Dingbat (building)
Encyclopedia
Sun Belt
The Sun Belt or Spanish Belt is a region of the United States generally considered to stretch across the South and Southwest . Another rough boundary of the region is the area south of the 36th parallel, north latitude. It is the largest region which the U.S government does not recognize officially...
region of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in the 1950s and 1960s, a vernacular
Vernacular architecture
Vernacular architecture is a term used to categorize methods of construction which use locally available resources and traditions to address local needs and circumstances. Vernacular architecture tends to evolve over time to reflect the environmental, cultural and historical context in which it...
variation of shoebox style
Shoebox style (architecture)
In architecture, shoebox style refers to the functionalist style of modern architecture characterised by predominantly rectilinear, orthogonal shapes, with regular horizontal rows of windows or glass walls...
"stucco boxes". Dingbats are boxy, two- or three-story apartment houses with overhangs sheltering street-front parking. The elevation view of a dingbat is "half parking structure, half dumb box."
Mainly found in Southern California
Southern California
Southern California is a megaregion, or megapolitan area, in the southern area of the U.S. state of California. Large urban areas include Greater Los Angeles and Greater San Diego. The urban area stretches along the coast from Ventura through the Southland and Inland Empire to San Diego...
, but also in Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
, Nevada
Nevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...
and Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, dingbats are known for their downmarket status and inexpensive rents. Some replaced more distinctive but less profitable building structures, such as single-family Victorian
Victorian architecture
The term Victorian architecture refers collectively to several architectural styles employed predominantly during the middle and late 19th century. The period that it indicates may slightly overlap the actual reign, 20 June 1837 – 22 January 1901, of Queen Victoria. This represents the British and...
homes. Since the 1980s they have been the subject of aesthetic interest as examples of Mid-Century modern
Mid-century modern
Mid-Century modern is an architectural, interior and product design form that generally describes mid-20th century developments in modern design, architecture, and urban development from roughly 1933 to 1965...
design and kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
, since many dingbats have themed names and specialized trim. Dingbats are also reviled as socially alienating visual blights; California historian Leonard Pitt said of them, "The dingbat typifies Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
apartment building architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
at its worst."
From a structural engineering
Structural engineering
Structural engineering is a field of engineering dealing with the analysis and design of structures that support or resist loads. Structural engineering is usually considered a specialty within civil engineering, but it can also be studied in its own right....
perspective, the "tuck-under parking" arrangement may create a soft story
Soft story building
A Soft story building is a multi-story building in which one or more floors have windows, wide doors, large unobstructed commercial spaces, or other openings in places where a shear wall would normally be required for stability as a matter of earthquake engineering design...
if the residential levels are supported on slender columns without many shear wall
Shear wall
In structural engineering, a shear wall is a wall composed of braced panels to counter the effects of lateral load acting on a structure. Wind and earthquake loads are the most common loads braced wall lines are designed to counteract...
s in the parking level.
Name
Reyner Banham
Peter Reyner Banham was a prolific architectural critic and writer best known for his 1960 theoretical treatise Theory and Design in the First Machine Age and for his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies...
in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). He credits the coining to architect Francis Ventre and describes them:
- "...[Dingbats] are normally a two-story walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stuccoStuccoStucco or render is a material made of an aggregate, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as decorative coating for walls and ceilings and as a sculptural and artistic material in architecture...
ed over. These are the materials that Rudolf SchindlerRudolf SchindlerRudolph Michael Schindler Rudolph Michael Schindler Rudolph Michael Schindler (born Rudolf Michael Schindler (1887 Vienna - 1953 Los Angeles) was an American, born in Austria, architect whose most important works were built in or near Los Angeles during the early to mid-twentieth century....
and others used to build the first modern architectureModern architectureModern architecture is generally characterized by simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building. It is a term applied to an overarching movement, with its exact definition and scope varying widely...
in Los Angeles, and the dingbat, left to its own devices, often exhibits the basic characteristics of a primitive modern architecture. Round the back, away from the public gaze, they display simple rectangular forms and flush smooth surfaces, skinny steel columns and simple boxed balconies, and extensive overhangs to shelter four or five cars..."
