L.A. Is My Beat: LAC - Garden Apartments Tour

The Village Green, Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, CA

This coming Saturday, November 1st, Los Angeles Conservancy is holding their fall tour entitled "We Heart Garden Apartments." Tickets are still available! This is going to be such an interesting tour depicting garden living in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the present. We will be visiting The Village Green (1941), Chase Knolls (1948) and Lincoln Place (1951).

Lincoln Place, Venice, CA

I have visited all three complexes in the past and love the green spaces and feeling of community in these beautiful developments. The architecture for all three is very similar. We will be touring the gardens of each complex as well as the interior of one apartment in each location. Before the tour starts, there will be an opening session at the Wilshire Ebell Theater which will include a brief overview of garden apartments, the premier of a short film about these apartments, and a summary of the L.A. Conservancy's work to preserve them. There is a marvelous movie online documenting Baldwin Village (aka Village Green) from 1942 through 1950. Be sure to watch the extra footage at the end showing old apartments in Hollywood and how inconvenient they are to live in compared to the modern planning of the beautiful Baldwin Village!

I have many friends living at The Village Green in Baldwin Hills, bordering on Culver City. I've attended dinners and parties in this bucolic setting. Every time I visit Village Green, I think about how nice it would be to live there. Maybe, one day...

Chase Knolls, Sherman Oaks, CA

Some of the apartments are large, most are on the small side, but designed beautifully to maximize all of the space...perfect for retirement living. The most wonderful part about living in any of these garden complexes are the GARDENS, of course. I'll be interested to hear how these three complexes are dealing with Southern California's drought.