Big Orange Landmarks

Tours, Talks, and Sunset Boulevard

2011-06-23T19:14:00.000-07:00

The Orpheum/Palace Theatre

A quick note about a couple of historically-minded events in downtown Los Angeles this weekend: Ed Kelsey's presentation at the Palace Theatre on the very eve of its centennial; and the Last Bookstore's inaugural tour of the Secret Lives of Downtown led by Brady Westwater.

If you're not among the lucky ticketholders to be a part of one of the three Sunday screenings of Sunset Boulevard at the Palace Theatre in conjunction with the L.A. Conservancy's Last Remaining Seats program, you're missing a special event indeed. Sunday will mark 100 years to the day that architect G. Albert Landsburg's vaudeville theater opened for business on Broadway as the Orpheum. You're not entirely out of luck, though. As a special treat, the League of Historic American Theatres' Ed Kelsey will provide a special presentation on the Palace this Saturday at 11:00 a.m. at the theater. Hosted by the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation, Ed's talk will be followed by your opportunity to tour the building and check out the results of the first phase of the building's restoration. Believe me, the chance to walk on the same stage on which the Marx Brothers trod is more than worth the price of admission, which for Saturday's event is free.

Also this weekend, for the low price of $15 (cheap!) you can be a part of Brady Westwater's first walking tours of "secret" downtown. You may've taken any number of tours of downtown, but what I know of Mr Westwater guarantees a point of view you will not have gotten from anyone in the past. The tours are scheduled to last about 2 1/2 hours each and begin at 11:00 a.m. Saturday and noon on Sunday. As if you needed any more incentive, the tours are presented by and begin at the Last Bookstore at 5th and Spring. Maybe it's your first chance to see the shop in its new location; the Last Bookstore held its grand re-opening on June 3. For more information on The Secret Lives of Downtown, visit the shop's blog. Thanks, Brady, for the alert.

And a nod to the Los Angeles Public Library for the photo.

Have a great history-filled weekend, everyone.

It's the Silver Anniversary for the Last Remaining Seats

2011-03-22T21:22:00.000-07:00

You know what's the best part of this year's Last Remaining Seats? We're getting the opportunity to spend a couple of hours in the 100-year-old Palace Theatre, and on its 100th birthday no less.

It's the L.A. Conservancy's 25th year of holding this event, and my guess is anyone within distance reading this has taken advantage of this awesome program. (Yeah, I know how stunning the Los Angeles and Orpheum theatres are, but my favorite Last Remaining Seats moment was seeing Bud and Lou in Buck Privates at the Million Dollar a couple of years back. What do you remember most of the last 25 years?) This year we get two chances to visit the Palace Theatre one century after it opened - to the day; there'll be both a matinee and evening screening of Sunset Boulevard on June 26. The Palace isn't a Historic-Cultural Monument, but don't let that stop you from visiting. I was lucky enough to visit the house back in February 2009 as part of a Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation tour. That picture up top - the ceiling mural close-up - is from then. Stopping back at the start of summer will be a treat (and don't even get me started about seeing King Kong at the Los Angeles; how great will that be?). I'm sure you know the drill, but here's the lowdown from the Conservancy:

LOS ANGELES CONSERVANCY PRESENTS 25TH ANNUAL LAST REMAINING SEATS

Classic Films and Live Entertainment in the Historic Theatres of Los Angeles

Special Season Includes Bonus Screenings on Palace Theatre’s 100th Birthday

May 25 – June 29, 2011; Tickets on sale March 30 to members, April 13 to general public

LOS ANGELES (March 2, 2011) – The Los Angeles Conservancy has announced the lineup for the twenty-fifth season of Last Remaining Seats, its signature series of classic films and live entertainment in historic theatres. All screenings will take place in the movie palaces of downtown Los Angeles’ Broadway Historic Theatre District.

The 2011 season runs primarily on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. from May 25 through June 29. To celebrate the twenty-fifth year, this season includes a bonus seventh show (two screenings, matinee and evening) at the Palace Theatre on Sunday, June 26, a century to the day after the theatre opened. Los Angeles Conservancy members chose the special screening through a Fan Favorite poll, selecting the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard. This special bonus event is in conjunction with Bringing Back Broadway’s "Broadway 100," a series of events marking important milestones on Broadway.

Tickets go on sale to Los Angeles Conservancy members at 10 a.m. on March 30 and to the general public at 10 a.m. on April 13, all at www.laconservancy.org. Advance tickets cost $20 ($16 for Conservancy members).

The 2011 schedule appears below. All programs are subject to change; any updates will be posted in the Last Remaining Seats section of our website at www.laconservancy.org.

Wednesday, May 25 – Rear Window (1954) at the Orpheum Theatre (1926)

Thriller starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Thelma Ritter, directed by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Evening host: film critic and historian Leonard Maltin. Pre-show performance by Robert York on the Orpheum's original Mighty Wurlitzer organ. At the beautifully restored Orpheum Theatre, celebrating its 85th birthday this year.

Wednesday, June 1 – The Music Man (1962) at the Los Angeles Theatre (1931)

The Technicolor version of the hit musical, with Robert Preston as con man Harold Hill. Special guest: Co-star Susan Luckey. At the magnificent Los Angeles Theatre, the last and grandest movie palace built on Broadway, celebrating its 80th birthday this year.

Wednesday, June 8 – Captain Blood (1935) at the Million Dollar Theatre (1918)

Swashbuckler that catapulted Errol Flynn to stardom and garnered Academy Award® nominations for Best Picture and Best Director (Michael Curtiz). At the beautiful Million Dollar Theatre, one of the first movie palaces in the U.S.

Wednesday, June 15 – King Kong (1933) at the Los Angeles Theatre

The original, timeless classic tale of beauty and the beast, starring Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray. Special guest: Pauline Wagner, Fay Wray's stunt double in the film.

Wednesday, June 22 – Zoot Suit (1981) at the Million Dollar Theatre

Co-presented with the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles

Filmed version of the play that made Edward James Olmos a star; based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and Zoot Suit Riots of 1940s Los Angeles.

Sunday, June 26 – Sunset Boulevard (1950) at the Palace Theatre (1911)

Sardonic look at Hollywood starring Gloria Swanson, William Holden, and Nancy Olson; Olson is slated to appear for an interview before either the matinee or evening screening. Voted Fan Favorite film by Los Angeles Conservancy members for this special bonus show celebrating the 25th season of Last Remaining Seats and the 100th birthday of the Palace Theatre, which opened June 26, 1911. Hosted by Fox-11 reporter Tony Valdez.

Wednesday, June 29 – Safety Last! (1923) at the Orpheum Theatre

Masterpiece of silent comedy starring Harold Lloyd, who ends up climbs up the side of a “skyscraper” on Broadway (filmed half a block from where it will be screened). Hosted by Lloyd's granddaughter Suzanne Lloyd; film accompanied live by Robert Israel on the Orpheum’s original Mighty Wurlitzer organ.

For full schedule information, visit http://laconservancy.org/remaining/2011.php4.

About Last Remaining Seats

What began in 1987 as a way to draw attention to Los Angeles’ historic theatres is now a summer tradition. Thousands of people come from all over Southern California, the United States, even other countries, to experience classic films as they were meant to be seen: in beautiful, single-screen theatres filled with fellow fans, and accompanied by vintage short films, onstage interviews, and live performances. For more information, see 25 Years of Last Remaining Seats.

2011 Last Remaining Seats Sponsors (As of March 1, 2011)

Series Star Sponsor: Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Series Supporting Sponsor: Steve Bing. Series Sponsors: NBC Universal; Trina Turk; Valley Economic Development Corporation. Evening Sponsors: Cathy and Steve Needleman; Linda and Jerry Bruckheimer; Warner Bros.; Clifton’s and The Edison; Paramount Pictures and 213 Downtown LA Nightlife; Hugh Hefner. Media Sponsor: Los Angeles Downtown News. VIP Reception Sponsor: Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. Funded in part by: The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; Los Angeles City Department of Cultural Affairs; The Walt Disney Company.

The Los Angeles Conservancy is a nonprofit membership organization that works through education and advocacy to recognize, preserve, and revitalize the historic architectural and cultural resources of Los Angeles County. What began as a volunteer group in 1978 now has more than 6,000 members, making the Conservancy the largest local organization of its kind in the U.S. For more information, visit www.laconservancy.org.

See Scrooge this Sunday at the Million Dollar Theatre

2010-12-02T21:16:00.000-08:00

Scrooge poster courtesy of movieposter.com

Jessica at the Los Angeles Conservancy asked me to remind you about this Sunday's matinee of Scrooge (1970) at the very historic Million Dollar Theatre downtown. I know everyone's weekends get a little crunched this time of year, but if you can spare the two hours and ten bucks, I bet you won't regret spending the afternoon in this 82-year-old theatre. Here's the Conservancy's press release:

L.A. Conservancy Holiday Matinee

Scrooge (1970)

Sunday, December 5; 2 p.m.

Million Dollar Theatre (1918)

307 S. Broadway, Downtown Los Angeles

$10 adults; $5 kids 12 and under (free candy canes!)

Tickets available here.

Kick off the holiday season with the Los Angeles Conservancy’s fifth annual holiday film matinee, featuring the joyous musical Scrooge (1970). Albert Finney and Alec Guinness star in this delightful version of A Christmas Carol filled with song, dance, and holiday cheer (not to mention ghosts, Tiny Tim, and Victorian London).

See the film in its colorful, big-screen splendor at the historic Million Dollar Theatre (1918), one of L.A.’s most historic movie palaces. Constructed as Sid Grauman’s first venue in Los Angeles, the Million Dollar was one of the largest and most ornate theatres built at the time specifically to show movies.

Million Dollar Theatre photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

Make an afternoon of it! Bring your friends and family downtown for an afternoon of holiday shopping and dining. Show your Scrooge ticket for 10 percent off at the iconic Clifton's Brookdale Cafeteria on Broadway, a downtown classic since 1935!

For details and tickets, please visit here.

Happy Holidays from the Los Angeles Conservancy!

Your Chance to Tour "El Mio"

2010-10-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

If I weren’t going to be out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, you can bet your bippy I’d be taking advantage of this special tour of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 142, the Smith Estate AKA El Mio. If you cough up the five bucks (cheap!) and take the tour, why don’t you let those of us who can’t make it know what you thought? The event benefits the Milford Archaeological Research Institute. Here's the information and press release:

"The LA city Cultural Monument Victorian residence of El Mio will be open for a Home tour and craft fair November 28, 2010. El Mio is perched on a hilltop overlooking historic Highland Park. Completed in 1887, the home was built in the Eastlake Queen Anne-style by the occults writer Judge David Patterson Hatch. In 1890 the residence was acquired by Charles William Smith and remained in the Smith family until the 1960s. In 1900 Smith was appointed by Henry E. Huntington to run the Los Angeles Railway’s Yellow Car trolley system. From his hilltop home he could see the Arroyo Seco Valley being developed with rail lines running from downtown to Pasadena. It is due to the Smith's long residence that the house is listed as "The Smith Estate" on the National Register of Historic Places.

