Dingbat (building) - History

History

In a 1998 Los Angeles Times editorial about the area's evolving standards for development, the birth of the dingbat is retold (as a cautionary tale): "By mid-century, a development-driven southern California was in full stride, paving its bean fields, leveling mountaintops, draining waterways and filling in wetlands...In our rush to build we tolerated monumentally careless and unattractive urban design...Some of it awful—start with the 'dingbat' apartment house, a boxy two-story walk-up with sheltered parking at street level and not one inch of outdoor space."

Geographer Barbara Rubin writes that since the existing housing stock of California bungalows, Mediterranean-style small houses, Spanish Colonial Revival duplexes and aging Victorians was insufficient, "a compromise capable of accommodating a marked increase in density, yet human in scale, and economical to construct, evolved by the early 1950s." This was the dingbat.

Dingbats were appealing to the three important factors of the real estate business - builders, landlords and renters:

• Developers used the cookie-cutter, straight-line approach to building because simplicity and repetition held down costs, allowed economies of scale and required much less skilled labor than would curvier or more creative buildings.
• Land owners profited if they invested in the new apartment style and replaced one or two streams of rental income with triple or quadruple the number of units.
• Since each unit typically had a private entrance, stucco boxes offered an affordable version of the American Dream to city dwellers who aspired to owning a detached, single-family home, and with on-site parking, dingbats participated in the car culture of postwar American life.

Rubin continues, "Inserted into empty lots or replacing the residential stock, the dingbat a remarkably successfully transitional solution, the fulminations of architectural critics notwithstanding." Dingbats are primarily located in areas of a city that were (sub)urbanized or redeveloped in the 1950s and 1960s; city centers are generally free of them. Many are located on cheaper lots found near "locally undesirable land uses" such as sewage plants, power stations, jails or major freeways.

The production of dingbats essentially ceased by the mid-1970s because they were "zoned out of existence when their signature back-out parking was banned by city ordinance."