Added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 25, 1996

Documented facts are great and all. But when you’re talking about historic buildings, their past residents and the stuff that happened in them long ago, hearsay and old stories passed down through the decades might be the best you can get. And most of the time they’re more interesting than the documented stuff anyway.

When I visited the regal Charmont Apartments in Santa Monica, my host Charlie pointed to a two-inch gap between the main Charmont building and a shorter, later addition just south of it, at 1114 4th Street. Charlie had heard the gap existed because of some city ordinance that prevented the two buildings from being connected. He also told me that the building just west of the Charmont at 320 California Avenue was once a military headquarters, where the distress calls were first intercepted after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. 

Another source with a long history at the Charmont hadn’t heard the Pearl Harbor story, but she had heard that the 320 California property may have housed naval officers before it became part of the Charmont. And then she revealed this tantalizing tidbit: around 1988, an elderly resident named Lucy accidentally set her unit on fire and partially destroyed some of the walls. When they were assessing the damage, they found Nazi paraphernalia inside the walls. Apparently the woman had been a spy during WWII, and hid some of her keepsakes where she thought nobody would find them.

Whether or not this lore is ever corroborated, there’s also plenty of verifiable stuff about the Charmont Apartments to pique our interest. They were built in 1928, at a time when multi-family housing and apartments were becoming a critical part of Santa Monica’s housing stock. LA County’s population exploded from under a million in 1920 to over 2 million in 1930, and as more and more people flowed in, the single-family homes and tourist hotels gave way to duplexes, bungalow courts and tall apartment buildings. 

The Charmont was one of the higher-end newcomers in Santa Monica (quite literally, at four/five stories it dwarfed the buildings around it), catering at first to snowbirds with expendable income, traveling west during the colder months. Rooms came fully furnished, and the complex offered many of the amenities of a luxury hotel, like maid service and underground parking, a dining room and an on-site beauty parlor. Even as the Great Depression dragged on, it wasn’t uncommon to find the Charmont in the Los Angeles Times society pages:

Mrs. Dorothy Bishop and Mrs. Marion Mitchell of Boston have been honored at a series of smart parties in Santa Monica, where they are the house guests of the Albert H. Waitts. 

This evening Mr. and Mrs. Waitt will be dinner hosts. Last night Mrs. Jessie Leepy invited sixty guests to the Charmont Apartments in Santa Monica to greet them at a cocktail tea.

– “Bostonians Entertained,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1936

The architect of the Charmont was Max Maltzman, one of the first Jewish architects to set up his own practice in Los Angeles. Maltzman gave us classic apartment complexes like El Cortez just a few blocks away, the Ravenswood in Hancock Park (Mae West’s residence for decades), and the Northmere in Los Feliz. He designed synagogues and community centers for the Jewish community in East LA and Boyle Heights, and was even the supervising architect for the Moroccan-themed Sahara, one of the earliest hotels on the Las Vegas Strip.

Maltzman designed the Charmont Apartments in a unique hybrid of Spanish colonial revival and art deco styles. The Spanish stuff was everywhere in southern California at the time, but art deco was just coming into vogue for large-scale buildings in 1928. Consider that art deco masterpieces like Bullocks Wilshire and the Richfield Tower were still a year away from completion; the Eastern Columbia Lofts wouldn’t open ‘til 1930. 

Owing to its Spanish provenance, the Charmont is clad in cream-colored stucco and topped with red tile, with wrought-iron lighting fixtures inside. You can see the art deco inspiration in the monumental vertical massing, and the zig-zag chevron shape that’s used as a decorative motif over doors and windows, and as part of the stringcourse between the first and second floor. Uniting the two styles is a blocky fountain in the courtyard, covered in multicolored, Andalusian-style tile and outlined in deco black. I don’t know which architectural tradition the five-story turret comes from, but it works. What a weird, successful merging of old and new.

Within a decade of its construction, Maltzman’s L-shaped main building was joined by the shorter one at 1114 4th Street, designed by someone else. A separate building, housing three bungalow/garage units, was added right next to the pool at some point in the ‘40s. By the end of 1947, the property at 320 California Avenue became the fourth part of the Charmont portfolio; classified ads from the time advertised “the Newly erected, elegantly furnished CHARMONT – The Home of Hospitality Where the Summer Spends the Winter.” Incidentally, the architect listed on the building permit for 320 California is Edith Northman, the first licensed woman architect in Los Angeles. 