In the late 1980s ardent preservationists Michael and Lacy Gage purchased the house
and were responsible for various restorations. The current owners Tim and Mari Parker
acquired the home in 1997, and after a devastating fire in 2001, have been working to
restore the home to its original luster. It has a rebuilt attic, the exterior color scheme is based on the original, and the interior has been largely decorated to reflect the original period. The home has Victorian furnishings and hand painted stenciling in the entrance hall, dining room, and many of the other rooms. The Parkers have graciously offered to open their home for a tour and craft fair. Tickets are available for the home tour by calling 213 309 8854 or via email at mariarchaeology@hotmail.com. Proceeds from ticket and craft sales are tax deductible and support the Milford Archaeological Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing public awareness and the understanding of archaeology in the Desert Southwest."

Strolling on Seventh Street

2010-10-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

What are you doing on November 7? No, no, no. I mean besides celebrating King Kong Bundy's birthday. Well, you better be taking the L.A. Conservancy's walking tour of downtown's 7th Street. The deal is for thirty bucks ($25 for Conservancy members - cheap!) you walk the stretch from Figueroa to Los Angeles, stopping at a bunch of sites for guided tours. These sites include Historic-Cultural Monument No. 125, the Fine Arts Building (that's one of the building's Burt W. Johnson sculptures above), and that lobby alone is worth the price of admission. Other sites include:

Broadway Plaza (Macy’s Plaza) (Charles Luckman Associates, 1973) - This plaza is one of the few modern buildings on Seventh and was the first "megastructure" in the U.S., combining a hotel with office and retail space. Guests will visit the circular glass Polaris Room atop the Sheraton Hotel, once a rotating restaurant known as Angel's Flight and now used only for private events.

Roosevelt Building (The Roosevelt) (Curlett and Beelman, 1927) - Touted as Southern California's largest office building when it opened, this massive structure now features over 200 residential units and a restored lobby with spectacular marble mosaic floors.

Brock & Co. (Seven Grand) (Dodd and Richards, 1922) - Once dubbed the “Tiffany’s of California,” Brock’s provided jewelry and china to an elite clientele. The building later housed Clifton’s Silver Spoon cafeteria and now serves as home to the super-hip whiskey bar Seven Grand. Guests will have the chance to pore over original ledgers from Brock & Co., including a 1920s diamond register with intricate sketches of jewelry pieces.

Coulter Dry Good Company & Henning Building (The Mandel) (Dodd and Richards, 1917) - Coulter Dry Goods Company was Los Angeles’ oldest mercantile establishment when it moved to its sixth location in 1917. Now combined with its small neighbor to the west, the building offers loft-style housing and an enormous rooftop garden with stunning views.

St. Vincent’s Court - A unique urban space, St. Vincent’s Court is at the heart of the former Bullock’s Department Store complex. Still a working alley, this dead-end street has eclectic charm and a surprising history.

Hellman Commercial Trust & Savings Bank (SB Spring) (Schultze and Weaver, 1925) - This building's two-story bank lobby, with ornamental ceilings by Giovanni Smeraldi, is a study in marble and bronze opulence -- and a popular filming location.

Overell’s (Dearden’s Home Furnishings) (Architect unknown, c. 1906) - Celebrating a century of business downtown, Dearden’s Home Furnishings has for decades occupied the building originally constructed for another furniture store, Overell’s. Dearden’s is a beloved community icon, an old-school classic, and the last remaining example of the many furniture stores that once filled the district.

Santee Court (Arthur W. Angel, 1911) - Located in the birthplace of L.A.’s fashion district, Santee Court’s vintage industrial buildings now form a thriving loft-style housing complex around a central courtyard. The featured loft on the tour occupies a space formed by connecting two buildings, resulting in an amazing "ghost sign" in the living room.

The event begins at 10:00 a.m., November 7. For more information, make with the clicks here. See you there - I'll be the guy with the camera.

No. 230 - Villa Maria

2009-04-23T22:27:00.000-07:00

Villa Maria
1908 – F.L. Roehrig
2425 South Western Avenue – map
Declared: 6/12/80

William Edmund Ramsay, born the son of Scottish immigrants in Quebec in 1855, made his fortune in the lumber business in Saginaw, Michigan, and Lake Charles, Louisiana. In 1906, Ramsay moved to Los Angeles with his family and bought up three parcels of land between Western Avenue and Adams Place (the latter renamed St Andrews Place in 1914) in West Adams Heights. Included in the mix were more than two and a half acres Ramsay purchased from Mira Hershey. Ramsay then hired architect Frederick L. Roehrig (1857 – 1948) to design this 9,000 square foot, forty-room mansion. Completed in the summer of 1908, the estate wouldn’t remain Ramsay’s home for long, as he died of “heart trouble” in early February the next year.

In that summer of ‘08, the L.A. Times wrote of Ramsay’s 225 x 500 foot property, “Probably no more entertaining spot could be found in all Los Angeles on which to build a handsome home.” Roehrig and the building contractors, the Barber-Bradley Construction Co., created for the Ramsays a three-story, Tudor Revival masterpiece made of stone and half timber, plaster finish, and topped with a slate roof.

See! The grand entrance hall, ceiling-beamed and wainscoted in mahogany.

Behold! The former living room/library. Originally, the room sported electric fixtures made of brass with Tiffany shades. Like with the rest of the first floor, this section of the home featured leaded windows.

Witness! The very splendid dining room, also in mahogany.

Observe! The kitchen.

View! Other pictures.

Art glass, from the inside and out.

The second floor contained five bedrooms, each finished in white enamel and given its own bathroom. The showcase of the Ramsay’s third floor was a 25 x 90 foot assembly hall/ballroom. That floor also had four bedrooms as part of its servants’ quarters.

Going back outside, F.L. Roehrig was also in charge of the estate’s landscaping. Here’s the old pergola, sans the original lily pond.

On the lot’s northwest corner stands the two-and-half-story carriage house with chauffeur’s quarters.

The home originally did have a tennis court, but probably not a basketball court.

Back in 2001, historian Cecilia Rasmussen wrote the Ramsay estate – after William’s death – became the site of “lavish parties, quarrels, a shooting and a suicide – of which no details survive.” (Rasmussen claims scenes from a Charlie Chaplin film were shot on the lawn – anyone have any idea which movie?) Ramsay’s widow, Katherine, by the way, passed away in July 1916.

Owners #2. William Durfee and Nellie McGaughey were each thirty-two-years old when they met; she was a filthy rich society dame, Durfee was “her mother’s horse trainer, a harness racing driver, a gambler, married and the father of two.” Soon after Nellie’s mom died in 1911, the couple wed, living in the South Figueroa Street mansion that had been the home of Nellie’s mother and her husband, banker Nicola Bonfilio. In 1924, a year after Bonfilio’s death, the Durfees bought the Ramsay estate for $105,000.

The north (top) and west facades.

Unfortunately, William Durfee died three years later after eating some poisoned fish on a trip to the Columbia River. Nellie didn’t take Durfee’s demise all that well, giving a go at suicide on a few occasions. While none of those attempts was successful, the poor woman grew to be an eccentric kook who, among other things, preserved her home in a museum-like fashion as kind of a shrine to her late husband – you know, keeping his clothes in his closet, his booze in the wine cellar, and the key to his bedroom around her neck. This lasted until she finally passed away in February 1976, a few months short of turning 100.

Owners #3. In the spring of 1978, the Brothers of St John of God, who, in the 1960s, demolished a turn-of-the-century mansion next door to the Ramsay-Durfee estate to make room for their nursing hospital, bought the seventy-year-old mansion for $470,000. The Brothers auctioned off much of the original furniture, fixtures, and Nellie’s seventy oriental rugs.

I should point out the Brothers have apparently been excellent stewards of the property. It was during their ownership the mansion was declared a Historic-Cultural Landmark as Villa Maria, and they were gracious to open up the house as part of a neighborhood tour put on by the West Adams Heritage Association last June. That’s when these pictures were taken.

The way in and out toward Western Avenue.

In addition to the aforementioned, unidentified Chaplin film, the Villa Maria has been the location for a few movies, including True Confessions and Sister Act II: Back in the Habit.

Sources:

“English Domestic Architecture Employed in Designing Handsome West Adams Heights Home.” The Los Angeles Times; Sep 27 1908, p. V1

“Catholic Order Purchases Historic Durfee Mansion for Headquarters” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 12, 1978, p. I25

Rasmussen, Cecilia “West Adams Mansion: If Only These Walls Could Talk” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 8, 2001, p. B3

Up next: El Greco Apartments

No. 229 - Westminster Presbyterian Church Building

2009-04-18T22:53:00.000-07:00

Westminster Presbyterian Church Building
1931 – Quentin Scott
2230 West Jefferson Boulevard – map
Declared: 6/11/80

Historic-Cultural Monument No. 229 is a Romanesque church building that has served as headquarters for two Presbyterian congregations during its seventy-eight year history – St Paul’s and Westminster.

At the end of 1930, Southwest Builder and Contractor announced Alhambra architect Scott Quentin – well, the magazine spelled his name Quintin – had completed preliminary plans for a new building for St Paul’s Presbyterian Church at Jefferson and 3rd. The new church would run $60,000, the magazine went on, and would contain a “basement, banquet room, social hall, auditorium to seat 600 people and Sunday School rooms to accommodate 800 pupils. Dimensions 86 x 124 feet, frame and stucco construction, tile and composition roofing, cement and ample floors, art glass, gas steam heating, etc.” The church’s pastor in 1930 was the Reverend Gustav A. Briegleb, who had been leading St Paul’s since leaving Westlake Presbyterian Church in October 1926. He succeeded Dr William G. Mills at St Paul’s.

Constructed by the Myers Brothers Company, the four-story building would replace a two-story, $35,000 church building put up just seven-and-a-half years earlier. That structure, designed by H.H. Whitely, was an addition to an older building, circa 1915 (the congregation was founded in May 1910). Whitely’s building seated about 600 worshippers, a little more than 100 larger than the congregation’s size during its March 18, 1923, dedication.

In January 1931, the Los Angeles Times reported demolition of the old church buildings would begin on the 12th and that the congregation would hold services at the Home Theater on Jefferson west of Arlington till the new structure was complete. The article also quoted Rev. Briegleb’s saying St Paul’s had just received a $40,000 loan from the Bank of America along with a gift of a diamond ring – valued at $3,554 – from “well-known politician Charles Crawford”. It turns out Crawford would give more than jewelry to finance the new church building.

Charles H. Crawford was a Los Angeles saloon-keeper-turned-crime-boss who surprised many folks with his conversion to the faith as a new member of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church in 1930. It was during his baptism that June when he donated the pricey ring, telling Rev. Briegleb to sell it and put the proceeds to the construction of a new Sunday School for the parish. At the time, Crawford was under indictments of bribery charges (those charges were later dismissed, as were charges of extortion and conspiracy in other cases). Briegleb’s acceptance of Crawford into the fold along with the racketeer’s gift was controversial, of course. The Reverend R.P. Shuler, a former pal of Briegleb, broadcasted he would “just as soon baptize a skunk as to receive Crawford.” Shuler also maintained it was Crawford’s money that was financing Briegleb’s radio sermons in which he endorsed some of Charles H.’s pals for political office, a charge which the reverend later copped to. (In fact, Crawford’s unrealized plans to finance a permanent radio station in St Paul’s were revealed after his death.)

Five months later after his baptism, Crawford donated a full $25,000 to St Paul’s for a new church building. When detractors criticized Briegleb’s receiving a donation from the “sinister influence”, the pastor replied, “If you know of any more sinners who have $25,000, send ‘em along: I can use it.”

