ADAMS BOULEVARD

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Introduction and Inventory

What was in its beginnings part of the southernmost platting within the boundaries of Los Angeles as it was incorporated on April 4, 1850, "Adams Street" appeared on maps as early as 1857, if not before, running through a bucolic agricultural plain a long carriage ride from the pueblo. It was one of several roads honoring U.S. presidents running southeast to northwest south of the downtown plaza toward which the city's expanding population moved in force after the establishment of the University of Southern California near Agricultural Park in 1880. Eventually divided into East Adams Street and West Adams Street with a directional demarcation at Main as per city practice, the 7.8-mile-long roadway was by the mid 1920s officially designated a boulevard, having become the signature thoroughfare of the original "West Los Angeles" as the city expanded beyond Hoover Street; pre-freeway traffic engineers had by then included it among the drags marked as major automobile and truck routes as the city expanded toward the Pacific. (Among other streets upgraded to boulevard status were 10th, which became Olympic Boulevard; Pico; 16th Street, which became Venice; Washington; and Jefferson.)

Pepper trees lined picturesque Adams Street from its early days as an agricultural road; parts would

Developing contemporaneously in the 1890s with the much-better-known "West Adams" was a district referred to as "South Los Angeles," a main thoroughfare of which was East Adams Street. A mile-and-a-quarter stretch of Victorian cottages, interspersed with a number of larger residences, went up along Adams from Main Street toward its eastern terminus at Long Beach Avenue, with perhaps hundreds if not thousands of additional houses to the north, toward downtown, and in neighborhoods extending far to the south. East Adams Boulevard remains the residential backbone of a vast area of Victorian housing, still, fascinatingly, intact and unheralded. With that district building up with mostly small-scale houses suiting the needs of employees of firms in the industrial zone at the Los Angeles River at its eastern end, and with West Adams and its University District staked out by the rich, the advent of the automobile and thus demands for better paving spurred high-end development miles west along Adams Street. Real estate speculation along its entire length was especially intense between 1890 and 1910.

The transition from a rural to a suburban southwest Los Angeles depended, of course, on water supplies for a dense population that would not be able to rely on the windmill-driven private wells found on farms and larger suburban properties into the 20th century.

While incorporated into a developing West Adams streetscape in an attractive way after evolving

from primitive earthen ditches, zanjas became notorious for collecting detritus, becoming

maintenance-intensive hazards in which mosquitoes would breed and, as would

happen from time to time, children and small animals would drown. The

newer cement conduits running along the south side of Adams

Street west from Figueroa to Hoover survived into the

20th century before being filled and replaced

with more sanitary enclosed mains.

Over the course of 40 years from the early 1880s larger dwellings, many very grand indeed, were built all the way out along Adams from Main Street toward Culver City. The accepted stretches of Adams District fashion moved rapidly along the Adams corridor toward Figueroa and beyond, the largest houses coming to be built in two sections of what became the fashionable linear West Adams District, one between Main and Hoover, the other centered around Arlington Avenue. The heyday of residential West Adams Boulevard came after virtually all traces of the agricultural beginnings of the district had disappeared. By 1914 it was clear to real estate investors that the most expensive West Adams neighborhoods in particular—seemingly in place forever and immutable—could face stiff competition as new subdivisions along the Wilshire Boulevard corridor began to open in rapid succession, including Windsor Square and Fremont Place. Though still considered too far for comfortable commuting in the automobiles of the day, Beverly Hills, where lot sales had begun eight years before, was incorporated in 1914. Significantly, given that its membership was then largely still living in West Adams near its former location, the Los Angeles Country Club had opened at its current location on the far side of Beverly Hills in 1911.

