![]() ![]() The affordable units, which cost no more than $80 a month, filled up quickly with young, progressive families. ![]() The first residents moved into Baldwin Hills Village on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. An ad from 1942 advertised Baldwin Hills Village and the Village Green as “the finest deluxe apartment that can be found” with views “unmarred by unsightly yards and neighboring buildings.” Apartments, which ranged from three and a half to six rooms, consisted of simple, large rooms and windows, walled in private patios, and wood burning fireplaces. The initial construction, which cost more than $3.25 million, included 97 structures. ![]() “A child could walk from his own front door to any of the other 627 units and never encounter an automobile.”ĭue to legal issues, construction did not begin until 1941. “Stein’s directive to the designers was to ‘tame the car,’” Keylon says. Tennis courts, croquet fields, and horseshoe pits were installed, as were nine playgrounds. Progressive design also stretched to the landscaping, which included drought-tolerant planting and pathways and plazas of decomposed granite. Both active and passive recreation were planned for, as well as ample room for outdoor living, which would encourage people to experience the acres and acres of beautifully landscape grounds.” “The contemporary architecture and landscape were wholly modern but used design details hearkening back to Old California to give it a sense of place. “The site plan and landscape took precedence over the architecture, which was kept deliberately simple,” Keylon says. The apartments, which would all look out on the central Village Green, were slated to only use 14 percent of the entire park area. Originally called Thousand Gardens, the project was soon rechristened Baldwin Hills Village. Wilson, Edwin Merrill, and Robert Alexander would also work on the community, in collaboration with landscape architect Fred Barlow, Jr. According to Keylon, local architects including Reginald D. In a huge get, Clarence Stein himself was hired as a consulting architect for the project. In 1935, they found a perfect parcel of relatively flat land, originally owned by the Baldwin family (who would invest in the project) and set about to build a self-contained community following the Radburn plan. “People were truly desperate.”Ī group of investors and architects sought to alleviate the housing shortage by building a Garden City in congested Los Angeles. “The 1930s were like the 1980s in the terrible shortage of affordable places to live,” architect Robert Alexander, who would work on Village Green, told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. This new community concept filtered to Southern California in the early 1930s, when LA’s population explosion, compounded by bad traffic, high rents and the Depression, caused an acute housing shortage. “At Radburn, New Jersey, they perfected these ideas-concepts that included superblocks, which allowed for separation of automobile and pedestrian houses turned away from streets, so that primary rooms looked out over landscaped greenbelts shared community gardens and recreational spaces.” “In the United States, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright took Howard’s ideas and began planning similar communities on the East Coast,” Keylon says. The movement had started during the industrialized Victorian-era in England, when city planner Ebenezer Howard drew plans for self-sustaining communities surrounded by green space. Both a National Historic Landmark and a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, the complex is, according to former resident and landscape historian Steven Keylon, a particularly successful example of the Garden City Movement, which came to America via the British Isles in the 20th century. Village Green’s architectural pedigree is nothing to sneeze at. “I came down here because of architecture-and I found community,” he says. Longtime resident Daniel Millner had a similar revelation after moving in, in 2001. “It has the most amazing, creative, smart, accomplished, diverse, eclectic residents: musicians, architects, teachers, organizers, academics, tech workers, families, single people, all ages, all backgrounds, from a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters to a Tuskegee Airman,” she says. But once she moved in, Gorton discovered that perhaps the best thing about her new home was its people. Her family had roots in the area, and the unit was affordable, centrally located, and surrounded by lush acres of green space. She purchased one of the 629 historic condos at Village Green, a midcentury complex that sprawls across 64 acres at the foot of Baldwin Hills. In 2008, design consultant Colombene Gorton became a homeowner. ![]()
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