population 1990 estimate: 52,761 1980-90 change: +14.0% Median age: 43.5 years Annual income Per capita: 16,774 Median household: 28,376 Household distribution Less than $20,000: 35.9% $20,000 - $30,000: 16.3% $30,000 - $50,000: 23.1% $50,000 - $100,000: 19.7% $100,000 + 5.0%
