NOTE: This is part of a series on Ben Weingart and his many partners who built much of LA from 1935-1970.
Lou Boyar entered Ben Weingart’s world in 1938. By 1950 they would become forever linked.
Boyar was born Louis Boyarsky on January 10, 1898, in San Francisco, the oldest son and one of ten children of Eliyahu Peretz “Peter” Boyarsky and the former Pearl Hershkovitz, who left Grodno, Russia in 1892.
They reportedly immigrated to Canada with a colony formed to help Jews leave an oppressive life in Russia and learn to be farmers in Canada. A granddaughter, Edith Morris, said, “The ground was so hard they couldn’t plant. The cows wouldn’t give milk, so they went to San Francisco.” Along the way Peter married Pearl, the daughter of the colony leader.
After settling in San Francisco, Peter worked for a Jewish newspaper, but around 1900 the family made their way back to Wisconsin and then Chicago by 1903, where Peter took a job as an editor on the Jewish Daily Courier. He worked there for 13 years until his death in 1916.
The ambitious 20-year old Louis took over responsibility as the family provider while his younger siblings finished school. On the 1918 draft registration forms, he listed his occupation as press agent for the Jones, Linick & Schaefer theatrical company, a partnership which began in 1913 to buy up major vaudeville houses and convert them to movie theaters in the 1920s. He lost that job in the Depression, but found found work as a sales manager for an automobile dealership. In 1932, he and his Chicago friend Morris A. Sommers partnered to purchase the Castlon Theater for $2,000, but this venture failed. He and Sommers then partnered on some shady charlatan companies that caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. Perhaps this is why the both moved to Los Angeles. Boyar found work as a salesman for a gold dealer, but was arrested for illegally purchasing and selling gold in 1937 (the FDR administration had passed laws putting the US on the gold standard and making it illegal for private citizens to buy or sell gold). The trial lasted a year, ending in a conviction but no jail time.
Convicted and embarrassed, he reconnected with his Chicago buddy, Maury Sommers, who had found work with Ben Weingart’s Junior Realty as a project coordinator. Perhaps this was through the Irving Siegel or Bill Berk connections, or it could have been through the Bnai Brith or another Jewish group.
Weingart had begun buying distressed properties that Krandill would build on. One of his projects, begun in early 1938, was to work with the Krandill Mortgage Company on a multi-house project in North Long Beach by present Compton College. When Krandill seemed to be overextended, Weingart set up Sommers in a separate construction company, Thrifty Building Service, to complete the homes for Krandill. Sommers reached out to Boyar and asked him to join him.
Boyar immediately took to this line of work, and after finishing the first group of homes, Sommers and Weingart bought an additional 100 lots in the area – which they called P&G Gardens. They would soon file a DBA saying they were collectively working as Morris A. Sommers, Builder & Subdivider, perhaps because they were relucrtant to use Boyar’s name after his recent legal troubles.
Two months later, in early April Weingart set them up on lots he had purchased from default tax rolls across Santa Fe Blvd from the Navy’s new Savannah Housing Project at Hill and Santa Fe. The pair proved themselves equal to the task, and in late April, with Weingart’s group providing the purchase money and Krandill handling the sales staff, plans and mortgages, Sommers and Boyer oversaw the construction of homes on lots immediately northeast of Silverado Park. This was a tract laid out ten years earlier by O.K. _____, unfortunately right when the Depression hit.
By now Boyar and Sommers were overseeing multiple Krandill / Thrifty projects, including one in San Bernardino and another in Montebello. They had also been joined by Boyar’s younger brother Mark, who had just migrated from Chicago.[1]
With the acceptance in California of FHA insurance, assistance was limited to a certain dollar amount per company, Weingart began having his contractors set up their own companies, and Sommers and Boyar incorporated as Thrifty Building Service on Sept 13, 1939. [2]
By this time, not only was Krandill sending them work, but Weingart had unleashed the full forces of Junior Realty to find new properties suitable for FHA housing. Many of their lots were again in the Garfield manor section.
