When Ben Weingart passed away in 1980, alone in a hospital, at age 92, his obituary in the LA Times described him as “one of the least-known and most influential members of the Los Angeles financial community for half a century.”
It primarily noted that he had been a developer of the Fed-Mart chain of discount stores – a misleading statement because he only invested in the company after seeing how well it was working. But it did correctly note that he was Los Angeles County’s largest property taxpayer as the owner of over 42,000 rental units. But it failed to mention that he was at one time the largest owner of hotels west of the Mississippi, the largest private developer of large-scale apartment buildings, and the largest builder of single-family homes in the United States. And that the total of homes he helped build in the 1950s may have exceeded the combined totals of the next three largest builders.
It also failed to mention he was a significant player in multiple other industries — insurance, laundry and linen, optics, geothermal energy among others — and that his business partners included influential political party leaders, gangsters and others with mob connections, and the first Director of the CIA.
But to be fair, Ben planned it this way. He was notoriously leery of the press, and let his partners appear to be the decision-makers on his projects. In 1950, his Lakewood Park was the most publicized residential construction project in the nation – described as the largest building project in US history, 8,000 homes were built in 1950 alone, making it the subject of hundreds of headlines and national magazine covers over the next four years.
Weingart envisioned the community’s scope and scale, secured the land, arranged the financing and handpicked the builders to execute his vision. It was his contacts, his team, his baby, a position affirmed by numerous articles, contemporary references, and first-person remembrances which say flatly he was the boss. But from the beginning, he let his associates Louis H. Boyar and Mark Taper be President and Vice-President and appear as the main individuals behind the Lakewood Park housing project. Same with Joe Eichenbaum who was President of the Lakewood Shopping Center. But all people involved with the project say Weingart was the boss.
Quirks
Ben rarely sought publicity. Beginning around 1915, a blurb on a transaction might add “well-known in Los Angeles hotel circles.” A feature story lauding the innovations of LA’s largest hotelier never once mentioned his name – only saying “the owner of the Lincoln Investment Company.”
An early mention of Ben seems to have been a 1930 photo feature and five paragraph story noting Weingart’s unique collection of bones of edible fowl, especially wishbones which had been stripped of their flesh by prominent American personalities, such as senators and governors, etc. The article, which included accompanying photos, also noted he had asked the Idaho governor to send a wishbone.
This might have been a joke. Weingart was also known to paste his photo over George Washington’s on a dollar bill and pass them out. He once paid off a $100 bet to another LA hotelier in pennies. He had a doorbell that played the sound of barking dogs to ward off unwanted visitors and robbers. He wore a lifelike Ladybug pin on his shoulder and he reportedly loved magic shows.
He wore specially designed 30 year old high-top shoes and a beret, which strangely enough made him very attractive to women – lots of women. His money obviously didn’t hurt his reputation as a a well-known Casanova, but his gracious charm and personality. He was fondly recalled by the numerous women he wined and dined, often concurrently.
But more than anything he was a businessman who achieved great financial success in numerous fields. His Consolidated Hotels not only owned or managed more hotels than Hilton — over 100 hotels and apartment-hotels, including at various times such high end inns as the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip and Villa Riviera along the Long Beach coast. They also developed many large garden apartment complexes that are on multiple historic structures lists. During the Depression Weingart’s management expertise endeared him to many lending institutions with defaulted properties on their hands. He agreed to take over management of these properties at no cost to the lenders, other than a share of any profits and an option to buy on good terms.
Vertical integration
And if he did not introduce it, he certainly perfected vertical integration in the hospitality industry by centralizing the basic administrative costs of 100 hotels at one headquarters location, and acquiring controlling interest in most of the companies that regularly provided services for the hotels and apartments he owned – laundry, linen, food services, room cleaning, building maintenance, furniture, etc. Using the hotel corporation as the center of cash flow, he set up a series of companies to facilitate further expansion. Junior Capital found investors and institutional capital funding for projects developed by the Angelus and Aetna Holding Companies. These were constructed by his Aetna Construction Company, and then leased, rented and managed by Junior Realty or an affiliated subsidiary, and serviced by Home Service (laundry and linens), food operations (Palmet) and insured by Pacific Employers Insurance Company. In addition furniture construction and repair was handled ojut of a warehouse, first on 10th Street (now Olympic) and later behind his main offices at 1301 Wilshire Blvd. Weingart controlled or was the largest stockholder in all these companies.
