Love Them or Hate Them, Dingbat Apartments Dot Los Angeles With Unusual Designs Complexes Were City's Response to Housing Shortage in '50s and '60s

This story was reported and written by Jack Witthaus, with design by Jelena Schulz.

Despite its small stature, an apartment property sticks out in Los Angeles's Sawtelle neighborhood with an unusual facade: three lanterns arranged in a diagonal pattern encased in a metal frame.

The four-unit apartment building at 1634 S. Bundy Drive isn't itself out of place. Other multifamily complexes surround the property. The building's ornamental front, though, is unlike any of its neighbors.

Welcome to the world of "dingbat" apartments, a vestige from an earlier era that's still catching eyes around Los Angeles.

The Bundy Drive property is emblematic of Los Angeles' era of dingbat design, a love-it-or-hate-it, mid-century style for multifamily units. These dingbat apartments are as much a part of the fabric of Los Angeles as palm trees and aspiring actors, and the properties are dotted across greater L.A.

Dingbats were largely built in the 1950s and 1960s in response to an all-too-familiar problem: a lack of housing. The stucco box apartments are typically ornamented, have a carport beneath and usually only have two or three floors. Dingbats typically are a handful to a dozen units in size and were built by numerous developers.

These apartments became popular in L.A. because they could be built quickly and fit into small lots, resulting in more affordable living for a fast-growing city. However, unless grandfathered in, the dingbat design no longer conforms to zoning laws and is illegal to build these days. Multiple changes to zoning laws, including parking requirements and higher architectural standards, led to the dingbat's demise.

No data exists on how many dingbat apartments were constructed in Los Angeles, but roughly 138,000 apartment units built between 1950 to 1970 are still around in the city of L.A., according to CoStar data.

Dingbat usually refers to a silly person, and the source of the word as a type of apartment isn't known, though architect Francis Ventre is credited as an early user of the term.

Dingbats aren't isolated to L.A. and are located across the U.S. Some even have nonresidential uses. For example, the city hall of Lackawanna, New York, was designed employing a dingbat style.

The apartments often have mid-century-looking ornaments and decorations typical of the period in which they were built and were meant to attract the attention of car-loving Angelenos as they drive past.

A shirtless surfer gliding along a massive wave on a dingbat apartment at 10876 Palms Blvd. certainly attracts eyeballs. The gold-and-gray tiled Tiki Apartments in Redondo Beach offer a Hawaiian feel 2,500 miles away from the island state. And a bronze, sun-like object adds a certain pizzazz to an otherwise nondescript building at 1438 Barrington Ave.