Metropolitan Living: The Los Angeles Parklabrea Apartments

Introduction

Developed during the 1940s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Met Life), Parklabrea stands in the center of Los Angeles as a 176-acre residential community of thirteen-story towers and two-story garden apartments. It is one of the largest housing developments west of the Mississippi River and among the earliest high-rise projects to be constructed in Los Angeles, yet it marks a glaring void within histories of California housing. ¹ Skirting scholarly attention, Parklabrea has been historically described as an enigmatic outlier. When Reyner Banham visited Los Angeles during the 1960s, he reinforced the city’s horizontal DNA by disassociating the community from the city, and he described Parklabrea’s surrounding neighborhood as an isolated culture with pedestrian values akin to an island of New York City on the Plains of Id. ² In 1990, urban historian and theorist Mike Davis argued that Parklabrea was the city’s most significantly “fortressed” experiment in mixed-income, high-rise living, with an “urbane population of singles, young families, and retirees” that provided Los Angeles with a “touch of Manhattan.” ³ These narratives of imported New York values—written decades after Parklabrea was constructed—eclipse the site’s contextually responsive planning and design history, and they gloss over the significant roles of life insurance companies in shaping American cities. In Los Angeles, life insurance companies financed between 7 and 8 percent of all one- to four-family residences during the latter half of the 1920s, and by 1950, they were responsible for nearly 15 percent of the city’s total multifamily housing. ⁴ While Met Life’s first housing communities, constructed in New York during the 1920s and 1930s, opened to sharp criticism and disapproval, its subsequent developments, including Parklabrea, were designed and planned with an increasing attunement to the social, economic, and material environments in which each was embedded. Parklabrea therefore stands against the well-documented demise of postwar modern public housing, which failed in part due to a patent disregard for the realities of urban context. Its planning and design history reveals how the obstinate desire by life insurance companies to balance economic gain with social responsibility helped to relieve widespread housing shortages for low and middle-class families, elevate the material standards of housing construction, and establish enduring modernist ideals. ⁵ While the shifting socioeconomic conditions from the interwar to postwar period required Met Life and its architects to carefully adapt and revise their designs, the fortuitous, unintended results of Parklabrea—a site whose two-story garden apartments wrap tightly around communal courtyards and its thirteen-story towers boast expansive views of the surrounding cityscape—materially conform to the simultaneous inward and outward pulls of modern subjectivity.

By the end of the 1930s, the city of Los Angeles was sprawling and appeared to be on the verge of spiraling backward: office buildings were constructed in excess and where they were unneeded; housing and commercial vacancy rates were rapidly increasing as people began to flock to developments mushrooming in the suburbs; and traffic was unbearably congested and without a coherent system of organization. Many suburban housing communities built during the 1930s at the city’s edges were publically funded and characterized by their unifying green spaces and socially democratic civic cultures inspired by the Garden City movement, which historian Donald Parson has referred to in the context of Los Angeles as a spirit of “community modernism.” ⁶ In striking contrast, housing projects constructed in Los Angeles during the decade following World War II were subjected to pressures of collective urban renewal, new structural and planning efficiencies, and an adamant desire by private developers to make profitable investments. Completed in 1951, just four years prior to the end of public housing programs in Los Angeles, Parklabrea was a result of both strands of influence, since it was developed in two distinct phases that straddled the war. The complex was first envisioned during the late 1930s as a sprawling suburban-cum-urban community of two-story garden apartments on the last remaining portion of the Mexican land grant, Rancho La Brea. Construction was halted by the war in 1944, by which time only half of the site was complete, and the drawings were modified in 1948 to include maximum-height, thirteen-story towers in response to the onset of commercial pressures of the postwar period. The extraordinarily dissimilar housing typologies and their respective histories—low-rise garden apartments and tall “high-rise” towers—represented opposing ideological and socioeconomic motivations; however, the resulting complex of postwar economic motivation on the one hand and prewar sociocultural motivation on the other presented a dialogue of history that can be understood as an operative condition to which the site and surrounding neighborhood’s long-term vitality has been attributed.

