A History Of The Silver Lake Garden Apartments

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Thanks again to Eric Brightwell for this retrospective (@ericbrightwell_official).

In Silver Lake, one encounters a variety of types of multi-dwelling residences in a variety of architectural styles. Mid-rises, duplexes, five-over-ones, and small lot subdivisions are all common. In a previous Ask Silver Lake, we looked at our community’s beloved bungalow courts. In an Ask Silver Lake exploring Mid-Century Modernism, we admired several apartments designed by the great Rudolph Schindler. In Silver Lake, there is one building typology represented by just one example – the garden apartment. That lone Silver Lake garden apartment is named, rather straightforwardly, Silver Lake Garden Apartments. 

Garden apartments sprouted from the 19th century urban planning philosophy, the Garden City movement. Their heyday was from roughly 1937 until 1955. There are many garden apartment complexes across Los Angeles, including Wyvernwood (1939), Avalon Gardens (1941), Baldwin Hills Village (1942), Hacienda Village (1942), the William Mead Homes (1942), Estrada Courts (1943), Chase Knolls (1948), Lincoln Place (1951), and Nickerson Gardens (1954). The Silver Lake Garden Apartments were built in 1949. They sprang up in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War, in response to a demand for more and higher quality housing.

The first serious effort to catalog garden apartments was launched in 2012. The Architectural Resources Group prepared a report titled Garden Apartments of Los Angeles for the LA Conservancy. Filmmaker Maya Santos and her Form Follows Function media crew crafted a documentary about three garden apartments titled Villages in the City: Garden Apartments of Los Angeles. It all culminated in 2014 at an event called We Like Garden Apartments!

Garden apartments share some characteristics with smaller and more common bungalow courts and courtyard apartments. Like those, they lack shared, interior corridors; rarely exceed two stories; and are oriented around courtyards rather than a lobby. Bungalow courts were essentially killed by parking mandates instituted in the 1930s and garden apartments represent an attempt to balance legal requirements for increased car storage with the human attraction to greenspace. The end effect is a bit like an apartment complex located inside of a park – or islands in the city.

The land on which the Silver Lake Garden Apartments stand has passed through many hands and served a variety of purposes. For thousands of years, this part of Los Angeles sustained the Tongva. In 1795, the Viceroyalty of New Spain granted this land to soldier José Vicente Tomás Féliz y Esquer to establish Rancho Los Feliz (or Felis, as it was often then spelled). The Ivanhoe Tract and Mrs. Garey’s Tract were both subdivided in 1887. The area was annexed by Los Angeles as part of the East Hollywood Addition in 1910. 

In the immediate vicinity, cowgirl stuntwoman and actress, Winna Brown, founded a ranch. She leased a section of it to Los Angeles’s first film studio, the Selig Polyscope Company, based nearby in Edendale. It was later taken over by cowboy star, Tom Mix, who named it Mixville. 

A map from 1923 shows the property on which Silver Lake Garden Apartments are located mislabeled McGarey’s Tract. The surrounding area was subdivided as St. Alban’s Lake Place in 1922. 

The northern half of Mrs. Garey’s Tract was then owned by M. L. Helsel. Heslel was a real estate developer. He was awarded $2,500 for the loss of an arm resulting from a house moving accident, after which he offered to part with his other arm for the same price. Instead, he parted with his life in 1925, when he was hit and killed by a motorist as he strolled through Belvedere Gardens. After his death, his property was turned into an auto court (a sort of motel with cabins) named Silver Lake Auto Rest – and the Silver Lake Produce Market. In 1966, the former auto court and market were redeveloped as the shopping center still there today – although in place of a Whole Foods and CVS there was then a Hughes Market and a Sav-On Pharmacy. 