Courtyard apartments
He played a key role in building well-designed courtyard apartments, some of them quite large and historically significant in the Westlake, West Wilshire, Hollywood, West Adams and communities further west. His projects with builder Irving Siegel and legendary architects such as Max Maltzman, JJ Rees, Allen & Lutzi, Hiller & Sheets are still frequently still seen in movies and television shows. There are arguably probably more Weingart-developed and financed housing structures eligible for historic status in the Los Angeles area than any other builder or architect. Examples of this are the Aloha Hotel, Washington Gardens, the Edgemont, Lyman Place, the Selma-Las Palmas Apartments, Dorsey Gardens, dozens of downtown hotels. Ironically, many of the applications or city documents covering potential historical status for these projects are oblivious of Weingart’s contributions. Prime examples of this are Crenshaw Village in Baldwin Hills or the Aloha Hotel in Hollywood, which never once mention Weingart’s name even though he controlled the multiple companies which bought the property, developed the property, and managed it for many years.
Economies of Scale
When the government introduced the FHA insurance program, Weingart was quick to recognize the profit potential of large scale low-cost single family housing being explored by Fritz Burns & Fred Marlow at Windsor Hills or the choose your plan flexibility offered by Richard Diller’s Krandill Mortgage Company. Weingart developed long relationships with both these entities, but he made it even more profitable and efficient by using Junior Realty to locate and acquire available land, exploited his excellent reputation with banks to move to the front of the line on mortgage approvals, and then increased the scale of projects by wholesaling the construction of homes (through sale or more often, partnerships) to a cadre of builders, many of whom became national names in their own right — such as Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, Spiros Ponty, Richard Diller and Richard Trousdale or scores more men who worked in varying degrees of concert with Weingart under such names as United, Grandview, Biltmore, Exhibit, Metropolitan, Liberty, Aldon, Don-Ja-Ran, Consolidated, Sunkist, Midland, Devon and more.
Sure, by the early 1950s all these builders could and did find and develop their own projects to work on, such as Hollypark, Palos Verdes or La Mirada, but with Weingart involved even just a little bit, his impeccable reputation in financial circles expedited approval from the FHA, and thus the banks and the local cities.
Perhaps he didn’t invent it, but he helped make it standard to use separate corporate entities for each project. During the 1954 Congressional hearings on possible FHA abuses, Weingart testified that he was involved with over 300 companies building homes just at that time. The committee and the press did their best to make Ben look bad, solely it seems because he personally made large profits. But he did it by building more housing at affordable costs with quality construction and minimal complaints, and without it ever actually costing the government a dime (the FHA only insured the private lenders investment). In effect, the government was mad that he figured out a way to accomplish what they wanted and make a profit out of it. Ultimately, the hearings concluded he had broken no laws, committed no fraud, endangered no funding, all the while providing more housing than anybody else during a major housing shortage – the exact intent of the legislation.
FHA – Merchant Builder
New York builder William Levitt, a notorious self-promoter, gets credit for building 17,000 homes in Levittown for the five years of 1947 through 1951. While Weingart’s Lakewood Park operation never actually built the 17,000 plus claimed by its eager young publicist, the company did build over 15,000 new homes in three years, 8,000 in 1950 alone. The latter fact alone would be a record, but even more amazing, at the same time, other Weingart-connected companies were constructing an additional 1,000 houses in an adjacent North Long Beach tract, another 2,000 in nearby Norwalk, and over 4,000 in the City of Los Angeles communities of Encino, Mar Vista, Westchester, Los Feliz, North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, and Arleta/Panorama City.
Politically, Weingart was deliberately neutral or polygamous. He donated to the candidates backed by his activist Democrat business partners like Mark Boyar, Paul Ziffren and Sol Price. But many of his other business partners were from the LA establishment, the Hancock Park and Pasadena rich, and Republican elite of Harry Chandler, Morgan Adams, Ingall Bull and Fritz Burns and other influential members of the All-Year Club. Both Burns and Weingart were on multiple Chamber of Commerce booster committees going back to the early 1930s.