Rev. Briegleb and his 700-member congregation dedicated the new St Paul’s Presbyterian Church building on May 17, 1931, with a sermon entitled, “Should We Build New Churches When Multitudes Are Hungry?” Of special note was the structure’s twelve-foot revolving lighted cross perched atop its tower. The church’s new parish house was named the Amelia Crawford Memorial, in honor of benefactor Charles H.’s mom.

Crawford didn’t attend the new church building for long, though. Four days after St Paul’s dedication, former deputy district attorney David H. Clark entered Crawford’s office at 6665 Sunset Boulevard and shot to death the politico (good thing he got in his baptism) and newspaper man Herbert Spencer. While Clark was acquitted of Spencer’s murder after pleading self-defense (prosecutors dropped the case of Crawford’s death), he eventually went to prison for the November 1953 shotgun slaying of the wife of his best friend and former law partner in Costa Mesa (seems she was bugging him to get a job). By the way, Clark, during the Spencer murder trial, was still running for municipal judge. He received 60,000 votes while in prison, proving some folks weren’t too broken up to see Crawford bite it.

In 1949, following its merger with Baldwin Hills Community Church, St Paul’s Presbyterian left its home on Jefferson and 3rd for a new building designed by Robert E. Alexander at Coliseum Street and La Brea Avenue. The Westminster Presbyterian Church took over the future landmark, moving a few blocks from their headquarters at 35th Place and Denker Avenue on land they had bought back in 1906.

The Westminster Presbyterian Church got its official start in Los Angeles on October 9, 1904, when seventeen worshippers who had been holding services in the Central Presbyterian Church were “received by confession of faith and examination.” Twelve days later, the church was officially reported to and enrolled in the L.A. Presbytery.

When it dedicated its church building – built the previous summer – in March 1908, Westminster Presbyterian was the sole all-black Presbyterian congregation in the west. It’s minister in charge, the Reverend E.P. Baker, was also the west’s only African-American minister. The Reverend Robert W. Holman became the congregation’s first official pastor later that year. In 1912, Rev. Hampton B. Hawes succeeded him, retiring after nearly half a century of service in 1958. Subsequent Westminster pastors included Reverends James E. Jones, Oliver L. Brown, and Glenn Jones. The current pastor is the Reverend Virginia Brown.

Sources:

“Colored People Finance Well.” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 9, 1908, p. I5

“To Build Church.” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 2, 1921, p. V2

“To Worship in New Homes” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 17, 1923, p. II2

“Dr. Briegleb at New Post”; The Los Angeles Times; Oct 2, 1926, p. A2

“Charles Crawford Joins Church of Dr. Briegleb” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 1, 1930, p. A1

“Crawford’s Latest Gift Announced” The Los Angeles Times; Nov 3, 1930, p. A1

Southwest Builder and Contractor; Dec 5, 1930, p. 49

“Briegleb Congregation to Build” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 5, 1931, p. A9

“Schuler Scored by Dr. Briegleb” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 20, 1931, p. A1

“Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” The Los Angeles Times; May 16, 1931, p. A8

“Briegleb’s New Church Dedicated” The Los Angeles Times; May 18, 1931, p. A1

“Crawford and Writer Victims of Assassin” The Los Angeles; May 21, 1931, p. 1

“Victims of Assassins’ Bullets” The Los Angeles Times; May 21, 1931, p. 2

“Crawford Likened to Matthew” The Los Angeles Times; May 25, 1931, p. 2

“Books of Murder Victims Examined” The Los Angeles Times; May 27, 1931, p. 2

“Presbytery Officials to Dedicate Building” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 1, 1949, p. A3

“Ex-L.A. Attorney Held in Slaying” The Los Angeles Times; Nov 12, 1953, p. 1

Up next: Villa Maria

No. 228 - Laurelwood Apartments

2009-04-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

Laurelwood Apartments
1948 – R.M. Schindler
11833 and 11837 Laurelwood Drive, Studio City – map
Declared: 4/22/80

Celebrating this year the 60th anniversary of its completion, R.M. Schindler’s Laurelwood Apartments has had healthier days. The landmark’s condition has been such the city just last year did what it had never done before – took away the owner’s privileges provided by the Mills Act, a 1972 tax incentive program helping owners rehabilitate and preserve their historic properties.

In his career, architect Rudolph Schindler designed about fifty residences (HCM No. 122, for instance) but just four apartment complexes. For the Laurelwood, he was given to work with a plot about an acre in size on two banks of a hill overlooking Ventura Boulevard. He created a two-level complex split into a pair of separate buildings each containing five, two-unit blocks on either side of a central walkway. Schindler gave the ground apartments garden patios, while the upper ones got roof decks.

Some of the things which set the Laurelwood apart when it was completed in 1949: wide eaves extending from a flat roof; clerestory windows; L-shaped living/dining areas; patios accessible through sliding glass windows; and garages separating the street from the living space.

The Laurelwood Apartments came this close to being bulldozed, not once but twice. The first time was after the owner, Laurelwood Properties Ltd, notified renters on New Year’s Eve 1979 of its plans to raze the complex along with the smaller one next to it to make way for fifty-eight new condos. Tenants and preservationists scrambled to have the city designate the Laurelwood a Historic-Cultural Monument which it did in April 1980. The owner surrendered in the demolition fight and instead put the monument up for sale.

Six years later, in the summer of 1986, owner Steve Hartunian of Empire Properties, who had bought the landmark in 1984 for about $900,000, filed for a demo permit. This time, the Cultural Heritage Commission and the Department Parks and Recreation put a freeze on the process, pressuring Hartunian to opt for selling the property rather than wage the war required to tear down the Laurelwood.

Helen Jameson purchased the property in January 1987 for $1.6 million. However, she turned around and put the complex up for sale the following year when City Council extended by six months a one-year hold on any large renovations at the Laurelwood. The city explained “the moratorium was imposed to prevent landlords from using renovation projects as an excuse for removing tenants so they can raise rents beyond levels spelled out in city rent-control rules.” In any event, Jameson changed her mind and kept the Laurelwood.

Jump ahead a decade. The Cultural Heritage Commission toured Laurelwood Apartments in February 2007 and found the monument lacked even the basic maintenance and rehabilitation work required as part of the Mills Act contract. Here are some notes of the Commission’s findings:

Exterior plaster wall finished that are cracked or missing and peeling paint.
Deteriorated exterior wood finishes including dry rot and peeling paint.
Spauled and cracked concrete surfaces.
Inappropriately placed electrical conduits on the exterior surfaces of the building.
Missing light fixtures.
Unrepaired planter boxes.
Deteriorated and missing privacy fences at ground floor gardens and the use of inappropriate fence and screening materials including wooden lattice panels, wood and chicken wire.
Deteriorated stairways. This is also noted as a life-safety hazard to the occupants of the building.
Rook leaks and interior water damage.
Inappropriate roof repairs.
Trash and other debris lay throughout the property.
Inappropriately placed plumbing along the front façade.
Missing façade signage.

Yeesh. All told, the city figured Ms Jameson received more than $80,000 in tax savings since it adopted the Mills Act in 1997. Consequently, Laurelwood Apartments lost the financial break, funds which could have and should have gone to the landmark’s upkeep.

Though there’s been some talk recently of converting the Laurelwood apartment buildings into condominiums (condominia?), the lack of required parking sort of dashes those development dreams (the Laurelwood is sandwiched between a 1990s complex and the older Twin Palms). I don’t have a good feeling about the future for this Schindler work, called one of “the best examples of hillside development because of its unobtrusive design.” The city’s landmark designation seems to be the sole reason we’ve still got it, and history has shown us even that isn’t a guarantee against a monument’s removal.

Sources:

Ryon, Ruth “Schindler Units Face Possible Razing” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 20, 1980, p. I2

Igler, Marc “Preservationists, Tenants Fight to Save Laurelwood” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 5, 1986, p. V_A6

Ryon, Ruth “Schindler ‘Masterpiece’ on the Market” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 20, 1986, p. H12

Pool, Bob “Rent-Control Ruling Ban on Renovations Threatens Landmark” The Los Angeles Times; July 19, 1988, p. 8

Up next: Westminster Presbyterian Church

No. 227 - Janes House

2009-03-31T22:33:00.000-07:00

Janes House
1902 – Oliver Dennis and Lyman Farwell
6541 Hollywood Boulevard – map
Declared: 4/3/80

Welcome to the oldest building in Hollywood, a Queen Anne/Dutch Colonial Revival single-family house designed by Oliver Dennis and Lyman Farwell for H.J. Whitley, the Father of Hollywood. While it was Whitley who built the home in 1902, it’s associated with the family who bought the house the following year, the Janes of Aurora, Illinois.

Herman Nelson and Mary Ruth Janes had been running a furniture business in Aurora when they purchased this home at what was then 241 West Prospect Avenue for $10,000. This was in June 1903. Here’s a Sanborn fire insurance map of the area from the company’s May 1907 volume. The Janes House is the second building from the left along the bottom (Rose is now Yucca; Chester Court is Hudson Ave).

Even though they bought it in 1903, it looks like the Janes – along with kids Mabel Howley, Carrie Belle, Mary Grace, and Robert Donald – didn’t move in until 1905. Six years later, mother Mary, Mabel, Carrie, and Grace opened the Misses Janes Kindergarten here with fifteen students each paying a tuition of five dollars a month. The ladies, who were also responsible for rounding up the children in the morning, usually via the Red Cars that ran up Hollywood Boulevard (Prospect’s name as of 1910), later expanded the school to include the primary grades. By the end of World War I, the Misses Janes private school featured courses were French and esthetic dancing.

It was a successful school, too, with more than 1,000 students attending here between 1911 and the time it closed in 1926. With Hollywood bigshot names of DeMille, Lasky, Ince, Beery, Chaplin, and Laemmle, the kids would attend classes outdoors, weather permitting (and in Los Angeles, it almost always permits). The Misses Janes School shut down after its final graduation exercises held at Hollywood High on June 19, 1926. An “at-home” for all former pupils of the school was held the following Saturday.

The Janes House also served as a local meeting place. Legend has it the first gathering to establish the Hollywood Bowl was held here.

After the school shut down, brother Donald set up a gas pump in the front yard and catered to motorists by opening Janes Auto Service. The gals continued to live in the home, though. Carrie Belle, in her forties, was the first (and only?) sister to get hitched, marrying Ernest Collier in the 1930s. After his death in 1964, she rented the space out front along the boulevard to street vendors.

Saying the home lacked architectural significance, the Cultural Heritage Board declined to designate the Janes House a monument in 1972. Eight years later, however, the group claimed the building had enough historical significance to warrant landmark status.

Now, from most accounts, it sounds like the living conditions at the Janes House in the 70s was a little grim. A man named Guy Miller, inventor of the Vocabumat, moved in as an ostensible caretaker around 1975, about two years after Grace died. After living a few months in a nursing home, Mabel passed away in 1978 right around the same time brother Donald died. After spending the last few years of her life in the kitchen sleeping on a window box converted to a bed, Carrie Belle was moved to a Studio City convalescent home in March 1982. She died the following January at the age of 94. That sure was a ton of change Carrie Belle witnessed outside her front door over the course of her sixty-seven year stint living on Hollywood Boulevard.

