In 2015, when I was twenty years old, I moved into a dingbat apartment in Los Angeles. I painted the walls canary yellow because I had read somewhere that yellow walls inspired optimism and serenity. I am twenty-eight now; I have lived in five apartments since that dingbat, and I have yet to experience a serene day in Los Angeles.
Like many people, I moved to Los Angeles to stake a claim in an ethereal coolness that I believed to be contagious and ubiquitous in that city. I just knew I’d catch it. What it offered to me instead was boxy overhang apartments outfitted with war-time appliances, a term I would quickly discover meant “doesn’t work.” Dingbat apartments were an economic invention in the 1950s that made it possible for twelve families to live in a single apartment building sitting atop a parking garage. The dingbat could accommodate the post-war increase in population with affordable construction prices and offered a scrappy version of the American dream to tenants. Often, their exteriors were painted in pastel colors and emblazoned with mid-century atomic-style font, as if they were the deranged and misshapen stepsisters of the swanky Beverly Hills Hotel. At the time, the design was pragmatic and unpretentious, and dingbats became a fixture in LA, scattered across the city in the manner of late-night diners and car washes.
Yet, in architecture and show business, beauty is hard-won. There are aesthetic concerns about dingbats: they’re flimsy, too boxy, effectively a parking garage you can live on. There are also more serious problems: dingbat apartments have structural issues. Their architects did not consider the possibility of earthquakes and the necessity for accessibility for people with limited mobility. They used cheap building materials, and they made the walls too thin. In The Slums of Beverly Hills, Natasha Lyonne’s character bluntly describes Dingbats as, “Two-story apartment buildings featuring cheap rent and fancy names that promise the good life, but never deliver.” Real estate developers in the city want to demolish and replace them with sleek, upscale apartment buildings of the kind that I can’t help but associate with Patrick Bateman, the opposite of the mostly immigrant and working families that tend to inhabit dingbats.
The truth is, though, that I once wanted to break free from the design, too. I tried to break my streak of taking up tenure in dingbat apartments by moving into a bungalow advertised on Craigslist as the ex-residence of Charles Bukowski. I didn’t go through with it because it was over my budget, but the experience of pursuing it was an amusing way to find out that just about everyone wants to live like a poet.
It is tempting to offer a sentimental rendering of the years I have spent in these scrappy apartments in Los Angeles, making too little money and spending too much of it on rent. In my current apartment, my bedroom perches over a car garage. I live here with a TV writer who, through sitting around in our bizarre home, has become my dear friend. I will likely spend the rest of my life nostalgic for the late nights in my bedroom when I made him pose for Polaroid portraits while we dreamt up our futures. Our apartment is lined with the trappings of self-consciously sophisticated young people: coffee tables littered with literary magazines we mean to read, walls adorned with foreign movie posters, too many things—postcards, paperbacks, syrupy liquors—cluttering our lives, the products of a youth of curious searching. Every few weeks, I come home and arrange fresh-cut daffodils in a vase in our living room, as if I were a businessman in a 1970s sitcom and this apartment my loyal wife.
Still, I complain. Our sinks drain too slowly. Our smoke detector is a nest of exposed wires. Street parking is impossible. The whole place is too loud. Every morning, the engines of cars vibrate underneath me. When it rains, a steady drip of rainwater falls from our living room ceiling, which briefly makes me feel like a character in a Charles Dickens novel. I imagine what it must be like to live in craftsman homes tucked in the Hollywood Hills, where people live lives neater and more defined than mine. I often think of my youth as an overwrought stage play stretching across apartments in Los Angeles, where I have come of age in buildings as idiosyncratic as my years spent in them. I wonder if I want something else entirely.
I am seduced by starting over, which is why I have lived in five apartments in one city. I wonder if the detractors of dingbat apartments are right. It is true: they are ugly and impractical. When I see one, I sometimes feel a twinge of sadness, knowing that the version of LA that I have come of age in will eventually disappear; the city has mandated seismic retrofitting, and dingbats will be cheaper to demolish than to repair. Once a symbol of housing innovation, dingbats are now, like so many things and people in Hollywood, considered sleazy, fading relics.
But I love them because, like so many of my days, they are an imperfect and sprawling mess of miscalculations. I can’t disentangle them from the memories of the years I have spent in Los Angeles. When I arrive in my own dingbat, I am reminded of a paradise promised but never delivered and, in its place, something stranger and more beautiful took shape.