Out with the old

Snakes shed scales. Roses drop petals. And Los Angeles levels buildings -- about three per day.

Taken together, a year’s worth of demolition permits amount to a new sort of ghost town, one whose structures once were scattered over the city’s 465 square miles. It’s an upscale ghost town, dominated by more than 135 Westside homes, many scraped away to make room for houses even larger.

The rest of phantom L.A., as gleaned in a Times study of 2001’s 1,211 demolition permits, includes sites as familiar as the Gilmore Bank -- the ‘50s Modernist structure at the Farmers Market complex, leveled to make room for the Grove shopping mall -- and as obscure as the Shell station at South La Brea Avenue and Rodeo Road, which is now a bare-scraped lot.

This “erase-atecture,” as some architectural historians call it, gives builders room to press forward with their perpetual reinvention of the city, and it often protects the public from unsafe structures. But nobody knows just how much valuable history the wrecking balls obliterate each year, because in most cases, nobody’s keeping track.

About 85% of the city’s standing structures have never been surveyed for historic or cultural significance, a study by the Getty Conservation Institute found in late 2001. Experts say this appears to put Los Angeles substantially behind such cities as Chicago (which completed a survey of its pre-1940 properties in 1995), Seattle (which in 2001 began a six-year building inventory project) and New York (where officials have stopped short of a citywide survey, but have logged a list of landmarks and historic districts that includes 22,000 properties, roughly 3% of the city’s total). By those and other measures, authorities in and outside Southern California say, official Los Angeles lags behind most major U.S. cities in attending to its architectural history.

“You hate to wake up to the sound of chainsaws or bulldozers,” says Dwayne Howard, who failed earlier this year in his efforts to block partial demolition of a Mar Vista home designed by modernist Gregory Ain. Although Howard’s efforts may lead to designation of a tract of Ain-designed homes as a historic zone, much of the threatened house was torn down in May.

The city’s leaders “have a responsibility that they’re not living up to,” says Alan Leib, volunteer chairman of the Los Angeles Conservancy’s modern committee.

For 40 years, city officials have been building a list of historic monuments, but without any particular methodology. Typically, a property goes unnoticed unless a resident nominates it, and those nominations, usually a dozen or two a year, frequently materialize as last-ditch acts of desperation when demolitions are threatened.

“I dare say that Los Angeles has never chosen to take itself seriously,” said Timothy P. Whelan, director of the Getty Conservation Institute, which is trying to build support for a citywide survey.

But among homeowners and entrepreneurs who are wary of creeping government restrictions, the word “historic” alone can start a debate.

“In the abstract, I don’t have any problem at all with surveys,” says attorney Tom Larmore, who is part of a Santa Monica homeowners’ revolt against that city’s historic-designation process. “I think inventory is an important part of any system. But the city should not be in a position of mandating that your house be historic. It’s just a fundamental impairment of individual freedom. In the process of trying to preserve some old building so you can drive by it once a year and say, ‘That’s nice,’ you’re really impinging on somebody.”

If that movement’s signature-gathering campaign succeeds, says Larmore, Santa Monica’s voters may in 2003 or 2004 face a ballot measure that would essentially give single-family homeowners veto rights over any historic designation.

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, the scales are weighted differently. Demolition applications get less scrutiny, and repeated efforts to take better measure of the city’s architectural history have collapsed.

“We don’t know what we have in this city,” says Ken Bernstein, the Los Angeles Conservancy’s director of preservation issues. In 2001, he said, his organization lobbied to save about three dozen imperiled addresses, usually alerted at the 11th hour by protests from neighbors. Some of those buildings have been preserved and given historic monument status, like the Chateau Colline apartment building in Westwood. Others, like the Gilmore Bank, were leveled anyway when city officials were unable or unwilling to intervene.

Among the demolition targets that nobody told the conservancy about, the roll call runs from sacred to profane: in the 5900 block of South Main Street, a church dating to 1929. In the 2500 block of North Soto Street, a 1940 dance hall. On West 4th Street in San Pedro, a 1932 mortuary. On North Telfair Avenue in Pacoima, a chicken coop from 1938. On Newcastle Avenue in Northridge, a bomb shelter from the early Cold War days of 1956.