Even before Carrie Belle passed on, her court-appointed conservator was working on selling the home for development. Despite the efforts of Mr Miller and Hollywood Heritage, the house was put up for sale in January 1984 for $695,000. The city, citing the building’s landmark status, delayed a demo permit issued a few months later. In the summer of 1984, developers Sayam Bamshad and Parviz Ebrahimian outbid Hollywood Heritage and bought the Janes House for $600,000.

Rather than demolish the historic building, in September 1985 the new owners moved the home toward the back of the lot, building the Janes Square Landmark Shopping Center out by the boulevard. The shopping center features two rows of buildings mirroring the style of the landmark separated by a courtyard leading back to the Janes House. The Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau set up shop in the former schoolhouse in August 1986. Here’s a picture of the shopping center where the Janes House originally stood:

In 2006, the Jane House was converted into the southern food restaurant called Memphis. It failed quickly, but that isn’t stopping Kimoon Kim and Katie Matthews taking a crack at opening a new restaurant here, appropriately named Janes House. The place opens in a few weeks (these interior shots here were snapped as the owners prepped the place for a test run).

Sources:

“Southern California’s Institutions of Learning Stand Unequaled in America Today.” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 17, 1919, p. III17

“Hollywood High School to Graduate Its Largest Class Next Week.” The Los Angeles Times; Jun 19, 1926, p. 8

Smith, Jack “Janes Sister Carries On” The Los Angeles Times; Jun 2, 1980, p. G1

Morain, Dan “Pioneer’s Home” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 3, 1982, p. WS1

Morain, Dan “Owener Dies; Home’s Future Uncertain” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 20, 1983, p. WS1

“Supervisors Agree to Save Old House” The Los Angeles Times; Sep 1, 1983, p. WS7

Curtius, Mary “Sale of Victorian House Collapses” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 19, 1984, p. WS1

Braun, Stephen “$540,000 Cash Offered for Victorian House” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 12, 1984, p. WS1

Braun, Stephen “Develop Buys Victorian for $600,000” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 16, 1984, p. WS_A8

Stambler, Lyndon “Hollywood Blvd. House Moves Aside – a Bit – for Progress” The Los Angeles Times, Sep 15, 1985, p. WS1

Fanucchi, Kenneth J. “Hollywood Visitors Bureau finds New Home in Historic Janes House” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 28, 1986. P. WS_A3

Up next: Laurelwood Apartments

No. 226 - (Site of) Masquers Club Building

2009-03-26T22:57:00.000-07:00

(Site of) Masquers Club Building
c. 1918
1765 North Sycamore Avenue – map
Declared: 8/29/79

I’ll admit I never heard of the Masquers Club until this landmark popped up on the list. However, I sure recognize many of its former members, including just about every name actor of the 1930s and 40s I can think of. And the genesis of the old clubhouse itself – gone for nearly twenty-four years now – lies with another actor, one I thought I didn’t know but I guess I really did.

Eight men in May 1925 got together to form Hollywood’s first actors club, one, like the Lambs in New York, which would be a “social sanctuary for actors and the theatrically inclined.” For a fleeting moment the men were calling themselves the Jesters, but when they found out the Shriners laid claim to that name, it was Earle Foxe who came up with the name Masquers (you may remember Foxe from such films as The Cub Reporter’s Temptation, Ladies Must Dress, and Rah! Rah! Heidelberg!). And it was the club’s first president, Robert Edeson (A Man’s Prerogative, The Colonel’s Peril, and Has the World Gone Mad!), who coined its motto, “We laugh to win.”

The club set up headquarters in the home below at 6735 Yucca Street (it, too, is gone). The Masquers remained here until the end of April 1928 when they relocated a couple of blocks west to North Sycamore (6735 later served as club for the Shriners).

The Masquers’ first home, on Yucca.

Now we leave that narrative thread to pick up this one: Antonio Moreno, born Antonio Garride Monteagudo in Madrid in 1887, was a popular Latin lover-type in silent films, appearing with Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Dorothy Gish, Greta Garbo, and Clara Bow. His career lasted until 1959, a few years after he acted in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and John Ford’s The Searchers. Sometime in the mid-teens, Moreno built himself a two-story Tudor home with fifteen rooms just above Hollywood Boulevard. In 1928, he sold his home to the Masquers whose alterations to the building were to accommodate an English tavern, theater, stage, dining area, kitchen, switchboard, reception office, and entrance lobby. Moreno was a Masquer himself, and was one of the club’s few life-members. (Antonio gets the nod for having lived in two Historic-Cultural Monuments, building with his wife, Daisy Canfield, Silverlake’s Canfield-Moreno Residence, HCM No. 391.)

Moreno and Gloria Swanson in My American Wife

In 1930, when club membership was limited to 700 men, the Los Angeles Times called the Masquers Club Building “one of the most charming, old-fashioned, two-story houses on Sycamore street. It is surrounded by spacious ground filled with trees and shrubs and a large parking space for cars as naturally everybody owns a car. On the first floor is a large dining-room with a small stage at one end on which the club revels are presented every six weeks.” I can’t figure if the “naturally everybody owns a car” line is sardonic or not.

The Masquers club was the type of fraternal organization you’d expect it to be, I guess. Charitable functions, all-male public performances which the club called “revels” (the first being held in downtown’s Philharmonic Auditorium), the annual picnic, or “mess”, often held at John Ford’s Encino ranch, and lots of dinners and tributes and such (the picture below is of a 1932 wing-ding honoring Doug Fairbanks). Oh, and the partying, too. A police raid in April 1930 netted a case each of gin and whiskey when a copper pressed a button under the café’s manager’s desk revealing a secret compartment behind a wall (“I’m shocked. Shocked!”). Go figure – booze on the premises, what with members at one time or another John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, John Gilbert, Buster Keaton, Frank Sinatra, Stan Laurel, Humphrey Bogart, Joe E. Brown, and W.C. Fields.

Honoring Douglas Fairbanks

The Masquers Club was also in the movie business, co-producing as an entity a series of two-reelers for RKO from 1931 to 1933. And it members, along with those of the Dominos (a Masquers Club for dames) and the Hollywood Cricket Club, were instrumental in the 1933 founding of the Screen Actors Guild. Plus, the clubhouse served as a military canteen and entertainment center during WWII.

In late 1965, the Masquers began to admit skirts into the mix but as “auxiliary members”. Some Masquerettes whose names I recognize: Maureen O’Hara, Mia Farrow, Jane Wyman, Gena Rowlands, Jane Wyman, Edith Head, and Lee Meriwether.

Masquers presidents – called “harlequins” – included Joe E. Brown, Frank Morgan, Pat O’Brien, Charlie Chase, Lou Costello, and Gene Autry. Producer Joe Pasternak was a harlequin from 1970-1978, and the club’s last harlequin on North Sycamore was actor Tony Caruso.

By 1985, the Masquers Club was in big trouble. The organization was struggling with a mortgage of $2,200 on top of being in debt to the tune of about $335,000 (I can’t answer why, after nearly sixty years, the Masquers didn’t own their clubhouse). Membership was low, and with dues at $10 per month, the club would’ve needed a whole hell of a lot of Masquers to make even a dent toward recovery.

In stepped Century City’s Urban Pacific Development Corp, buying the city landmark for $475,000. The good news was the money allowed the club to continue, the bad news its clubhouse would be razed to make way for a fifty-unit apartment building. The Cultural Heritage Board didn’t raise a fuss since the Masquers were leaving and the building had been so altered since Moreno built it seventy years earlier. Last minute attempts at preserving – and maybe even moving – the building failed. Members held a final wake for the clubhouse on Saturday night, April 28, very, very close to the 57th anniversary of their moving in.

Here’s the site of the Masquers Club landmark today, home of Westbury Apartments:

The Masquers moved downtown to the Variety Arts Center on Figueroa where owner Milt Larsen donated that landmark’s third floor to the club for use as its new headquarters. Although some of it disappeared in the club’s final days on Sycamore, the Masquers’ extensive memorabilia collection went with them. I have no idea where all that stuff, including the club’s famous nude murals by Henry Clive, eventually wound up.

Although it has no clubhouse, the Masquers Club still exists today with William Malin as its current harlequin. Membership is by invite only, although at $55 a year (cheap!) it’s less expensive today than it was twenty-five years ago.

Sources:

“Button Pressing Reveals Liquor” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 13, 1930, p. A5

Thompson, Paul “Show Without Women Will be Given” The Los Angeles Times; May 4, 1930, p. B11

Dean, Paul “Unmasking Masquers: End of a Landmark?” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 25, 1985, p. H1

Up next: Janes House

No. 225 - Los Angeles Theatre

2009-03-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Theatre
1931 – S. Charles Lee
615 South Broadway – map
Declared: 8/15/79

What perfect timing. Just as I was wondering if I’d have the chance to get inside the Los Angeles Theatre in time for this entry, the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation announced they’d be having their March meeting/tour at the landmark just in time to coincide with my post about it. Thanks, LAHTF.

In 1930, movie mogul William Fox – banged up from a fatal car crash and nearly $100 million in debt – agreed to allow independent exhibitor H.L. Gumbiner to own and operate a movie theater on a section of his property in downtown L.A. Fox’s lot (not to be confused with Fox’s lot) was a big one, located on Broadway between Sixth and Seventh Streets and stretching right through St Vincent Court back to South Hill Street. Gumbiner, who owned the Cameo (HCM No. 524) and Tower (HCM No. 450) theaters, would develop part of the section fronting Broadway. Having already worked with him on the Tower Theatre, Gumbiner hired architect S. Charles Lee to create what was to be the final and most spectacular of downtown’s movie palaces. (Lee was born Simeon Charles Levi in 1899 in Chicago. If you don’t believe he was the king of theater design, look at this Cinema Treasures list of his movie houses. He died in 1990.)

Now, before Fox bought it, the land was owned by the family of architect S. Tilden Norton. Initially, newspapers announced that Norton would be the one designing the theater, with Lee and Frederick H. Wallis as consulting architects. Ultimately, though, it was Lee who designed the Los Angeles Theatre while Norton was responsible for the adjoining retail/office buildings including the very nice thirteen-story Fox Building on South Hill. Maybe the confusion stemmed from both men sharing the first name of S.

Employing thirty-two draftsmen working in two shifts, Lee had the plans for the height-limit theater wrapped up in a mere ten weeks. The building is in the Baroque/French Renaissance style and takes much of its look from San Francisco’s Fox Theatre. With 600 people rushing to complete the theater for its scheduled opening, the Sumner-Sollitt Company, the project’s general contractors, finished the building in five months.

Where to start? Out on the sidewalk of Broadway, I guess. It’s where you’ll find the terrazzo pavement that leads you into the opulent fifty-foot-tall lobby, complete with crystal chandeliers and a grand staircase leading up to the mezzanine level. Here, on the mezzanine, stands a three-tiered marble and crystal fountain.

Heading downstairs, there’s the intermediate lounge. You can still see the window to the theater’s old radio station.

Another level down is the basement containing the main lounge with its glass ceiling. Back in the day, after the night’s films had ended, the theater would move its orchestra to the lounge, roll up the carpets, and hold dances on the parquet floor.

Off the main lounge are the ladies’ restroom (featuring different-colored marble in each stall), the cosmetic room, and my favorite area of the theater, the children’s playroom. Designed as a circus tent, the nursery’s murals by Anthony Heinsbergen are remarkably in pretty good shape.

