LOVING THE HIGHLIFE
Cooperative housing pioneer to landmark honors --
Crestwood Hills savors its affection for modernism
From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Dave Weinstein
Few neighborhoods have gotten underway with grander plans than Crestwood Hills. Imagine a place where hardworking musicians, teachers, and writers can live together, close to the city yet surrounded by nature, with cooperatively owned schools, stores, medical services -- and even a bus to take them to their jobs in Los Angeles.
Such was the dream. And some of it came true.
"It was very exciting, I have to say," says Nora Weckler, who joined the Mutual Housing Association, which in the late 1940s developed the site in the then-remote Santa Monica Mountains high above Sunset Boulevard.
The association, initially founded by a small group of studio musicians, hired a design team headed by architect A. Quincy Jones, who later designed houses for Northern California-based developer Joe Eichler. The architects came up with a neighborhood of modern homes, each expertly fit into its hillside location.
"I was very impressed and loved the design of the houses," Weckler says. "They were glass and redwood and concrete blocks -- a lot of glass. It felt very open. The way the property was designed, the landscaping, the architecture, it still had that feeling of country to it. No house around us was on the same level. They just didn't bulldoze and flatten the land out and make it easy to build on. Every house was designed for the lot, and made it seem very private."
"Everybody there was kind of idealistic," she recalls. "It was politically leftist. And people I think were very comfortable with one another."
But few modern neighborhoods have had as many ups and downs as Crestwood Hills -- in part because the terrain itself has so many ups and downs. Tracts of modern homes are not rare. But it is rare that you'll find one built atop mountainous ridges, which are usually reserved for custom-designed homes -- or bobcat and deer.
Harold Zellman and Roger Friedland, who wrote a wonderful historical account of the neighborhood, claimed that it unveiled "a new architectural form -- hillside modern."
The first of the neighborhood's downs came quickly. The association's grand plans never reached fruition due to financial problems that were due, in part, to the expense of building on the hilly site. The original plan called for 500 homes on 800 acres. Only 160 got built, and much of the land was sold off.
The second? On November 6, 1961, a wildfire driven by 50 mile-per-hour winds raced through the mountains, destroying more than 60 of the Jones-designed homes, as well as many others (but taking no lives).
Then, in the years that followed, many more of the Mutual homes were lost -- not to fire this time, but to insensitive remodeling and demolitions.
By the time architect Cory Buckner arrived on the scene, in 1994, only 45 of the remaining 100 homes retained their architectural integrity. That gradually dropped to 33.
"My husband and I said, we need to bring them in as historic monuments," Buckner says. So began the neighborhood's latest upswing. Over the next few years, Buckner convinced 17 residents to have their homes designated as Los Angeles 'historic-cultural monuments.' As an architect, she has also remodeled a dozen homes in the neighborhood, all in keeping with the original architecture. Buckner's own house, which originally served as Mutual Housing's architectural office, is one of the most dramatic, floating across its site on a bridge of steel.
Buckner has been helped by the newfound interest in mid-century modern architecture. When she first arrived, people buying in Crestwood didn't care about the original architecture, she says.
"People who buy them today buy them on purpose," says Lizzy Bentley O'Neal, who bought her home in 2007 because of her husband's interest in the architecture, and her interest in the good schools.
"This is clearly one of the most significant postwar modern residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles, both for its architecture, the design of its individual buildings and its overall tract design, and for its association with the model of cooperative housing and the social ideals associated with that," says Ken Bernstein, director of Los Angeles' Office of Historic Resources, who applauds Buckner's efforts.
Zellman and Friedland believe the neighborhood has national significance as well, as "the largest modernist residential cooperative ever attempted in America."
In 2002, the Los Angeles Conservancy gave Buckner its Preservation Award for helping preserve the homes.
The people whose homes have been landmarked don't mind the extra controls. For one thing, they qualify for property tax reductions under the state Mills Act because their homes are a protected historical resource. Plus, they simply love their homes and wouldn't want to alter what makes them special. "We're a designated cultural-historical landmark," O'Neal brags. "You can't mess around with your house." Landmarking doesn't prevent alterations or additions, Buckner says, if they are done sensitively.
"People didn't see any value in the homes," Buckner says. "Now there is respect for the architecture."
