9/2/2023 0 Comments Paul williams architect houses![]() neighborhood of his own choosing, the semi-gated Mid City neighborhood of LaFayette Square. In 1951, 14 years after he penned “I Am a Negro,” Williams and his family moved from West 35th Street to a home of his own design in a L.A. Williams and his family lived in the now-landmarked Jefferson Park home for three decades. ![]() And, with that, the first home owned by a pioneering Black architect who helped to shaped L.A.’s modern cityscape was designated as a Historic-Cultural Monument. On February 16, council members voted unanimously in support of the nomination’s passage. Shepherded by Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the nomination then moved to the full City Council. Things moved along slowly and just earlier this month, the PLUM Committee threw its support behind the pending nomination. Just over two months later, the CHC voted to recommend the Paul Revere Williams House Historic-Cultural Monument to the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee. The push to landmark 1271 West 35th Street formally kicked off in September 2021 when the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission (CHC) voted unanimously to take the Conservancy’s pending nomination submission under consideration. “But they have extraordinary stories in which they can tell, and that’s really important in understanding the full history of the places in which we live.” “So it may be that we’re working to save and protect places that look pretty ordinary or modest-looking,” relayed the Conservancy’s Adrian Scott Fine to LAist. In telling the full story about people and places, it is important to preserve this house as a physical reminder of what Williams achieved and his extraordinary career in architecture.” Until recently, the home was up for sale and threatened by potential redevelopment. The excerpt from that essay has been shared by the nonprofit Los Angeles Conservancy, which spearheaded the campaign to landmark Williams’ first home in Jefferson Park as an HCM. As the Conservancy explained, the home “illustrates a part of Paul Revere Williams’ life and story that is rarely told or fully understood. I must always live in that locality, or in another like it, because…I am a Negro.” ![]() ![]() But this evening, I returned to my own small, inexpensive home… in a comparatively undesirable section of Los Angeles. ![]() Sometimes I have dreamed of living there. “Today I sketched the preliminary plans for a large country house which will be erected in one of the most beautiful residential districts in the world. Those covenants did not exist in Jefferson Park, and, as a result, a sizable Black community thrived there.Īs Williams wrote in the 1937 essay “I Am a Negro:” While Williams’ professional successes could have easily afforded him a family home comparable to the ones commissioned by his celebrity clients, he, as a Black architect, settled in Jefferson Park (the neighborhood is located with a larger district contemporarily known as Historic West Adams) due to the strict racial covenants that blanketed large parts of L.A. Now, with the recent blessing of the Los Angeles City Council, that modest Craftsman-style bungalow at 1271 West 35th Street in South L.A.’s Jefferson Park neighborhood is the city’s newest designated Historic-Cultural Monument ( HCM). ![]()
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