‘The Hill,’ Hollywood’s Mediterranean Village : Whitley Heights: Built during the decade after World War I, many of the homes in close-knit community have been restored.
The list of those who’ve lived in Whitley Heights reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood--silent screen star Francis X. Bushman, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Tyrone Power, Donald O’Connor, Rosalind Russell--to name only a few.
Referred to simply as “The Hill” by residents and neighbors, the relative seclusion and convenience of Whitley Heights continues to attract members of the film and music industries even today.
“We moved to Whitley Heights three years ago after we’d fallen in love with its Mediterranean architecture,” said Australian artist Annie Kelly. “Its romantic history is a bonus, and the sense of community that we’ve found here is extraordinary.
“Our home was modeled after a villa on the Grand Canal in Venice and has always been known on the hill as Villa Vallambrosa. It was built in 1928 for a woman from the East Coast, who had arranged for architect Nathaniel Coleman to travel abroad to study Italian architecture.”
Just under 3,000 square feet, the three-story home has a concave facade, a five-sided filigreed balcony and an interior courtyard with original fireplace and fountain. “The 20-foot-high ceiling in the living room is typical of many homes in the area,” said Kelly, who lives with her husband, British photographer and writer, Tim Street-Porter.
“We love this area so much that we’ve bought a second home nearby. We lease the main part of that house to friends and use the rest as our studios.”
Located southeast of the Hollywood Bowl, Whitley Heights occupies an irregular triangle of lush hilly terrain to the north of Franklin Avenue, east of Highland Avenue and west of Cahuenga Boulevard. The Hill’s population in the 1990 census was 2,200; the median age was 35.4 years.
After World War I, H.J. Whitley, a major land developer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wanted to re-create a Mediterranean hillside village and thought the concept was perfectly suited for adjoining parcels of land he had purchased in 1902 and 1903.
Whitley’s vision and enthusiasm were shared by architect Arthur Barnes. Financed by Whitley, Barnes toured the Mediterranean to study its architecture and landscaping before returning to design a majority of the homes built on “The Hill” between 1918 and 1928.
In the late 1940s and again in the early ‘60s, construction and subsequent alterations of the Hollywood Freeway divided the original development, segregating about one-fifth of Whitley Heights, which now lies to the north of the freeway.
“The Hollywood Freeway took 49 homes from Whitley Heights in the late ‘40s, including those of Valentino and Charlie Chaplin,” said the late Brian Moore, the official local historian in an interview shortly before his death May 8 at age 58. In the early ‘60s, demolition for a Hollywood Museum that was never built claimed Bette Davis’ first Hollywood house on Alta Loma Terrace.
The majority of homes in Whitley Heights, built before 1928, include many interior as well as exterior features never seen in Los Angeles before 1920, but copied extensively afterward, including the use of wrought iron, leaded glass windows and tiled roofs.
The concept of hillside development was successfully introduced for the first time in the Hollywood Hills by Whitley, and similar innovations have been documented by Moore, whose four years of research and writing won both recognition and protection from further demolition for Whitley Heights under the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, as well as protection of its architectural integrity as a city of Los Angeles Historical Protection Overlay Zone.
“Whitley Heights hasn’t really changed since the ‘20s,” Moore said. The actor had discovered “The Hill” about 30 years ago while on location for a film. “I’d subleased a home from a friend and I decided I wanted to stay.” So Moore bought the home, which had been built in 1921.
The hill’s narrow, winding streets, paved in 1926, connected by flights of pedestrian stairs and supported by retaining walls, still serve the community almost 70 years later. Electrical lines and utilities placed in underground conduits, another novel concept for the times, as well as the original street lamps, function as they did in the late 1920s.
“The homes are the same,” Moore said during the interview “but it’s improved itself visually. It’s a better-kept neighborhood. I’ve been pleased to see that those who moved in during the ‘80s decided to restore rather than renovate. It’s certainly more costly to restore. I’ve watched as they’ve taken out sliding screen doors and replaced them with the original-styled french doors, and as they’ve taken out flagstone fireplaces and replaced them with the original terra cotta.”
Preservation is taken seriously by Whitley Heights residents. “People up here have a sense of history outside themselves and feel they have an obligation to the future of the community,” said resident Dave Heckman. A cameraman in the movie industry, Heckman has lived in Hollywood since the early ‘70s and moved into Whitley Heights 10 years ago.
“The rap on L.A. is that it presumably has no past, and we’re here to say that Whitley Heights is a very real part of L.A.’s past.”
“I paid $150,000 10 years ago for a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom fixer-upper built in 1922,” Heckman said. “It needed work on the foundation, and I knew I would have to duplicate expensive construction techniques. I’d looked at perfectly nice houses in other areas, but I was always intrigued by the Mediterranean architecture in Whitley Heights. I wanted to live in it and I wanted to be involved with the preservation of it.”
