Park Place
John Flanders used to envy his sister when he’d visit her and her family in their Westwood home.
“They have a sizable house with a backyard in a very nice family-oriented neighborhood,” said Flanders, an entertainment-industry professional who was renting a two-bedroom apartment in the Westside community of Palms with his wife, Anne, and their children, Forrest and Saskia.
“I remember wondering whether I would ever be able to afford a place to raise kids where they had so much room and were safe.”
The answer came last summer, when the Flanders were told about an unusual planned community just a few miles east of their Palms apartment.
The Village Green sounded too good to be true--a 69-acre complex of 629 condos and bungalows set among vast expanses of lush green grass and beautiful tree-lined walking paths. Parking was confined to the perimeter, leaving the inside of the complex free of traffic and city noise.
And yet, the Village Green was located in the heart of Los Angeles, spanning several city blocks near the intersection of South La Brea Avenue and Rodeo Road, in the flats of Baldwin Hills. The community is bounded by Rodeo on the north, Coliseum Street on the south, Sycamore Avenue on the east and Hauser Boulevard on the west.
The Village Green’s convenience and serenity also came with a relatively modest price: The Flanders family found a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,580-square-foot townhouse for $171,000.
“Try to find that anywhere else,” Flanders said. “It took us about a minute after we saw this place to say, ‘Yup.’ ”
It took Keta Hodgson less than that.
Hodgson, a cardiology research nurse, made up her mind to buy her one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit from a co-worker in 1993 the day the colleague, who was moving out of town, described the Village Green.
“I couldn’t imagine that such a place would exist in Los Angeles without my knowing about it,” Hodgson recalled, gazing out her living-room window at one of the greenbelts that dominate the view from almost anywhere inside the community. “Seeing all of this open space was breathtaking.”
The Village Green was designed in the late 1930s by Los Angeles architects Reginald Johnson and Robert Alexander, in consultation with the renowned architect and city planner Clarence Stein.
Their vision, shaped by the Garden City movement that began in Great Britain in the late 19th century, was to develop a “superblock” of affordable urban housing in an aesthetically pleasing, safe, community-oriented environment in which automobile and pedestrian traffic were separated.
The developers planted nearly 2,000 trees--from sycamores, and elms to the more exotic types--creating an urban forest impenetrable by cars with the buildings connected by pedestrian walkways.
Today the trees are in full sprawl, on grounds that are--no doubt about it--green, save for the camellia and azalea bushes that provide touches of color.
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Baldwin Hills Village, as the Village Green was originally called, opened in 1941. Stein later called the development one of the best realizations of his ideas for American city planning.
The complex has since served as a model for architecture and urban planning students and professionals. In 1993 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Although some 1,500 people live in the Village Green, residents marvel at how unpopulated the grounds seem. On a walk around the complex during the week you’re liable to cross paths with only a handful of friendly neighbors out for a stroll or relaxing on one of the park-style benches.
Other times, the only people to be seen are employees of the 24-hour patrol and escort service, the large crew of gardeners tending to the trees and flowers and the occasional resident using the pitch-and-putt golf course on the main lawn.
“In the summer I’ll sit out on the green, with this incredible grass and these old-growth trees keeping me cool, and it might be an hour before someone will come walking along,” Hodgson said.
For a multiunit development in Southern California, the Village Green has extremely low density, about 10 units per acre, with no building taller than two stories.
The effect is enhanced by the site planning. The units are grouped in 19 courts, which creates room for grassy areas on the interior (the main green and two side greens) and between the courts (“finger greens”).
“The clustering leaves a lot of free space for planting, and the landscaping is very well done,” said architect Robert Nicolais, a 20-year resident.
Nicolais said he sometimes feels as if his townhouse opens out onto New York’s Central Park. “It’s a beautiful place to walk around,” he said, “just incredibly pleasant.”
The Village Green typically attracts residents who cherish that tranquillity. “People aren’t using these greens for big picnics,” observed Debria Parker of Deloy Edwards Realtor in Ladera Heights.
