Why Wilton Place matters.
Wilton Place is a distinguished corridor where Hancock Park's residential character meets Craftsman architecture, Period Revival houses and an unusually intact sequence of early twentieth-century Los Angeles development.
Running through Hancock Park between Koreatown and Hollywood, the residential corridor follows a long north-south line from the neighborhoods below Pico Boulevard toward Franklin Avenue, passing through successive districts shaped during Los Angeles' westward expansion. Central stretches near First and Third streets narrow into a quieter residential passage where mature street trees, deep lawns and closely spaced houses replace the larger apartment and commercial buildings found along surrounding arterials. Traveling north carries the roadway past Beverly Boulevard and Melrose Avenue before the built scale shifts again toward denser Hollywood apartments and commercial intersections. The final approach toward Franklin Avenue climbs gently beneath the Hollywood Hills, extending sightlines from the level Wilshire basin toward the steep terrain above Los Feliz and Hollywood. The result is a corridor whose changing residential scale, mature landscaping, surviving early houses and extended alignment connect several distinct chapters of Central Los Angeles development along a single street.
What defines Wilton Place.
Wilton Place is best known for containing one of Los Angeles' earliest nationally recognized residential districts, a compact collection of houses whose development began when the city's western edge still lay nearby. The street itself originated in 1901 as two blocks between Pico Boulevard and present-day Venice Boulevard within a tract associated with railroad executive William G. Nevin and real-estate operator Walter James Horne. Farther north, the land that became the Wilton Historic District formed the central portion of Plummer Square, where the Plummer family raised chickens and vegetables 1900 for its restaurant near the historic Plaza. John L. Plummer filed a tract covering Wilton Place between present-day Second and Third streets on January 8, 1907, and E. T. Wright filed the adjoining tract between Second and First streets that May before modifying it in June 1908. Houses rose quickly across the new subdivision, which was conceived for upper-middle-class families at a moment when Western Avenue marked the far western boundary of Los Angeles. Nearly half of the district's 65 houses were completed before World War I, and most of the remainder followed during the decade after the war, producing an unusually concentrated building period. Craftsman houses dominated the earlier phase, followed by Colonial Revival, Classical Revival, Mission Revival and other period designs as architectural fashion changed. Ridgewood Place was cut through in October 1912 to connect Wilton Drive with the existing street south of 1st Street, producing the distinctive divergence and residential island still visible around 2nd Street. The configuration gave builders irregular parcels and shifting sightlines that encouraged houses to address corners, curves and neighboring façades with unusual care. Wilton Place preserves both the architecture and subdivision geometry of an upper-middle-class Los Angeles district created during the city's rapid early twentieth-century expansion.
The architectural survival of those blocks became consequential again during the 1970s, when proposed changes to Wilton Place threatened the street configuration that had distinguished the tract for six decades. A 1972 plan to widen and straighten the roadway drew opposition from residents concerned about the loss of houses and the disruption of the district's curved street pattern. Preservation efforts subsequently focused attention on the concentration of Craftsman and Colonial Revival residences, including houses whose placement around Wilton Drive and Ridgewood Place made the streets themselves part of the architectural composition. California State Historic Preservation Officer Knox Mellon recommended national recognition in May 1979, and the Wilton Historic District entered the National Register of Historic Places on July 24 that year as the third Los Angeles district to receive that distinction. The designated area contained 63 single-family residences dating from 1907 through 1925, supplemented by two houses from the mid-1930s. Individual properties later received Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status, including houses at 103 South Wilton Drive, 132 South Wilton Place, 212 South Wilton Place, 215 South Wilton Place, 220 South Wilton Place and 245 South Wilton Place. Another architectural concentration developed farther north between 1st Street and Beverly Boulevard, where houses dating principally from 1905 through 1929 formed the North Wilton Place Historic District. Craftsman, Spanish Colonial Revival and American Colonial Revival houses there extended the street's early residential character beyond the nationally recognized blocks to the south. Wilton Place emerged from these successive preservation chapters with an unusual continuity of early Los Angeles residential architecture extending across multiple tracts and architectural periods.
How Wilton Place fits.
Wilton Place works as the anchor for a Central Los Angeles sequence tracing women-led cultural institution building, the industrial rise of Hollywood filmmaking and the transformation of a nineteenth-century cemetery into an enduring repository of motion-picture history.
Begin at The Ebell of Los Angeles, founded in 1894 under the leadership of Harriet Williams Russell Strong as a women's organization devoted to literature, art, science and education. The club occupied earlier buildings on Broadway and Figueroa Street before commissioning architect Sumner Hunt to design its present Renaissance-inspired campus, which opened in 1927 with a theater, library, art spaces and gathering rooms arranged around a large institutional complex. John William Chard created the ironwork installed at the entrance in 1928, the Art Salon followed in 1929 and sculptor Henry Lion designed the Fountain of Honor in 1930 as a memorial to relatives of Ebell members lost during World War I. Frances Gumm, later Judy Garland, performed on the theater stage before MGM producer George Sidney during the 1930s, adding Hollywood history to an institution created four decades earlier around women's intellectual life. Continue to Paramount Pictures, where the surviving studio complex carries Hollywood filmmaking from silent-era production through sound, radio, television and contemporary motion pictures. Paramount's Hollywood property incorporates buildings associated with both Paramount and RKO, with construction spanning 1926 through 1967 across Mediterranean Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, Streamline Moderne and other architectural forms. The studio system concentrated administration, stages, preproduction, postproduction and technical work within the same industrial compound during the period when eight major companies controlled 95 percent of American film revenue. RKO's Jesse Lasky Building later became the workplace of secretary Edythe Eyde, who wrote and circulated Vice Versa under the name Lisa Ben from June 1947 through February 1948, creating the first lesbian periodical published in the United States. Paramount's surviving streets and production buildings preserve the physical organization of the vertically integrated studio era alongside later broadcasting and television development. Conclude at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, founded in 1899 as Hollywood Cemetery on 100 acres near the emerging community that would become the center of the American motion-picture industry. Its grounds accumulated the graves and mausoleums of figures including Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Judy Garland and numerous other actors, directors and studio-era practitioners as Hollywood developed around the property. Paramount eventually grew along the cemetery's southern boundary, creating an unusually direct physical relationship between a working film studio and the burial place of generations who built the industry. Financial decline and physical deterioration marked later decades before Tyler and Brent Cassity acquired the property in 1998, restored its Hollywood Forever name and began extensive rehabilitation of the grounds. The progression moves from The Ebell's women-led cultural institution through Paramount's industrial consolidation of filmmaking and culminates at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where the people who built that industry remain physically connected to the studio district that grew beside them.
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