The town of Palms was established in the eighteen eighties when the Southern Pacific was a cross-desert lifeline for the _____citizens of Los Angeles and they were shipping the first oranges to San Francisco by sea. LA county was a 34,000 square mile wilderness punctuated occasionally by ranches and occasional orchards; civilizational ties ran more to Mexico than to New York or even Chicago.
There might be an adobe wall or a stone foundation dating from the 19th century, but most of the diminishing stock of historic buildings in West LA date from the boom years between the turn of the Century and the First World War, when wood-framed Craftsman houses rose in clusters along downtown, sprinkled in handfuls to the West across what is now West LA, Beverly Hills and Culver City and and clustering again as beach cottages in Santa Monica and Venice, extending down the coast to Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo and Palos Verdes.
Casita was built, as far as I can tell, around 1906 as one of a few buildings on a sheep ranch that had been carved out of the Rancho de la Ballona - the old Spanish grant that stretched from the hills of what is now UCLA, south down to where the Ballona Creek enters the Pacific beneath he Westchester bluffs. In grainy photographs from that period there are steam-driven wheat threshers, cattle roundups with cowboys in sombreros and high-masted sailing ships standing in their moorings off San Pedro.
Driving around West LA, the occasionally dot of historic architecture gets lost in the blur. But when you slow down and move through on your bike, it's everywhere, though disappearing month by month. The bright prink craftsman bungalow, listing on its blocks, overgrown with jungle foliage, overseen by old hippies who bought thirty years ago, with well into seven figures by simple virtue of lot value. The used car lot festooned with multicolor pennants, the sales office planted in what was once a simple farmhouse. The old post office long since converted into a surplus supply store; a rickety two story wood duplex, almost Victorian in its preciosity of detail, improbably wedged between a massive apartment block from the nineteen seventies and a substantially more massive block from 2005.
In some corners of LA, where substantial money has managed to hold off the forces that be, hundred year old houses stand on generous lots graced by mature trees and a general air of ease. But for the most part these little hamlets of classic Americana have been brutalized one way or another. Near downtown, what used to be called urban decay has been the culprit, with 3,000 square foot manses being bulldozed for parking lots or chopped into multiple apartments for refugees from Alabama and Michoacan and their gang-banging progeny. The hand-carved wood detailing buried under stucco; the sash windows swapped for cheap aluminum sliders.
