The Residence Rip-off in LA Was Attributable to a Nineteen Twenties Con Artist
A gaggle of darling homes in Los Angeles have acquired one thing of a cult following. That includes a number of gables, steep-slope roofs, arched doorways, and trowel-swept stucco partitions, these six-room storybook cottages are “a novel time capsule of the Nineteen Twenties,” based on the development’s website. Generally known as Janes Village, the houses nestled within the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains are nonetheless extremely fascinating as we speak. However few folks know that the complete village was a con, and the person who constructed the homes was a con artist.
Together with his beguiling gray-green eyes and reward for gab, E.P. Janes, who got here from an extended line of evangelical missionaries, was a born salesman. His title was on everybody’s lips in Nineteen Twenties Los Angeles, when his cottages have been promoting as quick as he may construct them. After which, after finishing nearly 400 coveted homes and simply when he introduced grandiose plans to construct a thousand extra, he disappeared.
Seems Elisha Paul Janes was recurrently on the run from the legislation. Removed from being a “famed architect” (as admirers assumed), Janes was a high-school drop-out who had roamed from Seattle to Manhattan peddling miracle cures, desert “farm land,” and faulty mail-order tires—incomes him a number of lawsuits and a federal indictment.
Born on Shelter Island, New York in 1877, Janes began out as a touring cleaning soap salesman. Maybe that occupation is what drew him, when the enterprise wasn’t proving profitable, to Soap Lake within the barren panorama of central Washington. Claiming that the oddly foamy waters within the meromictic soda lake may remedy the whole lot from gout to gonorrhea, he began promoting the lake water to these with well being illnesses. He erected a barn-shaped bottling plant—and a home identified as we speak as Rock Fort—out of rounded boulders scavenged by native farmers in alternate for nugatory shares in his firm.
He additionally dabbled in actual property, shopping for up swaths of arid land, planting some timber to make it appear like there was loads of water beneath floor, then flipping the parcels to naive homesteaders. After being convicted of land fraud, he skipped out of Washington and turned up in Manhattan.
From an workplace close to Central Park, he orchestrated a nationwide mail-order rip-off, promoting “prime quality” tires that have been truly flimsy retreads with all the sturdiness of French toast. Underneath federal indictment, he informed the decide that he was only a hapless desk jockey who had no thought what his bosses (who have been in on the rip-off) have been as much as. He bought off with a slap on the wrist and instantly opened his personal storage in Queens, the place he continued to resurrect worn-out tires by dipping them in molten goo and embossing them with bogus logos. One windy evening, the place burned to the bottom in a fireplace that consumed a whole metropolis block. By the point the insurance coverage examine was lower, Janes had taken off to California to start his constructing spree of Janes Village.
For the placement of his subsequent con, Janes selected the unincorporated rural group of Altadena in northeast L.A. The clear air and secluded location had lengthy made the realm a haven for tuberculosis patients and bootleggers alike, however it was low cost land, low taxes, and a booming inhabitants that attracted Janes. Inside just a few months he had dispatched scores of building employees throughout dozens of newly lower heaps. Like Keystone Cops with hammers and saws, they assembled a home a day. Altadena didn’t require constructing permits, so no blueprints have been filed, however it seems that Janes tweaked broadly obtainable single-story home plans to incorporate English cottage touches similar to nested, “cat-slide” gables and steep Coldswold-inspired roofs with warped (composite) shingles.
He then hawked his quaint properties relentlessly. By day, sedans emblazoned with “E. P. Janes, Builder of Tremendous Properties” chirred round city. By evening, the E. P. Janes Live performance Hour aired on KFWB, the brand new Warner Brothers radio station. He rebranded the actual property pages of native newspapers “The E. P. Janes Part” and stuffed them with breathless tales, shilling for tradesmen, dissing grasping landlords, and hyping facilities similar to in-ground sprinklers, Batchelder tile, 56 electrical retailers per dwelling, and grounds “all dolled up with garden, shrubbery, walks, and so forth.” Within the fall of 1925, automobiles jammed the streets of his “sun-bathed, fog-free, unique” subdivision as 50,000 gawkers traipsed via the three-bedroom fashions of his “Properties Lovely” expo.
