Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/21555
Williams remembered. “Whoever heard of a Negro being an architect?” the man exclaimed. He set out to prove the man wrong. “USC was the school in the neighborhood,” Williams’ granddaughter Karen Hudson told the USC Trojan Family magazine, “and the school that accepted black faces.” In 1916 Williams entered a 3-year program in architectural engineering and graduated in 1919, supporting himself as an office boy in the landscape design firm which planned Beverly Hills and Los Feliz. By the time Williams received an architectural li- cense from the State of California in 1921, he was a member of the Los Angeles City Planning Com- mission where he could monitor devel- oping subdivisions where buyers might be seeking an archi- tect. When he was accepted as a mem- ber of the American Institute of Archi- tects two years later, he became the first African American to practice architecture. and was frequently called upon to speak and to advise. “If prejudice is ever to be overcome,” Williams would tell his audience, “it must be through the efforts of individual Negroes to rise above the average cultural level of their kind.” Tenacity, charm, self-confidence, talent: the four traits served him well in dealing with the well-healed. But it was his adherence to the gentlemanly maxim, “Discretion is the ABOVE: Manuel Glickman residence, 4522 Gainsborough Avenue, built1946. Williams wrote “The Small Home of Tomorrow” in 1945 and “New Homes for Today” in 1946. The shortage of local housing for the hordes of returning veterans was a boon for architects. This home is one of the few known to have been built in Los Angeles using Williams’ small house principles. Its cost was $17,600, according to a building permit. LEFT: David H. Miller residence, 2601 Aberdeen Avenue, built 1926. The two-story English Tudor-style home near the Vermont Avenue entrance to Griffith Park is undergoing a major renovation. better part of valor” which won him a clientele of privacy seeking actors and indus- trialists, and kept his career moving full speed ahead for a half a century. Hollywood, Hancock Park and Los Feliz contain a major concentration of Williams’ designs, some of them grand and a few, genuinely modest. Te Assistance League headquar- ters came from his office late in his career, as did the Hollywood YMCA which was an early project. Te broader Hollywood community contained such clients as Frank WINTER 2010 / DISCOVER HOLLYWOOD 35 Continues