The low-key architecture includes a mix of townhouses, bungalows and apartment-style buildings with upstairs and downstairs units. Every unit includes a private patio, and most have parquet floors downstairs and hardwood upstairs.
“There’s nothing heroic about the architecture, but everything is nicely built and quite efficient,” Nicolais said.
Most of the structures are four-, six- and eight-family stucco buildings, with individual units ranging from roughly 800 square feet to 3,000 square feet, though the vast majority are under 2,000, said Angelle de Lavallade Schwentner of Deloy Edwards, herself a Village Green resident.
She estimated that one-bedroom condos start in the $80,000-to-$90,000 range, two-bedrooms are selling for about $125,000, and the three-bedroom townhouses go for $170,000 and up. The monthly dues of the homeowner association range from $201 to $349, depending on the size of the unit.
In 1996, Rebecca Shaw was able to purchase a two-bedroom, one-bathroom Village Green townhouse that was in foreclosure for only $98,000. Shaw, a coordinator at a substance abuse treatment program, now lives there with her 4-year-old son and the boy’s father.
“I thought I wanted a bigger place,” she said. “You have this ideal of a [single-family] home with a white picket fence, and when you can’t afford it, you figure maybe one day you’ll get there.”
But she began to change her thinking when she woke up her first morning at the Village Green and heard a chorus of birds chirping, then looked outside and saw multicolored leaves decorating the grass in a way that reminded her of the South, where she attended college. (Besides the aesthetics, residents swear by the cooling effect the trees provide.)
Shaw was greeted warmly by neighbors, who invited her into their homes. Soon, she became involved in the Village Green Owners Assn.’s cultural affairs committee, helping bring events to the facility’s clubhouse each month and concerts to the lawn area several times a year.
“Everyone gets together, and it’s like one big family,” Shaw said.
The best-attended events also showcase the unusual diversity among Village Green homeowners. About half of the residents are white, about 40% are black, with a sprinkling of other ethnic groups. Most are professionals. There are a number of families with children, and as well as senior citizens.
“We have a very nice blend of people, ethnically as well as across all age groups,” Hodgson said. “That’s one of the unique things about this place, along with the landscape and the fact that it has changed so little since the 1940s.”
One resident who can attest to the historic integrity of the Village Green is Sara Cina, who has lived in the same unit since she arrived in 1946, just a few years after the complex opened. At the time, Cina was a renter, but shortly after the Village Green converted to condos in 1973, she bought her one-bedroom unit for $27,500.
Cina remembers a few things that were different. In its early years, Baldwin Hills Village had a small convenience store, a barbershop, a child-care facility and tennis courts, all of which have disappeared over the years.
But compared with the area around it, the Village Green has remained remarkably constant over the past 50 years.
“You’ve always had the same feeling--that you were in a different world when you came in here,” Cina said.
A desire to preserve Village Green’s special feeling has driven a 10-year-long historic-certification effort led by resident Dorothy Fue Wong, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District teacher.
Wong spearheaded the process leading to the Village Green’s designation as a National Register of Historic Places site in 1993. And now, assisted by scholars from Cornell University, Los Angeles-area architects, urban planners and preservationists, as well as some of her neighbors, Wong has begun to seek National Historic Landmark status for the complex.
If the pending application is approved, the Village Green would be added to a select group of about 2,000 properties across the country that receive federal assistance to preserve the site.
“This is one of the premiere landscapes in the United States,” Wong said. “It’s a prototype for a planned community in the modern age.”
The research conducted for the National Historic Landmark effort has already yielded a dramatic find.
In looking through archives at the Huntington Library, Nicolais found a 1944 photograph that showed the Village Green’s clubhouse with a mural painted by noted Southland artist Rico LeBrun.
The mural was later painted over and is now a white wall, but conservators have been contacted to see whether it can be restored.
These preservation efforts may not impress prospective buyers looking for luxury. “Some people are looking for tennis courts and swimming pools and security buildings, and we don’t have those amenities,” said Hodgson.
“But most people, once they see this place, fall in love with it.”
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Dan Gordon is a Los Angeles freelance writer.
