Can this lovely 100-year-old bungalow court near Paramount Studios be saved?

Gentle reader,

Steps away from the west wall of Paramount Studios in Hollywood, a lovely bungalow court sits vacant and lonely behind its picket fence.

New: scroll to the bottom for updates, including the reported demolition of this property on January 24, 2023, and visit the citywide bungalow court map we created in response to this loss.

esotouric

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ORIGINAL POST:

We spied this charmer on one of our drives on the Hollywood side streets, which have become more frequent since our flame point Siamese cat Numa started needing regular veterinary visits in the neighborhood. (He’s on chemotherapy, and doing very well.)

Stopping to take some photos, we met an observant local who sized us up to make sure we weren’t looking for distressed real estate to buy.

Judging us to be okay, he then spoke frankly of landlord intimidation, displaced seniors, isolation, homelessness, and the incessant roar of the wreckers as a whole neighborhood of mostly low-income renters had been emptied out by predatory development. He didn’t know how long he’d stick around, but for now, he was intensely present.

It was too bad, he said, that we’d missed the chance to photograph the 1906 Craftsman house next door at 5728 Waring. The longtime family home of Winfred L. Teaford (1884-1965), a cashier for the Southern Pacific Railroad—he’s resting with his bride a few blocks away at Hollywood Forever—it had last changed hands in 1971.

The house had sold for $1.5 Million in April as “a prime LAR3 development opportunity… located within an Opportunity Zone, which may provide additional tax incentives (buyer to verify)” and was immediately torn down, along with the old trees and shrubs and backyard incinerator.

While actual development has been slow, the very existence of Opportunity Zones, ostensibly created by the Federal government to spur investment in poor neighborhoods, has supercharged the demolition focused buying sprees in high value districts like Hollywood and Koreatown, while raising serious questions about corruption in the mapping process. (East Los Angeles? South Central? Florence-Firestone? Boyle Heights? Yeah, not much “opportunity” there.)

By the time we stopped on Waring Avenue, two months ago, the old Teaford place was just a scoured, vacant lot with ugly green demo fencing, like hundreds of others we see in our travels around Los Angeles. Sometimes those fences stay up for years, with the shuttered houses and apartment buildings falling to ruin or catching fire.

It’s tough to age in place in Hollywood. If you own your home, schemers will try to take it from you. If you rent, god help you. The “highest and best use” of most of L.A.’s residential property is upzoned redevelopment, and to hell with anyone who cares about historic buildings or the communities of workers, retirees, families, artists and dreamers who call them home.

The 5720-24 Waring Avenue bungalow court, with its double row of modest cottages built flush to the sidewalk opening up to a larger Spanish style residence behind, is a classic example of quickly constructed motion picture industry workforce housing that remains attractive and useful a century on.

In the 1940 Census, the bungalow court was home to eight people:

• Arthur C. Robbins (motion picture sound electrician) and his wife Ailene

• Anne Caldwell (publicity secretary) and her lodgers Alice and Dorothy Bleecker

• James Ryan (motion picture studio grip), his wife Dessie and wee daughter Suzanne

By 1961, the Japanese American actor John "Mamo" Mamoru Fujioka (1925-2018) was in residence.

It’s hard to track down the names of tenants in the years since. The last public census is 1950—Arthur Robbins has remarried after the death of Ailene, to an English wardrobe mistress named Lily—and city directories are hit and miss. But we know this type of housing, and that in a Hollywood uncorrupted by land use profiteering, it would host a healthy mix of generations and cultures.

There’s nobody left to ask about the Waring Avenue bungalows. The property sold in July 2021 for $1.2 Million with one unit of four vacant, but our neighborhood Virgil told us the other residents were gone now, and he feared it would be demolished, too.

A check of the city’s ZIMAS database shows that two 2-bedroom units (1936) and two single units (1923) are protected under rent control, and that their vacancy is not due to Ellis Act eviction. So even if the stalled 2019 City Council Ellis Act / Right-of-Refusal / Purchase Apartment Buildings motion had been made law, this sale would not have triggered it. [Update: after publishing this newsletter, we obtained Ellis Act documents from the city in which the property owner describes these rental units, purchased during the pandemic as 75% occupied, as being 100% uninhabited.]

Although it is a designated historic resource in the city’s own Survey LA database, the removal of the rental units was rubber stamped on 12/1/2022 and a demolition permit approved on 12/19/2022.

Maybe the tenants accepted a lowball cash for keys offer, or died, or were unable to make the rent—in any case, the units have been held off market while the demolition permit moved through the city system. An application is also pending to build a new duplex at the back of the property, thus replacing four rent controlled units with half as many at market rate.

This is all probably illegal under The Housing Crisis Act of 2019, and under the city’s deference to historic resources. And yet… the permit is approved and the wreckers could come at any time.

Unless a miracle of good governance happens, it could soon be goodbye, pretty green cement steps and front window mail slots. Goodbye funny eyebrow arches. Goodbye, four rent controlled units. Goodbye ghosts.

We hate the thought of the old palms being scraped out of the earth and clouds of lead paint dust wafting down Waring Avenue, as honest, sturdy bungalow walls fall. Don’t you?

