A few stops on a tour of phantom L.A.

Gone but not forgotten

It may be only a phantom city, but demolished Los Angeles has enough points of interest to keep any tour guide busy.

Last year’s demolition records show that residential buildings outnumber commercial buildings (mirroring citywide patterns) and that permits for new housing units outnumber demo permits by more than 4 to 1. However, as affordable-housing advocates note, the new units are typically pricier than the old. Among structures that were targeted for wrecking in 2001:

Absences of note

Outside Los Angeles city limits, county government devotes less staff time to preservation than City Hall does, and several other cities have seen controversy.

Irving Gill’s Dodge House came crashing down in 1969, in part because it lay just outside Los Angeles city limits, in then-unincorporated (and less restricted) West Hollywood. The house, a 1916 mansion, was widely seen as the signature work of Gill, an architect who was among the first to bring together Spanish Colonial influences and modernist innovations. Apartments rose in the Dodge House’s place.

Among demolitions near L.A. in 2001 were two homes by architect Rudolf Schindler -- his 1924 Packard House in San Marino and his 1931 Wolfe House in Avalon. In March 2002, Richard Neutra’s 1963 Maslon House in Rancho Mirage (in Riverside County) was razed as well.

Among the most significant individual buildings lost from Los Angeles, architectural historians say, are:

Vanished monuments

Even the city’s list of protected monuments holds phantoms -- structures that were demolished or otherwise lost even after winning historic designations.

On Hindry Avenue and Hindry Place near the Los Angeles International Airport, the city’s Airports Department bought and leveled 16 houses, all built in 1949, as part of a voluntary program to expand airport territory and give exit options to homeowners in noisy areas.

At 2011 Sunset Blvd., near Alvarado Street in Echo Park, the city of Los Angeles bought and leveled the Peerless Hardware building to make room for a new city library. In the process, the neighborhood lost a bold-hued mural, painted in 1995 by Ernesto de la Loza. The mural paid homage to manual laborers -- and a year later, as the new library rises, day laborers still gather at the site to wait for drive-by job offers.

At 3017 S. University Ave., near USC, Hebrew Union College purchased the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house, a two-story 1960s building that was leased to the fraternity by the university, then knocked it down to make way for a parking lot. The fraternity moved on to a house on 28th Street.

At 6333 W. 3rd St., A.F. Gilmore Co., owners of the 68-year-old Farmers Market complex, not only relocated the Farmers Market clock tower but also razed the Gilmore Bank Building. (Past demolitions on the property include a drive-in theater and the old baseball stadium where the minor league Hollywood Stars once played.)

Neutra’s modernist home in the San Fernando Valley was built with stylized moat and stark geometry for film director Josef von Sternberg in 1935. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, author Ayn Rand took up residence there and created the most famous architect in 20th century American literature, Howard Roark, in her novel “The Fountainhead.” The home was razed in 1971 to make room for a housing tract.

The Richfield Tower downtown on South Flower Street, a 328-foot-high Art Deco skyscraper, went up in 1929 with steel lattice work on top spelling out “Richfield.” It featured black masonry (to symbolize oil) and gold terra-cotta trim. It was demolished in 1968 and replaced three years later by the 699-foot-high Arco Plaza Towers.

The Fox Carthay Circle Theatre at Carrillo Drive and San Vicente Boulevard, a Spanish Revival building with a tiled dome, hosted the premiere of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” It was demolished in March 1969.

The “Castle” mansion on South Bunker Hill Avenue, built in 1882 and declared a monument in 1964, was relocated in 1969 to make way for a new batch of business-district skyscrapers, but burned before it could be renovated.

The Garden Court apartment building at 7021 Hollywood Blvd., a 1919 exemplar of courtyard housing and once among the city’s most elite addresses, was declared a monument in 1981 but razed in 1984. The Hollywood Galaxy mall now stands on the site.

The 1906 Philharmonic Auditorium on West 5th Street at Pershing Square was declared a monument in 1969, then demolished 15 years later. The site is now a parking lot.