Architect Paul Williams Honored for L.A. Legacy

He designed the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Nickerson Gardens public housing project. He designed palatial mansions among the oaks in Pasadena and brick Baptist churches in South-Central Los Angeles.

He designed Los Angeles’ first black YMCA and homes below the mountains in La Canada, even though an ordinance prohibited him from spending the night there.

On Saturday, Paul Williams, an orphan and black Angeleno who rose to become one of the city’s most prominent architects, was honored in a modest Mediterranean home in Pasadena, one of 3,000 projects that marks his legacy in Southern California.

“He’s really a historical figure for African Americans,” said Juanita Wade, 72, “because he was one of the first architects of note we were aware of.”

As sunlight streamed through the wide casement windows and across the hand-hewn beams, Williams’ granddaughter, Karen Hudson, showed 75 people slides of Williams’ life and work. The event was organized by the Pasadena Historical Museum as part of Black History Month.

Williams’ story began in 1894 on 8th and Santee streets. In a neighborhood of Germans, Japanese and Latinos, he grew up catching pheasants in the nearby bean fields and citrus groves, Hudson said.

“It was a very integrated L.A.,” said Hudson, who has compiled two books about her grandfather. “From that early age, he learned that other cultures could bring things to the table.”

He attended but did not finish USC and later studied at five art schools. After working for several architects, Williams set up shop in the stock exchange building downtown, always arriving to work immaculately dressed and expecting the same from his employees, Hudson said.

In 1924, he moved his office to Wilshire Boulevard. “He believed that people would treat him differently if he had an office on Wilshire,” Hudson said.

Her grandfather, even after becoming a renowned architect who designed homes for movie stars, faced blatant discrimination, often working in neighborhoods where the law barred him from living, she said. “He learned to write upside-down because it was inappropriate for a black man to lean over a white person, especially a white woman,” she said.

Williams became the first black member of the American Institute of Architects in 1923 and the first black fellow in 1957, she said. He was on five presidential commissions, routinely spoke around the country, and employed a staff of 57 during the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Over the years he designed every type of project, from sprawling estates in Beverly Hills to the now-threatened Long Beach Naval Station, from futuristic car dealerships to the LAX Theme Building. He designed St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis and Lucille Ball’s ranch house in Palm Springs.

The 1920s Monterey revival-style home where Saturday’s event took place lacked the sweeping curves that are Williams’ trademark, which was not unusual for the easygoing architect.

“Paul Williams did not put his style in it, he put his clients’ in it,” said John Ziegler, an architect who was in attendance.