Sommers seemed to focus on the Long Beach operations as head of Thrifty Building Service and Boyar became a General manager at Krandill. Was he just overseeing those products that Weingart had an interest in or was he helping out with all Krandill projects is unknown. But the company was more active than ever with its larger tract projects in Montebello, Lynwood, Southgate, Morningside Heights (by Inglewood) West LA, and North Hollywood and numerous one-offs in West Los Angeles.
Sommers secured an arrangement with an active Long Beach builder, the JM Lenney Company, to handle construction while Thrifty oversaw planning, sales, and funding responsibilities for many of the lots they had already purchased in the California Heights subdivision, an ambitious 1920s tract on the property of the Jotham Bixby that received a lot of hoopla over their nice sidewalks and curbs but very few sales of lots.[3] .
This started a relationship between Thrifty and the Jotham Bixby family that would prove fruitful for both over the next seven years.[4]
The process was thrown for a loop in 1940 when the US government, by now fully aware of the possibility of involvement in the World War, began to shift the majority of their housing assistance to homes for those in the defense industries. Under the terms of its new Title VI, the majority of FHA assistance would be limited to areas near defense-related industries.
This is where Weingart’s connections came into play. Not only was he the largest operator of hotels and apartment hotels, with Irving Siegel he had become the FHA’s largest private builder of apartment residences – having constructed over 100 buildings in the past four years. And now with Thrifty and Krandill, Weingart was now one of the largest builders of single-family homes, involved in at least six larger-scale tracts that had all been built, never defaulted, and minimal complaints. He was very trusted by the SoCal FHA authorities.
And fortunately, he was already building in the very areas where defense housing was needed most – North Hollywood (close to Lockheed and Vega), Southgate, Montebello, Lynwood and North Long Beach (near Vultee Aircraft in Downey) and Long Beach’s West Side (just north of the Port of LA and Long Beach). And they were already to start building in property owned by the Jotham Bixby Company near the Bixby Knolls area of Long Beach (just 1 mile from the new Douglas Aircraft site on the north side of the Long Beach Airport)
With Weingart’s assistance, Sommers secured on April 27, 1941, the very first FHA Title VI (Defense Housing) loan offered in Southern California – for 58 homes to be built on infill lots in the Garfield Manor area bordered by Hill and 20th Santa Fe and the LA River. These were unsold lots that Weingart had rescued from tax default in 1938.
The attack on Pearl Harbor paralyzed SoCal housing construction until the powers that be in Washington could figure it out, but by February 1942 Sommers & Boyar and the Lenneys were building again, now constructing 200 and 400 at a time. doing . Boyar was also on the scene in Long Beach and other locations, including Torrance where Thrifty built some apartments off Sonoma.
Primarily Sommers and Boyar just kept filling up the Bixby properties, moving further north with each development – across Bixby, Roosevelt, Carson, Tehachapi – over 5,000 homes in four years – despite excessive government regulations and material shortages. Significantly, the latter homes were directly west of the area Weingart and Boyar would start constructing in 1950 — Lakewood.
But the experience showed many of the World War II builders that large-scale building was possible, especially if you had the deep pockets of Ben Weingart as a business partner. And it offered efficiencies at economy of scale. These were efficiencies that Sommers and Boyar took great advantage of, and Weingarted noted this and he had big plans for them after the war.
[1] A article in a 1940 Bricklayer about the new Krandill office on Wilshire Blvd. in the Miracle Mile District lists Boyar as a General Manager at Krandill. The 1941 Long Beach directory lists Mark Boyar as a salesman at Krandill and Thrifty.
[2] At 1954 hearings Boyar said he had to borrow $700 to get into the construction business. This would be the only time that would be applicable. But by now the business was almost a sure thing, so not a great leap of faith. The money bought an interest in Sommers operation, and also paid for the incorporation fees and the publication of the DBA in the Bnai Brith Messenger.
[3] The Long Beach FHA office noted that by this time Lenney and Thrifty were basically the same thing.
[4] There were three Bixby families that settled Long Beach. The Lewellyn and Jotham Bixby families had purchased the Rancho Los Cerritos in the 1860s and but the next generation had made a series of luckless real estate decisions in the 1920s and 1930s. The John W. Bixby family had purchased the Rancho Los Alamitos in 1881 and their next generation, Fred H. and Susannah Bixby Bryant, had done much better in ranching and real estate, especially after oil had been found on some of their land.