As publicity over his fortune grew he became a target of ambitious fundraisers such as Buff Chandler who was trying to raise funds for her vision of a Los Angeles Music Center. After his partners Mark Taper and Lou Boyar donated, Weingart turned her down, telling her he preferred to donate to programs that helped the little guy. He did donate and provide housing at many of his downtown hotels, which he kept even as the area became the center of Skid Row.
Weingart still was very generous albeit on a low-key level. Many of his partners were the key fundraisers for nonprofits raising funds for Israel, the City of Hope and the two hospitals that later became Cedars-Sinai and he allowed large donations to be made in the company names.
Weingart’s pre-Depression accomplishments were amazing. He came to LA virtually penniless around 1908, quickly finding a job driving a wagon for the Diamond Laundry Company. He soon recruited others to be collection points for his service, then also signed up multiple rooming houses by trading reduced laundry rates if they also hired him to manage their hotels. This caught the attention of John G. Orth, a successful nearby hotelier and in 1912 helped Ben open his first hotel. Within six years the pair owned and managed over 20 hotels. Working with Orth and John Morris, another laundry owner, Ben organized six laundries into a single group, the Home Service Company, which serviced all these hotels and as well as thousands of Los Angeles area homes. He also leveraged his hotels and laundries into buying insurance from the Pacific Employers Insurance Company, another company he helped set up. On his own, he began investing in automobile dealerships and Hollywood real estate, including film studios, and as the 20’s started to roar, Weingart started playing the stock market, and expanding his real estate operations, forming new companies to raise capital and Junior Realty to find these properties. On his own, especially preferred stocks in real estate funds which financed much of the city’s building activity.
The Great Depression hurt many of his stock investments, and impacted the number visitors at his many inns. But other hotels and apartments were hit harder and many defaulted into the hands of lenders or tax collectors. Weingart offered to take these properties off their hands at no cost, in return for a percentage of the profits after costs — a policy he had practiced with great success in building up his original hotel empire with Orth. Many banks and liquidators took him up on this, expanding his portfolio of hotels and apartment buildings to well over 100 — but even he was still hit hard when one of American Mortgage, with whom he was over 30 hotels, defaulted leaving him with hundreds of thousands of dollars for which he only ultimately got about forty cents on the dollar.
He would partner with another victim of American Mortgage, builder Irving Siegel who had developed some attractive apartment-hotels around Weingart’s other projects. He began to back Siegel in new construction and when the government introduced the FHA, he and Siegel formed a new partnership, Aetna Construction, to build within the FHA guidelines. Aetna became Los Angeles’ largest builder of large scale privately funded apartment structures. They built impressive multi-family structures in Wilshire Center, Hollywood and West Adams. In 1938 they built a dozen multi-family homes at Leimert Park, just a few blocks south of Windsor Hills, the 1938 project where Burns and his partner Fred Marlow used the new FHA programs to become the first full-service “merchant builders,” not only developing subdivision projects, but handling the construction and sales as well. Burns and Marlow preached that the new key to a builder’s financial success with these FHA programs was a focus on a large quantity of smaller low-margin homes than a small number of large, better quality higher-margin homes.
The success of Windsor Hills definitely caught Ben’s attention, but he carried it to the next step, Not only to use the FHA to build a lot of desperately needed single family homes, but also to rapidly create a marketplace for the nearby commercial properties that he kept and leased out. After buying a mostly unsold Long Beach subdivisions in the West Side from the default tax rolls, he partnered with Richard Diller’s Krandill Company to build FHA-approved minimum size homes. He also helped set up other Diller builders (such as Sidney Kleefeld, J. George Wright and Samuel Firks) with their own companies to construct homes in North Hollywood, South Gate, Morningside Heights, West LA and Lynwood. When that wasn’t enough he set up his own Consolidated Hotels employee Morris A. Sommers and his Chicago friend Louis A. Boyar under the name of Thrifty Building Services to help Diller complete homes in Long Beach and start new tracts in San Bernardino. After the sudden death of his longtime partner Siegel in 1949, Weingart brought in Boyar to take over Siegel’s role in the Encino Park and Westchester Park subdivisions. Boyar would become the consummate Weingart acolyte, and Weingart rewarded him by offering him a partnership in their huge Lakewood project. The pair would eventually build well over 50,000 homes in 35 years in Long Beach, Westchester, Encino, Lakewood, Buena Park, Seal Beach, Las Vegas, Ventura, Tarzana, Woodland Hills, Canoga Park, West Hills, and Oak Park (Agoura) and numerous other smaller infill tracts.
