My dad was a carpenter. He started back in Kennett, Missouri in the late 1930s after his dad lost their family farm around 1934 during the Depression. He and his brothers tried to rent farms and raise melons after they lost their own farm, but times and markets were tough. He ended up becoming a carpenter, and within a couple years he and four brothers were all working as carpenters.
My dad said he and his brothers learned carpentry by building barns and other structures on their own place and for nearby farms and neighbors and merchants in the Missouri bootheel. After he married my mom in early 1938 and the birth of my oldest brother later that year, I guess my mom told him they needed more money than a farm could provide. By 1940 he is working on a US Government housing project funded by the Farm Services Administration. He was soon a superintendent and when that job was finished, he was hired as a superintendent for a company which won the contract to build barracks at Fort Leonard Wood. That led to a job building housing structures at a new ammunition plant in Childersburg, Alabama, and then more barracks at Camp Atterbury in Shelbyville, Indiana and Malden Air Force Base back in Missouri before moving to California in January 1943 where he worked for a time on many other military construction projects until settling down in San Francisco where he became a superintendent for Henry Doelger who built most of the Sunset District (Doelgerville) in the western sand dunes of that city. Because he was building homes that housed defense workers, he qualified as a critical defense worker himself and was able to buy a home in the Sunset in 1943. My parents and three older brothers lived their on Pacheco until my mom became pregnant with me in early 1952.
So needing more room to raise their family, my folks moved down the San Francisco Peninsula to a tract called Friendly Acres. So I guess you can say I am literally a child of post-war suburban subdivisions. Friendly Acres, which was laid out in 1937 but didn’t really take off until post-war, was part of a David Bohannon subdivision called Belle Haven, and adjacent to two other subdivisions, Menlo Oaks and Lorelei Manor. As a general contractor, my Dad subbed out to work for Doelger (in The Sunset and Westlake (Daly City), and for Claude T. Lindsay (Linfield Oaks), and Joseph Eichler (Sunnyvale, Palo Alto and some infill in Redwood City). During summers, I often visited and later worked on my Dad’s own subdivisions (mainly San Jose, but also Santa clara and Los Gatos), but carpentry wasn’t in my blood so in 1976 moved to LA to become a TV writer and lived in North Hollywood (Earl White & Sons), Playa del Rey (a K&B knock-off condo), West Hills (MJ Brock & Sons, immediately north of a plethora of Weingart/Boyar/Diller-Kalsman “Valleywood” homes on the Platt Ranch, and then for a few years in Toluca Lake. Upon the encouragement of my wife, we moved to the original Rossmoor (just east of the Long Beach subdivisons of Los Altos, Lakewood Plaza, and Lakewood Ranchos, which are in turn just south the many subdivisions of Lakewood. I have now lived in Rossmoor for over 25 years, and have written histories of both Los Alamitos/Rossmoor and Seal Beach and did much research into Ross Cortese who built Rossmoor and Leisure World (originally called Rossmoor Leisure World) and also on the Lakewood Park trio of Ben Weingart, Mark Taper and Louis H. Boyar who, through some subcontractors, built The Hill in Seal Beach.
I am now working on a book about Ben Weingart – who I believe to be the most prolific and perhaps most significant or influential builder in US history — at least the most significant builder that you probably never heard of. Weingart was primarily a financial genius — one who when he died in 1980 was the largest taxpayer in Los Angels County. Arriving penniless in LA around 1908, he got a job driving a horse-drawn laundry cart, then a laundry truck. He quickly ended up a major player in the local laundry industry, which led him into the hotel and hospitality fields — hotels keep laundries very busy with a need for clean sheets, towels and restaurant tablecloths, etc. By 1928 he owned or operated over 100 hotels, making him the largest hotel operator west of the Mississippi. Using his hotels and laundries as collateral (and clients), he also got into the insurance business and the hotel supply fields (linens, silverware, furniture, etc.). He lost a lot of money in the stock market crash but quickly pivoted and survived by contracting with banks and other lenders who had many defaulted hotels and apartment houses on their books. He offered to take over management of their troubled assets at no fee. But they would share all profits on a percentage basis and he would have an option to purchase. By consolidating costs, and renovating from plush to single room apartments, Weingart kept most of his employees working and turned around numerous hotels.
Once cash flow was dependable he soon expanded into the hotel and apartment-hotel construction industry and built many of the Wilshire Boulevard and Hollywood area classic hotels that are seen so often in movies and are now considered historical buildings. But when the FHA introduced plans to basically insure up to 90% of construction and mortgage costs for single family homes, he saw an even bigger opportunity and was soon working with a cadre of builders and realtors-turned-builders to build thousands of single family homes. Using his already established real estate division (Angelus Properties, Junior Capital and Junior Realty) to find large unimproved properties, and using the trust he had earned by rescuing the troubled foreclosed properties held by banks (F&M, Security National, Bank of America, California Bank, and especially Union Bank), insurance companies (especially Prudential)and other lending institutions (Mortgage Guarahnty Co.) , Weingart found financing for large projects in West LA, Culver City, Inglewood, Lynwood, South Gate, Montebello and Long Beach. He rarely used his name on a project, preferring to let his building partners take the credit in the belief they would work harder if they got the credit.
But he was a key stockholder and financial player in pretty much everything built by Irving Siegel (Aetna Construction from 1935 until his death in 1949, when Louis Boyar became the face while Weingart continued to control the stock and finances), Morrie Sommers and Lou Boyar (Thrifty Building Service in Long Beach – from 1938-1948) and Mark Taper (Biltmore Homes) in Long Beach, Compton, Norwalk and Montebello in the 1940s, Sidney Kleefeld (South Gate, Lynwood, Westchester, Alhambra, Mar Vista and North Hollywood), Diller-Kalsman, and Diller-Weber, and Zuckerman-Morris, J. George Wright, Spiros Ponty, Fritz Burns, Arthur Edmunds, Louis Towne, Liberty Building Company, Ed Zuckermand and B.R. Morris and many others. Weingart’s investment in a project (even if only 10%) was usually enough to get a bank to supply a loan.
William Levitt was lauded by the New York media for creating a 28 crew system to mass produce 17,000 houses over 7 years in building Levittown, New York from 1947-to 1954. By all accounts this was amazing output. But in 1950 Weingart and his partners built almost 17,000 homes in 1950 alone — 8,000 just in Lakewood. Others were built in North Long Beach, South Gate, Mar Vista, Downey, Norwalk, Westchester, Baldwin Hills, Encino, North Hollywood and the Panorama City-Arleta area. And they also used Levitt’s lauded system of mass-production — the same one they had been using since it was developed in California by 1939.
Lakewood (technically, Lakewood Park) was the most famous of all the tracts Weingart was involved with. Although he let Boyar and Taper take credit, Lakewood was 100% Weingart’s baby. Through long-standing relations with Montana Land Co officers and Clark family members going back to the 1920s, Weingart secured the remaining 3000+ undeveloped acres of the Montana ranch after the Montana Land Company’s President Clark J. Bonner died in 1947. He and Bonner had known each other for years as board members with the LA Chamber of Commerce, through the insurance field, and their common interests as subdividers. Weingart was a trusted builder who would carry out Clark’s vision and the Clark family heirs, most of whom lived elsewhere, wanted to quickly dispose of the property to minimize onerous inheritance taxes. Weingart was probably the only Southern California builder who could pull together such large financing, which he did through a combination of Prudential Insurance, Investors Diversified Services, and Union Bank.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say, researching Ben Weingart led to me doing research on many builders and subdivisions — which I will get to in this section.