Park La Brea Gets a Face Lift : Venerable Apartments Acquire Brighter Colors, New Landscaping, to Mixed Reviews

Some things never seem to change: The tourist-pleasing whimsy of Mann’s Chinese Theatre. The turn-of-the-century elegance of the downtown Bradbury Building. The plain-wrap, World War II-era stodginess of the Park La Brea Apartments.

Oops. Scratch that last one.

Fifty years after its first coat of gray paint was slapped on, the sprawling Los Angeles housing complex is getting a $7-million make-over that is lifting eyebrows west of downtown Los Angeles.

Gone is the nondescript color scheme that made the biggest apartment complex west of the Mississippi also seem like the blandest. And on its way out is the closely clipped landscaping that for generations had all the style of a GI’s haircut.

Taking their place is a wilder look--in the air and on the ground.

The development’s 18 residential towers have been decorated with zig-zagging bands of color picked after a painstaking analysis on a computer screen.

Grassy lawns spread over the 176-acre Third Street site are sprouting swaths of ground cover. Shrubs for the first time are being allowed to go unpruned.

Critics grumble that the new color scheme is garish and the new landscaping is messy. Supporters counter that the face lift gives new zest to both buildings and grounds.

The property’s owners have urged patience. Both the new paint and the new plants, they promise, will grow on you.

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Such renovations would scarcely cause a ripple of interest at most Los Angeles apartment developments. But people tend to notice when things happen on a big scale. And Park La Brea is big.

Its 4,222 rental units are spread out among dozens of two-story garden apartments as well as the series of 13-story towers. The garden-unit structures are arranged to form 26 grassy courtyards. About 10,000 people live there. And just about everyone has an opinion on the new look.

“When I first looked out the window and saw them painting the towers red, green and white, I thought it was the most dreadful idea I’d seen. It looked awful,” recalled Joy Simmons, a lawyer who has lived more than 20 years at Park La Brea.

“But when they’d painted about half, I could look one direction and see the new colors and look the other and see the old white and gray theme. And I could see that the old colors looked too plain.”

Simmons has concerns about courtyard conversions that began two weeks ago, however. At the first of the 26 courtyards to be refurbished, only a small island of grass is left. It is encircled by a dirt-and-mulch-covered area that is dotted with shrubs.

“I want to step off my patio into a park, not a forest primeval,” said Simmons, who found her shoes and pants cuffs covered by dust when she visited the courtyard.

Others are glad to say goodbye to the lawns, however.

“The grass never served a good purpose. It just gave us a bunch of lawn mower noise all day,” said Rick Navarro, a retired airline pilot who some days had to check into a motel to sleep because of the racket.

“I heard a lot of complaints about the paint initially. But now those most vociferous in their objections kind of like it,” said Paul Ash, a Los Angeles housing commissioner who heads the Park La Brea Tenants Assn.

And swapping grass for ground cover? “It’s a little of a trade-off. It’s a kind of ‘everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die’ kind of thing,” Ash added.

The controversy is a first for Park La Brea, which was started in 1941 after the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. purchased the land from USC. The company’s original plan was to build only garden units.

But the concept changed when World War II created a housing shortage. The first high-rises were constructed in 1948, with the towers laid out in the shape of giant Xs to allow for plenty of corner units--and to give each apartment a nice view.

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The tower idea was an adaptation of a concept promoted at the time by the French architect Le Corbusier. His so-called urban village called for clusters of housing units rising from the middle of open space. Park La Brea’s planners added extra interior greenbelts after an earlier metropolitan project in New York’s Bronx was criticized for buildings crowded too closely together.

The insurance company sold its interest in Park La Brea in 1985. Its new owners quickly decided to spruce up the place by adding pastel colors to the garden units and installing a fence around the property.

The property changed hands again last year when a partnership called Prime Property Capital Inc. purchased the entire project for $220 million. This time, though, the new owners opted for a more radical make-over.

The tricolor paint design (bands of orangish-red, cream and lime green) was picked after it was decided it would be too expensive to add friezes or other architectural detailing to the towers. Designer Thomas Cox settled on the paint scheme after trying 50 color combinations on a computer.

The high-rises had “always been painted and repainted in their World War II colors,” according to Dan James, the new co-owner of Park La Brea.

The new drought-resistant landscaping plan was devised to save on lawn-sprinkling and mowing costs, as well as to brighten up the look of the place, James said.

“Landscaping techniques from the ‘40s were still being carried through,” said Dave Ericson, a Rancho Cucamonga horticulturist in charge of the replanting. “It was all green. As soon as something was ready to bloom, they’d prune it off. That’s the way it had always been done.”

Ericson is replacing grass with drought-resistant ground cover such as white-blossomed jasmine, blue-leafed senecio, pink dwarf oleander and yellow-blooming bidens. Deep-rooting plants that can tap into Park La Brea’s surprisingly shallow underground water table were selected.

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At the same time, gardeners were ordered to stop manicuring shrubs and hedges, and let them flower. Instead of constant mowing, the new landscaping requires maintenance only twice a year. A water-thrifty drip irrigation system has replaced lawn sprinklers in replanted areas.

As radical as the changes sound to some, they haven’t seen anything yet, according to Pat Houston, assistant general manager of Park La Brea.

This fall, workers plan to start building something the likes of which old-timers never thought they’d see, she said.

After 50 years, Park La Brea is finally getting a swimming pool.