Bukowski's Bungalow gets Monument Status

Not a Nazi: Bukowski Bungalow gets Monument Status

The City of Los Angeles’ Cultural Heritage Commission brushed aside allegations that legendary L.A. writer Charles Bukowski was a Nazi sympathizer and by a three-to-one vote, approved a recommendation that the East Hollywood bungalow court in which Bukowski morphed from postal worker to author be named a Cultural-Historic Monument.

Bukowski and Friends Bungalow days:
Bukowski, editor John Martin, Linda King

This, after an attorney for property co-owner Victoria Gureyeva cited playwright and former Bukowski buddy Ben Pleasants’ 2003 hollywoodinvestigator.com article “When Bukowski Was a Nazi” and Pleasants’ 2004 biography Visceral Bukowski. The two parted company in 1985. Pleasants cemented the split with the comment, ““What Bukowski really wanted was to be the most famous Nazi writer in the world!”

“Bukowski talks about things like gassing Jews,” Joseph Trenk told commissioners Thursday. “In fact, one of the conclusions he reaches is that maybe he didn’t hate all the Jews, he just hated Hollywood Jews. Remember where this property is located. It’s located in Hollywood.”

Pleasants and Bukowski

“Pleasants’ evidence consisted of unreported conversations, unverified membership in the American Bund, and the supposed existence of pro-Nazi stories seized by the FBI and never seen again, even when Bukowski’s FBI file was made public,” photographer Lauren Everett told commissioners.

Everett has led effort to monumentize the old stucco and plaster apartment and publishes the save-the-bungalow site 5124DeLongpre.org. She, and others, attribute the remarks to sheer provocateurism by Bukowski, then attending L.A. City College.

Commission President Mary Klaus-Martin summed up the allegations moments before the vote. “(Bukowski) was the poet laureate of the poor. He started in Hollywood and now has his archives at the Huntington. If I thought that any of the claims were true, in no way would I consider this.”

The typewriter
that captured L.A.

Trenk insists the 1920’s-vintage Spanish Colonial Revival-style bungalow is in no immediate threat of demolition but told the commission that waves of renters had scoured the unit of any traces of its former tenant, or the way the unit appeared in the Sixties. He argued Gureyeva’s property rights.

“The way this commission works, and the ordinance that it works under, simply gives no rights to the owner. My client had a grandfather who was in a concentration camp and escaped, saving fifteen people. He was a hero, not Charles Bukowski.”

Bukowski resided in the complex from 1963-1972, writing Post Office, South Of No North, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses and Factorum there, in addition to his newspaper column, Notes from A Dirty Old Man.

“At 6:15 every evening, he’d light a cigarette and drink some beers and would just get started,” Bukowski fan, cultural preservationist and Esotouric tours co-founder Richard Schave told me outside the complex recently.

“When I think about this place and why it’s important, I think about it being 4 a.m., the light’s still on and Bukowski is still crossing some stuff out with a pencil. This is where it all happened.”

5124 W. De Longpre

“This is not like Mark Twain’s or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Connecticut where you see huge mansions,” Robert Nudelman of Hollywood Heritage told the commission. “It points to how a person working at the post office can start writing literature that made L.A. known throughout the world — one of the popular and important writers of L.A. history in the last half of the Twentieth Century.”

“Was he a Nazi? I don’t know,” Trenk said later on the steps of City Hall. “Did he say stupid things in that regard? Apparently so. Is this a guy you want to honor in the City of Hollywood?”

Gureyeva stood by her attorney’s side, “far too emotional” to speak with reporters though she’d earlier told L.A. Weekly, “This man (Bukowski) loved Hitler. I will never allow the City of Los Angeles to turn (the bungalow) into a monument for this man.”

What next? Lauren Everett envisions a writers’ community eventually taking up residence at a refurbished Bukowski Arms, though another hearing looms before the Planning and Land Use Management Committee before — Nazi allegations and all — the issue moves on to City Council.

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