Lincoln Place Apartments (Los Angeles, California)

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Garden style apartment complexe built in 1949-1951 for returning vets and their families.
Now on the National Register for Historic Places.
Stylish and pace-setting at the time of their construction, Lincoln Place’s 795 garden apartments occupied U- and L-shaped buildings that featured bold, geometrically shaped entryways. The units had etched-glass tub enclosures and tile kitchen counters, and were the first of their kind to be pre-wired with built-in TV antennas.
Considered a premier example of postwar Federal Housing Authority planning, Lincoln Park was designed by pioneering African-American architect Ralph A. Vaughn, a onetime senior set designer at MGM who had worked with architect Paul Williams on celebrity homes in Beverly Hills. Architure experts say Vaughn used his studio skills to design varied facades that kept Lincoln Place from having a monotonous, housing-project look.
Lincoln Place was once a bit of paradise. As far as possible from the dilapidated bureaucratic disaster that the words "government housing project" typically summon to mind, the 795 apartments there instead contained the kind of community urban planners dream about. The project, completed with federal funds in 1951 to address the housing crisis that followed World War II, was designed by Ralph Vaughn and Heth Wharton. They organized the brightly colored Modernist complex into small groups of units around shared courtyards, fostering frequent contact between neighbors. Tenants were protected by strict rent controls, so they stayed there for decades, fortifying an extremely close community; the place was so welcoming, some residents were joined by their extended families in next-door units, and would-be renters sometimes sat on wait lists for months or longer. Tenants planted gardens along their walls and left lawn furniture in their shared front yards without so much as the protection of a fence. Over time, Lincoln Place came to be a shining example of government's power for positive social change. Many tenants would only have left if they were dragged out and had their doors padlocked behind them.
That's exactly what happened in December 2005 when Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies swept through the complex in what has been called the largest mass lockout in the city's history. At that moment, Lincoln Place changed from a tight-knit community to a case study for the interplay between real estate developers, the L.A. City Council, and the Angelenos who benefit from affordable housing. The lockouts culminated a long battle waged by the complex's latest owner, the Denver-based corporate monolith AIMCO, to tear down the complex and build condos; ballooning land values and a dizzying influx of wealth to Venice were beckoning. At first, the company said they merely planned "renovations" and even signed a contract under the California Environmental Quality Act promising that no Lincoln Place residents would be evicted against their wills. They kicked out the tenants anyway under the auspices of the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict if they plan to go out of the apartment rental business - this despite the fact that, as the nation's largest apartment rental company, AIMCO had no intention of giving up landlording. Still, they posted eviction notices, offered small buyouts, filed ludicrous lawsuits - suing tenants over broken locks, yard sales, and keeping their cars in their garages - and ultimately called in the sheriff. When offered the chance to halt the evictions, the City Council (whose members' campaigns are funded largely by developers) took the advice of the City Attorney's Office and stayed laissez-faire. So much for government's power for positive social change. While AIMCO offered extensions to some elderly and ailing residents, those tenants eventually received eviction notices, too.
Seven of its 52 buildings were demolished by a past owner who had planned to build condominiums on the 38 acre site.