The main lounge also featured what’s my second favorite feature of the theater, a screen that allowed those in the lounge to watch the movie as it was being shown in the auditorium. This all happened through a prism and a series of mirrors, a system invented for the Los Angeles by Francis Pease.

Finally, from the main lounge you’d enter directly into the theater’s walnut-paneled café and soda fountain.

Also in the basement is the men’s room complete with shoe-shining parlor. There used to be a barbershop, too. As for the urinals, they’re far too nice to pee in.

And while I don’t have a shot of them here, the theater also had a pair of “crying rooms”, which gave moms of howling babies the opportunity to slip away into a glass-enclosed booth, continue to watch the movie with earphones, and do whatever it is mothers do to mollify kids crying at the movies. But here’s a shot of the phone booths in the main lounge:

The auditorium itself seats more than 2,000 people. Originally, the main floor had eight aisles so that there were no more than six seats in a row, “… doing away with the annoyance caused by late arrivals.” Aisles were lit with blue neon tubes planted in the floor. And there are more striking Heinsbergen murals decorating the ceiling.

And even though the Los Angeles Theatre was built primarily as a movie house, there is full stage (60’ x 27’), orchestra pit, and several dressing rooms for theater more legitimate.

The B.F. Shearer Corporation was responsible for the theater’s curtains, drapes, and carpets. The stage’s embroidered curtain is yet another highlight of the landmark. It was “… designed to give, at a moment’s glance, the feeling, spirit, and the accomplishments in architecture during the reign of Louis XIV.” There are several scenes in the life of the Sun King stitched into the curtain, including one with his mistress, Louise de la Valliere. For some reason, the curtain was never fully embroidered. What was finished, however, is worth the price of admission.

The cutting-edge theater opened with an $80,000 air-conditioning set-up and a $34,000 Westinghouse switchboard allowing ushers to keep track of seat counts.

The Los Angeles Theatre, “the Theatre Unusual” and “the ultra of ultras in its modernistic appointments and its conveniences”, opened on January 30, 1931, with the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. (Two notes: first, the film, not silent but sans dialog, failed to take advantage of the theater’s state-of-the-art sound system. Second, it took nearly three years to produce City Lights – about six times the amount of time to build the landmark theater itself.) Charlie Chaplin attended opening night, of course (and got royally cheesed when Gumbiner stopped the movie midway to rave about the theater), as was Pasadena resident Albert Einstein.

The restaurant kitchen.

More than 25,000 people thronged Broadway that night, effectively shutting down center city. The L.A. Times reported “the whole traffic on the chief downtown thoroughfares for a mile on either side of the theater was at a complete standstill for more than two hours, store windows were broken, clothes were torn, windshields in cars were smashed and many women fainted in the milling multitudes gathered to make a movie holiday.”

Entrance to the ladies’ room and the washroom.

Like I said, while mainly for movies, the Los Angeles also featured live stage shows and prologues. Albert E. Short, who also conducted the theater’s orchestra, put these on originally. The performances included casts of between thirty and fifty people, “including at least ten principals.” Premier night, the stage presentation was “The Little Things in Life” inspired by the Irving Berlin ballad.

H.L. Gumbiner’s brother, Robert, was the Los Angeles’s resident manager and Harry M. Rosenbaum was its secretary-treasurer. Sam B. Cohn was in charge of advertising and publicity.

The Depression wasn’t kind to Gumbiner, his company going bankrupt just three months after the theater opened. By the end of the year, the Los Angeles Theatre had shut its doors. William Fox soon re-opened it as a second-run house, running it until 1939 when Metropolitan Theatres took over the lease. Metropolitan continued the theater as a second-run house until 1944 when they switched it back to first-run pictures. Fox West Coast operated the theater beginning in 1949 as the major studios were forced to divest their theater holdings. They ran the Los Angeles until 1962. It was then the theater’s future looked sketchiest, but Metropolitan Theatres came back into the picture, again running first-run films, including features from Mexico and English-dubbed Spanish films. The Los Angeles Theatre closed in 1994.

Concession stand.

The Los Angeles Theatre today is one of four movie palaces in downtown owned by the Delijani family and Delson Investment Co. Events are still held there, and it’s used frequently for film shoots. According to the ultimate authority on the movie palaces of downtown L.A., Jackie Chan, the Los Angeles Theatre can be seen in the movies Batman Forever, Alien Nation, Man on the Moon, Houdini, Escape from LA, Chaplin, Charlie's Angels II, and The Prestige. It also makes appearances in New York, New York and 1941.

Backstage stuff.

The Los Angeles Theatre, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has a very cool homepage. Especially take note of the nifty 3D gallery.

The top shot is from St Vincent Court and Sixth Street. The marquee shows A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Marquee letters below.

The Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation is hitting the Tower, the Rialto, and the Olympic theaters on April 18. If you missed the Los Angeles Theatre event and are eager to visit the landmark, make sure you buy tickets for the L.A. Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats. The Los Angeles Theatre will screen Cabaret on June 10 and A Streetcar Named Desire two weeks later.

Thanks to the California State Library for all the black and white shots. They’re part of the Mott-Merge Collection from early 1931.

Sources:

“Broadway Theater to be Erected” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 27, 1930, p. A1

“Construction Under Way on Theater Building” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 10, 1930, p. D3

“Innovations Mark Newest Theater” The Los Angeles Times; Dec 4, 1930, p. A3

Scheuer, Philip K. “Theater Ideal Soon to Open” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 18, 1931, p. B11

“Los Angeles Theater Opens Tomorrow Night” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 29, 1931, p. A8

“Stage Shows also Planned” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 29, 1931, p. A8

Schallert, Edwin “Premier Jams Broadway” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 2, 1931, p. A7

“Preview Pandemonium” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 2, 1931, p. A4

Thomas, Kevin “Los Angeles Theater Has Cloudy Future” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 18, 1963, p. A1

Up next: (Site of) Masquers Club Building

No. 224 - Cesar E. Chavez Avenue Viaduct

2009-03-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

Cesar E. Chavez Avenue Viaduct
1926 – Merrill Butler
Cesar E. Chavez Avenue between Mission Road and Vignes Street – map
Declared: 8/1/79

What’s today called the Cesar E. Chavez Avenue Viaduct was the second span realized as part of a major bridge-building program in Los Angeles begun in the mid-1920s (the one at Ninth Street, or the Olympic Boulevard Bridge, built by the North Pacific Construction Company, was the first completed). Lead by the Chamber of Commerce, a collection of groups started lobbying hard in the spring of 1923 for the replacement of six of the city’s outdated bridges and viaducts, but mainly at First, Seventh, Ninth, and Macy Streets.

Now, there had been a couple of bridges over the years connecting Macy Street with Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights (or with Pleasant Avenue in East Los Angeles, depending on when you lived). In fact, the first span over the Los Angeles River was a covered bridge, lit with kerosene lamps, built on this spot in 1870 (has anyone seen a photo of that bridge?). By 1923, however, you would cross the L.A. River at Macy on the metal truss bridge pictured below. What was a particular drag was, while crossing, you were required to contend with the trains of both the Santa Fe (on the eastern side) and the Union Pacific (on the western), as the tracks for each were at the same grade as the bridge’s. Hoping the tracks would be lowered, this brought the Chamber of Commerce to recommend the railroads pay for at least the cost of the new span’s approaches.

The penultimate Macy Street Bridge, from the L.A. Public Library Photo Collection

On June 5, 1923, the electorate voted for a $2 million bond issue to be put toward the big bridge initiative. A few months later, in September, City Council asked the State Railroad Commission to figure an equitable way for the city, the county, the Santa Fe Railroad, the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad Company, the Pacific Electric Railway Company, and the Los Angeles Railway Corporation to all chip in for the project.

When the city presented plans to the State Railroad Commission in mid-July 1924, the projected cost for the new Macy Street Viaduct was estimated at $507,261.70. In addition to that half a million, there was another $94,000 to pay for damages to “abutting property” and $378,578 for the Santa Fe and Union Pacific’s estimates at lowering their tracks. (I should point out here I’ve seen several figures as to how much the viaduct ultimately cost – nearly all from contemporary accounts in the L.A. Times. These tallies include $400,000, $450,000 (including rights of way), $516,000, $655,000, and even a million dollars.)

The city’s bridge engineer, Merrill Butler, oversaw the design of the viaduct while H.P. Cortelyou, construction engineer, and Ross H. Rook, inspector of public works, supervised the construction. The Atkinson-Spicer Company, who had the lowest bid in May 1925 of $324,824.50, were the contractors. While a small legal to-do had construction delayed until August 1925, the builders finished the viaduct a few months early. The Macy Street Viaduct opened formally on April 17, 1926.

Do you know why the bridges features elements of the Spanish Colonial persuasion? It turns out Macy Street/Cesar Chavez Avenue was once part of the El Camino Real, the road linking the twenty-one missions up and down Alta California from San Diego to Sonoma. To further drive home the connection, the city dedicated the span to the founder of the missions, Father Junipero Serra. A pair of plaques on the bridge says so. Here’s the one less tagged:

The viaduct is seventy-one-feet wide, large enough to have originally accommodated a pair of tracks for the Los Angeles Railway. It stretches 1270 feet, and boasts a central span of about 215 feet in length. If you look at the porticos’ cornices, you’ll even see the city seal of Los Angeles.

On opening day that spring of 1926, there was all the usual speechmaking and ceremonies – including the ribbon-cutting and main address by Mayor George Cryer – along with a contractor-sponsored luncheon under the bridge for about 300 guests. The picture below shows how, apparently, the opening day picnickers lacked the good sense to clean up after themselves.

Oh, and there’s a story behind the pair of $600 memorial bronze plates you can find on the bridge, too. In April 1926, City Council voted to add its members’ names to the viaduct’s tablets, pointing to the fact the recently completed Ninth Street Bridge had plaques bearing the names of the Mayor, the Board of Public Works, and engineers, “but no mention of the men who did the heavy work and who raised the money” (i.e. City Council). The board of Public Works, though, shot down the idea pronto, pissing off council to no end.

Views north of the viaduct (a bonus):

A seismic retrofit was completed on the bridge in 1995, right around the same time the city decided Los Angeles pioneer Dr Obed Macy really wasn’t worthy of the honor of having a street named after him those century-plus years. (Actually, while Macy Street and Brooklyn Avenue were renamed to honor labor leader Cesar Chavez, there’s a chance the Macy Street Viaduct may have kept its name. I shouldn’t assume just because the street was renamed, so too was the bridge. A quick call to the Board of Public Works can answer the question, so someone let me know how that turns out.)

Sources:

“Start Move to Obtain Bridges” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 27, 1923, p. II5

“Bridge Cost Division Urged” The Los Angeles Times; Sep 26, 1923, p. II1

“Macy Viaduct Plan Offered” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 16, 1924, p. A8

“Macy Viaduct Contract Let” The Los Angeles Times; May 18, 1925, p. A3

“Councilmen Vote Honor for Selves” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 8, 1926, p. A2

“Council not to Live in Bronze” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 10, 1926, p. A1

“Macy Viaduct is Completed” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 18, 1926, p. E13

“Macy Street Span Opened” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 18, 1926, p. 17

“Municipal Art Commission, Los Angeles, Annual Reports 1921-1929” 1929 Los Angeles, CA

Up next: Los Angeles Theatre

No. 223 - Weller Residence

2009-03-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

Weller Residence
1894
824 East Kensington Road – map
Declared: 6/20/79

Businessman Zachariah Weller’s house was just six years old in 1900 when he sent his family off for a short vacation on Catalina Island, split the house in two, and moved it about 3,000 feet north (as the crow flies), deep into Angeleño Heights. When the Weller clan’s Avalon holiday was up, they returned to a home not only no longer encroached upon by filthy oil wells, but one which was newly wired for electricity, the first home in the Heights to be powered as such.