“A real fixer-upper” might be found in Whitley Heights today for about $160,000, according to Barry Sloane, an agent with the real estate office of Dalton, Brown & Long in Los Angeles. “However, such homes are rare,” he said.
“The general range of prices in Whitley Heights begins at between $275,000 to $290,000 for a 1,000-square-foot home to one that recently sold for $920,000. That home had seven bedrooms and a ballroom and balcony that could accommodate a 40-piece orchestra--straight from the ‘20s,” Sloane said.
Isabel and Bob Higgins bought their 1924 Mediterranean-style home in 1984. “We’d left our Greenwich Village home in New York to work in the television industry. We weren’t sure if it would turn into anything permanent, so for a time we lived in a hotel. Then we began looking for a permanent home,” Bob Higgins said.
“We fell in love with this house immediately. It has a particularly charming walled garden and terrace that have a wonderful view across (neighboring) Hollywood Heights and the Hollywood Hills. We later learned that Whitley deliberately had the homes built so that each would have an unobstructed view.”
Indeed, longtime residents Art and Barbara Lloyd, who live in the second home they’ve owned in Whitley Heights, enjoy three magnificent views from their 1923 Italian-style villa. “On one side we have an ocean view and Century City, on another we watch the fireworks at the Hollywood Bowl, and on the third, from the top floor, we see the Hollywood Hills,” said Barbara Lloyd.
For the Lloyds, living in Whitley Heights has been a family affair. Barbara’s parents bought a parcel in the Heights in 1922, but the lot remained vacant until 1961, when it was given to Barbara and Art, who built a French Norman-style home.
In 1969, the family tradition was continued and the Lloyds offered the home they had built to their daughter, Candy, and her husband. Although the Lloyds lived outside Whitley Heights for a time, they returned in 1974 and bought their present home.
The Lloyds vow they won’t move again. “We wouldn’t know where to find a place quite like Whitley Heights,” Barbara said.
“What keeps a lot of people here is the sense of community,” said Candy Barnhart, who, with husband Al, a captain with the Los Angeles City Fire Department, raised their daughter, Barbara, on The Hill.
“I moved to Whitley Heights with my parents when I was 14,” Barnhart said. “It was pointed out to me recently that it’s not typical to be on a first name basis with all your neighbors, but I am. And so is everyone else on The Hill.”
Barnhart’s sentiments were echoed by all who were interviewed for this story, but they were equally quick to add that everyone has a “let live” attitude that allows for a diversity of lifestyles.
“Whitley Heights has people who are very middle-class, 9 to 5 suburban types with children and it also has very colorful, rock ‘n’ roll stars,” Sloane said.
“When I moved here, there hadn’t been a baby born on the hill in 17 years,” Moore told a visitor. There were no young children. Then, in the early 1980s, young people moved in and it became a family-oriented area. We have lots of kids now. It’s a pleasant change.”
Like others interviewed for this story, Moore expressed his pleasure in the friendships he had over the years with Whitley Heights’ earliest residents. He said Whitley Heights is still “a small rural village in the middle of L.A.” because of the tenacity of its early residents, who fought to maintain the special character of The Hill.
Founded in 1923, the Whitley Heights Civic Assn. is going strong, taking steps to preserve its community’s unique architectural heritage.
During the ‘80s, Moore and Barnhart initiated docent tours in Whitley Heights. While residents applaud current efforts of the civic association to make Whitley Heights a gated community, they also encourage the docent tours as a way of sharing its architectural and theatrical heritage.
“It isn’t that we don’t want to share Whitley Heights,” said Heckman, president of the civic association, “it’s just that we don’t want Los Angeles to lose it.”
“If it hadn’t been for the organization,” Kelly said, “Whitley Heights would have been leveled. There isn’t a piece of land on The Hill where someone hasn’t wanted to do something out of character with the neighborhood. Now, with its HPOZ status, any new development, or exterior restoration, must conform to the original plans envisioned by Whitley.”
Residents’ No. 1 complaint is traffic. “We are an island in one of the city’s busiest traffic districts,” said Kelly. “The intersections on Highland Avenue at Sunset and Franklin are on the list of the 10 busiest intersections in the city. When the Hollywood Bowl begins its season, we’re barely able to leave our neighborhood.”
“I’ll admit (nearby) Hollywood Boulevard isn’t attractive,” said Bob Higgins, “and maybe it’s because I’m from New York, but I don’t consider it a frightening area either. We wouldn’t want to live any place else in L.A. I suppose if we ever did move away, it would be to the south of France. Whitley Heights reminds us of that part of the world.”