When driving around Los Angeles, we stick to the side streets, eyes open for beauty. There is so much that is beautiful, but too often we find it close to death.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A city that cared about its residents would enforce laws protecting naturally occurring affordable housing. There would be real consequences for illegally renting such units out by the night or not at all, or for doing crazy stuff like this.

It wouldn’t “pencil out” to wreck a useful complex like the Waring Avenue bungalow court. And so it would remain a home, with children playing on the lawn and old folks sneaking them treats and birds singing in the trees. It doesn’t seem too much to ask, that Los Angeles be a place to live in, and not just a cash register jingling in bank accounts far from here.

If you happen to be over by Paramount Studios, please swing by 5720-24 Waring Avenue and see if she’s standing still and if she’s actively menaced. We all of us Angelenos need to look after each other, and that includes good buildings in peril. It’s the oldest story in Hollywood, and still a compelling one: a beauty rescued at the last possible minute, evil vanquished, and love triumphant.

Anyway, we’re going to go make some calls, and see if there is anyone in Los Angeles City Hall prepared to stop the clock and ensure this is actually a legal demolition before it proceeds. Wish us, the lovely Waring Avenue bungalows and their future tenants, luck!

yours for Los Angeles,

Kim & Richard

Esotouric

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Waring Bungalow Court updates:

12/29/2022 - New! We missed a second application for a duplex at the front of the bungalow court parcel—but with the other duplex, this is just 1-to-1 replacement of the protected RSO units. Meanwhile, today, the owner seeks a zone check for a 5 story, 36 unit under SB330. What is actual the plan here?

1/5/2023: Today we encountered a preservation minded DWP crew shutting off power ahead of demolition.

1/24/2023: in the comments below, a neighbor states that the bungalow court was demolished today. This is a tragic and unnecessary loss of good buildings and desperately needed affordable housing, and we’re very disappointed that new Hollywood councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez did not act on our repeated requests to pause the demolition long enough to determine if the RSO units were being properly replaced, on or off site. Additionally, we have obtained Ellis Act documents from the city in which the property owner describes these rental units, purchased during the pandemic as 75% occupied, as being 100% uninhabited. There is still no approved new project for this property.

3/2/2023: Today at the Cultural Heritage Commission, we made public comment alerting them to the demolition of the rent controlled Waring Avenue bungalow court, which LADBS confirmed was done without any valid permits.

3/20/2024: Renderings hit the case file for a huge proposed new apartment building that is seeking a density bonus. As we suspected, the two parcels are now proposed to be combined into one, numbered 5720-2728 W Waring Avenue. Demolishing two occupied lots (including four RSO units) with the unstated intention of building on both of them is not legal and is called piecemealing. We are calling on councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez to hold the developer accountable and require a full project review.

It is blatant piecemealing! On page 6 of the new project proposal, developer 5728 Waring Partners, LP includes a pre-demolition topographical survey of both parcels with their historic buildings in place.

4/30/2024: The first public hearing for the proposed development spanning 5720-5728 Waring will be held virtually on Tuesday, May 7, 2024 at 10am. It is the first item on the agenda, and the public can attend and speak via Zoom or phone. A second City Planning Commission hearing will be held on Thursday, June 13, 2024 after 8:30am. The agenda, when published, will be here.

5/7/2024: At the first public hearing for the 5720-5728 Waring development, neighbors expressed alarm at the “greedy” size of the project, the lack of parking on a block where it’s already so difficult to park, and asked who making the decision on approving this had been paid off to rubber stamp it. Our Kim Cooper expressed concern about the illegal piecemealing to deceptively combine two lots without an EIR, the unpermitted demolition of RSO units in an historic bungalow court and the loss of a pre-cityhood bungalow next door, the displacement of renters during the pandemic protections, and unhoused people who lived on the property once it was empty. Lobbyist / project representative Kevin Scott responded with the false claim that “this project started with a vacant lot” and that we’re in a housing crisis. It’s actually a housing use crisis, and it is manufactured for the benefit of developers like Cy Kirshner & Andrew Meepos, 5728 Waring Partners LP and their land use consultant lobbyists like Jesi Harris and Kevin Scott of Brian Silveira & Associates.

DEMOLITION & BUILDING PERMITS: This is the landing page for 5720-24 Waring, with all permits on it. At the time of demolition, there was only one apparently approved demo permit, #21019-20000-05213, for the front bungalow on the east side of the property (though LADBS tells us none of the demo permits were actually approved). Demolition of the west bungalow and back duplex was not permitted. The unapproved demolition permits at the time of demolition are: #21019-30000-05237, #21019-30000-05238, #21019-30000-05239, #21019-20000-05189 and #21019-10000-02688.

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Psst… If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar and a subscriber edition of this newsletter, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person walking tours, gift certificates and a souvenir shop you can browse in. Or just share this link with other people who care.

UPCOMING WALKING TOURS

• Saturday, January 14 - Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher Cases

• Sunday, January 29 - Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness

• Saturday, February 11 - Broadway: Downtown Los Angeles’ Beautiful, Magical Mess

• Saturday, February 18 - Evergreen Cemetery, 1877

• Saturday, February 25 - Westlake Park Time Travel Trip

• Saturday, March 11 - Downtown Los Angeles is For Book Lovers

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