Obituaries : Selden Ring; Pioneered Idea of Garden Apartments

Selden Ring, who four decades ago brought the concept of spacious garden apartments for young married couples to Los Angeles and with his brother built more than 5,000 individual units in the intervening years, is dead.

Douglas Ring said Tuesday that his father had died of the complications of cancer and Parkinson’s Disease at his Bel-Air home Aug. 5. He was 74.

Ring, who was so impressed by the media’s performance during the Watergate era that he established a $25,000 annual prize for investigative reporting, came to Los Angeles in the early 1950s.

He and his brother, Ellis, developed apartment complexes featuring waterfalls, artificial lakes and other amenities then new to the construction industry.

“Their models were copied by competitors, and the whole idea of apartments aimed at young married couples without children began to grow,” said Douglas Ring.

The developments, which earned the brothers several beautification awards from the City of Los Angeles, included units in Brentwood and Fox Hills. Construction was valued at nearly $1 billion.

The Ring family sold most of their company to Monogram Industries in the early 1970s, Douglas Ring said, but kept their holdings at Marina del Rey, including the marina’s largest waterfront complex, Mariner’s Village.

The first of the journalism prizes was awarded in 1990, Douglas Ring said. He said the delay between his father’s conception of the prize in the late 1970s and the actual award came from media leaders who were cautious about giving such a large amount to an individual reporter. The winner is selected by a panel of prominent national journalists and awarded through USC.

Ring also was a trustee at the University of La Verne and served on the board of advisers at UCLA Medical Center.

Besides his son Douglas and brother Ellis, Ring is survived by another brother, Irving, another son, Grant, and a daughter, Karen.

The family asks contributions in his name to the USC School of Journalism.