While the word is sometimes said to reference dingbat in the sense of a "general term of disparagement," dingbat refers to the stylistic star-shaped decorations (reminiscent of typographic dingbat
Dingbat
A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character"....
s) that often garnish the stucco façades. These flourishes and other ornamental elements reflect the contemporary but more complex Googie architecture
Googie architecture
Googie architecture is a form of modern architecture, a subdivision of futurist architecture influenced by car culture and the Space and Atomic Ages....
.
History
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
editorial about the area's evolving standards for development, the birth of the dingbat is retold (as a cautionary tale
Cautionary tale
A cautionary tale is a tale told in folklore, to warn its hearer of a danger. There are three essential parts to a cautionary tale, though they can be introduced in a large variety of ways. First, a taboo or prohibition is stated: some act, location, or thing is said to be dangerous. Then, the...
): "By mid-century, a development-driven southern California was in full stride, paving its bean fields, leveling mountaintops, draining waterways and filling in wetlands...In our rush to build we tolerated monumentally careless and unattractive urban design...Some of it [was] awful—start with the 'dingbat' apartment house, a boxy two-story walk-up with sheltered parking at street level and not one inch of outdoor space."
Geographer
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
Barbara Rubin writes that since the existing housing stock of California bungalow
California Bungalow
California bungalows, known as Californian bungalows in Australia and are commonly called simply bungalows in America, are a form of residential structure that were widely popular across America and, to some extent, the world around the years 1910 to 1939.-Exterior features:Bungalows are 1 or 1½...
s, Mediterranean-style small houses, Spanish Colonial Revival duplex
Duplex (building)
The term duplex can be used to describe several different dwelling unit configurations:A duplex house is defined as a dwelling having apartments with separate entrances for two families. This includes two-story houses having a complete apartment on each floor and also side-by-side apartments on a...
es and aging Victorian
Victorian architecture
The term Victorian architecture refers collectively to several architectural styles employed predominantly during the middle and late 19th century. The period that it indicates may slightly overlap the actual reign, 20 June 1837 – 22 January 1901, of Queen Victoria. This represents the British and...
s was insufficient, "a compromise capable of accommodating a marked increase in density, yet human in scale, and economical to construct, evolved by the early 1950s." This was the dingbat.
Dingbats were appealing to the three important factors of the real estate
Real estate
In general use, esp. North American, 'real estate' is taken to mean "Property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals, or water; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this; an item of real property; buildings or...
business - builders, landlords and renters:
- Developers used the cookie-cutter, straight-line approach to building because simplicity and repetition held down costs, allowed economies of scale and required much less skilled labor than would curvier or more creative buildings.
- Land ownersLandlordA landlord is the owner of a house, apartment, condominium, or real estate which is rented or leased to an individual or business, who is called a tenant . When a juristic person is in this position, the term landlord is used. Other terms include lessor and owner...
profited if they invested in the new apartment style and replaced one or two streams of rental income with triple or quadruple the number of units. - Since each unit typically had a private entrance, stucco boxes offered an affordable version of the American DreamAmerican DreamThe American Dream is a national ethos of the United States in which freedom includes a promise of the possibility of prosperity and success. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each...
to city dwellers who aspired to owning a detached, single-family home, and with on-site parking, dingbats participated in the car culture of postwar American life.
Rubin continues, "Inserted into empty lots or replacing the [existing] residential stock, the dingbat [was] a remarkably successfully transitional solution, the fulminations of architectural critics notwithstanding." Dingbats are primarily located in areas of a city that were (sub)urbanized or redeveloped in the 1950s and 1960s; city centers are generally free of them. Many are located on cheaper lots found near "locally undesirable land uses" such as sewage plants, power station
Power station
A power station is an industrial facility for the generation of electric energy....
s, jail
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
s or major freeways.
The production of dingbats essentially ceased by the mid-1970s because they were "zoned out of existence when their signature back-out parking was banned by city ordinance."