Born in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, on April 4, 1847, Zachariah Weller moved to Waterloo, Iowa, in 1864, where he worked as a building contractor and, later, a hardware merchant. In 1887, along with the rest of the state of Iowa, Weller moved to sunny Los Angeles. Here he continued in the hardware trade, forming a partnership with E.A. Hoffman under the moniker Hoffman & Weller. The duo also entered the oil business together.

In early 1893, Zach Weller bought from Charles Stimson a pair of lots in the Beauvoir Tract for $2,000. A Queen Anne home, with bits of Eastlake elements and hints of Moorishness, would be completed the following year and claim the address of 401 North Figueroa Street.

Below are two Sanborn maps. The top, from 1888, shows the land before Weller got hold of it. The bottom, grabbed from the 1894-1900 Sanborn volume, has his house more or less at the end of Angelina.

When Hoffman & Weller decided to end their partnership, Weller traded his interest in the hardware shop to Hoffman for the latter’s share in the oil wells. Set your eyes on this L.A. Times ad from April 17, 1898, announcing the close-out sale at their store at 109 North Main Street. What bargains we missed!

Now the word is Weller moved his house because he was fed up with the oil derricks in his neighborhood and, literally, backyard. I don’t doubt this, but, considering he owned or co-owned up to thirty wells at one point, I can’t help thinking some of these were Weller’s wells. Either way, I know I wouldn’t be too crazy if my yard looked like this:

Weller Residence at 401 North Figueroa (original location)

(This may be a crazy question, but does anyone know of any remnants of oil drilling in the area? David L. Clark, in Los Angeles: A City Apart, says the area of Edward Doheny’s original strike, bounded by Figueroa, First, Union, and Temple, had more than 500 producing oil wells by 1897. You’d think there be some evidence somewhere.)

On Sunday, June 21, 1903, Weller, a member of the Ancient Order of United Workmen and of the Royal Arcanum, died of a series of strokes at his home after a long illness (blamed in part on overdoing it on his ten-acre orange orchard in Ontario). He left behind his widow, Eliza, three daughters, and a son.

The house stayed in the Weller family into the early 1950s. Albert and Helen McNellis, who had purchased the home in 1953, owned the residence at the time of its 1979 designation. My (somewhat irresponsible) guess is the picture below was taken around that time. Besides the differences in the landscaping and paint, note how at some point a portion of the porch was enclosed, only to be re-opened during a later renovation.

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning

Oh. And 401 North Figueroa? Well, Angelina Street is no longer there to meet it, and, since 1897, North Figueroa is North Boylston. Finally, on the old Weller lot stands this vaguely Spanish multi-family residence from the mid-20s. There are handful of vintage homes on the block, though. And they must all have a grand view of downtown Los Angeles.

401 North Figueroa, now 401 North Boylston

The Weller Residence ends this month-long stay in Angelino Heights. We’ll be back in the neighborhood in four months, though, so don’t throw away your map just yet.

Sources:

“Real Estate Transfers.” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 15, 1893, p. 15

“A Good Investment.” The Los Angeles Times; April 3, 1898, p. A10

“Well-Known Citizen Passes Away.” The Los Angeles Times; Jun 22, 1903, p. 13

Morales, T.M. “Closer Look at Angelino Heights” Parkside Journal; Jul 4, 1979, p. 1

Clark, David L. Los Angeles: A City Apart Windsor Publications, Inc. 1981 Woodland Hills, CA

Up next: Cesar Chavez Avenue (Macy Street) Bridge

No. 222 - Daggett Residence

2009-03-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

Daggett Residence
c. 1909 – R.L. Gifford
1405 Kellam Avenue – map
Declared: 6/6/79

Charles H. Daggett was born in 1847 to Hiram and Sarah Daggett of Canton, Massachusetts. The family moved to Minneapolis, with Charles marrying Sarah Marilla Bidwell. Charles and Sarah (his wife, that is, not his mom) had a son, Hubert Lindsley Daggett, in September 1877. The Charles Daggetts headed west to Los Angeles in 1901 to find fortune in the oil industry.

The Daggetts settled into a home at 1277 Bellevue Avenue, with eyes on both the relatively exclusive neighborhood of Angeleño Heights and the oil wells lining Temple Street. Soon after, Charles, son Hubert, and William H. Fletcher of nearby Calumet Avenue, formed an oil production company, one which would grow to include thirty producing wells in L.A.

In 1902, the Daggett family moved into 1321 Carroll Avenue (there is a landmarked home today at 1321, but the site’s original house in which the Daggetts lived was demolished in 1970). The following year, Charles purchased part of the old Everett E. Hall property at the northwest corner of Kellam Avenue and Douglas Street. It took a few years, but finally in the late oughts, local builder Sylvester J. Cook (he was living on Beaudry Avenue nearby), working off an R.L. Gifford design, built for the Daggetts one of the few Mission Revival houses in Angelino Heights today.

Much of the home is obscured today by trees, but you still can enjoy the style’s eaves and rafters, red-tiled roof, glimpses of leaded windows, and the tell-tale parapets.

Hubert died in 1933. Charles had passed on years before (a 1929 city directory has listed living at 1405 Kellam both Hubert and his widowed mom).

Grace W. Trentani and Betty Fox were the home’s owners during its designation as a city landmark in 1979.

Note: A big thanks to Pete Daggett for his comment below. I’ve gone and edited the post based on the information he provided. Thanks, Pete.

Sources:

Morales, Thomas M. “Incongruous Style of Barn, Home Raise Curiosity” Northwest Leader; Sep 26, 1979, p. 2

An Album of Architecturally Significant Homes in Century-Old Angelino Heights Carroll Avenue Restoration Foundation 1987 Los Angeles, CA

Up next: Weller Residence

L.A. Heritage Day - Sunday, March 22

2009-03-10T20:27:00.000-07:00

If you’ve got but a sliver of interest in the history and culture of Los Angeles, CA, you’ve probably already got Sunday, March 22, marked on your calendar. L.A. Heritage Day, being held at Heritage Square Museum, brings together more than seventy-five history and heritage-minded organizations whose goal it is “to reconnect the public with greater Los Angeles’ vast range of cultural institutions and resources.” The event kicks off at 11:00 a.m. and costs $5 (cheap!) or, if you present this flyer, $0 (cheaper!).

The shot above is from the March 7 dedication of the rebuilt veranda on the Longfellow-Hastings Octagon House, HCM No. 413, as part of Heritage Square’s 40th anniversary.

Below, from top to bottom, the museum’s Hale House, Perry House, Palms-Southern Pacific Railroad Depot, Valley Knudsen Garden-Residence, and Ford House. L.A. Historic-Cultural Monuments all.

L.A. Heritage Day is presented by the Los Angeles Heritage Alliance.

Nos 220 & 221 - The Hall Twins

2009-03-07T22:47:00.000-08:00

The Hall Twins
1887
1343 and 1347 Kellam Avenue – map & map
Declared: 6/6/79

Well, after two years of blogging individual Historic-Cultural Monuments, I feel compelled to break with tradition and document two landmarks in the very same post. The reasoning behind such craziness lies with the fact when local contractor John M. Skinner (he was living on Carroll Avenue) built these two homes for $6,000 per, they sported identical floor plans and designs. That, coupled with the fact they were owned early on by Hall families, inspired historian Thomas Morales to designate them the “Hall Twins”.

Just a few posts ago, we visited the 1887 home of one of the two subdividers of Angelino (Angeleño) Heights, Everett E. Hall. It was that same year that Skinner (Skinn-ERR!) built a literal stone’s throw from Everett’s home our two Victorian subjects using a single blueprint.

Take a good look at this 1888 Sanborn map and you can see four city landmarks: the Everett Hall Residence in the center; Everett’s carriage house (now the property of 1417 Kellam Avenue home); and the twin homes across Waters Street (now called Douglas Street). Note our twins at this point enjoy no carriage houses.

Now set your orbs on this vintage (retouched) photo of Carroll Avenue’s Monument No. 74, the Sanders House. In the background, the Hall Twins stand looking more twinly (twinnish?) than today.

Boy, there sure were a lot of Halls in early Angelino Heights. A whole hell of a lot of Halls. (For instance, a Giles S. Hall, the secretary of the Los Angeles and Santa Monica Land and Water Co., was living on East Edgeware in 1890). And while both of this post’s landmarks are named for Halls, I’ve seen conflicting reports as to how they were related to Everett, if at all. But they probably were.

There’s the enclosed porch of 1347 (top) and original open porch of 1343 (bottom).

No. 220 –the Henry G. Hall Residence

From the L.A. Department of City Planning website.

As you look at both landmarks head-on, the home on the right is 1343 Kellam Avenue. It was where real estate agent Henry G. Hall lived with his wife, Anna L., through most of the 1890s. Maxwell’s Directory of Los Angeles City & County for 1887-1888 said “capitalist” Hall was living on Bellevue Avenue between Edgeware and “the Crescent” (Kensington). In 1890, he was listed as living on East Edgeware between Bellevue and Carroll. Since 1343 Kellam Avenue was built in 1887, this means Henry Hall wasn’t its first resident. However, he was there by 1893, and he was still there in 1901. By 1903, however, the city directory had him residing at 714 Edgeware Road. Morales tells us 1343 was sold in 1904 to non-Halls. A jump to 1915 has that year’s city directory showing the home’s residents including Cora A. Rannells and the auditor for the Hollenbeck Hotel, John M. Wood. Sammy and Pat Lee were 1343’s owners during its declaration of landmark status in 1979.

Compare these images of 1343 and 1347 and 1347.

No. 221 –the Jesse Hall Residence

The corner house was the home of Jesse Q. Hall, his wife, Mary, and children, Tracey (a guy) and Jessie (a gal). While Jessie became a telephone operator and moved out around 1900 (presumably after her father’s death), Tracey stayed at the home with his widowed mom. Both were there in 1915, but Tracey split around 1920. (He moved to 7070 Franklin Avenue, then to 2209 Canyon Drive in the Hollywood Hills with his wife, Sophie.) Tracey had worked his way up in the banking industry from clerk to Vice-President of the Security-First National Bank of Los Angeles. It was he who converted the 1347 Kellam Avenue into a two-family home in 1915, at least according to this 1939 census, from USC's Digital Archive.

In 1928 Adolph Marx bought 1347 Kellam to lure his son, Charles, a sailor, to settle in the west with his Philadelphia fiancé, Tillie. Tillie from Philly was still living there when the home was landmarked in 1979.

As part of its designation, 1347 Kellam contains its carriage house with its entry off Douglas. Here is a pair of pictures of it:

Are you as surprised as I was to learn the two homes were once identical, veritable peas in a pod? Clearly the upkeep of the one landmark compared to the other’s is the main difference, but there’s also that enclosed porch on 1347. In truth, the paint job in general was enough to throw me. In any event, I sure would like to attack the less fortunate twin (there’s always a less fortunate twin), armed only with but a scraper and a couple of cans of paint. Who’s with me?

