A dingbat is a type of apartment building that flourished in the Sun Belt region of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, a vernacular variation of shoebox style "stucco boxes". Dingbats are boxy, two or three-story apartment houses with overhangs sheltering street-front parking. [1] .

Nov 12, 2024 · While LA is still home to tens of thousands of dingbat apartment buildings, inhabited by countless Angelenos and often rent-stabilized (as most were built before 1978), they’re a dying breed — and...

May 30, 2011 · The dingbat is a two-story wood-framed apartment building constructed between 1950 and 1970 on a single-wide lot of approximately 7500 square feet and comprising five to 12 units, each accessed by an individual entry.

Hayworth Avenue Dingbats. An entire street full of intact dingbats is a rare and special thing indeed, making Hollywood's wonderful 1956-1965 dingbat cluster on Hayworth Avenue a must-see.

Sep 7, 2015 · California historian Leonard Pitto once declared. But the simple, boxy apartment buildings have become as beloved as they are loathed, and are as common as palm trees and parking garages to the...

Sep 24, 2021 · From the San Fernando Valley to Culver City to La Cienega Heights, developers in the 1950s and ‘60s replaced thousands of older Los Angeles buildings with economical two- or three-story apartment...

Built in the 1950s and ‘60s, the dingbat apartment was largely the result of planning codes put in place during the massive postwar expansion of Los Angeles. It is an identifiable, yet anonymous, vernacular building type, box-shaped and clad primarily in stucco, with apartments propped up on stilts over open carports.

Sep 28, 2021 · Describing the "aggressively economical" icon of mid- density apartment buildings known as dingbats that pepper Los Angeles from the Valley to the Eastside, Laura Bliss writes that these buildings "were a multifamily answer to that single-family template."

Jan 22, 2022 · By definition, a dingbat is a rectangular structure that sits above an open carport. Though the boxy silhouette is a bit polarizing to Angelenos, many dingbats are swathed in cheery pastel colors and decorative trimmings.

Download a PDF of the introduction to Dingbat 2.0. Co-edited by Joshua G. Stein of Radical Craft, Dingbat 2.0 is a publication which discusses the influence, both past and future, of the dingbat apartment building on urban development, cultural iconography and architectural history.