"Metropolitan Living: The Los Angeles Park La Brea Apartments" in the Journal of Urban History, (May 2018).
Developed in Los Angeles during the 1940s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Parklabrea (now Park La Brea) stands as an amalgam of residential towers and two-story garden apartments in the center of the city. However, it also marks a glaring void within scholarship on California housing, even though it is one of the largest housing developments west of the Mississippi River and among the earliest high-rise projects to be constructed in Los Angeles. Against the backdrop of histories of modern public housing, which failed in part due to a patent disregard for the realities of urban context during the 1960s and 1970s, Parklabrea’s history reveals how life insurance companies, such as Met Life, became increasingly attuned to the social, physical, and economic contexts of the cities in which they were embedded.
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