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California--and Los Angeles, in particular--is known far and wide for architectural strangenesses. Many of you have probably seen pictures of the donut stand in the form of a giant donut, the hot-dog stand in the form of a giant hot-dog, the orange juice stand located inside a gigantic orange, etc. Here is a more restrained example of that style, dating from roughly the same period--I would guess the 1920s or '30s. I don't know if there is any connection between the "Egyptian" style of this apartment building and that of Sid Graumann's Egyptian Theater, located a few miles away on Hollywood Boulevard (recently saved from the wrecker's ball as the new home of the American Cinematheque film museum, and [speaking from my experience as a movie projectionist, one of many occupations I've had] one of the best technically set-up theaters in Los Angeles), but the two buildings certainly share a lot of architectural furbelows. As of this writing (August 1999), the Egyptian is now re-opened and going strong as a movie theater again. I support the American Cinematheque strongly and I invite you to do the same: you are invited and exhorted to contribute to the American Cinematheque, 1800 N. Highland Avenue #717, Los Angeles, CA 90028, [213] 466-3456; please mention this site/page with your contribution. --Yes, that's the same Sid Graumann of Graumann's Chinese Theater ... another southern California architectural weirdness.
This apartment building still stands at 1240 through 1242-5/8 N. Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood. I was by there recently and the interior courtyard is still the same as it looked when I lived there (at 1240-3/8, fourth unit back on the right side) in the late 1960s, before several feet were removed from (whacked off of? castrated from?) the front in order to make room for the widening of Fairfax Avenue to accommodate on- and off-ramp traffic from the soon-to-be-built Beverly Hills Freeway ... which ended up never being built because the City of Beverly Hills was able successfully to keep it from being run straight down Santa Monica Boulevard, dividing B.H. in two along the old Pacific Electric trolley car right-of-way. (A similar battle is still being waged by the cities of South Pasadena and Alhambra, in an attempt to prevent the northern extension of the Long Beach Freeway, Interstate 710--the last remaining gap in the L.A. freeway system--from being run roughshod through them, taking out several hundred examples of early southern California residential architecture. As of August 1999, there has been yet another court decision halting the project ... and the Alhambra has retaliated by erecting barriers on various streets and changing the timing on traffic lights, in streets, in an effort to make traffic flow as difficult as possible -- if they can't have the freeway, they are doing their best to chase the traffic out of town, obviously to force the issue. Of course this is by no means the end of the story; we shall see what we shall see....) The front of this building really got trashed then -- replaced with standard angular stucco blahness, with no resemblance whatever to the original and not even the same color, fer chrissake! ... but at least the Fairfax reconstruction gave the gas company and City of L.A. the opportunity to replace the gas and water mains, so some good came of that bullshit. --Well, I suppose it was good....
--Anyhow, back to the aborted freeway project: those of you who are Los Angeles-area residents now know (if you didn't already) why the southbound Glendale Freeway ends in that sudden hair-raising, death-defying, free-fall dive down onto Glendale Boulevard; why the north- and southbound lanes of the Hollywood Freeway split apart at Vermont Avenue (to accommodate the planned but never-built interchange); and why various West Hollywood streets such as Fairfax and Gardner, for no apparent reason, suddenly spread out into parkways for several blocks before becoming their old two-lane selves once again: blame Beverly Hills! Meeeeeaaaaannnnwhile, Santa Monica Boulevard -- California State Route 2, formerly good ole U.S. Route 66 (as in "Get Your Kicks On”) -- is still a major bottleneck through WeHo and Beverly Hills all the way out to Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean, thanks in no small measure to the presence of Century City, which was developed in anticipation of the freeway. Recently, the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) -- after proposing such ferkakte schemes as tunneling through Beverly Hills! -- has floated yet another proposal for solving the Westside traffic problem by finally doing what should probably have been done in the first place. West of Beverly Hills, Santa Monica Boulevard is actually two streets (S.M. Blvd. and Little S.M. Blvd.), with the former railroad right-of-way between them. It would seem obvious that this stretch could be turned into a dandy parkway, now that the railroad's gone ... and CalTrans is proposing to do just that. Doh!!!
These photos are among the first I ever shot, with a 35mm Pentax SLR camera borrowed from my dear friend Terry Hodel*, of KPFK, Pacifica Radio Los Angeles' Hour 25 show, and I wish I had more ... perhaps one of these days I'll go back there and shoot some more. Most of the negatives from that time (including some more shots of this place) were unfortunately destroyed in a basement flood, and a couple of these shots are a little dinged up--the one of the front elevation in particular. In fact, these shots are among the few that survive (parts of roughly 30 of 120 rolls); here they are for your enjoyment.
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*Terry died in March 1999 after a long battle with cancer. She was one of the truly gentle souls in the world and I miss her terribly.
Catalog Number: F3-18 
Front elevation of the building, from across the street. All of this exterior detail (including the sculpted beam) is now gone, as is the shrubbery and the original sidewalk and pavement. |
Catalog Number: F3-15
Closer-in view of the courtyard. |
Catalog Numbers: F3-11 (left) and
F3-12 (right)
Two additional views of the courtyard. The door visible behind the planter opens to a stairway which ascends to a landing and the entrances of the upstairs apartments. The courtyard grass was dug up at the time the gas and water mains were replaced, in order to replace the mains for the building, and it could clearly be seen that the planter was once a fountain. |
Catalog Numbers: F3-10 (left) ,
F3-8 (center) , and
F3-4 (right)
Three views of the planter / fountain. Was this was a "stock” piece of architectural ornamentation, obtained from some anonymous supply yard, or was it especially constructed for the building? Or-- and this is the most fascinating speculation!--did the architect of the building encounter this fountain first and, inspired thereby, pattern the rest of the place upon it? --The weathering of this piece is beautiful. From what I could see when I poked my head in recently, it is still there, thirty-odd years later. |
Catalog Numbers:
F3-19 (left) ,
F3-14 (center) , and
F3-13 (right)
Three detail views of the courtyard entrance. The left photo shows not only the detail of the original (and since removed) front beam--which you can see has been neglected and is in need of repair, perhaps because the owners knew the building would soon be modified--and of the front left unit; the detail of this unit's entrance is reflected in all of the others in the building and in the rear entrances as well (see below). The right photo gives a good close-up of the column detail. I don't know why that piece of wire is there. |
Catalog Numbers:
F3-27(left) ,
F3-28 (center)
, and
F3-21 (right)
The left photo shows the entrance to the left rear unit; the column on the right--similar to that over the front left unit, shown in the first photo of the above row--frames the doorway to the stairs to the upstairs units. The middle photo shows a decorative beam which spans the courtyard; I seem to recall that it is far enough back from the front that it may have survived the modification, although I didn't notice it when I looked recently. The right photo shows the right side, from the street; all of the detail on the side, including the roof overhang, right to the front of the reconstructed portion, still survives. |
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