On August 6, 1916, the Los Angeles Times ran a feature on the recent efforts of 38 of the richest property owners along Adams Street—including William May Garland, Isidore Dockweiler, Randolph H. Miner, and Edward Doheny—to upgrade it to what they envisioned as an actual divided boulevard well before "West Adams Street" became "West Adams Boulevard" officially. Financed by these householders and not by the city, the first 15-foot-wide medians were installed between Figueroa and Hoover streets in 1914, with owners between Figueroa and Grand Avenue soon adopting the scheme. On May 15, 1914, the public works department of the city council classified Adams for engineering purposes as a boulevard, if not yet in name, and gave its approval for a program that was to cost the city nothing except perhaps for additional future upkeep. Contracted for by Edward Doheny himself, bronze lamp standards of a six-round-globe variety that was retro even for 1916 were in place westward from Figueroa by that summer and would soon be placed along the stretch toward Grand; they were said to be duplicates of electroliers found along Chicago's glamorous Michigan Avenue. In 1917 the street would be further raised in stature by a shade-tree program extending from Hoover toward the Palms district, annexed to the city in May 1915. Interestingly, these trees would be replacing expired or cleared peppers that had lined Adams for decades from its early rural days, in some places forming a near canopy over the road.

There was little protest over their property assessments being raised, but the owners who self-financed the improvements could not yet have been aware that traffic planners would be pushing Adams Street as one of a number of major crosstown routes that would eventually drain West Adams and other districts close to downtown of a critical mass of well-heeled residents, not to mention affecting their quality of life along the old road. An upgraded Adams itself would lead to new subdivisions within its borders such as Lafayette Square, Wellington Square, and Victoria Park. But as more modern and reliable automobiles multiplied exponentially—promoted tirelessly by the Automobile Club of Southern California whose massive headquarters opened, not insignificantly, at the southwest corner of Adams and Figueroa in 1923—and as the population of Los Angeles began to more than double during the 1920s, the handwriting was on the wall even before the Great Depression cast its pall over West Adams once if not for all.

What was at first merely a line on a map was then a dirt roadway for several decades; it remained

largely unpaved until after medians and elaborate lighting appeared from 1914-16, legitimizing

Adams Street's later upgrade to Boulevard with extravagant verdure and considerable charm.

When the major lateral arteries of Los Angeles were further widened and promoted in the city's Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924, resulting in Adams Street actually being re-signed as Adams Boulevard, it might have been hoped by some property owners that the nomenclature involved in the newest upgrade—intended to accommodate cars, not to enhance image, as their makeover of the prewar years was meant to—would further bolster the old grandeur and help slow the decline of the older of the various neighborhoods along its route, which were, ironically, at the peak of their leafy attractiveness. But as the housing stock aged and the population of the city exploded during the decade and householders cashed out and moved to newer precincts to the north and west, any such hopes attendant to the promotion of Street to Boulevard proved to be in vain, especially after Black Tuesday. A small residential section along the Adams corridor anchored by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, including gated Berkeley Square, held on through the Depression, but Old Guard diehards were relatively few in number. What little was left of the withering, once-salubrious heart of the linear Adams district, centering on the intersection of the Boulevard and Figueroa Street, was destroyed once excavation for the Harbor Freeway began after the State Highway Commission announced that, as reported in the Times on June 24, 1950, the highway would "literally...make a bow to the University of Southern California.... The bend over to Flower St. [south from downtown] is being made...to avoid interfering with plans for the future development and expansion of either the University of Southern California or the university housing facilities, including the fraternity and sorority row development along both sides of 28th St. and west of Figueroa." While rumors circulated as to the influence of telephone-operator-turned-papal-countess Estelle Doheny attempting to spare her Chester Place fiefdom, the key to the altered route was no doubt the university and the power of its fraternity alumni now spread throughout an establishment trying to balance progress with collegiate nostalgia. To that cohort, now living in newer suburbs such as Windsor Square, Hancock Park, on the Westside, and elsewhere, Adams Boulevard had long since become déclassé as a residential boulevard except in that, since the 1920s, its big residences had been repurposed as fraternities before the decision to consolidated them on the 28th Street row was made. With emphasis on the more contemporary meaning of the second word, so it seems, sic transit gloria Adams Boulevard.

An article appeared in the Los Angeles Times on June 13, 1914, describing impending upgrades
to Adams Street that included elaborately landscaped center medians and parkways, new
lighting, and other amenities from Grand Street toward the east, running west to
at least Hoover. The stretch above is west of Normandie Avenue, where
the Los Angeles Railway turns onto Adams from downtown. At
left can just be seen 2205 West Adams; at right, 2190.

ADAMS BOULEVARD: AN INVENTORY OF ITS HOUSES is a work in progress; we will be cataloging the residential street westward beginning on East Adams Boulevard, adding regularly to the images in our inventory below. Addresses in red are active links to completed histories.