But not among everyone. In September 2007, just before the MAK Center for Art and Architecture led an architectural tour of the Crestwood Hills, one of the last remaining homes was demolished by its owner -- which dropped the number of intact residences to 30. Fans of the homes were aghast. The house was replaced by a basketball court.
But the architectural review board of the Crestwood Hills Association had its hands tied, says Allison Baratelli, a longtime member of the homeowners association.
Gregory Serrao, a member of the three-person architectural board, says they lack "legal basis for stopping demolitions" in the neighborhood's governing covenants. "We have jurisdiction only over new construction and changes. If somebody buys a Quincy Jones house and wants to tear it down, there's nothing we can do. That's just a fact."
Baratelli, who brags about the welcome wagon that greets neighborhood newcomers, argues that despite rifts over architectural controls, Crestwood Hills is a great place to live. On that point, she gets no argument.
"Raising a child in this neighborhood is like the old-fashioned days of walking to school and walking to each others' homes," says Kathy Leader, who has a 13-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son. The preschool -- which is still a cooperative, as it was when Nora Weckler was its first president -- helps create a tight-knit community, she says.
It's always been a great place for children, says Peter Israel, who grew up in the neighborhood, and whose father was a longtime board president. Israel remembers adventuring through the hills. "I was in the wild," he says.
Shortly after moving to the neighborhood, Kathy and Jon Leader helped revive the tradition of hosting concerts in woodsy Crestwood Hills Park. They've featured jazz, African dance, and klezmer. The park, once owned by Mutual Housing, was donated to the city, and is another community-building spot, thanks to pizza nights and the like.
Crestwood Hills, in other words, retains much of the spirit of its cooperative days. Even the mix of people is similar to the old days -- Hollywood writers, musicians, photographers, graphic designers, lawyers. The big difference today: owners have fatter bank accounts.
"When it was originally built, this was an affordable neighborhood to live," says Christopher Wargin, a designer of motion picture graphics who serves on the Crestwood Hills board. Most of the homes were small -- many only 1,200 square feet -- with small galley kitchens and bathrooms that, by today's standards, seem cramped.
Lizzy Bentley O'Neal's house is typical. Low-slung, with a free-form plan, resting on a pad well below street level, the post-and-beam home comes across as rustic and unpretentious. The exterior is vertical redwood siding above concrete blocks. The front door hides beneath a canopy that's supported by broadly cantilevered roof rafters.
Out back the house opens up, with a wall of windows beneath a glassed-in, low-sloped gable. Inside are open ceiling beams, a narrow hallway to the bedrooms, and concrete block walls that create a raised dining area over a sunken living room. "This was not a glitzy place," O'Neal says of her home. "The master bath doesn't even have a tub."
Houses are arrayed on the hillsides, which were terraced to create building pads, to take advantage of the views. Although most of the homes are quite close to each other, the contours of the terrain, and the dense shrubbery and trees that have grown up since construction generally hide neighboring homes.
Since the sites varied, so did the houses. Split-levels are common. Owners got to chose from several uphill and downhill plans. There are single-slope shed roofs and butterfly roofs, sometimes rising to two-story height living rooms. Many have prow-shaped, glass-filled fronts, suggesting ships. Roofs and decks tend to be dramatically angular and boldly cantilevered.
Though Jones is most often credited as the architect, it was really a team effort that involved architect Whitney R. Smith, architect-engineer Edgardo Contini, and several draftsmen who also played a creative role in the designs, Buckner says, including Wayne Williams and Jim Charlton.
Zellman says Charlton, who trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, played an especially important role in the design, designing 18 of the 26 models that were eventually built, and siting the individual homes. Charlton, who worked for Wright when he was designing his utopian and never-built 'Broadacre City' of low-cost homes, gave the homes and site plan a strong Wrightian touch.
Wright's plan for Broadacre City "achieved its most complete realization" in Crestwood Hills, Zellman and Friedland wrote.
Diane Phillips, an original owner, lives in one of the most dramatic houses, wonderfully fitted to a tricky hillside site. It remains one of the most original. Steps from a carport rise one floor to the main living area, which is supported by steel beams. A brick fireplace opens both to the living area and to a den several steps higher. The living area opens to a small deck. Much of the interior is dark, Douglas fir plywood, giving it the feel of a mountain lodge.