To review last year’s demolitions in Los Angeles, The Times used computer software to link city and county records, then analyzed the age, type and location of buildings targeted for destruction. Of all permits, roughly one in four were for garages or carports only. Residential buildings outnumbered commercial structures by a wide margin. Among the findings:

The city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, largely overlooked by architectural surveys, do the most demolition.

Pacific Palisades, where census figures show the median household income is nearly three times that of the rest of the city, had more teardowns authorized than any other ZIP Code area in the city: 54, including 41 homes, most of them built between 1940 and 1952. Brentwood, with incomes about twice the city average, ran second, with 50 demo permits issued, 36 of them for houses, most from the 1940s.

Neither area has ever had a city historic survey -- an alarming oversight, says preservation expert and Getty researcher Kathryn Welch Howe, because “those are areas of great architectural significance, since there has been affluence throughout time in those neighborhoods.”

Other areas never surveyed by the city, despite a history of notable residential architecture, include Bel-Air, most of the Hollywood Hills and Silver Lake, home to many of the 36 Case Study homes, built from 1945 to 1962, that architects prize as forerunners of the modernist movement. Any assessment of those neighborhoods, said architectural historian Richard Starzack of Myra L. Frank & Associates, “is going to have some pretty important architects represented.”

But in such neighborhoods, even a big-name architect’s work may not withstand homeowners’ big ideas. In 1998, technology mogul Gary Winnick bought a 12,000-square-foot home designed in the 1960s by celebrated architect Paul Williams for Ronald Reagan confidant Henry Salvatori, then leveled it. After the razing, Winnick lost interest in the 4-acre property and traded it to developer David Murdock, who turned around and sold it again a year later for $15 million.

In early November, bulldozers leveled the “Pink Palace” of Holmby Hills, an 8,200-square-foot 1935 Spanish-style home built at 10100 Sunset Blvd. for Rudy Vallee, much amended by Jayne Mansfield and later taken over by Engelbert Humperdinck. The current owners, listed as Burns Sunset Properties LLC, have cited plans to combine the 1.4-acre site with two neighboring properties to make a 10-acre compound.

Buildings from the early 1920s and late 1940s are the most likely targets.

That’s not surprising, historians note, since so many structures went up during those boom eras, just before the Depression and just after World War II’s conclusion. More than 200 structures built from 1947 to 1950 were targeted for demolition last year, along with 156 structures that went up from 1923 to 1926.

“Those are the periods of housing that are being hit all over the country,” said Adrian Scott Fine, a senior program officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who recently completed a report on tear-downs nationwide. “That’s a big percentage of the historic housing stock for a lot of communities.” In many cases, he added, “the houses that are going down are perfectly good houses.”

But they’re not big houses. Fine notes the average new American house measured 1,000 square feet in 1950; 1,500 square feet in 1970; 2,260 square feet in 2001.

Locally, demolitions typically jump with every economic boom.

Demolition permits in Los Angeles have fluctuated since 1997, rising and dipping between 955 and 1,418. In Santa Monica, officials granted 276 demolition permits from 1999 through 2001, and 58 in the first nine months of 2002. In Beverly Hills, officials report that they issued 65 residential demolition permits from 2000 through 2001 and 21 in the first nine months of 2002.

But beyond Southern California, the National Trust’s Fine warned in a July study, “a disturbing pattern of demolitions is approaching epidemic proportions in historic neighborhoods across America.”

In days gone by, Fine and colleague Jim Lindberg wrote, the tear-down phenomenon was mostly limited to ultra-rich neighborhoods, such as Beverly Hills, where new residents have long knocked down sound old homes to build bigger, more luxurious residences. Now, the National Trust study asserts, historic neighborhoods in Chicago, Denver, Dallas and elsewhere are among more than 100 communities in 20 states reporting growing numbers of tear-downs.

To grapple with such issues, city-to-city comparisons show, New York has a staff of about 45 devoted to architectural preservation duties; Chicago and San Francisco, 10 staffers each; Washington, D.C., Seattle, Atlanta and Phoenix, four to nine full-timers each. Los Angeles has two to four, depending on how employees are counted.

