Hathaway Estates: Should Public Streets Be Closed to the Public?

The all-concrete Garbutt House looms impressively on its summit over Silver Lake.

Frank A. Garbutt – inventor, industrialist and silent movie pioneer – built the 11,743 square foot three story high house in 1926, on a 37-acre hilltop estate.   

The 20-room house has a 360 -degree view of the Pacific Ocean, the Santa Monica and Verdugo Mountains, and the downtown skyline. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places (1987) at 1809 Apex Avenue.   

The people of the city -- other than residents of the Hathaway Hill Estates and their visitors -- cannot walk through the gates surrounding the enclave to see this historic building without permission. 

The streets within the fenced estate, however, belong to the City of Los Angeles.

The story of how the Hathaway summit with its spectacular views became a gated enclave began on July 7, 1846, with the conquest of Monterey, the capital of Alta California. The City of Los Angeles inherited that hillside as part of its legacy of four-square leagues (about 17,000 square acres) of municipally owned lands from the pueblo of Los Angeles. (W. W. Robinson, Land in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), pp. 34-40.). 

The American city mayor gave away the hill above Silver Lake where the estate now is as one of the City’s “Donation Lots.”  Several private wealthy men built houses on the hill before Garbutt.

In 1960, Garbutt’s children sold the property to a corporation that rented the houses on what had become the Hathaway Estate (named after Charles F. Hathaway, Garbutt’s son-in-law).

In 1982, 100 homes went up on the site as part of a planned subdivision with chunky stucco homes on cul de sac streets.  In a 1983 story, L.A. Times urban design critic Sam Hall Kaplan savaged Hathaway Hill Estates as “an abuse of almost every planning principal” and a development that “looks as if it has been lifted intact from an expensive Orange County subdivision and transplanted in error or jest on a prominent hill bordering the Echo Park and Silver Lake communities.”

City councilmember Robert Stevenson made a motion to declare that the public streets within Hathaway Hill subdivision be withdrawn from public use pursuant to Government Code §37359.

 On August 31, 1984, the Council Public Works Committee report recommended that McCollum and other cul de sac streets be withdrawn from public use (McCollum, Aaron, Benton Way, Branden Street, and Apex.) The Planning department issued a negative declaration, so there was no further California Environmental Quality Act review.

Local residents urged that the City purchase the estate to use the buildings to show works by Silver Lake architects:  Lautner, Ain, Neutra, Schindler and Soriano, and as a museum of the silent film industry that began on Glendale Avenue.  (See, Barbara Bestor, Bohemian Modern Living in Silver Lake (2006).

The City Council ignored the public’s opposition and it ignored the 1979 appellate holding in City of Lafayette v. Contra Costa County that held cities cannot gate public streets , which stated:

The streets of a city belong to the people of the state, and every citizen of the state has a right to the use thereof, subject to legislative control. ... The right of control over street traffic is an exercise of a part of the sovereign power of the state. ....”  (Codified in 1990 as Vehicle Code 21101.6. http://dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc21101_6.htm).

In Citizens Against Gated Enclaves v. Whitley Heights Civic Assn. (1994) 23 Cal.App.4th 812, 28 Cal.Rptr.2d 451, the Second District Court of Appeal held that, according to the Vehicle Code provision, the City of Los Angeles could not allow a private homeowners Association from closing public streets in Whitley Heights, and cities have no authority to close off public streets to the public while allowing some private individuals to use them.  

For quite a few years signs posted at entrances to the Hathaway Hill Estates that tell us the city withdrew the streets pursuant to Government Code §37359.