Added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 14, 1998

Here we have the venerable Halifax Apartments at Yucca and Cahuenga. It’s one of the earliest apartment buildings of its kind, along with the Havenhurst and Hotel Knickerbocker, all finished in 1923. We have the firm of Albert Walker & Percy Eisen to thank for it, a large firm that specialized in mid- to high-rise residential and commercial buildings. They also built The Havenhurst, the Hollywood Plaza Hotel and the Taft Building in Hollywood, and the Gaylord Apartments on Wilshire. The immortal Oviatt Building, Fine Arts Building and United Artists Theatre (now the ACE Hotel) downtown are Walker & Eisen joints, too. 

When the Halifax was built, Hollywood was undergoing a multi-family housing boom as masses of easterners and midwesterners moved to LA, attracted to the burgeoning film industry. Between 1920 and 1930, the population of Los Angeles more than doubled, from ~576,000 to more than 1.2 million. And they all needed somewhere to stay! During the ‘20s, available land was quickly subdivided and bought up by developers, and many of Hollywood’s single-family homes were razed to make way for denser housing and the backlots of numerous film studios. 

This particular one was considered more luxe than the alternatives, something of a midway point between a standard apartment building and a hotel. Its rooms came pre-furnished, and there was both maid service and a garage, both qualities that you would soon come to see in many of the nicer properties catering to Hollywood types. 

While the client list wasn’t as celebrity-rich as, say, the Montecito or Andalusia, this was home to character actor Ned Sparks (Blessed Event, 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933), and also housed opera star Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who stayed there with her son in 1928 while on vacation. 

The Building

The Halifax is a classic Italian renaissance revival layer cake, defined by three horizontal zones. On the bottom you’ve got your “base” made of smooth concrete, scored so it looks kinda like huge bricks, with alternating pairs and single windows wrapping around the corner of Yucca and Cahuenga. The second and third floors make up the middle layer, or the “shaft.” That one is clad in bricks and punctuated with pairs of rectangular windows. Up on the fourth floor is the “capital” of the building – sticking with our layer cake metaphor, this part was rimmed by architectural whip cream. The arched windows on the top layer are set off by orange molding, and framed by fancy pilasters and decorative spandrels. Notice the elaborate parapets above each of the fire escapes in the 1926 photo above. They were removed later on (bummer, they were cool).

I’ve not seen the interior of The Halifax myself, but the pictures from its 1998 nomination form for the NRHP show a refined lobby with gray terrazzo floors and wrought iron chandeliers, ornate molding ringing the coffered ceilings and tons of columns. The rooms themselves are comparatively spartan, but there are (were?) built-in kitchen cabinets the likes of which you don’t often see in more modern builds. 

The Dude That Built It

For its first year of existence, the Halifax was called the Cross Arms Apartments, named after its owner Leach Cross. He was a trained dentist-turned-professional-boxer, I kid you not. His nickname was actually “the boxing dentist.”  

Born in New York, Cross had turned to boxing in 1905 as a way to pay for tuition to dentistry school at NYU. He adopted the nom-du-ring “Leach Cross” (his real name was Louis Wallach) so his parents wouldn’t find out, and then have to explain why their well-educated son enjoyed getting the crap kicked out of him on a regular basis. According to the Jewish Boxing Blog, that plan went out the window in 1908, when a family friend congratulated Cross’s dad on a recent bout that their son had won. Mr. Wallach was of course upset, but somewhat assuaged by the $100 that his son took home.

Cross was a legit fighter, and smart enough to recognize that his peculiar combination of skills was potentially bankable. He and another boxer developed a comedy stage show, alternating exhibition matches and silly sketches. Hoping to make it into the pictures, Cross and his brothers set up a film company in 1914. While the company never took off, Cross did end up attacking Douglas Fairbanks in the 1917 silent film Reaching for the Moon, and he would later train actors to box. 

By 1921 Cross’s boxing days were over, and he decided real estate would be a good use of his savings. So he bought the tract of land at Yucca & Cahuenga, hired Walker & Eisen, and you know the rest. His wife Alta, a respected painter, turned out some 150 paintings to decorate the building’s interiors. 

Within a year, Cross sold the Cross Arms to the Boston-based moneyman A.C. Burrage as part of a real estate swap. Burrage got the apartment building and Cross got Burrage’s mansion in Redlands, in a deal valued at $1,000,000. For a time, Cross tried his hand at the restaurant business; but the stock market crash of 1929 KO’d him, so he returned to New York and went back to tooth extractions and cavity fillings, occasionally serving as a boxing referee. 

The Post-Cross Years

Burrage changed the building’s name from Cross Arms to the Halifax Apartments in 1924. A few years later it was sold to SJ Straus and Leigh Battson, the second husband of Lucy Doheny (owner of Greystone Mansion). Those two put the neon sign up on the roof in the early ‘30s.

The parts of the Halifax that you can see from the street have undergone only minimal alterations over the years. A studio was added to the roof in late 1923, and an entirely new roof was installed in 1952. After a period of decline in the ‘60s – ‘80s (same story as many of Hollywood’s grand apartments), the building was converted into low-income housing for senior citizens. A full-on renovation took place after the Thai Community Development Center took over in 1997, which involved reconfiguring the 72 single rooms into 46 larger units for low-income families and individuals. The renovation uncovered much of the original surfaces and materials. These days, the Thai CDC also has its offices in the Halifax.

Thanks to Chancee Martorell, Executive Director of the Thai Community Development Center, for filling in some details of the Halifax’s more recent history. And thanks to the Jewish Boxing blog for correcting the record on Leach Cross’s skills in the ring.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Halifax Apartments’ NRHP nomination form

+ “A Look Back: Leach Cross” (Jewish Boxing Blog, 2011)

+ “CROSS ARMS APARTMENTS SOLD: More Than Million Involved in Sale” (Los Angeles Times, 1924 – via ProQuest)

+ Leach Cross @ Boxing Records Archive

+ Fontanes, Tom: “‘The Fighting Dentist’ was the second owner of the Burrage Mansion” (Redlands Community News, 2019)

+ Mallory, Mary: “Hollywood Heights: Halifax Apartments at Crossroads of Boxing and Film” (Daily Mirror, 2021)

+ “NEW ROUTE PLANNED AS ROAD LINK: THOROUGHFARE TO PARALLEL WHITTIER” (Los Angeles Times, 1924 – via ProQuest)

+ “OPERA STAR HERE AFTER LONG TOUR” (Los Angeles Times, 1928 – via ProQuest)