Further, authorities note that Los Angeles is the only major American city that has not yet joined a federally sponsored “certified local partner” preservation program, which offers financial incentives to cities that agree to survey their historic resources and appoint commissioners with training in architecture, archeology or city planning. Given the relatively low cost of joining, that program “should be a no-brainer,” says the L.A. Conservancy’s Bernstein. City officials say they’re working toward joining the program.

And although the Los Angeles City Council has granted protective historic status to 15 neighborhoods and 738 individual sites, within its 465-square-mile area, that sort of protection is weaker in Los Angeles than in many other cities. Instead of blocking an owner’s demolition plans, as a monument designation does in New York, such a designation by itself in Los Angeles can only delay demolition for up to 360 days.

Further, the city’s monument list includes some surprising omissions, such as the 1954 Capitol Records building in Hollywood -- one of Los Angeles’ foremost icons, with an exterior that resembles a stack of records with a stylus on top. Nobody has nominated it, city officials say. (Despite its local omission, the Capitol Records building is listed as a state historic resource. Historic status at the city level typically carries more protection than inclusion on state or national monument lists, preservationists say.)

“Not every old building needs to be saved,” says John Welborne, a Los Angeles preservation consultant who sits on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “But there are a lot of good examples of historic architecture out there that can be adaptively reused.” Too often, he says, “it hasn’t been done.”

The process

When a property owner in Los Angeles plans to level a building, the first step is to apply for a permit with the city’s Building and Safety Department. That department typically sends an inspector to check out the targeted structure, and if the building doesn’t already carry a historic designation, inspectors are unlikely to raise an alarm. In fact, the application form asks many questions about location, valuation, the owner and the contract, but no questions about the age of the structure involved.

The city Building and Safety Department’s spokesman and chief residential inspector, Bob Steinbach, said his department has, on occasion, flagged threats to potentially significant buildings, “but I can’t remember the last time that it happened. We don’t track that.” He also said the city keeps no record of how often demolition requests are turned down.

Jay Oren, the city’s historic preservation officer, says that in 15 years, he can’t remember ever getting a call from Building and Safety officials seeking advice on a proposed demolition that didn’t already have a historic designation. In Santa Monica, by comparison, a city landmarks commission reviews demolition applications for every building more than 40 years old.

L.A.’s current practices, asserts the Getty’s Howe, amount to “a pattern of inadequate appraisals, last-minute interpretations, and limited negotiating room in the designation and reviews process. This has resulted in the destruction of important buildings along with the erosion of community trust and loss of investment dollars.”

Right now, Howe says, developers are probably spending $1 million or more yearly on legally mandated piecemeal pre-project studies that might not be necessary if a city survey was in place. Given that, says Howe, she suspects “it’s costing Los Angeles more to be without a survey than to develop one.”

Howe and others have made this case in recent meetings with City Councilman Jack Weiss, who hopes to build a coalition to push forward with a citywide survey. Weiss, whose 5th District territory includes much of the city’s Westside, on Oct. 22 persuaded colleagues to set up committees of city officials and outside experts to explore survey options.

But experts acknowledge that the cost is likely to be well into the millions, and Weiss isn’t ready to suggest a timetable or funding source. To fly, he acknowledges, the project may depend for most of its money on sources outside city government, perhaps some from the Getty, some from other philanthropies and some from the private sector.

Getty officials have underwritten Howe’s 2001 study, hired her for a long-term position and in 2000 established a three-year Preserve L.A. program, which last April awarded $1.3 million in grants to government agencies and nonprofit organizations caring for historic buildings. But Getty’s leaders say they can’t bankroll a survey alone.

That puts the spotlight on city officials, whose preservation history includes several false starts.

The City Council first pledged to survey Los Angeles’ historic and cultural resources in 1962, when its members approved the city’s first Cultural Heritage Commission ordinance. But the survey, one of the ordinance’s costliest elements, was postponed. It was still waiting 38 years later, when a new City Council approved another survey proposal as part of another ambitious cultural plan -- then backed off from the spending when economic doldrums set in.

For now, the loudest voice for preservation is that of the Los Angeles Conservancy, founded 24 years ago as a nonprofit organization that leads neighborhood tours and raises alarms when it hears of imperiled historic properties.

