Added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 13, 2018

The name “Aloha Apartments” suggests tropical landscaping, seaside vistas and friendly locals. I know for sure that the Aloha Apartments in Hollywood have neither swaying palm trees nor views of the Pacific. I can’t speak to the amiability of the tenants, though I can say to their credit that nobody reported the suspicious photographer (ahem – me) creeping around the back and shooting video through the front gate.

What we have here is a mostly four-story, 74-unit apartment complex, shaped like a U (or a horseshoe, if you prefer), covered in white stucco with green trim. It’s wrapped around a central courtyard of decorative brick and tile, and features simple yet elegant Mediterranean-revival embellishments – some archways here, some decorative cuts into the stucco there, a doorway surrounded by quoins, some variation in the rooflines on the southwest and southeast corners. A simple green stringcourse runs between the third and fourth floors, like one of those horizontal bars separating sections of an article. Enough exterior charm to raise the Aloha above “white stucco box” territory.

Current pics would suggest that the interior of the Aloha hasn’t changed much aside from updates to the kitchens in each unit. Bathroom finishes are original, floors are still varnished wood, walls and ceilings are painted plaster. Some units have exposed brick wall, a nice touch. The lobby has been modified over the years (can’t imagine the vending machines or the painting of the Capitol Records building that I see in the NRHP application were around in 1928), but still retains its original layout.

The folks responsible for the Aloha’s design were Hillier and Sheet, an engineer/architect duo based in LA, who built a slew of revival-style apartment buildings in the late ‘20s and early ’30s.

Like the Halifax Apartments, Hollywood Argyle Apartments and Villa Bonita, the Aloha Apartments went up during a 1920s Hollywood housing boom aimed at meeting the needs of a huge influx of transplants moving in. LA’s population more than doubled between 1920 and 1930, from ~576,000 to more than 1.2 million. The population of Hollywood itself had skyrocketed from just 700 residents in the early 1900s to nearly 40,000 by the time the Halifax was built, in 1928. Many of them were attracted by the fast-growing film industry. 

The Aloha was part of a general pattern of increased housing density that you saw repeated throughout Hollywood in the first half of the 1900s. As the area developed, commercial zones rose up surrounding the big streets, like Sunset and Hollywood, and residential buildings filled in the streets in between. The land around Leland Way, where the Aloha stands, was subdivided around 1906 by the street’s namesake, landowner Cora Lower Leland. Over the next few decades you saw bungalows sprouting up in the residential sections, many of which were replaced by duplexes and then apartment buildings. The lot on which the Aloha sits was a freestanding single-family house and garage, at least as late as 1921.

The first available building permit for the Aloha, from October 8, 1928, shows the owner as William Berkowitz and Associates, and lists 142 rooms for 72 families. By the time the Certificate of Occupancy had been issued the following year, Berkowitz had sold the Aloha to Consolidated Hotels, Inc. (one of the largest apartment management companies in the west at the time) and the unit number had decreased to 52 apartments and 16 hotel rooms.

Why that mix of apartments and hotel rooms? The Aloha is a good example of the “apartment hotel,” a kind of establishment gaining traction in the early 1900s that offered the privacy of a traditional apartment, with some of the amenities you’d expect from a nicer hotel. So for example the Aloha offered 24-hour switchboard service and maid service to its hotel guests; early on, kitchens were available in the apartments, presumably a feature not included in the hotel rooms. This mix of types of rooms meant that the Aloha could serve a variety of lifestyles – families putting down roots, single professionals plugged into the workforce in LA, and more transient guests who needed temporary accommodations.

This being Hollywood, we do have records of Tinseltown professionals at the Aloha. Oscar-nominated actress Bonita Granville (These Three, Nancy Drew films) lived here, as did screenwriter Byron Morgan (Thunder), actress Beryl Mercer (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Little Princess) and stage director Russell Fillmore. Actress Ethel Grey Terry, known for her role in 1920’s The Penalty with Lon Chaney, lived and died at the Aloha.

(l-r) Bonita Granville, Beryl Mercer ca. 1918, Ethel Grey Terry ca. 1922. All public domain.

But for the most part, the residents at the Aloha were regular middle-class people, living and working in and around Hollywood. The 1930 and 1940 censuses place dentists, teachers, artists, engineers, pilots, journalists, accountants, army captains and photographers at the Aloha. There’s a tragic LA Times story from 1951 about the death of Terrence Murray, night clerk at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, who accidentally fell off the third-floor fire escape at the Aloha while trying to enter his apartment through the window so as not to wake his wife.

These days, the Aloha Apartments appear to be operating as affordable housing under the name Artiste Apartments. For what it’s worth, the Yelp reviews are almost uniformly awful. Roach infestations, parking hassles, broken security gates, absent landlords, that kind of thing. One former resident reported, in 2022, that their next-door neighbor was lying dead in his apartment for two weeks before anyone called the exterminator to investigate the smell.

All that sounds pretty bad. Though I’d prefer fleas and the occasional corpse to having a deranged murderer living down the hall, like we get in the 1974 sexploitation flick The Centerfold Girls, shot on location at the Aloha Apartments (caution, this is very NSFW).

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Building permit for 6731 Leland Way (Department of Building and Safety, 10/8/28)

+ “E. Allen Sheet and Harry Hillier” (Architect and Engineer, vol. 92, October 1927 – PDF via USModernist)

+ Ferguson, Logan, Powers and Company, Inc.: Aloha Apartments’ NRHP nomination form

+ “Hotels Chain Adds 48 Links” (Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1929 – via ProQuest)

+ “Income Realty in Sales Deals” (Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1937 – via ProQuest)

+ “Late Homecomer Gets Fatal Injuries in Plunge” (Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1951 – via ProQuest)

+ Kines, Mark Tapio: “Leland Way” (LAStreetNames.com)

+ “Miss Terry, Stage Star, Succumbs” (Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1931 – via ProQuest)

+ “Ocean Drowning Victim Identified as Director” (Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1950 – via ProQuest)

+ “The Centerfold Girls (1974) directed by Arthur Marks.” (Showbiz Imagery and Forgotten History

+ The Centerfold Girls (directed by Arthur Marks, 1974 – via Golden Cinema Red n Blue on YouTube)