Metropolitan Living

Amid housing shortages, industrial bankruptcies, and widespread mortgage loan defaults during the 1920s and 1930s, life insurance companies across the United States sought to diversify and lift restrictions on their investment practices. ⁷ While their earnings were commonly placed into the safe haven of government bonds, mortgages, and real estate, investments in housing construction were thought to provide unwavering alternatives. Yet as urban and architectural historians have illustrated, the specific interest in housing also revealed a moral standard that undergirded the practices of life insurance companies. ⁸ Housing construction, according to policies developed by companies such as Met Life, was not only motivated by a desire to invest in projects that were lucrative and enduring but also that were valuable in the eyes of the public. ⁹ Met Life historian Marquis James argued that “homes engaged the most public attention. One feels more for a man losing the roof over his family’s head than for a man—or a life insurance company—with an investment in a bankrupt office building.” ¹⁰ Through housing development, Met Life could connect to new populations, including hundreds of potential builders and thousands of renting working-class families. At the same time, the construction of environmentally sensitive, efficiently constructed, and well-planned housing could help to mitigate housing shortages, as well as improve the well-being of residents; the company believed that it could extend the life expectancies of working-class families and instill the values of financial planning into the minds of its tenants. ¹¹

In the early 1920s, Met Life developed a three-phase practice of financing, building, and managing their own housing projects, and by mid-century, the company was the nation’s largest owner-builder of housing in the insurance industry—constructing more apartment units than any other financial institution in the United States. ¹² Following severe housing shortages after World War I, Met Life built its first housing project in 1922, named Metropolitan Life Apartments, which was a fifty-four-building complex spread across three separate sites in Queens, New York, with twenty-eight buildings in Sunnyside, ten in Woodside, and sixteen in Astoria. ¹³ The apartments were rented at rates remarkably lower than New York City averages, with two-bedroom apartments offered for $42.75 per month, or approximately 17 percent of an average worker’s salary at the time. ¹⁴ At the time, state laws across the U.S. prohibited insurance companies, banks, and other financial institutions from directly investing in housing, yet the state of New York granted an exception in 1922 to Met Life, allowing the company to aid in mitigating postwar housing shortages for working-class families. Although exceptions were rare, another exception was granted to Met Life in 1938, during the Great Depression, when legislators hoped that direct investments in housing by large financial institutions would help to reduce high unemployment rates and alleviate socioeconomic instability. ¹⁵ That same year, Met Life unveiled plans to build and manage a large-scale, fully self-contained housing community on an available 129-acre site in east Bronx, New York, which included housing for moderate-income families, as well as spaces for recreation, shopping, restaurants, and grocery stores. As the largest urban housing community in the United States when it was completed, the design echoed a Le Corbusien tower-in-a-park model. The project, named Parkchester, was of a monumental scale and dubbed a “city within a city,” with 171 interconnected cruciform towers ranging from seven to thirteen stories and organized around large green spaces. ¹⁶

The site plan of Parkchester disrupted the city grid, and four arching streets divided the site into quadrants that met at an oval-shaped traffic circle in the center to reduce through-traffic, known as the “Metropolitan Oval” (Figure 1). Following the recommendations for suburban garden-city developments put forth by architects and planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, each quadrant at Parkchester included its own tree-lined park, and parking structures were importantly located on the site’s periphery in an effort to preserve as much pedestrian-friendly space as possible. The design of the apartments also revealed Met Life’s commitment to the physical and social well-being of its residents. For instance, the organization of the apartment units, as well as the placement of electrical outlets, closet sizes, and kitchen configurations were based upon scientific studies of housekeeping, safety, and sanitation that coincided with Met Life’s welfare programs, and educational opportunities ranging from first aid to financial management to interior design were made available to residents. ¹⁷ In addition, Met Life carefully screened its residents—only white tenants were permitted until the 1960s—just as carefully as it screened its policyholders, which drew significant public criticism. ¹⁸ However, despite its exclusionary and discriminatory rhetoric, Parkchester received acclaim in architecture journals due to its contribution to urban recovery, its high-quality construction, and its affordable rental rates that ranged from $52 to $60 per month. ¹⁹

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Figure 1.

Site plan for Parkchester, Bronx, New York, completed in 1940.