In the undated aerial photo above, the lot where the Silver Lake Garden Apartments stand (on the right side of the frame) appears vacant. The 1923 map lists it as belonging to L. B. Byron Moving Pictures. By 1927, it was listed as the address of Lionel F. Comport. Comport raised a variety of animals that he trained for films. He founded a ranch around 1918 in North Hollywood where he raised the expected dogs, cats, and horses – but also bats, bears, chickens, cockatoos, cows, donkeys, geese, goats, kangaroos, macaws, mules, pigeons, pigs, rabbits, raccoons, sheep, skunks, turkeys, and turtles.

Comport was living at 2127 Teviot Street when, in 1927, he was sued by Miss Marion Blackwood. Blackwood was the manager of a squirrel named Chester who, it was hoped, would pursue an artistically and financially rewarding career in film. It may sound strange to modern Silver Lakers, accustomed as we are to the daily sight of red squirrels, but our bushy-tailed neighbors were a comparative rarity back in early 20th century Los Angeles. The non-native mammals arrived in Los Angeles in 1904, when veterans brought them to the Sawtelle Veterans Home as pets. Blackwood and Chester both lived mere blocks from the Veterans’ Home, in neighboring Brentwood Heights. Chester escaped from Comport’s and was never re-apprehended. Blackwood sued Comport for $35 (roughly $650 adjusted for inflation).

By 1928, that stretch of Teviot Street had been renamed Silver Lake Boulevard. The home at 2421 Silver Lake was also associated with Comport’s in-laws, the Hopkins Family. L. F. was married to Lillian Ellen Comport (née Hopkins), whose parents, Raymond C. and Lulu, lived there with their other daughter, Mary Louise. Sacramento-born Raymond was, for twenty years, a performer in the Mason Opera House Orchestra – one of the leading live theaters in Los Angeles. He died in 1932. Many members of the Comport/Hopkins clan died in fairly rapid succession before the decade ended. Mary Louise died in 1935. Lulu died in 1937. Lillian died in 1938. A horse named Molly (who’d appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame) died in 1939. Lionel, however, retired to a different home in North Hollywood, where he died in 1959.

By then, the area around his former residence on Teviot/Silver Lake was almost entirely built out. A new wave of residential construction had arrived in the 1940s – before residential downzoning would reduce the city’s residential capacity and make multi-dwelling residences like garden apartments illegal across nearly 80% of the renter-majority city. The curious concentration of banks neighboring Silver Lake Gardens sprang up nearby in the decades that followed. The CitiBank building was built in 1959. The Bank of America followed in 1963. The East West Bank building was completed in 1972. Its parking lot was poured over the gravesite of Tom Mix’s horse, Old Blue. 

Usually a search through the newspaper archives for any multi-dwelling residence – especially a larger one like a garden apartment complex – yields all sorts of colorful results. Silver Lake Garden Apartments are, in this regard, rather an exception. The only incident concerning an inhabitant that seems to have been deemed newsworthy involved an eleven year old boy named Mike Burns. In 1953, he got a fish hook stuck in his skull over at Echo Park Lake and was covered in the pages of both The Los Angeles Mirror and The Los Angeles Times.

66 years passed before anything at the garden apartments reached that level of media attention. Then, in 2024, owners Fang Qian and Seth James Morgan submitted an application to the Los Angeles Department of City Planning that, if nothing else, will make the Silver Lake Garden Apartments decidedly less garden-like (if approved). The Morgans would like to construct a cluster of four and five-story mid-rises atop multi-level subterranean car storage in the garden apartments’ greenspace. If the new buildings, designed by DFH Architecture, are constructed, it won’t be the first time the character of a garden apartment complex was altered by the addition of residential towers.

Over in Midtown, the famed Park La Brea complex began as garden apartments. That development was constructed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1944. In 1950, eighteen 13-story towers were added, turning the former garden apartment complex into the largest multi-dwelling development in the Western US. The new buildings called for in the Morgans’ application could scarcely be referred to as towers, though, topping out as they do at four and five stories. In the rendering, they look, it has to be said, a bit like Frank Garbutt’s monolithic, all-concrete architectural monument to himself, the Garbutt Estate. If built, they will add 76 residential units (6 of them “affordable”) – and subterranean storage space for 119 cars.