Added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 11, 2009

When I think of LA’s finest craftsman enclaves, I think of Greene & Greene’s “ultimate bungalows” in Pasadena, and the handsome estates of West Adams. These were palaces of wood and rock, crafted with the finest materials and quality of workmanship, for people who could pay for them. But craftsman homes weren’t solely the province of the ultra-rich back in the early decades of the 20th century. Plenty were built for owners of more modest means.  

A great example is the tract of one-story craftsman homes on E. 52nd Place, between McKinley and Avalon in South LA, built from 1911-1914 for an affordable $2000 each. They were collectively added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009 as the 52nd Place Historic District. The 37 homes that contribute to this district are the work of Charles, Gustav and William Tifal, a trio of brothers who emigrated from Posen, Germany around 1909, and became well known for their tidy craftsman homes in LA and Monrovia. They would go on to design and build more than 450 of them in the LA area, including a gorgeous string on Monrovia’s Wildrose Avenue, described as “the quintessential bungalow neighborhood” by no less an authority on American bungalows than…American Bungalow magazine.

The Tifals built all the homes on 52nd Place as part of a single tract that they developed on spec. This was a time when a rapidly expanding network of streetcars made it possible for new suburbs to spring up all over, including south on Central Avenue. Walk down the street and you’ll notice similar elements cropping up from house to house – gabled roofs and exposed rafter tails, pedestals made of brick or river rock, shingles and horizontal cladding. They’ve mostly got porches, and they’re all set back from the street by about the same amount. 

While nobody’s gonna confuse these modest homes for the Gamble House, they embody an important history about the demographic shifts in South LA during the first half of the 20th century. When the Tifals built them in the 1910s, the area was largely white and working class, with plenty of immigrants from Germany, Russia and Ireland. Census data from the 1930s showed a rapidly changing neighborhood, with Black people in the majority, along with smaller groups of Mexican Americans and whites; by 1950 it was almost all Black families. 

Why the change? Partly because Black people were prevented from living anywhere else. According to the 52nd Place Historic District’s NRHP nomination form, 40% of Black Angelenos owned their homes as of 1910, one of the highest rates in the country. But by the 1920s, racist housing covenants prevented homeowners in many neighborhoods from selling to non-whites. As a result, a large percentage of Blacks moved to the area surrounding Central Avenue south of downtown LA, where the covenants didn’t exist. Adding to this limited mobility was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal government-backed business that classified majority-Black parts of town as “hazardous” for mortgage lenders. HOLC’s maps marked South LA in red, the origin of the term “redlining.”

As the Black community grew before WWII, its cultural and commercial center kept moving south on Central Avenue, further away from downtown. The vitally important Second Baptist Church opened in 1926; successful Black-owned businesses like the Angelus Funeral Home and Golden State Mutual Life Insurance opened further south in the ‘20s; entertainment venues like the Lincoln Theater and Club Alabam, right next to the wildly popular Dunbar Hotel, attracted the country’s finest jazz musicians. 

The 52nd Place Historic District housed some of the most prominent figures in Black LA during the area’s heyday from the ‘30s through the early ‘50s. Ivie Anderson, who spent over a decade as the lead singer for Duke Ellington’s band (that’s her on the very first recording of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” lived at 724 52nd Place from 1930-1945; after she retired from touring, she opened a popular restaurant called Ivie’s Chicken Shack at Central and Vernon. 

Just a few doors down, at 697, lived the civil rights leaders and journalists Charlotta and Joseph Bass. Together they owned and operated the California Eagle, a proudly political newspaper focused on ennobling and educating the Black community; at one point it was the largest Black newspaper on the west coast. Charlotta, in particular, was an incredible badass. She was the first Black woman to run a US newspaper, and championed progressive causes ranging from women’s rights to civil rights, equal housing laws to anti-discrimination in the workplace. She was also the first Black woman to run for Vice President, on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952. 

By the ‘50s, with the racist housing covenants finally struck down by the 1948 Shelley vs. Kraemer Supreme Court decision, the demographic makeup of Central Avenue began to change as the Black community moved elsewhere, and thousands of Latinos moved in. As of the 2020 census, South LA was 76% Hispanic and 21% Black; that change is reflected in the current ownership of the houses on 52nd Place, too.

These craftsmen houses of the 52nd Place Historic District have witnessed massive changes in the neighborhood over the years. It’s a testament to the Tifal Brothers’ quality design and construction that most of them are still standing, and retain a lot of their craftsman character. The declaration of this District as a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) in 2015 should help it stay craftsmany for years to come. 

But I can also appreciate how the non-original quirks on these homes reflect the changing tastes and personalities of their owners. The patterned concrete block walls added to the porch of 774; the stuccoed-over river rock on 765; the bright yellow paint on 648. I wouldn’t have made those choices myself, but they all lend the impression that the owners of these homes are having fun with the Tifal Brothers’ templates, and making them their own.

Recommended Reading

• 52nd Place Historic District’s NRHP nomination form
• 52nd Place Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (LA City Planning website)
• South Central/Watts census data (Censusreporter.org)
• Wild Rose: The Quintessential Bungalow Neighborhood (American Bungalow, 2004)