Source:

Morales, T.M. “’Twins’ Result of Close Family Ties” Parkside Journal; Jul 18, 1979, p. 1

Up next: Daggett Residence

No. 219 - Galbreth Residence

2009-03-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

Galbreth Residence
c. 1887
1239 Boston Street – map
Declared: 6/6/79

If attorney E. Edgar Galbreth wasn’t the man who built this Queen Anne house, he was at least one of its very first residents. The library’s city directories prior to 1890 show no record of Galbreth, but that year’s index has him living at 5 Cummings Street, today known as Boston Street.

E. Edgar Galbreth was born in Lewisville, Indiana, two days after Christmas in 1845, just a handful of months after the death of Johnny Appleseed. Starting in 1870, he practiced law in Pittsburgh, PA, where he married Anna Mary Taggart and spawned four children. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1887. (Three years later, the same year he ran for L.A. township Justice of the Peace, Galbreth and Anna sold a block of Angeleno Heights land to a D. Clark Morrison for $4,000). It was here he went into practice with his son, R. Morgan, Commander of the United Spanish War Veterans of California and treasurer of Maternity Cottage and Homeopathic Hospital. Galbreth was a member of the Odd Fellows, the Foresters, and the Maccabees. He was also for years an elder of the First Presbyterian Church.

By 1893, the Galbreth Residence had its renamed address of 1243 Ionia Street. Now, let’s make an educated guess and say Ionia got its name from the Michigan hometown of Everett E. Hall who, with William W. Stilson, originally developed Angelino Heights. Spencer G. Millard, another Ionia native (Millard was married to the sister of a further Hall, Giles S. Hall, yet another Heights resident), was living a few doors down from Galbreth at 1259 Ionia. Or at least he was, as Lieutenant Governor of California, until his death in October 1895 at the age of a mere 39.

Take a look at this bit of Sanborn fire insurance map from their 1894-1900 volume. Down in the lower right-hand corner, at the intersection of Ionia and Holliday, sits the Galbreth House (the Millards lived three doors to your left).

On a brief tangent, you can see on the map above, at the point formed by Bellevue and Holliday, the Bethany Presbyterian Church of which Mr Glabreth was most certainly a member, I conjecture. From the L.A. Public Library, this is that old church building (like the Millard Residence, it, too, is long gone):

But, by 1898, while Millard’s widow, Ida H., was still living at 1259 Ionia, E. Edgar Galbreth had moved on to 223 East Adams Boulevard. He died in 1921 at the home of his son, W. Edgar, in Long Beach.

L.A.’s 1915 directory lists the residents of 1243 Ionia as the president of Viole-Lopizich Drug Co., Jules C. Viole, along with his sons, Andre (a pharmacist at said company), and student Pierre. No mention of a wife or mother (it was 1915 – who cared?). (The drug company at that time had locations at 427 and 242 North Main Street.) Like many old Victorians in the area, the Galbreth Residence was later separated into a multi-housing unit.

Time for another Sanborn map. This one, from the 1906-1950 volume, shows not only a couple more structures on the old Galbreth property, but also the recently completed 101 Freeway at – almost literally – the attorney’s old front door. Oh, and you see how Holliday’s now an extension of East Kensington and Ionia (formerly Cummings) is now Boston. Whew! What a lot of knowledge.

From the Los Angeles Department of City Planning website.

In 1979, at the time of the property’s historic designation, it was owned by the Bethel Temple of Los Angeles. Twelve years ago, the owners got busted for removing the historic wood window frames and replacing them with a type of aluminum siding (ouch! – they were forced by the city to rip out the aluminum and re-replace it with more authentic material). Today, this site says it’s of the Iglesia Evangelica Latina Ministerio de Damas. I don’t know anything about that, but I do know the home appears in pretty good shape, what with its vintage add-ons, tucked away in the corner of Angelino Heights and slammed pretty well up against the 101 Freeway (wave next time you speed by).

Sources:

“Real Estate Transaction 1” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 21, 1890, p. 3

“City Briefs” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 21, 1890, p. 8

“Millard Dead” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 25, 1895, p. 1

“Burial of Attorney Tomorrow” The Los Angeles Times; Dec 23, 1921, p. III3

Up next: The Hall Twins

No. 218 - Politi Residence

2009-03-01T23:27:00.000-08:00

Politi Residence
c. 1908
845 East Edgeware Road – map
Declared: 6/6/79

Well, there’s not much to be seen from the road of this century-old house. It’s a shame, too, as the city reports not only is this a good example of Craftsman architecture, but it’s also reminiscent of the work of Greene and Greene.

The house – at least on this blog – doesn’t sport the name of its builder or original owner, but rather its – and Angelino Heights’ – most famous resident and one of the neighborhood’s biggest boosters, artist/author Leo Politi. Politi moved here in 1973 after living for a dozen years at 415 East Edgeware. Of course, the author’s well-known from his thirty years of living on Bunker Hill (he moved out of the neighborhood in the early sixties when his home was condemned with the rest of Bunker Hill’s buildings).

Politi in front of the Castle working on his 1964 book, Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, with nine-year-old Susan Marshall and county librarian Mary Rogers Smith. L.A. Public Library

Leo was born in Fresno on November 21, 1908, right around the same time his future home was built. Around six years later, he moved with his family to Italy (unfortunate timing, what with World War I breaking out and all). Leo won a six-year scholarship to study at an Italian art institute when he was just fifteen. In 1931, he returned to Fresno, moving down to Los Angeles soon after. He married Helen Fontes in 1934 after wooing her with a fifteen-cent ring he bought at Woolworth’s. He published his first book, Little Pancho, about a little Olvera Street boy who wouldn’t smile, in 1938.

A less obstructed view from the city’s Department of City Planning website.

Leo Politi wrote and illustrated about two dozen books. Most of them are for kids, and many of them, including Pedro, the Angel of Olvera Street, The Mission Bell, The Poinsettia, Mieko, Moy Moy, The Nicest Gift, Piccolo’s Prank, and Juanita, take place in Los Angeles. Pedro and Juanita were awarded Caldecott Honors while Song of the Swallows received the Caldecott Medal in 1950. Bunker Hill, Los Angeles is a Southern California classic. Criminally, Song of the Swallows is the only one of Politi books still in print, I think. One I’d especially enjoy seeing available is his 1989 book about the neighborhood he loved so much, Angeleño Heights. The book was his last.

In March 1996, “the Artist of Olvera Street” passed away in the very Angelino Heights home he submitted for landmarking seventeen years earlier, but his memory lives on throughout Los Angeles. We’ve got a Leo Politi Square, Monticillo de Leo Politi Park, and the Leo Politi Elementary School. Fresno, getting in on the act, has its Politi Branch Library, too. And, of course, his Blessing of the Animals mural adorns Olvera Street’s Biscaluz Building (look for the artist’s own dogs, Emmet and Oscar, in the painting). And when you take Spot and Fido to the next Blessing of the Animals on April 11, stroll on over the Leo Politi Tree, dedicated just after Leo Politi Appreciation Month in April 1984 (just keep away Spot and Fido).

Emmet or Oscar

The Plaza’s Leo Politi Tree

Click here for a list of the many, many, many events held for the Leo Politi 2008 Centennial. Yeah, most – but not all – of them have passed (like last May’s open house tour of Leo’s landmarked house – pictures here), but there are lots of links, often leading to wonderful Politi art.

Update, 5/12/09: Leo’s son, Mr Paul Politi, has been kind enough to drop me an email with a brief note and a pair of photos. Paul writes:

I noticed on the comment from some of your readers that there is interest in my father’s books. I am pleased to inform you that the Getty is re-publishing four of my father’s books and hopefully more in the future. The first four that will be published for the fall by the Getty is Song of the Swallows, Juanita, Pedro, the Angel of Olvera Street, and Emmet. We are also completing a coffee table book that will spotlight my father’s fine art. The title of the book is Leo Politi, Capturing the Heart of Los Angeles. It will be published by Angel City Press.

Of course, I’m already looking forward to buying copies of the books. Here, from Paul’s collection, is a shot of his father in his Olvera Street studio taken in the late 1930s.

Also included in Paul’s email is Leo Politi’s only painting of his own landmarked home at 945 East Edgeware. Thanks for allowing me to share this with the readers of Big Orange Landmarks, Paul.

Sources:

Oliver, Myrna “Leo Politi; Author of Children’s Books, Artist” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 30, 1996, p. 18

Rasmussen, Cecilia “Street Artist Tapped into L.A.’s Spirit” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 13, 2008, p. B2

Up next: Galbreth Residence

Heritage Square Turns 40

2009-02-28T21:47:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, March 7, help Heritage Square Museum celebrate its 40th anniversary.

It was on March 6, 1969, Monuments Nos 5 and 27 – the Salt Box and the Castle – were moved from on Bunker Hill to the Square (of course, they weren’t there long). The anniversary event begins at 2:00 p.m., costs ten bucks, and will feature talks by freshly re-elected City Councilman Ed Reyes and Dr Robert Winter, a long-time member of the Cultural Heritage Commission, a Heritage Square co-founder, and Los Angeles’s premiere architectural historian. Plus, I’m looking forward to the unveiling of the rebuilt veranda on HCM No. 413, the Longfellow-Hastings Octagon House, pictured above between the Ford House and the Palms-Southern Pacific Railroad Depot, both city landmarks. The original veranda was removed more than ninety years ago. You can find more information at the Heritage Square blog.

No. 217 - Wicks Residence

2009-02-24T21:37:00.001-08:00

Wicks Residence
c. 1895
1101 Douglas Street – map
Declared: 6/6/79

Here’s an Angelino Heights house built around 1895 for “smooth speaking” “gentleman of vision” M.L. Wicks. Regarding Wicks and Los Angeles, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in his History of California (1884-90), wrote there were “few prominent enterprises in this portion of the state in which he has not been one of the leading promoters.”

Moses Langley Wicks was born in Aberdeen, Mississippi, in 1852. He moved with his family to Memphis, graduated from college as an accountant, and got a law degree from the University of Virginia. In 1875, Wicks married Elizabeth Littlejohn. The couple followed his father to L.A., then moved down to Anaheim where Wicks set up law practice. Elizabeth died shortly after giving birth to Moses, Jr., but Wicks remarried in 1881 and had another son, Percy Langley. M.L. returned to Los Angeles in 1877, residing at 121 South Fort Street (now Broadway). (His investment in Fort property paid off in 1886 when, along with L.H. Titus and Howard W. Mills, Wicks sold to the city for $34,000 the land for a new City Hall (1889) between 2nd and 3rd.)

M.L. Wicks, from USC Libraries Digital Archive

By the mid-1880s, after helping to found the Los Angeles Bar Association, M.L. Wicks had fairly well left lawyering to live in the world of real state and transportation. (Don’t confuse Moses with his brother, Moye, an L.A. attorney in the firm of Wicks, Lucas, and Bentley. And now for something completely different: Moye and his pistol once took a couple of shots at J.H. Levering in the County Clerk’s office, but was soon exonerated; turns out he didn’t mean to hurt the guy. Moye eventually moved to Washington state.)