Architecture, construction and styling
Land use
Land use is the human use of land. Land use involves the management and modification of natural environment or wilderness into built environment such as fields, pastures, and settlements. It has also been defined as "the arrangements, activities and inputs people undertake in a certain land cover...
, stretch their footprints to the lot line and are typically 50 feet (15 m) wide by 100 feet (30 m) deep. Always cuboid
Cuboid
In geometry, a cuboid is a solid figure bounded by six faces, forming a convex polyhedron. There are two competing definitions of a cuboid in mathematical literature...
, the stucco boxes usually contain six to eight apartments per building. Most dingbats are covered in stucco
Stucco
Stucco or render is a material made of an aggregate, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as decorative coating for walls and ceilings and as a sculptural and artistic material in architecture...
, sometimes along with other materials like vertical wooden clapboard, concrete blocks or river rock. The stilts that support the cantilever
Cantilever
A cantilever is a beam anchored at only one end. The beam carries the load to the support where it is resisted by moment and shear stress. Cantilever construction allows for overhanging structures without external bracing. Cantilevers can also be constructed with trusses or slabs.This is in...
ed portion of the building are generally made of metal or stucco-covered wood.
Two standard elements of the dingbat type are multiple entrances and the illusion of single-family residential density. The front of the building usually has one entrance or no entrances, presenting a unified front to the street. Typically, each unit is assigned a reserved parking
Parking
Parking is the act of stopping a vehicle and leaving it unoccupied for more than a brief time. Parking on one or both sides of a road is commonly permitted, though often with restrictions...
spot; in some cases it is tandem
Tandem
Tandem is an arrangement where a team of machines, animals or people are lined up one behind another, all facing in the same direction....
parking. Some dingbats have studio
Studio apartment
A studio apartment, also known as a studio flat , efficiency apartment or bachelor/bachelorette style apartment, is a small apartment which combines living room, bedroom, and kitchen or kitchenette into a single room...
s; most are filled with one-or-two bedroom, one-bathroom units.
As for their livability, Gary Indiana
Gary Indiana
Gary Indiana is an American writer, filmmaker, and visual artist. He teaches philosophy and literature at the New School in New York City. He divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.- Fiction :...
writes, "A bad idea run amok, these one- or two- (sometimes three-) story stucco shoeboxes that nearly everyone lives in at one time or another in L.A. have an existential
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
emptiness that can be gussied up and dissembled by track lighting
Track lighting
Track lighting is a method of lighting where light fixtures are attached anywhere on a continuous track device which contains electrical conductors. This is as opposed to the routing of electrical wiring to individual light positions. Tracks can be mounted to ceilings or walls, lengthwise down...
and the right sort of throw pillow
Throw pillow
A throw pillow, or toss pillow, is a small, decorative type of pillow. Throw pillows are usually placed on sofas or armchairs but are also frequently used on beds and day beds. Throw pillows serve both an aesthetic and a functional purpose. Decorative pillows are commonly used to tie in color...
s and furniture
Furniture
Furniture is the mass noun for the movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating and sleeping in beds, to hold objects at a convenient height for work using horizontal surfaces above the ground, or to store things...
, but the spatial insipidity of the dingbat eventually defeats most efforts to turn a 'unit' into 'home,' even when little sparkle lights
Fairy lights
In the United Kingdom, a common name for Christmas lights. A string of electrically powered lamps usually used for decoration and for special effect are known as fairy lights...
enliven the façade."
There is either no yard or small residual yards surrounding the building.
The typically cheap construction means that the buildings may have a disproportionate number of leaky roofs (most dingbats have flat roofs where rainwater pools and can rot the outer roofing), yellowing walls, spotty plumbing or cheap wiring.
The external ornamentation holds most of the aesthetic appeal that is to be found in a stucco box. Their dingbats, if detached, are collected by fans of the Space Age
Space Age
The Space Age is a time period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events. The Space Age is generally considered to have begun with Sputnik...
, Tiki
Tiki culture
Tiki kitsch culture is a 20th-century theme used in Polynesian-style restaurants and clubs originally in the United States and then, to a lesser degree, around the world...
and mid-century American design in general.
