Carroll Avenue, 1300 Block

Carroll Avenue's 1300 block sits on a hilltop in Angelino Heights, overlooking downtown Los Angeles, and holds the largest surviving cluster of Victorian houses in the city. Nine two-story homes, eight built in 1887-1888 and one in 1895, show Eastlake and Queen Anne design, with spindlework, turrets, art glass and redwood interiors. One house, at 1330, was designed by architect Joseph Cather Newsom. Two Craftsman houses from shortly after 1900 and two small post-World War II stucco homes complete the block. The tract was recorded in 1886, at the start of the Los Angeles land boom, and developed as a solid, respectable suburb served by the Temple Street Cable Railway. Its residents appeared year after year in the city's Blue Book. Most Victorian buildings elsewhere in Los Angeles have been lost or stand isolated among modern apartment buildings, while this street kept its original setting. Each Victorian house is a city Historic-Cultural Monument, and restoration was in progress.