On the edge of what is now...

On the edge of what is now the Vermont Avenue exit off the Hollywood Freeway, theater magnate Alexander Pantages once owned a five-acre estate.

But even before Pantages owned the property, its Mediterranean mansion was the subject of a thousand and one tales.

The home, built between 1906 and 1908 by Los Angeles architect Edwin Bergstrom for himself and his young wife, included five marble bathrooms. Nine years later, it was reported in The Times that Bergstrom sold the property for $100,000 to a man described as “belonging to one of Mexico’s most distinguished families.”

As the legend goes, Lazaro de la Garza came to Los Angeles with $1 million to purchase guns and ammunition for Pancho Villa’s revolutionary forces in Mexico. The outbreak of fighting prevented him from getting back across the border, but he did manage to sell the ammunition at a profit. Garza decided to keep the money, which outraged Villa, and remain in Southern California.

A few years later, Villa told the U.S. government that he had seized a prominent American in Mexico and would hold him until the United States turned Garza over to him. When reports filtered out of Mexico that assassins were coming to get him, Garza built escape tunnels under the mansion.

With its high walls and iron gate, it was one of the most carefully guarded estates in America. Garza fled to Europe, and Villa released the American.

In the 1920s, Pantages, known as the “Great God Pan,” purchased the mansion, where he died of a heart attack in 1936.

During World War II, military police used the house as their headquarters. It then reverted back to the Pantages heirs and was bought in 1947 by the Jewish Community Council.

Excavations for the council’s new $900,000 L-shaped office building inched up to the very doorstep of the fortress-like mansion at 590 N. Vermont Ave. It was demolished once the new building was completed in 1951.

That building now houses the Cleveland Chiropractic College, and the site of the mansion is now a parking lot. The property is up for sale.