Critics of Parkchester argued that the development failed to establish a new modernist urban ideal, suggesting that the design was overly controlled by quantitative planning details that resulted in an insular community with its back turned against the city: the buildings occupied only twenty-seven of the 129 total acres at a density ratio of ninety-five dwelling units per acre, 51 percent of the site was designated as open landscape, and the remaining 22 percent was paved. ²⁰ In an article in New York Magazine titled “Parkchester: Trouble in Paradise,” one critic argued that “beneath the statistics is a corner of New York with its vision not on the future, but in the past. Inside New York’s boundaries, it is somehow not of the city.” ²¹ Historian Eric Mumford similarly noted,

The only stated design rationale was to respond to a set of “functional” considerations, such as maximizing the construction costs. This kind of “functionalism” produced far grimmer results than European avant-gardists had envisioned, even though Architectural Forum praised it as “a master pattern for better living . . . of sound, conservative design.” ²²

As a way to garner greater social and political backing and to further conceal its financial intentions, Met Life developed a new design strategy for future housing developments. Pressing forward with two alternative proposals in California and another in Virginia, Met Life sought to overcome the functionalist critiques of Parkchester by drawing on the urban conditions in which each project would be uniquely embedded, as well as the recommendations set forth by federal housing policy.

During the latter half of the 1930s, pastorally rooted suburban housing communities began to pepper Virginia and California due to federal public housing programs that sponsored projects that followed the rubrics of community-centered, garden-city ideals. Indeed, the marriage of land and dwelling resulted in the proliferation of “garden apartments,” which were characterized as low-rise apartments organized around tranquil communal green spaces, upon which residents could detach from the frenetic routines of urban life and, in cities such as Los Angeles, from their automobiles. Garden apartments were endorsed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in the 1930s due to their ability to produce a sense of home and land ownership for residents, and the government insured mortgages on two hundred garden apartment developments across the country between 1935 and 1940. ²³ The FHA declared that garden apartments offered renters “the nearest thing to ‘home’ that can be found in apartment buildings—private entrances, front yards, [and] few overhead neighbors.” ²⁴

In Alexandria, Virginia, Met Life’s new proposal was named Parkfairfax, and in California, the projects were named Parklabrea and Parkmerced in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. Each of the new projects was strictly residential, rather than a self-sustaining urban community, which ensured that residents would depend on—and support—the existing and future commercial and cultural development of the surrounding urban areas. The sites were imagined as sprawling expanses of low-rise, two-story brick masonry townhouses, and they were designed by New York architect Leonard Schultze and Associates in tandem with local architects and landscape designers. ²⁵

In Los Angeles, a 176-acre site was purchased for Parklabrea as the last remaining portion of the Mexican land grant Rancho La Brea, owned by George Allan Hancock (Figure 2). As the oil leases on the land were set to expire, Hancock subdivided and zoned the land for multifamily development, envisioning the area as a nucleus for high-class apartment buildings and hotels. ²⁶ In 1939, Hancock donated the land to the University of Southern California, from which Met Life purchased it in 1940 for an exceptionally low cost of $1.5 million. ²⁷ Unlike the company’s other large-scale housing projects and those slated for construction elsewhere in Los Angeles, the land guaranteed that Parklabrea would be constructed in the immediate center of the city, rather than on the periphery, which was atypical of Met Life’s prior developments, and it demanded urban integration.

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Figure 2.

Aerial of the remaining Rancho La Brea land grant and future site of Parklabrea, 1940.

The plans for Parklabrea were not met without opposition, however. Local residents and nearby apartment associations were infuriated by the potential scale and prominence of the proposed site, since direct investments by Met Life would likely result in rental rates well-below average for comparable, high-grade construction and could deflate rental rates across the city. In response to the proposal, neighboring property owners, policyholders, the California State Apartment Conference, and the Apartment Association of Los Angeles County obtained a restraining order against Met Life by challenging the constitutionality of direct investments in housing by insurance companies. In addition, they argued that the tax provisions were unjust, since, in their view, there was already a sufficient supply of housing in the immediate area. However, these arguments were contradicted by reports of widespread housing shortages in other parts of the city, upon which Met Life had based its initial decision to invest in Los Angeles. ²⁸ The debate was ultimately resolved by the California Supreme Court in 1940, which ruled in favor of Met Life, and the city of Los Angeles annexed the land to expedite groundbreaking for construction. ²⁹

The Gardens of Los Angeles

Schultze’s plan for Parklabrea consisted of two thousand four hundred two-story rental apartments that were designed in collaboration with Los Angeles architect Earl T. Heitschmidt, who served as associate architect, as well as local landscape architect Tommy Tomson (Figure 3). ³⁰ Prior to their work for Met Life, Heitschmidt and Schultze collaborated to design the Biltmore Hotel (1923) in downtown Los Angeles, and Tomson was well-regarded for his landscaping designs for Los Angeles’s Pan-Pacific Auditorium (1935) and Union Station (1939). The townhouses were constructed on concrete slab foundations, with reinforced brick masonry walls and wood trusses and joists. Advertised as “garden apartments,” Parklabrea abided by the socially attuned suburban rhetoric of the 1930s, and it resembled New York’s Parkchester only in name. Improving upon the figure-ground calculations, the buildings occupied only 18 percent of the 176-acre site, yielding a drastically reduced total of thirteen units per acre compared with Parkchester’s 95, which helped Met Life overcome the portrait of overcrowding and “New York-style” density for which the company was criticized.