Another well-known Weingart associate was Mark Taper, whose housing tracts were almost always found around a Weingart project, or on properties secured by Weingart entities. These included more Long Beach subdivisions rescued from the tax default roles, undeveloped strips abandoned by The Pacific Electric Railway, or owned by oil companies (Long Beach, Mar Vista, Montebello) or (in the 1950s) on agricultural land considered unfit for housing until concrete channels were built to control the frequent flooding (as is the case with Pico Rivera, Whittier, Norwalk and Downey or Compton, Lakewood, East Long Beach or much of the San Fernando Valley).
Taper saw how Weingart leveraged his properties with insurance companies, banks and savings and loans and after finishing a Weingart partnership in Lakewood, Encino, Mar Vista and Seal Beach, Taper retired from construction in 1955 and got into the Savings and Loan Business full-time. Not surprisingly, Weingart was a large investor in Taper’s First Charter Financial Savings which became the second largest in the nation, behind only Howard Ahmanson’s Home Savings — which also had some partnerships with Weingart.
In late 1943 and 1944 Weingart-affiliated United Builders, in partnership with Irving Siegel, built three tracts in Westchester, south of Manchester and west of Sepulveda, in the community organized by Security Pacific Bank and three builders, Burns and Marlow, Frank Ayres & Sons, and Silas Nowell. Today probably even most Westchester historians are unaware of Weingart’s tracts because most of these homes were removed when LAX expanded North in the early 1950s.
In 1948 Weingart built a 500-home Westchester tract which was immediately adjacent to a Fritz Burns-Henry Kaiser post-war tracts built under Kaiser Community Homes. But it was another Kaiser-Burns project, Panorama City, that was considered one of the milestones of post-war construction history. It’s also a perfect example of how Weingart worked.
Most histories state that Burns and Kaiser bought the land from the Pellesier family’s old Panorama Ranch in 1946. But the truth is Midland Properties, a syndicate involving Al and Sid Lushing, Joseph Schulman, Louis Halper and Weingart associate Bill Berk, had already bought the undeveloped dairy land from the Pellesier family (with whom Weingart had been working since 1929). They also purchased multiple other nearby undeveloped ranches and properties, some of it still in the untamed Pacoima Wash and Tujunga Wash -flood lands.
The Midland group laid out the streets, and made a large chunk of lots available on a lease-hold basis to KCH’s Panorama Companies (one for residential and one for commercial) with the syndicate still holding 21% of the KCH Panorama project.
Much of the general surveying work and dealing with the government agencies for flood control and utilities had already been done by the time Burns and Kaiser got involved. KCH built the first 2,000 homes but then tax laws made it prohibitive for them to build more houses, so they focused on the commercial areas. Unphased, the Midland syndicate immediately sold adjacent land to Richard S. Diller, another long-time Weingart associate, who preceded to build Van Nuys Gardens (with Arthur Weber), 2,000 homes that many people believe are part of Panorama City. The syndicate then began selling land to other Diller (and Weingart)-connected entities such as Sanford Schulhofer (Stanwin Construction, Canterbury Construction), Sunkist Gardens (Diller-Kalsman), Mark Taper (Residence Mortgage, Inc.), and Aldon Homes Woodman Plaza. (Aldon made a career of building large tracts adjacent to Weingart tracts: Woodman Plaza, Pioneer Plaza (Norwalk), Lakewood Plaza, Buena Plaza (Buena Park) Granada Hills Plaza, Canoga Plaza). Weingart, who was an integral if somewhat silent participant through his lease-hold ownership, also built a tract called Harbor Park.