Crestwood Hills morphed from a middle-class community to a neighborhood for the wealthy around the time of the 1961 fire, says Peter Israel, who remembers as larger homes began sprouting on empty lots. "Non-association people came in after first couple of years. There was such a big difference between the original homes and the ones that came in later," he says.
Many of the newer homes were designed by well-known modern architects -- including William Krisel, Richard Neutra, Paul Williams, Craig Ellwood, and Ray Kappe -- and add to Crestwood Hills architectural cachet.
Still, Crestwood Hills retains much of its original spirit, despite the run-up in prices, Wargin says. "You get a different kind of people than you would in the other areas up in the hills," he says. Homes in Crestwood Hills can sell for $2 million. Just down the hill, they go for $10 million or more. Nearby, they go for double that. "When you consider that, the homes here are pretty reasonable," he says.
Making a killing in real estate was far from the thoughts of the three Hollywood studio musicians who first proposed pooling their resources to buy a little land in the hills. But to make a cooperative work, more members were needed. "The idea just blossomed," remembers Nora Weckler, who heard about the scheme from friends.
Although the association bought the land together, individual lots and homes were individually owned. The goal was to run several services as cooperatives. Besides the nursery school, they hoped to have cooperative stores and doctors, and even a bus, Weckler remembers. But they would have needed more than 160 family members to make those services efficient, she says.
Why did the cooperative fail to achieve its potential? Economics played a large part. The homes proved more costly to build than anticipated, even though the architects hoped that by prefabricating certain parts, they could save money.
It also took much longer than anticipated to win governmental approvals and find financing. "By the time it got close to fruition," Israel says, "some people had gotten cold feet and wanted to withdraw. But there was no money to give them," he says.
Zellman says politics hurt the project as well. Federal officials opposed cooperative housing because it competed with for-profit housing, he says, and the Federal Housing Administration shied away from modern homes, considering them structurally unsound. Lenders also shied away because the neighborhood was going to be integrated -- a first in the hillside district. The neighborhood's "reputation of being a cooperative got translated into being a bunch of Commies," Nora Weckler adds.
Building on odd-shaped sites on hilly slopes also presented problems. Two contractors who signed on for the job went bankrupt. "The contractors, when they bid, they didn't recognize the problems, or the added costs," Weckler says. "So they bid too low."
"Part of it was an architectural problem," Buckner says, citing the intricacy of the detailing, which proved expensive. Jones, she says, "clearly learned from the mistakes and applied that learning to the later houses he designed for Eichler Homes."
Rather than building just a few designs, Zellman says, Mutual Housing went with 26 in an effort to meet the desires of the members. That raised costs. "It turned out to be a victory for democracy," he and Friedland wrote, "but a disaster for production efficiency."
"The architects designed it so the cabinets and closets could all be mass-produced," Weckler says. "It turned out none of the houses were quite that square, so they all had to be done separately, and by hand almost, to fit. So that added to the cost."
And cooperative living is never easy. Israel remembers his father on the phone, night after night, ironing out neighborhood problems.
But no one ever complained that the dream had been lost, Israel says. "The people who lived there, they liked it," he says. "It was good for them."
Photos: John Eng, Adriene Biondo, Spencer Cheng; and courtesy Crestwood Hills Archive, Cory Buckner, A. Quincy Jones Architecture Archive, Simon Elliott
• Crestwood Hills is up Kenter Avenue, above Sunset Boulevard, in Brentwood. Mutual Housing Association homes can be spotted along Rochedale Lane, Hanley Avenue, Stonehill Lane, Deerbrook Lane, Tigertail Road, Bluegrass Lane, and nearby streets. The Crestwood Hills website is crestwoodla.com.
• 'A. Quincy Jones,' the book by Cory Buckner (Phaidon Press, 2002), includes a chapter on the Mutual Housing Association homes.
• 'Looking for Los Angeles,' edited by Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth (Getty Research Institute, 2001), includes the essay 'Broadacre in Brentwood? The Politics of Architectural Aesthetics' by Harold Zellman and Roger Friedland.
Visit other 'Neighborhoods on the Rise'
|