“Why pay hire?” was his chorus as he preached the gospel of dwelling possession and promised a deed to a $7,000 dwelling (with no escrow expenses and taxes absolutely paid) for as little as $150 money down. That interprets to a down fee of two.14%, whereas the typical down fee required for a home as we speak is 15 to twenty%. Performing as agent, designer, financier, and booster for one of many nation’s first mass-produced housing developments, Janes was “forward of his time when it comes to vertical integration,” says Altadena historian Michele Zack. “For a fly-by-nighter, he should have been form of sensible.”
He was additionally form of “shady,” says architectural historian Tim Gregory, a founding father of Altadena Heritage. “He was cashing in on folks’s style for Gothic revival, and he was such a quick talker that he bought lots of backers to go alongside.”
Janes claimed that “quantity and doing enterprise on a money foundation” have been his secret to low costs, based on a 1925 newspaper. He dealt solely in belief deeds, which protected him in case a borrower defaulted, leaving a financial institution to scrub up the mess. “That is no fairy story,” he crowed within the L.A. Evening Express. “It’s the sound enterprise achievement of an environment friendly constructing group.”
Then got here a hitch. In January 1926, tax-averse Altadeneans voted down a bond measure to offer paved roads, sidewalks, and sewers, which he had assured patrons have been imminent. A couple of months later, after torrential rains left Janes’s streets in deplorable situation, he vanished, fleeing collectors and leaving 200 skeleton homes. Some weren’t completed till after WWII. Due to design deviations and non-existent permits, Altadena Heritage has verified solely 160 of the cottages as having been formally constructed by E. P. Janes—nearly all have his distinctive pointy roofs—however estimates that there are a number of hundred extra.
Janes’s departure presaged an actual property bust, which hit Altadena laborious just a few months later in 1927. A number of of his patrons defaulted (together with his father-in-law, who held a number of plots), though it’s unclear if homeowners stopped making mortgage funds as a result of their homes have been unfinished. In September, Janes quietly filed for chapter.
However the place was Janes? An ocean away, in Honolulu, constructing a whole lot of charming, cheap cottages, which regarded lots like his Altadena homes. “Why Pay Hire?” was once more his slogan as he bought them for little or no cash down. Authorities quickly charged him with zoning violations—failure to file blueprints, set up sidewalks, and house buildings adequately—which carried a most penalty of a $1,000 superb and a 12 months in jail.
One balmy night, as an alternative of coping with these expenses, he hopped a steamer to San Francisco, abandoning his new hilltop mansion, famous for its “excessive lighting” at evening. His excuse for leaving so all of the sudden was that he urgently wanted to take his furnishings to the mainland to be reupholstered (as one does). A couple of months later, because the Despair hit, a rich Chinese language developer who had partnered with Janes on quite a few offers, filed for chapter to the tune of $425,000 ($7.5 million as we speak). “‘Nothing Down’ Plan Proves Undoing of Landowner,” learn one headline in The Honolulu Advertiser. Seems those that couldn’t afford a down fee couldn’t sustain with month-to-month ones both.
Right now the typical value of an unique (however modernized) E. P. Janes house is round $1 million, even with just one toilet as a result of small footprint. Acolytes typically take windshield excursions to identify traces of his signature silhouette: six gables, steeple-like roofs, and cement terraces. “Nicely constructed however not overbuilt” is how former resident Zac Matthews describes them. “Janes truly used good supplies like outsized redwood rafters,” he says. “They’re not simply cute, they’re a part of the historic material. Come what may, he made neighborhoods out of the deal.”
So what occurred to E.P. Janes? The day earlier than he skedaddled from Hawaii, Janes secured a $40,000 funding from a enterprise affiliate for a California gold-mine, which got here to naught. He eked out his final years on the lam in a nondescript tract home in San Diego, dying of most cancers in 1940. No one claimed his ashes, which have been finally interred within the pauper’s part of a municipal cemetery. Deedless in dying, E. P. Janes had scored his forever home with no cash down, landscaping included. In spite of everything, as he all the time stated, why pay hire?