$8.36M Acquisition Loan on the Townhouse Building at 52 Windward Avenue in Venice

Local coverage of 52 Windward Avenue counts only about three owners in the building's first century. In April 2026 the record added a transfer: the property sold for $11,945,000, and City First Bank recorded an $8,361,500 deed of trust, executed March 27 and recorded April 6 under Los Angeles County document 236285. The loan equals exactly 70 percent of the recorded sale price. The buyer and borrower is The1915building LLC, a California LLC formed in July 2025 and named for the year the building went up.

The collateral is a two-story mixed-use building of 8,100 square feet on a 4,079 square foot lot in the Windward Avenue commercial core, a block from the boardwalk. It opened in 1915 as Menotti Buffet, ran its basement as a speakeasy during Prohibition, and today houses Townhouse, the bar the National Trust for Historic Preservation has profiled as the oldest in Venice, with the Del Monte Speakeasy still operating below. For all that documented history, no individual historic designation for the building was confirmed in city records, and none is asserted here; the designated landmark on this block, Historic-Cultural Monument 532, covers a different building up the street.

The debt history is as thin as the ownership history. The only prior renderable instrument on the parcel is a $300,000 Bank of America deed of trust recorded in 2006. Two recorded instruments in twenty years is what a long-hold, low-leverage asset looks like in the county index, and it makes the 2026 financing the largest recorded debt event in the property's file by a wide margin.

City First Bank is a national bank headquartered in Washington DC, formed in its current shape by a 2021 merger of equals between City First and the parent of Los Angeles based Broadway Federal Bank. It is a certified community development financial institution and the largest Black-led minority depository institution in the country, with service areas in Washington DC and California and a stated lending focus on affordable housing, small business, nonprofits, and commercial real estate in low-to-moderate-income communities. LoanList types this closing as bank debt because the lender is a chartered bank; the CDFI certification sits on top of the charter, not instead of it. This is the bank's first closing in the tracked record.

Within LoanList's 57 tracked Los Angeles closings the loan ranks 50th by amount, in a crowded mixed-use band: Preferred Bank at $8,500,000 in Beverly Hills, Bank of America at $9,000,000 in Inglewood, and Kinecta at $9,850,000 in Los Angeles all closed within months of it. Nothing about the leverage is exotic. Seventy percent of purchase price on an income property with a century-old operating tenant is conventional acquisition financing; what distinguishes the deal is which bank wrote it.

Owners of legacy commercial buildings on the Westside tend to assume their lender universe is the familiar regional bank roster. This record adds a name to it. A CDFI-certified bank financed one of the oldest commercial buildings in Venice at conventional acquisition leverage, and it is now in the tracked record.