Mimi Zeiger said, "[Stucco boxes] wear their accessories—star-shaped wrought iron
Wrought iron
thumb|The [[Eiffel tower]] is constructed from [[puddle iron]], a form of wrought ironWrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon...
, carriage lamps, decorative tile
Tile
A tile is a manufactured piece of hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, metal, or even glass. Tiles are generally used for covering roofs, floors, walls, showers, or other objects such as tabletops...
, coats-of-arms—like clip-on jewelry. Baubles and brooch
Brooch
A brooch ; also known in ancient times as a fibula; is a decorative jewelry item designed to be attached to garments. It is usually made of metal, often silver or gold but sometimes bronze or some other material...
es designed to emulate a glamour just beyond reach." (Other popular decorations include electric-light torch
Torch
A torch is a fire source, usually a rod-shaped piece of wood with a rag soaked in pitch and/or some other flammable material wrapped around one end. Torches were often supported in sconces by brackets high up on walls, to throw light over corridors in stone structures such as castles or crypts...
es, stylized animals and geometric designs that evoke Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
's art.)
Dingbats often have a name applied to the face of the building in cursive
Cursive
Cursive, also known as joined-up writing, joint writing, or running writing, is any style of handwriting in which the symbols of the language are written in a simplified and/or flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing easier or faster...
writing. Some used the name of the street (The Redondo sat on Redondo Avenue, etc.) and others referenced fantasy lifestyles and geographies: tropical paradises (the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
, the Riviera
French Riviera
The Côte d'Azur, pronounced , often known in English as the French Riviera , is the Mediterranean coastline of the southeast corner of France, also including the sovereign state of Monaco...
, Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
) or stately dwellings of rarefied provenance (villa
Villa
A villa was originally an ancient Roman upper-class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became small farming compounds, which were increasingly fortified in Late Antiquity,...
s, castle
Castle
A castle is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble...
s).
A Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
reporter writing about a book devoted to the rediscovery of the dingbat noted, "Grandiose names—manors, arms, chezs, chateaus—abound. 'How charming is that?' [dingbat fan] Piercy asks, flipping to a big, numb box with Byron Arms printed above the doorway. 'Nobody in their right mind would think that Lord Byron lived there. It's lovely!'"
Artists have recently produced series of dingbat photographs, some connecting images of their uniformity to the replicative pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
of Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
and finding that "the little differences between a monstrosity called the Capri and a twin called the Flamingo acquire the cachet of something like concepts." Others see a recognition of "individual dignity and communal worth" within the varied but conventional structures.
Residents
Despite the stigma attached to them, dingbats are inhabited by a diverse populace who end up living there as a consequence of any number of circumstances. Some are there as a temporary situation, until superior housing opens up or becomes affordable, and some live in dingbats for years on end. In cities like Vancouver, B.C., however, there is little stigma attached to dingbat living, as the dingbat is present in almost all neighbourhoods of the city regardless of their general socioeconomic class.Writer Gary Indiana says of L.A. dingbats, "[They] are not so much déclassé or redolent of actual poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
as they are an architecture of transience, of three-month lease
Lease
A lease is a contractual arrangement calling for the lessee to pay the lessor for use of an asset. A rental agreement is a lease in which the asset is tangible property...
s or month-to-month rentals, in some ways ideal for the dicey professions so many Angelenos follow: illegal hair salons, "therapeutic massage" and a spectrum of feast-or-famine jobs in the entertainment industry, from acting
Acting
Acting is the work of an actor or actress, which is a person in theatre, television, film, or any other storytelling medium who tells the story by portraying a character and, usually, speaking or singing the written text or play....
to video editing
Video editing
The term video editing can refer to:* Linear video editing, using video tape* Non-linear editing system , using computers with video editing software* Offline editing* Online editing...
