'Dingbat' apartments became popular in the 1950s amid LA's housing boom Dingbat building in Glendale, Calif., Feb. 19, 2010. Britta Gustafson via Flickr CC 2.0 ...

A before and after image of a retrofitted Dingbat building. [Photo: courtesy Paul Jesman] Seismic safety rules passed in 2015 now require retrofits of multistory buildings with what the city’s ...

Boxy, dingbat-style apartments dot the San Fernando Valley, the understated architectural design evoking the region’s 1950s post-war boom. But now the Valley’s stock of dingbats is getting a ...

Los Angeles’ “dingbat” apartments are a kitschy piece of the past Shaped by the car culture, dingbats are going obsolete due to earthquake risk. But their names and style flourishes bring ...

The book successfully leverages the Dingbat as a launchpad for surveying multi-family housing in Los Angeles, picking apart the prickly and multivalent nature of its creation myth and subsequent ...

In 49 states, a dingbat is an elementary school insult, but in California and especially LA, the term refers to a residential building with a very distinct style. These edifices are typically painted ...

The dingbat is almost 50 years old. I’m not talking about Edith Bunker, the “All in the Family” character who was given that derisive name by her husband Archie. That version of the dingbat ...

By the 1980s dingbats were illegal to build, and much of Los Angeles, including Parkman Avenue, was zoned for lower density. By the turn of the millennium only single-family homes could be built ...