SAN FERNANDO VALLEY ELITE
Sparked by a renewed interest in modernism,
life's looking up for Corbin Palms' Alexanders

From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Dave Weinstein

When people talk about Los Angeles neighborhoods known for high modern design, they talk Silver Lake, the Hollywood Hills, Malibu -- not the sprawling, suburban San Fernando Valley. But that's starting to change -- and the change is starting in the quiet enclave of Corbin Palms in Woodland Hills.

Two years ago, William Krisel, who designed the neighborhood with his partner Dan Palmer from 1953 to 1955, warned a visitor not to expect too much from the houses. "Be prepared for some to be terrible and some to be pristine," he said. The good news is the tide is slowly turning towards the pristine -- or at the least towards the sensitively restored.

"What's really building the community is our shared love of the architecture," says Tracy Bartley, who moved into the neighborhood in 2001 with her husband David Glickman. The increasing number of neighbors who love the modern architecture -- many of them younger newcomers, but some old-timers as well -- have formed something of a neighborhood within a neighborhood.

One of their dreams is to convince enough of their neighbors to restore their homes to their original look so Corbin Palms again becomes the modern mecca it once was.

"Unfortunately," says Ken Yerke, "this neighborhood has had a rough time of it. There have been a lot of people who turned their homes into Tuscan villas, or what they thought a Tuscan villa would look like." "I don't have to have everyone living in modern houses," says Robyn Van Dewark, whose recently restored home has become a neighborhood landmark. "But it would be nice for the neighborhood."

It might, in fact, be nice for the entire Valley. For several years, members of the Los Angeles Conservancy's modern committee have been touring the Valley's modern tracts, which were designed by such architects as Edward Fickett and Gilbert Leong, as well as Palmer & Krisel. Many of the neighborhoods have lost much of their architectural integrity due to insensitive remodels. Modernism fans were afraid that the Valley, one of the nation's trendsetting, post-World War II suburbs, was losing its modernist legacy.

The committee focused on Corbin Palms, which was among the most intact of the endangered modern neighborhoods. Success there, it was hoped, would spur success elsewhere in the San Fernando Valley, which is part of Los Angeles and separated from the heart of the city by the Santa Monica Mountains.

If, indeed, Corbin Palms does regain its modern looks, it will be the second time the neighborhood has pioneered modernism. Although Palmer & Krisel had designed a small eight- or ten-home subdivision a few months earlier as a trial run, Corbin Palms, which originally had 287 homes, according to Krisel, was their first modern tract anywhere. Palmer & Krisel ended up designing about 4,000 homes in the Valley.

Palmer & Krisel also took what they had learned in Corbin Palms to Palm Springs, when the Corbin Palms developer, Alexander Construction, relocated there in 1955. Together, the developer and architects would go on to build more than 2,500 homes in Palm Springs, which were rediscovered by mid-century modern fans in the 1990s.

When Corbin Palms was new, its glass-walled houses in a park-like setting were so distinctive -- startling, even -- that Walt Disney filmed the neighborhood for a segment of the 'America the Beautiful' movie that was shown at Disneyland's Cyclorama. The goal was to suggest the sunny suburbia of tomorrow.

Tomorrow still looks sunny -- at least in Eastwood Estates, the southern portion of the neighborhood where most of the architecture-loving newcomers have settled. (According to Krisel, originally, only a small group of homes that face Corbin Avenue were dubbed Eastwood Estates.)

Neighbors credit Yerke, a Hollywood studio violinist, and Bill Yaryan, with spurring the renaissance. When the couple arrived in 1997, they found a neighborhood that had largely forgotten its history. In fact, all Yerke and Yaryan knew about the houses was that they were beautiful. "Everybody kept telling me we had a Fickett," Yerke remembers.

Yaryan began researching the neighborhood history and visiting city offices to peruse building permits. They also met Krisel, who has been happily lionized for years by fans in Palm Springs and was gratified to find new fans in the San Fernando Valley.

"Your house will be worth more if you can keep it authentic and use the name of the architect," Krisel informed his new fans. "They're architectural properties now. A 'dingbat' that is just a tract house has no lineage. But a house that was done by an architect, and that in its day was something special but has become rundown, is worth restoring." No one argued.

Yerke began talking to newcomers, including David Glickman, an artist who works for the Getty Museum. "When we moved in, Ken was knocking on our door saying, 'Welcome to the neighborhood,'" Glickman recalls. "He walked right through our house, and said, 'This is what you can do, this is what you can't do.'"

The Los Angeles Conservancy played a major role in the resurgence by sponsoring a 'Spectacular Vernacular' tour of the Valley in October 2006, featuring two homes in Corbin Palms, including Yaryan and Yerke's.

Having your home chosen for the tour was akin to winning an Oscar. "Within our inner circle two people got chosen for the tour -- and we were jealous, but we were also thrilled for them," says Stacey Margolis-Sigman, a psychologist whose home was passed over.

"When we had Los Angeles people come to our neighborhood, we were overwhelmed with pride, and we were just like, 'Whoo-hoo! Go modern!'" she says.

"Emily sold lemonade for 25 cents a glass that day," Tracy Bartley says of her daughter, "and she made over $50."

After the tour, more than 70 people gathered in the backyard of Robyn Van Dewark and Joe Moshier's house, which was on the tour. Krisel autographed brochures. "It was awesome. It felt like a block party in our backyard," Moshier says, adding, "It strengthened the movement."

