Five Historic Houses That Even Your Kids Will Love
December 12, 2022
LA is full of cool-ass old buildings that offer plenty for both architecture buffs and the young' uns. Here's my "trail" guide to historic LA houses kids will love.
#129: The Lummis House/”El Alisal” (Highland Park)
December 9, 2022
The Lummis House (aka El Alisal) in Highland Park is a playful castle-like structure of stone, cement and telephone poles (!), hand-built by one of the most colorful figures in LA history, Charles Lummis. You can appreciate it for its architectural uniqueness, or as a 3D manifestation of Lummis's philosophy. Either way, it's one of my favorite LA landmarks.
#128: Prince Hall Masonic Temple (South LA)
November 30, 2022
Much of the early history of this brick-faced building in South LA is a mystery. What we do know is that since 1926, this Masonic temple has been a regular meeting place for Black fraternal societies in LA, primarily the Masons of the Prince Hall order - America’s oldest and largest Black fraternal organization.
#127: Grace Nicholson Building / Pacific Asia Museum (Pasadena)
November 21, 2022
The USC Pacific Asia Museum continues the legacy of Grace Nicholson, who built this remarkable Chinese building in 1925 to house her massive collection of Asian and Native American art and artifacts.
#126: Richard Neutra’s Strathmore Apartments (Westwood)
November 12, 2022
The Strathmore Apartments are one of four complexes designed in Westwood by famed modernist architect Richard Neutra. With its unadorned white stucco walls, flat roofs and long rows of ribbon windows, the Strathmore is quintessential international style. It's also surprisingly a plant lover's paradise, and a great example of Neutra's ability to design spaces that respond to the needs of his occupants with unfussy grace.
#125: Los Cerritos Ranch House (Long Beach)
November 6, 2022
Built in 1844 by a yankee-turned-Mexican named John Temple, this house in Long Beach was the largest adobe built in southern California during the period when SoCal was controlled by Mexico. Its layered history tells LA’s transition from barren ranch land, to prosperous agricultural paradise, to a network of subdivisions that eventually coalesced into separate cities. You read into its history the story of Los Angeles becoming itself.
#124: Aztec Hotel (Monrovia)
October 30, 2022
Ghosts! Hookers! Cultural appropriation! They're all part of the fascinating history of the Aztec Hotel, an eye-popping 1925 Mayan revival hotel in Monrovia (now closed) designed by the idiosyncratic architect Robert Stacy-Judd.
#123: Natural History Museum (Exposition Park)
October 23, 2022
The Natural History Museum is justifiably famous for its awe-inspiring dinosaur skeletons and taxidermied animals. But did you know it was also an art museum for 50 years? Or that Exposition Park was once a hotbed of illicit activity like drinking, gambling and...camel racing?
#120-122: Garment District High-Rises (Downtown)
October 10, 2022
The 1920s-era Garment Capitol Building, Textile Center Building and Maxfield Lofts each have their own thing going for them aesthetically. And they each capture a unique period in the economic and architectural development of the Garment District in downtown LA, which remains one of the city's economic engines to this day.
#119: Chicano Moratorium March, 12/20/1969 (Boyle Heights)
October 2, 2022
On December 20, 1969, some 2000 anti-war protesters took part in the first Chicano Moratorium March, starting at Los Cinco Puntos in Boyle Heights and ending at a rally in Eugene A. Obregon Park. It was a watershed moment in Chicano activism, both in Los Angeles and nationwide.
#118: Wayfarers Chapel by Lloyd Wright (Palos Verdes)
September 25, 2022
Lloyd Wright's shimmering cliffside masterpiece of redwood, glass and stone gets more impressive with each passing year, as nature swallows it up. But Wright almost didn't build it! The story of how the Wayfarers Chapel came to be is almost as amazing as the building itself. Almost.
#117: Howard Longley House (Greene & Greene – South Pasadena)
September 18, 2022
Finished in 1897, the Howard Longley House is the oldest surviving building in LA by Charles & Henry Greene, towering figures in the California craftsman architecture movement.
#116: Fire Station No. 14 (South LA)
September 12, 2022
As the home of the LA Fire Department's second all-Black engine company, Fire Station No. 14 was a symbol of both pride and pain for LA's Black community before LAFD was integrated in 1956. The current station was built in 1949, a time of great change as LA reckoned with its segregated past.
#115: Upton Sinclair House (Monrovia)
September 5, 2022
This was the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, labor activist and would-be politician Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle. Sinclair moved to Monrovia from Pasadena after unsuccessfully running for Governor of California, and wrote nearly everything from the last 15 years of his career in the study in the back.
#114: Alex Theatre (Glendale)
September 1, 2022
The Alex Theatre is the last of Glendale's grand movie palaces. Opened in 1925 as a venue for vaudeville and silent films, it spent decades as a first-run movie theater, and more recently as a vital performing arts center. The iconic marquee and tower, added in 1940, projects a timeless opulence befitting a building that's endured nearly 100 years of ownership changes, fires, renovations and the changing tastes of the public.