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Figure 3.

Site plan of Parklabrea, completed in 1951.

Sunny California was a state well-suited for garden apartments, and in Los Angeles, the City Housing Authority named garden-city booster Clarence Stein as a consulting architect and site planner of housing communities beginning in 1938, due in part to his work with Henry Wright on New Jersey’s Radburn plan and New York’s Sunnyside Gardens. ³¹ Together, Wright and Stein argued that low-rise buildings of two to four stories tall, arranged around cul-de-sacs, and facing inward around open, automobile-free green spaces were ideal places to live. Stein consulted on three major public housing developments surrounding Los Angeles that were contemporaries of Parklabrea, including Carmelitos in Long Beach (1939), Harbor Hills in Lomita (1941), and Baldwin Hills Village (1942) in South Los Angeles. In addition, across the city in Boyle Heights, the seventy-acre Wyvernwood Garden Apartments (1939), designed by David J. Witmer and Loyall F. Watson, served as the largest FHA-insured housing development in the United States when it opened for occupancy. ³²

Parklabrea and the Modern Subject

In glaring contrast to the Stein-influenced models of suburban housing, the plans for Parklabrea provided the experience of living not only in a tranquil suburban environment but also in a seemingly contradictory dense urban community. Unlike Stein’s garden apartments, such as Baldwin Hills Village (Figure 4), which prohibited automobiles from entering the site to preserve pedestrian-only green space, through-traffic was embraced at Parklabrea. Indeed, Schultze used the automobile itself as a primary organizational device for the apartment units (Figure 5). Streets were extended into the site in two prominent octagonal arrangements that fully intertwined the city, gardens, and dwellings rather than separated them. The apartments and their adjacent carports were tightly clustered around small, decentralized communal courtyards that were by-products of five primary traffic circles, and large glass windows and doors opened onto the grassy lawns of the courtyards with sycamore and olive trees. Only small windows fronted the streets where automobiles zipped through the site.

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Figure 4.

Site plan for Baldwin Hills Village, built in 1942.

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Figure 5.

Aerial photo of Parklabrea courtyards and garden apartments, 1950.

While the courtyards provided residents with a clear sense of privacy, detachment, and solitude, the strict organizational logics of the courtyards and their strained inward orientation were matched by stern regulatory control of the grounds. Lease agreements prohibited cats and dogs, and children were not allowed to play on the carefully manicured lawns nor patios. ³³ Photographs of the pristine, suburban lifestyle appeared in the bimonthly resident newspaper, Parklabrea News, as well as the Los Angeles Times, in which residents’ personal lives were profiled and the new apartments advertised (Figure 6). However, residents were most frequently photographed looking inward—into the courtyard voids of collective solitude—in seeming conformance to the mechanizing tendencies of modernization but also in such a way that the exterior and interior became indistinguishable. ³⁴

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Figure 6.

A garden-apartment resident works facing into the courtyard and patio, 1953.

Although the garden apartments were bounded by the automobile and the courtyards were subjected to the disciplinary control of the camera, Parklabrea residents found the rigidness of regulations and administration paradoxically appealing, since they sharply contrasted the ostensibly unplanned and sprawling megalopolis by which they were surrounded. As one resident recalled in a Los Angeles Times article titled “A Shelter in the Center of the Universe”:

I began to see Park La Brea as a sheltered workshop with an efficient, impersonal landlord and strict rules that kept everyone quiet—not just me. Finally I saw how this rigidity could work to my advantage . . . The garden apartments have patios, grassy courtyard and lovely sycamores (and not-so-lovely olive trees) . . . Some courtyards have informal tag football sessions while, in others, not an errant toe steps on the lawn thanks to self-appointed watchdogs who report all infractions of the numerous regulations . . . It feels more like living in a small town than an ant colony. The garden apartments are set around spacious courtyards. There’s a huge sycamore outside my bedroom window; I love to watch it bud and green up and then go bare. ³⁵