The "movement," as Moshier calls it, is both social and architectural. 'Flamingo parties' -- hosted by whoever places a pink flamingo outside their door -- occur most Friday nights. Folks discuss restorations and house maintenance. There has even been talk of winning historic designation for the neighborhood -- becoming a city historic preservation overlay zone. But that's a long shot, Stacey concedes, because so many houses have been modified.

So far, neighbors say, the group is made up entirely of people who live in the southern Eastwood Estates half of the neighborhood. The northern portion is separated from the southern by busy Victory Boulevard and a dedicated bus way.

"We don't even know them," longtime resident June Jones says of her northern neighbors.

"Yet!" Stacey adds. "The one tie that really binds us is the architecture," she says, "so, I think if we knew a modern family in that area, we would absolutely bring them into our fold."

But architecture isn't the only tie. Stacey and her spouse, Melanie Margolis-Sigman, often get together with other parents. The neighborhood has an increasing number of children, and parents put on a Halloween parade last year. "The children are like the glue that keeps the neighborhood together," Yerke says.

The nearby Calvert Street Elementary is a good school, but its playground is a "big old blacktop thing," according to June Jones, an original owner who has happily joined the rejuvenation crowd. It's also locked up when school is closed. Tracy Bartley hopes to change that by turning it into a community park. She's won some political support and is seeking funding.

More and more people find themselves attracted to the neighborhood, many because of the architecture, says Craig Terrien, a real estate broker whose moniker, ValleyModern, suggests his specialty. His renovated home is one of the neighborhood gems.

The Valley, Terrien says, is "attracting people who rent in West L.A. or on the 'miracle mile' and can't afford to buy there. There are plenty of negative things people say about the Valley, but it has nice tree-lined streets, it's less congested, and there are whole tracts of architect-designed homes." Throughout the Valley, he says, people are starting to restore modern tract homes.

The attraction for many newcomers is what attracted Corbin Palms' original buyers -- the opportunity to own a stylish home at an affordable price. Corbin Palms was designed with economy in mind.

As Krisel tells the story, the Alexander Construction-Palmer & Krisel venture started like this: Krisel and his friend, Bob Alexander, got Bob's father, George Alexander, to let the younger men try an experiment. Build eight or ten modern tract homes in the Valley and see if they'd sell. Up to that point, the Alexanders had been building what Krisel contemptuously calls dingbats.

"They cost less per square foot than what Bob's father sold as dingbats, and they sold at a higher price -- so they made a bigger profit per house," Krisel has said. Krisel did whatever it took to keep costs down. "We had developed a system of post-and-beam houses, developed our own windows, our own walls. We found out what cost money in a home, and we figured out how to do it better and cheaper."

Plus the homes had style -- open beams, open plans, broad overhangs, low gables with glass-filled clerestories, Mondrian-like wall screens by the entries (Krisel designed them himself), wooden parquet floors, and laminate countertops decorated with a classic '50s motif -- the boomerang.

Houses are rectangular in plan, with a carport generally separated from the house by a breezeway. One distinctive feature was floor-to-ceiling windows divided by wooden muntins. Many people have filled in the bottom portion of the windows over the years, and most have turned the breezeway into living space.

Krisel was a landscape architect as well as an architect, and one of the neighborhood's best features is its park-like setting. The homes facing Corbin Avenue present a particularly satisfying picture to passersby thanks to their broad lawns.

Low berms in front of each house add interest to an otherwise flat landscape. They also illustrate Palmer & Krisel's ability to turn economy to their advantage. Rather than haul away leftover drywall and other construction debris, they bulldozed it into mounds and turned it into an amenity.

The original plan was to provide each home with two Washingtonia palms. (The architects repeated this trick two years later in one of their first Palm Springs subdivisions, Twin Palms.) But, Krisel recalls, Disney needed palms for Disneyland, so he "bought them from anybody who had a palm tree." As a result, later homes at Corbin Palms made do with olive trees.

Corbin Palms homes range from about 1,000 to 1,400 square feet, and have four bedrooms with two to three baths.

Krisel was so pleased with the homes, he and his wife bought one themselves. "I had no special deal, it was $500 down and the $14,000 was financed, and it cost me $60 a month."

The homes attracted people with design savvy, Krisel recalls, just as they do today. June Jones recalls many engineers who worked in nearby aerospace plants. She and her husband, John A. Jones, a theater set designer and sculptor, taught at UCLA.

Over the past few years, one house after another, starting with Yaryan and Yerke's, has been restored, and others are underway. But destructive remodels continue as well. "I wish we could inform them," Yerke says of his wayward neighbors, "and help them to see what we see." Yerke does more than wish; he knocks on doors and informs. "Unfortunately, sometimes you come up against a little bit of a brick wall," he says.

"The new people who come in, it would be nice if they were like us, and they wanted to keep the house and make it modern, and not ruin it," says Melanie Margolis-Sigman.

"Or maybe even buy a broken one and fix it," Yaryan adds.

Photos: John Eng, Adriene Biondo, Douglas M. Simmonds (courtesy Bill Krisel); and courtesy Bill Yaryan

• Corbin Palms is located on the west side of Corbin Avenue, between Calvert and Hamlin streets. The 6100 and 6200 blocks of Jumilla have homes that are particularly well preserved. Two landmark homes share a broad, park-like lawn on Corbin, just south of Topham Street. Victory Boulevard has a remarkable array of palms. Look for Corbin Palms online at CorbinPalmsModern.com

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