Bungalow courts are like condos or townhouses with style

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

Before we lived in townhomes, condominiums—or even so much in apartments—we also lived in courts: bungalow courts. Groupings of shrunken, free-standing bungalows (or Spanish-style boxes), they were an immediate hit in transitory, touristy, early 20th century Southern California—perhaps reaching their architectural zenith in Pasadena.

“In Pasadena, they went around and surveyed all their bungalow courts, and they have all the bungalow courts on the National Register of Historic Places,” says Long Beach Historic Preservation Officer Jan Ostashay. “Our bungalow courts aren’t as highly executed as the ones in Pasadena. They’re like a high-quality Craftsman, only smaller.”

Long Beach has never surveyed its bungalow courts, but it has a few intriguing examples that haven’t met the bulldozer. They’re much more charming than, say, our crackerbox apartments.

Let’s start with what may be the only Long Beach court that’s somewhat protected—even though it’s not technically a court. It’s the El Cortez, a Spanish-style, 1937 arrangement of seven duplex units, two single-family units and one “office,” in the Sunrise Boulevard Historic District near Atlantic Avenue and Willow Street.

Named for the man who conquered the Aztecs on behalf of Spain in the 1500s, it looks like a little Spanish-style encampment (stucco exterior walls crowned in rows of Spanish tile), circling a round asphalt driveway and a common grassy area. But it was originally built as an auto camp.

“If you ever saw the movie The Grapes of Wrath, that’s where they stayed when they were in California, in an auto camp. That’s what they would have called the old-time motels on the go,” Ostashay says, noting that travel was a much bigger deal then—and because people didn’t drive as far every day of a road trip, they needed more places to say.

The El Cortez is now a rental property, but from the outside its units are still largely untouched—down to their original wood windows. A wood sign out front—which once might have shouted the place’s name—was removed some time in the last 10 years, but there’s still some original concrete work on one side of the driveway apron, where inset letters read “El Cortez.”

One of the city’s neatest bungalow courts has to be a Pabst-Kinney rental property in Belmont Heights, in the 200 block of Loma Avenue. Now a gated six- or seven-unit complex, it features six little frame-siding bungalows on opposite sides of a small central courtyard. This is a very common layout, and this group is remarkably well-preserved—except that sometime in the past 15 years someone stuccoed over every bungalow except the back unit.

“It kills you,” Ostashay says. “It depreciates the cost of your building, but people don’t realize that. If you buy a house that’s the most expensive thing you’re ever going to buy, why would you do that?”

Time has been slightly kinder to a seven-unit own-your-own bungalow complex in the 1100 block of Termino Avenue: Some of these units are stuccoed, others aren’t. They vary in size from around 700 to 1,000 square feet, according to a longtime resident (some of the El Cortez units were around 300 square feet), and they face off over a concrete driveway apron. Otherwise details are similar: frame-siding exteriors (or stucco), wood-framed windows, porch columns, and a sense that every home must have a picture of Franklin Roosevelt hanging somewhere.

“Sometimes, when you see bungalow courts and things like this, you wonder if they were homes for the oil workers,” Ostashay says, reminding us of the days when Signal Hill was full of derricks. “And as the years went on, you’ll find that a lot of women who lost their husbands—widows—would live there.”

Today, they’re just one more piece of our past that still does its job remarkably.

Tags: bungalow court, el cortez, grapes of wrath, Long Beach, Shelter