The Northridge earthquake of January 17, 1994 severely damaged a lot of Santa Monica’s historic apartment complexes. Across the city, the residents in some 2000 units were displaced. Santa Monica lacked an official disaster plan for historic resources, so in the days after the quake, the City Council met to consider emergency legislation on how to determine what should be demolished, what should be repaired, and how. With the input of preservation experts statewide, they adopted an ordinance specifying that only buildings that couldn’t be reasonably shored up would be considered “imminent threats,” and thus slated for demolition.

Of course a city ordinance can’t mandate the costly repair of a damaged building. Many of the local apartment buildings were renting far below market rate due to Santa Monica’s strict rent control rules, and rebuilding simply wasn’t affordable when tenants are only paying $150 a month. The city’s Rent Board permitted some property owners to raise rent, but not every Santa Monica apartment complex was able to bounce back. 

In an article from two months after the earthquake, the Los Angeles Times reported that the owners of El Cortez got a $1 million loan from FEMA within a few weeks and planned to restore the complex; another property owner feared he would lose his apartment complex to the bank, because the building would cost just as much to repair as to knock it down and rebuild. An apartment complex on San Vicente Boulevard was damaged beyond repair and quickly knocked down. The Sea Castle Apartments on the Santa Monica waterfront were condemned after the earthquake, destroyed by fire in 1996, and then demolished and rebuilt a few years later. 

And what of the Charmont? Compared to some of its neighbors, the damage was fairly minimal, consisting mostly of toppled bricks around the exterior corners and atop the turret. The building was designed with a thick core of load-bearing masonry at its center, which protected the interior walls and hallways during the shaking. 

The Charmont’s owner Susan Connally cobbled together loans from the government and other financing sources to repair and retrofit the place. She brought in a structural engineer, who replaced a big chunk of the unreinforced masonry with stronger gunite, placed straps around the entire building to hold the walls in, and then added anchor bolts to hold the brick to the foundation. While they were at it, they replaced all the plumbing and electrical to bring the Charmont up to code, and dug through layers of paint to uncover the original colors, and match them where they could. 

Connally spent two years fixing up the Charmont, and finally reopened in January of 1996. Her prior tenants had first dibs on the restored apartments, but by then many had moved on with their lives already. One source told me that less than 50% of tenants returned after the restoration. 

The restoration won an award from the California Preservation Foundation in 1996, and in 2012 Connally was honored by the Santa Monica Conservancy for her stewardship of both the Charmont and The Sovereign.

Today the Charmont offers studios, bachelors and one-bedrooms for rent, in the $1800 – $3000+ range depending on the unit. The turn-down service and beauty parlor are gone from its days as an apartment hotel, but on the plus side, you get to sleep in a historic building that totally won’t collapse in an earthquake.  

Thanks to Susan, Teri and Charlie at the Charmont Apartments for letting me tour the property and answering my endless questions. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “Bostonians Entertained” (Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1936 – via ProQuest)

+ California Preservation Foundation: “14 Projects Receive CPF Design Awards” (PDF – California Preservation, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 1996)

+ O’Connor, Pamela: “The View from Santa Monica” (PDF – California Preservation, Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 1994)

+ The Charmont Santa Monica (thecharmontsantamonica.com)

+ Grimes, Teresa: Charmont Apartments’ NRHP nomination form

+ Hill-Holtzman, Nancy: “A House Divided in Santa Monica : City’s Rebuilding Effort Seeks Delicate Balance, but Renters and Landlords Feel Like Losers” (Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1994)

+ Hill-Holtzman, Nancy: “SANTA MONICA: ‘Residents’ of Empty Lots Allowed to Vote” (Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1994)

+ “Landmark Sea Castle Apartments to Be Rebuilt” (Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1998)

+ maxmaltzman.com

+ Sanborn Map Company: “Santa Monica, 1918 – Feb. 1950, Sheet 11” (via ProQuest)

+ Santa Monica Conservancy: “Charmont Apartments” (smconservancy.org)

+ Santa Monica Conservancy: “Preservation Awards” (smconservancy.org)