The garden apartments as highlighted by this resident revealed a series of contradictions and confrontations that architectural and urban historians have attributed to the enduring conditions of modernity: of a simultaneously sprawling suburb and planned urban development, of collective obedience and modern individuality, privacy and publicity, and interiority and exteriority. Historians of modern housing, including Beatriz Colomina and Thomas Hines, have argued that it was precisely these confrontations that characterized the production of modernity and the concomitant ability of domestic architecture to produce modern subjects. For Colomina, modernity was predicated on the publicity of the private, whereby the advent of the photograph made possible the exposure of everyday private life and its circulation through mass media. ³⁶ For Hines, modern housing in Southern California reflected the dueling forces of modern subjectivity itself. He followed Marxian philosopher Marshall Berman’s assertion that

to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. ³⁷

According to Hines, exemplars of modernist housing in California held a two-fold role as both an “integral part of a steadily urbanizing landscape and as a privileged pavilion for observing the receding paradise.” Not only did they provide shelter and protection from the “woes of the world” but they also included a public “stage for confronting and enjoying life.” ³⁸ At Parklabrea, the inward-facing garden apartments made clear the powerful tendencies of modernization to produce an image of shelter and protection, administered by both the automobile and the camera, though there were no deliberate “stages” upon which residents could individually face or confront the city. However, the missing stages would soon be added to the site due to the unintended financial pressures following the end of World War II, which compelled Schultze and Met Life to adapt the initial plan by adding maximum-height residential towers.

Down with Community: Parklabrea Gets Towers

The demand for housing by the late 1930s was less immediate in California than it was in Virginia or New York. Consequently, initial building permits were granted for only half of Parklabrea and two-thirds of Parkmerced in 1941, and construction at both sites was halted by the exigencies of war in 1944. ³⁹ By the war’s end, construction costs were higher, skilled labor was difficult to find, and specified materials, such as copper flashing, were scarce. Parklabrea remained incomplete, with only 1,316 apartments, with partially built walls, stairways, and foundation slabs strewn across the site. But, while the buildings were under construction, the demand for new housing in Los Angeles increased exponentially, and a new need to house military workers added a second layer of urgency. Of the completed apartments, one-third of the garden apartments were rented to workers of nearby aircraft factories, one-third to servicemen, and the remaining third to the public. Additionally, the company’s total investment in the initial garden apartments yielded a low, 2.7 percent return, and as real estate prices soared, the idea of an entire complex of low-rise garden apartments pastorally situated in the city proved to be financially impractical. ⁴⁰ Pledging to rent to defense workers and to returning veterans and their families, Met Life revised the site plan after the war by adding eighteen maximum-height (thirteen stories) towers, which raised the total unit count to 4,255 and provided a new density of twenty-four units per acre—nearly doubling the initial proposal, yet still well below Parkchester’s 95. ⁴¹ Designed by Schultze and local associate architects Gordon Kaufmann and J. E. Stanton, the placement of the towers adhered to the 1941 masterplan of sprawling pathways and gardens. The towers were pulled into the center and filled the east end of the site, with spaces of 125 to 200 feet in between each building to avoid the still-prevalent stigma of overcrowding that had come to be associated with the Parkchester project in New York. With the new drawings completed and building permits granted in 1948, builders dismantled the unfinished garden apartments to make room for the new towers, which were ready for occupancy by 1951. ⁴²

As the towers began to rise, they shaped a new skyline for the city, and Parklabrea’s newsletter, Parklabrea News, reported that a new “urban look” with “skyscrapers everywhere” resembled Met Life’s communities in New York. ⁴³ While the thirteen stories were relatively squat and did not qualified as “high rises” by the commercial standards of New York or Chicago, they stood out against the flat plane of Los Angeles (Figure 7). More importantly, however, despite the unintended results, the combining of high-rise and low-rise housing would became a trend in large-scale modern housing across the United States nearly a decade later, including Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park (1955-1963) redevelopment project in Detroit. However, many public housing proposals that sought to mix high-rise and low-rise typologies succumbed to political objections, including Robert Alexander and Richard Neutra’s unbuilt proposal, Elysian Park Heights, in Los Angeles’s Chavez Ravine, as well as Minoru Yamasaki’s initial proposal of mixed low and high-rises for Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis in the 1950s. ⁴⁴

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Figure 7.

