1529 Pizarro St. Los Angeles, CA 90026

I was moving some photos around from my father’s hoard, and found a photo of a tiny piece of paper with his name at that address, 1529 Pizarro St.

Google Maps shows there’s nothing there now.

A search found a digitzed copy of a July 31, 1915 issue of Southwest Contractor with that address in the listings of permits pulled.

It looks like C. A. Briggs owned the place in 1915.

This is the single mention of this address found on Google.

The owner, at 1537 is found three times on Google – two are above and the third is in the LA Herald in 1916:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH19160523.2.197.1

A search for the address on Zimas shows that there’s now a new-ish building there. It appears to have been built in 1965, and is now occupied by Pho Siam. The addresses 1537 and 1529 no longer exist, and the parcels seem to be combined with 1525 Pizarro, which is the address for the entire corner.  That parcel also consolidates 1519 and 1517.

It’s on sale at Loopnet for over $5 million.

Also, a search for C. A. Briggs brought up another record from the Southwest Contractor showing that a lien had been released to Briggs and an Elsie Jouromsky.  I think that Briggs helped Jouromsky buy a property. Her name comes up along with George L. Jouromsky a couple times, regarding liens as well.

My best guess is that my father lived briefly at 1529 Pizarro, which was next to 1539, in the 1950s.  It was an older house, and was torn down and redeveloped.

Torn Down

This is reminiscent of another address my father lived at, 729 Wheeling Way, in Highland Park. That address also no longer exists, because the street was demolished for the Monterey Hills development.  (He happened to have an ad for the Monterey Highlands development in his hoard as well. I guess he kept that as some kind of memento.)

They seemed to bounce around a lot. He mentioned living in Highland Park and Hollywood (this may be the Hollywood address), before buying a house on Mariposa in what is now Koreatown.  Then, flipping that house and moving to the Rosemead area.

The Koreatown house is still there.

Neither of the old rental houses, or these old neighborhoods, for that matter, turned up any photographs. I have to wonder if they were so unremarkable that nobody saw fit to preserve them. Keeping photos and information is always a subjective, selective process, and most of the material is thrown away.

Special, beautiful houses are preserved, but plain or ugly houses are not. They just become targets for demolition and redevelopment into something new that will sell for a greater profit. The plain houses are probably usable, or could be made habitable, but they always have limited market value.

In a market economy, the market destroys as it also creates. The market satisfies desires before it will satisfy needs.