. One can move from dingbat to dingbat on an income scale that slides up and down, and the very flimsiness of these buildings, which are usually supported on stilts on at least one side to make room for carport
Carport
A carport is a covered structure used to offer limited protection to vehicles, primarily cars, from the elements. The structure can either be free standing or attached to a wall. Unlike most structures a carport does not have four walls, and usually has one or two...
s, encourages the idea that residing in one is invariably temporary, that the people inside are waiting to bottom out and segue to a Skid Row
Skid row
A skid row or skid road is a run-down or dilapidated urban area with a large, impoverished population. The term originally referred literally to a path along which working men skidded logs. Its current sense appears to have originated in the Pacific Northwest...
hotel, hoping for the right Richard Neutra
Richard Neutra
Richard Joseph Neutra is considered one of modernism's most important architects.- Biography :Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892. He was born into both-Jewish wealthy family...
to come on the market or looking for something in between—a guesthouse in the hills, a Silver Lake
Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California
Silver Lake is a hilly neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles, California east of Hollywood and northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Silver Lake is inhabited by a wide variety of ethnic and socioeconomic groups, but it is best known as an eclectic gathering of hipsters and the creative class.The...
triplex with a long-term lease, a bungalow in Atwater Village
Atwater Village, Los Angeles, California
Atwater Village is a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, California. It lies at an elevation of 404 feet .-Geography:Atwater Village lies between the Los Angeles River to the west and Glendale to the north and east...
."
Urban planning and the future of the dingbat
Sarasota, Florida
Sarasota is a city located in Sarasota County on the southwestern coast of the U.S. state of Florida. It is south of the Tampa Bay Area and north of Fort Myers...
adopted in 2000 included a gallery of buildings found in the city, with only the dingbat being pointed out as an "undesirable" building type. Similarly, in 1999, the northern California
Northern California
Northern California is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. The San Francisco Bay Area , and Sacramento as well as its metropolitan area are the main population centers...
city of El Cerrito
El Cerrito, Contra Costa County, California
-Transportation:The city's primary transportation infrastructure consists of the El Cerrito Plaza and El Cerrito del Norte BART stations along with several local bus lines, operated by AC Transit, providing access to the surrounding area and the nearby cities of Albany, Berkeley and Richmond...
published a master plan in which "Older 'stucco box' apartment buildings will be replaced with more up-to-date and better quality apartments and condominiums."
One design magazine states that, "The construction of one dingbat on a street of elegant rowhouses is enough to send property values plummeting," and subsequently calls for more form-based codes, a type of building-design ordinance that distinguishes between the aesthetic (and therefore socio-economic) value of dingbats and rowhouses.
Also, their small size relative to newer buildings means that lower densities may result from their construction, which encourages wider roads and more highways, and greater urban sprawl
Urban sprawl
Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a multifaceted concept, which includes the spreading outwards of a city and its suburbs to its outskirts to low-density and auto-dependent development on rural land, high segregation of uses Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a...
, further aggravating traffic problems
Gridlock
The term gridlock is defined as "A state of severe road congestion arising when continuous queues of vehicles block an entire network of intersecting streets, bringing traffic in all directions to a complete standstill; a traffic jam of this kind." The term originates from a situation possible in...
and the expense of utilities. Possibly more detrimental than any effect on density is the prominence of dingbat parking spots, since they reduce the attractiveness and usefulness of street-level pedestrian space.
On the other hand, critics generally overlook the fact that, like all forms of urban multifamily housing, dingbats do offer consumers an alternative to suburban houses and long commutes. Compared with suburbanites, apartment dwellers almost always enjoy greater availability not only of public transit, but also of nearby amenities and services that can be reached on foot.
Additional sources
BooksWeb
- Frost, Garrison, Dingbat Living, The Aesthetic, date unknown, last modified April 2, 2005 (Accessed December 28, 2005).
- Noll, Udo, Peter Scupelli and gruppo A12, parole dynamic dictionary: dingbat, date unknown (Accessed December 28, 2005).
- Office of Historic Resources, City of Los Angeles, Dingbats, Preservation Plan Workbook, June 12, 2003 (Accessed September 7, 2009).
External links
- Outré Gallery - Artists - Lesley Marlene Siegel: Apartment Living Is Great - art exhibition information
- Tobias Begalke - Dingbat buildings - set of photographs
- Seattle Dingbats - page with photos
- The Dingbat Project: Photographs and commentary on Los Angeles dingbats - blog