Aerial photograph of Parklabrea and surrounding Miracle Mile area, 1954.

In contrast to the garden apartments, where the automobile and the street were embraced to produce spaces of inward-oriented seclusion, or protection from the “woes” of the world, the peripheral city was the organizational device for the towers. With large sixteen-foot picture windows and X-shaped plans that maximized views from each apartment, the towers were designed as the stages upon which residents could experience and confront the city; therefore, the completed site and contrasting housing typologies conformed to the conflicting forces—the simultaneous pulls inward and outward—of modern subjectivity (Figure 8). Unlike the garden apartments, residents of the towers could project their own desires outward to claim a sense of individual authority over the city. Schultze imagined tower residents to be looking out to the adjacent Beverly Hills and Hollywood Hills and to the relatively flat surrounding city. New advertisings for Parklabrea touted the central location of the towers, which described the residents as surrounded by convenient destinations to which they could walk or drive, rather than be sheltered from.

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Figure 8.

Photograph of the Parklabrea towers after completion, c. 1955.

The towers represented a new form of urban living in Los Angeles, since residents were entirely detached from the ground plane and their automobiles. Automobiles were handed off at the front door where they were courteously topped off with gasoline, and they were parked in adjacent parking garages by valet attendants. And, the towers attracted the type of residents who particularly enjoyed the new form of “high-rise” Los Angeles living. Due to its prime Hollywood-adjacent location, the towers were more attractive to younger and older couples than to nuclear families during the 1950s and 1960s (Figure 9). Often referred to as “Cliff-Dwellers” in local newspapers and advertisements across the city, the residents of the towers were predominantly transient and short-term and included actors, pilots, and doctors, which resulted in a high turnover rate unlike the predominantly long-term families residing in the garden apartments below (Figure 10). ⁴⁵ Within the tower apartments, there was less noise from neighbors and fewer solicitors, and views of the city were matched only by views from the hills themselves.

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Figure 9.

Advertisements of Parklabrea.

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Figure 10.

Photograph of “Cliff Dwellers.”

However, the new tower apartments came with a higher price. Apartments were initially rented at a range of $115 to $180 per month, and they also impacted the rental rates for the garden apartments, which increased from a range of $42 to $68 per month to $52 to $80. ⁴⁶ Much like the screening process for residents at Parkchester in New York, the manager of Parklabrea accepted applications from predominantly white residents, and two towers were set aside exclusively for Jewish residents—even as vacancies arose. In addition, residents with children were located primarily in garden apartments at the edges of the site, where they would be least disruptive to other tenants. ⁴⁷ Since Schultze and Met Life’s design fed on the attributes of the city and were slipped into an already-active project, the towers evaded public opposition and the negative stigmas associated with Met Life’s New York towers. By the mid-1950s, Parklabrea confirmed Met Life’s two-fold plan to produce solid investments and to construct projects of high public value. In 1954, the towers were used to aid the charities of the Junior League of Los Angeles Community Trust Fund of Los Angeles. ⁴⁸ The Southern California District Chapter of the American Institute of Decorators furnished the first floor of eight apartment towers for a six-month exhibition, titled “Metropolitan Living,” suggesting that the design of “metropolitan life” had transcended its mere association with New York City and that it could benefit the metropolis itself; or, as a brochure described: “to present as a public service, ‘Metropolitan Living—1954,’ and to raise funds needed to carry on their [the Junior League of LA] wonderful charity work of which they are so famous.” ⁴⁹ Each of the apartments was designed by noted interior designers, with apartments ranging in style from “outdoor atmosphere” to “Chinese Modern” to “French Provincial.” ⁵⁰ “You’ll agree,” the opening brochure asserted, “that Parklabrea Towers is the perfect, practical answer to gracious ‘Metropolitan Living’” (Figure 11). ⁵¹

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Figure 11.

“Metropolitan Living—1954” catalog with model rooms designed by William Schneider and Don Garnier.

