Added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 24, 1979

The Wilton Historic District is a collection of 63 single-family, two-story homes lining an oddly-shaped circuit of streets on Wilton Drive and S. Wilton Place, between 1st and 3rd near Windsor Square. These houses are a mix of two-story craftsman and colonial revival. And while there are plenty of high quality examples of both around Los Angeles, the Wilton Historic District is unique for a few reasons. First, the relative homogeneity of the styles; second, the unconventional siting; and third, the houses’ integrity over time. 

Around the turn of the 20th century, the land that would become the Wilton Historic District was owned by the Plummers, a family of early LA settlers (see visit #155 for more on the Plummers’ history) that purchased large parcel of the old Rancho La Brea land grant. They used “Plummer Square” (as they called the area back then) for growing vegetables and raising chickens to stock their restaurant in the plaza downtown. 

In 1907 John Plummer began developing a tract on S. Wilton Place between the present 2nd Street and 3rd Street; around the same time another developer, ET Wright, filed another tract with the County, for the area between 1st and 2nd. The tract plans were modified once in 1912, to allow for S. Ridgewood Place to cut down below 1st Street and join up with Wilton Drive. By that time the area had been annexed to the city of Los Angeles, and upper middle-class Angelenos were gradually moving westward past the city’s previous western border, Western Avenue. 

With two exceptions, all of the homes in the Wilton Historic District were finished in 1907-1925. About half of them were designed in the craftsman style – one of the most popular SoCal building styles from before WWI, and many of the rest in the colonial revival style that was regaining steam in the 1920s, with a sprinkling of tudor and mission revival in there. And while that mix in itself isn’t so surprising, it’s rare to find a neighborhood that hangs together so well.  You get a real sense of intentionality here, despite the multitude of architects (including local notables Frank M. Tyler and Pierpont Davis) who designed these houses over a two-decade span.

Because of how the land was graded as this tract was laid out, many of the houses on S. Wilton Place between 2nd and 3rd Streets are five to seven feet above street level, and set back relatively far from the street. It gives them a sense of majesty as you approach. Just walking up to the front gate feels like you’re entering Oz. 

Above 2nd Street, the district contorts into a truly weird shape, a kind of lacrosse stick-shaped streetscape with a residential island above 2nd Street between Wilton Drive and Wilton Place, where the lacrosse netting would be. It’s a big departure from the rigid street grids that surround it, and the extreme curve of S. Wilton Place makes for some interesting architectural and landscaping solutions to the oddly-shaped lots. It’s an artifact of city planning before the automobile rose to prominence.  

That curve was the subject of controversy in the early 1970s, when the city’s Bureau of Engineering proposed demolishing six houses on Wilton Place to widen the street from 40 feet to at least 56 feet, to soften or eliminate that curve. The city purchased four of the houses in preparation for demolition; the owners of the other two refused to sell. When the city threatened taking them by eminent domain, a group of concerned residents banded together as the Ridgewood-Wilton Neighborhood Association (RWNA) to fight the proposal, arguing that the city’s plan would irrevocably alter the historic character of the neighborhood, and encourage speeding. 

The RWNA proposed a more conservative 50-foot widening, and lobbied the local councilman John Ferraro to get involved. It was in this context that the RWNA nominated the Wilton Historic District for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. When it was formally added in the summer of 1979, it became only the third district in Los Angeles to be added to the National Register, after Carroll Avenue (see visit #94) and the Broadway Theatre & Commercial District. 

Finally in 1982, Ferraro sided with the RWNA and instructed the Bureau of Engineering to abandon the project and put the four houses they owned up for auction (the RWNA website has video footage of the auction). Some residents who were looking forward to a wider, safer street put up signs that said “Thanks! Mr. Ferraro for nothing.” The rest helped clean up the yards in the abandoned houses in preparation for the auction.  

The houses in the Wilton Historic District have kept a remarkable level of historic fabric over time. When the district was nominated for the National Register in 1979, the form stated “The area has remained essentially unchanged over the years; there have been no significant alterations to any of the structures nor to the area itself.” And the same is mostly true more than 40 years later. New coats of paint, re-landscaping, a sleeping porch or two added, sure. There’ve been a couple tasteful remodels; one less tasteful example is 215 S. Wilton Place, which looks like a war zone after K-Pop singer Samuel (formerly of 1Punch) bought it in 2021 and immediately began ripping out historic floors, walls and mahogany details, in violation of its protected status as an LA Historic-Cultural Monument. But there have been no new houses built here since the 1930s, and the large majority of them look very much like they did 100 years ago.

There’s a great story from 2019 about a woman who was remodeling the master bathroom in her 1911 craftsman in the district, and uncovered two issues of the Los Angeles Evening Express and the Los Angeles Daily Times, dating from 1920-21, hidden in the walls. A perfect time capsule, within a district of houses that can claim the same.

Sources & Recommended Reading 

+ City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning: “L.A.’s Newest Historic-Cultural Monuments” (HPOZ Newsletter, Vol. 5 issue 4, October 2011)

+ Curran, Brian: “Nightmare on Wilton Place: Another historic home lost”

+ Curran, Brian: “Ridgewood Place, a lost gem and overlooked subdivision” (Larchmont Chronicle, December 29, 2022)

+ Curran, Brian: “The ‘Places’ — Wilton, Gramercy, St. Andrew’s and Manhattan” (Larchmont Chronicle, March 30, 2023)

+ Filipek, Suzan: “2019 Chronicle sealed for posterity, or 99 years on” (Larchmont Chronicle, August 29 2019)

+ Groves, Martha: “From shabby to stately chic” (Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2008)

+ Kaplan, Sam: “Wilton Area Up in Arms Over Street Widening: Controversy Over Street Widening” (Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1980 – via ProQuest)

+ Kaplan, Sam: “South Wilton Place: There Was a Crooked Street” (Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1982 – via ProQuest)

+ Kazor, Virginia Ernst: Wilton Historic District’s NRHP nomination form 

+ Kines, Mark Tapio: “Wilton Place” (lastreetnames.com) 

+ Lombard, Patricia: “Wilton Place’s Historic Thomas A. Churchill Sr. Residence on the Market”

+ Ridgewood-Wilton Neighborhood Association