Rethinking attitudes

THE group’s most public victory came six years ago, when it sued to keep the Archdiocese of Los Angeles from demolishing the quake-damaged St. Vibiana’s Cathedral. (Downtown redeveloper Tom Gilmore purchased the building and plans to renovate and reopen it as an arts venue.) Since then, the conservancy’s dues-paying membership has grown from 4,500 to 7,200, and the group’s modern committee has won a reputation for ferocity in its quest to get the public to start thinking of ‘40s, ‘50s and even ‘60s buildings as historic.

The group’s most closely watched address at the moment is the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, which dates to 1921 and was the site of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. The Los Angeles Unified School District, owner of the 24-acre site, wants to open a school complex there, and it has not decided whether to convert the existing structure (which the conservancy is urging) or level it.

In fact, preservationists and the school district are old adversaries. Although the district has taken a historic inventory of its 947 schools -- many of which count among the community’s most familiar and beloved structures -- it has successfully resisted any city historic designations.

In the case of the Ambassador, says Bob Moeller, the school district’s director of new construction, “we’ve really tried to engage the conservancy, and we’re open to preservation. But it has to be within our budget.”

The economics that nudge the wrecking ball forward can be powerful, especially in the vast majority of buildings that aren’t already on a monuments list or subject to a state-mandated environmental impact report.

Older buildings are especially ripe targets these days, says the conservancy’s Leib, because investors are attracted by historically low mortgage rates, rapid appreciation and the chance to acquire small buildings on large lots.

Although it may cost $300,000 to $400,000 to buy a 1,500-square-foot house on a flat lot, knocking one down and scraping it away is probably a matter of $3,000 to $4,000, and takes a day, maybe two.

“We just smash it up and separate what we can,” says Jeff Hale, president of Fast Forward Concrete Cutting in Canoga Park. A 1,500-square-foot house, he added, usually includes about 100 tons of concrete (foundation, slab and driveway) and 20-some tons of “everything else.”

Larger demos can be more complicated, requiring months as workers take steps to separate materials and contain asbestos, sometimes even limiting air pollution by enclosing a structure in shrink wrap. And many large demos are coming up.

In Century City, for instance, two eight-story buildings, which include the 30-year-old Shubert Theatre and offices of the ABC Entertainment Center, will be leveled in coming months to make room for a new 15-story office building.

The Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters building at 450 N. Grand Ave. is to be leveled in February, with a new high school to rise in its place. The Caltrans District 7 headquarters building, a 1949 modernist office building with a 1960 annex covering a full city block along Spring Street between 1st and 2nd streets, is to be leveled in favor of a public plaza in 2005, its occupants relocated to a new office now rising next door.

Less certain is the fate of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where trustees announced plans a year ago for a demolition and reconstruction costing an estimated $200 million to $300 million, then put it all on hold in early December, saying fund-raising was lagging.

Still, “stuff comes in almost every day,” says Jerry Hernandez, manager of Santa Fe Wrecking in downtown Los Angeles, casting a glance toward a ton or two of orphaned porcelain. “We probably have about 300 toilets. We go as far back as about the 1890s.”

Working with demolition companies, firms such as Santa Fe Wrecking harvest fixtures from doomed buildings, taking the best bits for resale on lots like the one at Olympic Boulevard and South Santa Fe Avenue. Each day, Hernandez and company sort glass doorknobs, stack doors, wrangle sinks, drag wrought iron to the alley out back and hose down old bathtubs, mostly claw-footed models from the 1930s and before.

“We have about 200 tubs,” Hernandez says.

How does he know?

“Every year,” he explains, “we do an inventory of what we have.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

ZIP files

Most common ZIP Codes in the city of Los Angeles for 2001 demolition permits:

*--* City ZIP Code Permits Pacific Palisades 90272 54 Brentwood 90049 50 Westchester 90045 49 West Los Angeles 90025 43 Venice 90291 40 Mar Vista 90066 25 Sun Valley 91352 25 Tarzana 91356 22 West Adams 90019 21 San Pedro 90731 21 Studio City 91604 21

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Source: Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety

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Times researchers Cary Schneider and Paul Singleton, Times Director of Computer Analysis Richard O’Reilly and data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this report.