Across Los Angeles in the 1950s, housing developments of similarly mixed high- and low-rises were proposed; however, Los Angelenos argued that “New York-styled high-rises” were primarily profit-driven and culturally unfit for Los Angeles unless they adequately responded to, and were integrated with, urban context. The most publicized of these was a larger redevelopment project proposed for the purportedly blighted area of Chavez Ravine—a canyon north of downtown—as part of the city’s urban renewal initiatives commencing in 1949. As Parklabrea’s towers opened for full occupancy in 1951, architects Robert Alexander and Richard Neutra proposed a housing community in Chavez Ravine to replace the nearly 3,360 units in which Mexican American families resided in an effort to evade housing discrimination elsewhere in the city. Unlike the privately funded Parklabrea, however, the redevelopment project, named Elysian Park Heights, was to be publically funded, though the design proposal comparably included twenty-four thirteen-story towers and 163 low-rise buildings in addition to a community building, two schools, playgrounds, nurseries, and churches. ⁵² Using the site’s challenging hill topography to their advantage, Neutra and Alexander arranged the buildings on a grid system that carefully considered the views from one tower to the next, since there was little surrounding urban context. However, as public housing, the project was intensely scrutinized, and the towers incited significant opposition, since dense and high-rise living was thought to be inappropriate for primarily low-income families accustomed to living in low-rise dwellings. One representative example of this hesitation came from Clarence Stein, who asked the similarly skeptical public housing advocate Catherine Bauer:

[Stein] asked me straightforwardly how I could justify in my own mind working on a project which was going to take people who are accustomed to living on the ground, having their gardens, having chickens and their little animals in their yards, having space around them, having flowers, to have these people living in these twenty-four thirteen-story-high buildings. ⁵³

Unlike at Parklabrea, where the towers were seamlessly inserted into a preexisting plan and fed off the appeal of the surrounding commercial fabric, the garden apartments and towers at Elysian Park Heights were blurred together as if they represented similar genealogies, motivations, and prospective residents. Neutra described views from the towers that folded back in and onto the development itself rather than outward, failing to emphasize that the towers could, like Parklabrea, produce a new kind of urban subject in dialogue with those on the ground. By 1953, public housing in Los Angeles came to be viewed as overly totalitarian, and the concerns fueled the Los Angeles mayoral race. The victor, Norris Poulson, immediately canceled the city’s public housing contract with the federal government. Chavez Ravine was reserved to construct the Dodger’s baseball stadium, and in so doing, it signaled an end of possibility for modernist housing in Los Angeles.

Conclusion

Although Parklabrea was sold to Forest City Enterprises in 1985, which subsequently installed fences, gates, and gatehouses that produced the kind of “fortressed” housing of which Mike Davis and Reyner Banham were so highly critical, Met Life’s history of planning, constructing, and managing Parklabrea reveals an alternative narrative about urban integration, public value, and modern subjectivity that is often overlooked within histories of development capital. As a negotiation of social and economic forces, Parklabrea’s history was and continues to be a model of planning for Los Angeles. In a 1950 article in Parklabrea News, Parklabrea’s influence on prospective architects, builders, and developers in Los Angeles was made patently clear:

There is talk of another skyscraper residential community in downtown Los Angeles, to be erected by another insurance company. Height-limit buildings have been proposed in the Wilshire-Vermont area. And plans for a set of 13-story office buildings on Wilshire near the Ambassador [Hotel] were announced some months ago. So it looks like Parklabrea is leading the way toward a more vertical city. ⁵⁴

Rather than developing—at least as initially proposed—a self-sustaining community with shopping, restaurants, and entertainment, Parklabrea stimulated both commercial and cultural growth around it. As a prototypical mix of Los Angeles urbanism, the surrounding Wilshire Boulevard area and Miracle Mile emerged as a poised center of culture and commerce, including the adjacent Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CBS Television City, single-family homes, and shopping centers.

Despite functionalist and formal critiques of the standardized buildings and the discriminatory rhetoric of Met Life’s tenant selection practices in the 1950s, Parklabrea represents an important chapter within the history of modern housing in Los Angeles and as a reminder of the political debates that shaped the residential fabric of the city between the 1930s and 1950s. Much like the development projects of Baldwin Hills and Wyvernwood Gardens, Parklabrea was merely an onlooker to the fall of public housing and to the impacts that followed. However, unlike many suburban community-centered developments, including Baldwin Hills, which were built on the margins of the city and that resolved the trials of modernization only by pressing the automobile and all that it implied to the periphery, Met Life and the architects of Parklabrea fully embraced it. Just as historians and theorists understood modernity as a representation of life processes, Parklabrea offered both spaces for recluse and for confronting the realities of urban living. And while economic advantage continues to drive large-scale upheavals and development projects in Los Angeles, the history of Parklabrea serves as a historical precedent for architects, planners, and developers struggling to balance their own financial satiability with social responsibility.