All this time, Weingart’s other units continued to build in the high hundreds of courtyard apartments, duplexes and fourplexes. Southern California was garden spot with available land waiting to be paired with a plethora of dreams. And many of those dreams had been built out of nightmares. Multiple real estate booms, and speculative oil land investments, had become busts, especially during the Depression. The busts became bankruptcies, receiverships and an intricate web of ownerships, second and third mortgages, and liens. All this would be bad enough but the Depression made it ten times worse with banks forced to hire large staffs just to sort out their titles of the properties they had a stake in. Burnt once, sometimes twice, banks were loathe to take on additional risks. Yes, somebody could find available land in Arleta or Alhambra or Compton, but god, it was out in the boonies of … Arleta, Alhambra or Compton, surrounded by chicken ranches, dairy farms, industrial areas. Did they really think they could convince 120 people to buy homes all the way out there – where there were no stores, no schools. Or convince a another financial institution to provide a mortgage for such a risk? But when Ben Weingart got involved, all knew it was a project that would bring in 1000 homes and attract merchants, and service sector businesses, and make all the commercial properties more valuable as well. This made banks and other investors to take risk, over and over and over. And once Ben went in and built on his 160 acre section, that opened the doors for all the people who held a 10 or 20 acre parcel.
Shopping centers
Nor can one overlook the impact Weingart had on shopping centers. His Lakewood Shopping Center was not only the world’s largest at the time but it transformed that industry. Using what he had learned while building adjacent to Leimert Park and the Crenshaw Center – from layout protocols to parking ratios (3.5 square feet of parking pace to each square foot of retail space) loading access supplies, securing anchor tenants, from the crucial timing for building surrounding houses to establish a market and when to open the stores. Ultimately, Weingart was smart enough to hire an experienced retired retailer, Joseph K. Eichenbaum, to oversee this aspect of his businesses, although he continued to provide advice and cash to a company that became a pioneer in shopping center development, conversion of old hotels into shopping destinations, restaurant rows (they built the first at eastland center in West Covina) and warehouse discount stores (he became the largest investor in Sol Price’s Fed Mart chain), and Price called him an invaluable influence which played a part in his later development of Price Club and Costco.
Ultimately, in all of these fields, Weingart’s primary expertise was efficiently managing cash flow. Early on he figured out how to leverage the money he was making, and more importantly, how to continuously feed the pipeline – be it hotels, construction of apartments, or the most efficient way of financing, permitting and constructing a single family home tract so money was always coming in before you needed it to go out. He even mastered this with insurance companies and investing in insurance companies, holding companies and making use of government programs in unintended ways. He frustrated Senators and Washington bureaucrats, but in the end he showed them he had broken no laws while figuring out the best way to game their system, make large profits while fulfilling the primary goals of the programs they enacted – find affordable new housing for millions of people. Unlike many big name contractors, he never filed for bankruptcy – even during the tough days of the Depression — and he never defaulted on a loan.
Weingart had vision
Weingart had vision – seeing possibilities where others didn’t, but he also knew that success also required reality times luck.
Levitt and Fritz Burns were like movie producers, focusing on one or two films at a time. Weingart was like a studio mogul – overseeing multiple proven producers, each with multiple projects. Guiding some projects, being a passive investor on others, figuring out which producers might make an interesting double feature, and always filling the pipeline.
His genius was perfecting the process
While Weingart was an inventor (he had a number of patents to his credit, including a long handle vacuum cleaner to make it easier for employees to clean under beds, and the rolling rack now very familiar in hotel hallways, which store sheets, towels, pens, toilet paper, glasses, etc. to minimize minimize worker trips to a storage area . But Weingart’s true genius was as the ultimate tweaker — the small adjustments he made to further perfect a process, a system, a program, a company, a tract, a shopping center, a community, an industry.
He saw the strengths and weaknesses of the FHA program and used what was good and avoided what was bad. In 1951, he saw ways to utilize the FHA’s mutual homes assistance program in ways not intended by Congress. Over the next year he and Louis Boyar built nearly 7,000 homes for home-seeking veterans and in the process, made a fortune.
Ben didn’t just build houses. He played the housing market like it was the stock market, but instead of investing in projects, He invested in builders – and they paid dividends for him over and over again.
He made mistakes, but he never let it seem to bother him, telling his associates “there’s always another deal around the corner.”
For Ben Weingart, there was always another deal.