From L.A.’s Department of City Planning

Wicks played various parts in the development of Glendale, San Dimas, Garvanza, Highland Park, Edendale, sections of downtown L.A., and San Bernardino. His primary platting: Eagle Rock and Linda Vista as part of Benajmin Dreyfus’s old Rancho San Rafael; the Dalton portion of the San Jose Rancho which he’d bought from Jonathan S. Slauson et al for $255,000; Pomona; and the Playa del Rey section of Rancho La Ballona. In 1884, Wicks bought land from the Southern Pacific for $2.50 an acre (cheap!) and laid out the town of Lancaster. Four years later, Wicks sold just about the whole town to James P. Ward for $46,620, or about $20 per acre.

Wicks became affiliated with the Temecula Land and Water Company, and, according to author Glenn S. Dumke, he was “interested in the Savings Fund and Building Association of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles and Santa Monica Railroad, the Abstract and Title Insurance Company, and the California Bank.” Wicks put the first $50,00 into the Los Angeles County Railroad Company (of which he was first president), and sunk another $120,000 in to Ballona Harbor which he saw as a shipping point to compete with the Southern Pacific’s Santa Monica wharf. Wicks served as President of both the Citizens’ Water Company and the Sunset Boulevard Improvement Association. He was the “principal promoter of the Red Car Line” and tried several times to connect downtown L.A. to the coast by rail.

It wasn’t all a bed of roses for Wicks. His 1887 subdivision of Hyde Park – a “midway town between the city and the harbor” – failed. A dozen years later he filed for bankruptcy (an L.A. Times article reported “Wicks was insolvent and heavily involved in debt as afar back as December 25, 1887, when his liabilities aggregated $200,000.”)

Historic-Cultural Monument No. 217, this 1895 house is primarily Queen Anne in design with a few hints of the Colonial Revival. Wicks lived here until about 1915.

Moses Langley Wicks died in late 1919 as a result of injuries suffered after being struck by a car at Hollywood and Vine (construction engineer Louis C. Hill of 2144 Canyon Drive was behind the wheel). Poor M.L. then fell and konked his head on a steel streetcar rail, cracking his skull. At the time, Wicks had been living at 1918 Miramar Avenue.

Sources:

Bancroft, Hubert Howe History of California The History Company 1894-90 San Francisco, CA

“The Shooting.” The Los Angeles Times; May 22, 1886, p. O_2

“The City Hall.” The Los Angeles Times; Sep 18, 1886, p. O_4

“Council.” The Los Angeles Times; Oct. 1, 1886, p. O_4

An Illustrated History of Los Angeles, California Lewis Publishing Co. 1889 Chicago, IL

“Decided to Annex.” The Los Angeles Times; Jun 30, 1895, p. 22

“Pursuit of Property.” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 7, 1900, p. I10

“Second Ward Federation.” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 21, 1908, p. II6

“Explains Politics of the Henderson Appointment” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 28, 1912, p. II1

Newmark, Harris Sixty Years in Southern California 1853-1913; The Knickerbocker Press 1916 New York, NY

“Aged Realty Dealer Hurt by Automobile.” The Los Angeles Times; Dec 4, 1919, p. I8

Dumke, Glenn S. The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California Huntington Library 1944 San Marino, CA

“City Hall Site Purchased in Early Days for Trifle” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 17, 1929, p. E1

Robinson, W.W. Lawyers of Los Angeles; a history of the Los Angeles Bar Association and of the Bar of Los Angeles County Los Angeles Bar Association 1959 Los Angeles, CA

Lombard, Sarah R. Rancho Tujunga: a History of Sunland-Tujunga, California Sunland Woman's Club c. 1990 Sunland, CA

Wayte, Beverly At the Arroyo’s Edge: a History of Linda Vista Historical Society of Southern California and Linda Vista/Annandale Association 1993, Los Angeles, CA

Up next: Politi Residence

No. 216 - Hall Residence

2009-02-21T21:07:00.000-08:00

Hall Residence
1887
917 Douglas Street – map
Declared: 6/6/79

Angelino Heights – originally spelled Angeleno Heights, with an ‘e’ – was first developed by two men: William W. Stilson and Everett E. Hall. Having bought the land from Victor Beaudry and his partners (Victor Heights was right next door), the duo filed for subdivision on March 19, 1886. Stilson would be the money man while promotion would be Hall’s territory. Stilson built his thirty-room mansion on the northwest corner of East Edgeware Road and Carroll Avenue. It’s still there, too, but a modernization from half a century ago has rendered the home unrecognizable. Hall and his wife, Nellie, initially moved into a place close by on Edgeware, but very soon after settled into this house on Douglas Street (then called Waters Street). Unlike the Stilson mansion, it remains much more authentic (if in need of a paint job) and is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 216.

Hall, from Ionia, Michigan, was an attorney and president of the Los Angeles and Pacific Railway Company. When he moved to this future landmark his estate stretched from Kellam to Edgeware. Included on the property was Hall’s carriage house. Though still in the same spot, the carriage house now belongs to 1417 Kellam Avenue around the corner. It’s HCM No. 166.

From L.A.’s Department of City Planning website.

The two-story house is Eastlake in design and features an Oriental fret pattern along with its L-shaped porch. And if posting the year of construction on the side of your home were a law in L.A., it’d make things a whole lot easier for bloggers who list the year of construction on the line after the address.

Hall fell on hard times shortly after moving into the house. He began selling off chunks of his property, then the home itself. Subsequent residents of 917 Douglas included members of the Heim Brewing Company’s Heim family (another Heim, Ferdinand, owned HCM No. 77 nearby on Carroll Avenue), future Glendale bigshots Leslie C. Brand and Daniel Campbell, and Ida Millard, sister of Everett Hall and widow of Spencer Millard, Lt Governor of California (also from Ionia, Michigan). And a contemporary city directory tells us widows Amelia M. Knox and Helen Marmion were living there in 1915.

Some more information with which to stymie your enemies: besides through the city landmark, Everett Hall and his family live on through a few street names in and around Angelino Heights. Allison Avenue is named for Hall’s younger brother, and Marion Avenue for a daughter who died in infancy. And there’s nearby Everett Place, Everett Street, and Everett Park. (Wallace and Carroll took the names of Stilson sons.)

Sources:

“Spencer C. Millard Dead: A Farmer’s Son Who Became California’s Lieutenant Governor.” The New York Times; Oct. 26, 1895, p. 9

Los Angeles City Directory 1915 Los Angeles Directory Company, Los Angeles, CA

Morales, T.M. “Neighborhood ‘Dandy’ now Disguised ‘Victorian’” Parkside Journal Oct 3, 1979, p. 1

An Album of Significant Homes in Century-Old Angelino Heights 1987 The Carroll Avenue Restoration Foundation

Morales, Tom Angelino Heights Preservation Plan – Section 4.1 History of Angelino Heights; June 10, 2004 p .9

Up next: Wicks Residence

City of the Seekers: L.A.'s Unique Spiritual Legacy

2009-02-17T23:05:00.000-08:00

L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument No. 845, Mount Washington Hotel/Self-Realization Fellowship International Headquarters

Your reading this post makes me think you already know the Los Angeles Conservancy is sponsoring a self-driving tour of “five historic sites related to spiritual organizations that took root in Los Angeles in the early part of the twentieth century.” The sites are: Angelus Temple; the Self-Realization Fellowship Mother Center; Chapel of the Jesus Ethic; the Philosophical Research Society; and the Bonnie Brae House, home of the Pentecostal movement.

Two of the stops – the Philosophical Research Society and the Self-Realization Fellowship Mother Center (the former Mount Washington Hotel, pictured above) – are Historic-Cultural Monuments, and I’m going to take full advantage of the Conservancy tour to visit them (even though I won’t be blogging about them until, like, 2012 and 2015). I’m also planning on getting the answer to why Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple is not a city landmark, despite being both listed on the National Register of Historic Places and one of just seven National Historic Landmarks located in L.A.

The tour is March 14, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Go here for more information and tickets, please.

The shot of the Mount Washington Hotel is from the Los Angeles Public Library online photo archive.

No. 215 - Bob's Market

2009-02-13T23:37:00.001-08:00

Bob’s Market
1913 – George F. Colterison
1230 Bellevue Avenue – map
Declared: 6/6/79

Okay. Add the proprietors of Bob’s Market to the list of those who do not appreciate my taking photos of their establishment, in this case a city landmark for nearly thirty years now.

In 1913 Ella J. McMillen hired architect George F. Colterison to design for her what would be this one-story, false front, frame structure with slight Mission Revival and Oriental elements. Peter A. Holmberg’s construction costs ran the Widow McMillen $3,500.

The sight was absolutely perfect for a grocery store, located at a six-point intersection in the paths of trolleys, carriages, and pedestrians. Now, at first, the building housed two businesses (and two families). One of the first tenants/shop-owners was Levon Melkonian. He fled the Turks and the Armenian Genocide in 1914, setting up a tailor shop in the 1253 Bellevue half (his wife, Azniv M., joined him five years afterwards). Levon was on the other side of grocer Frank E. Sandberg. Abram and Miriam Kooper bought the grocery half in 1926, establishing a home there the following year. In 1934 the Koopers acquired the dry cleaning business next door from Fred and Nelly Baalberger. Since then, the building’s held a single business.

Kensington Properties bought the landmark on January 11, 1963. Two years later, Bob and Keiko Nimura bought it from Ben Nakone.

Bob’s Market narrowly escaped a devastating six-house fire on the block in August 2003. The blaze left nearly thirty residents homeless.

McGrew and Julian, in their Landmarks of Los Angeles, say Bob’s Market is “unique primarily because it has survived”, but what they don’t say is that Angelino Heights at one time had four local grocery stores, one of which was around till not that long ago.

Even those of us with only a passing knowledge of Angelino Heights remember the B & K Market at the northwest corner of Bellevue and West Edgeware. You can still see the shop’s sign telling us Knudsen is The Very Best (and you can make out the B & K on the sign if you get up really close). Ninety-plus years ago, this grocery was run by a man named Henry M. Reuter. He lived right behind his shop at 1166 West Edgeware.

Henry Reuter’s grocery store / B & K Market

For those of you who can remember back twenty-five years, you might recall the shop at 826 East Edgeware, between Carroll and Kellam. A plaque on the building’s side tells us it was a community store from 1911 to 1984. In 1915, this was the Driggs Bros market. That year, brothers B. Ruggles and John W. were living at nearby 816b East Kensington and 1100 West Kensington, respectively. Here’s the Driggs Bros store today:

The Driggs Bros market

Thirdly – and most obscurely – there was Harry Smookler’s grocery at 954 East Edgeware. Harry bought the land – lot 5, block 11 – from Charlie Stimson in 1906. Smookler also lived here with his family.

Former Harry Smookler store/residence

Poor Harry. Just a few days before Christmas 1912, the neighborhood grocer gave his son, Willie, what the Los Angeles Times called a “slight chastisement”. A sensitive lad, distraught fifteen-year-old Willie subsequently borrowed a pistol from his pal, Waldo Hardeson, who then accompanied his buddy to buy cartridges. The teenage Smookler walked to a nearby vacant lot, stuck the gun in his mouth, and committed suicide. Harry the grocer found the body.

Sources:

“Houses, Lots and Lands – Review of Building and Development” The Los Angeles Times; Jun 10, 1906, p. V24

“Youthful Pride Causes Tragedy.” The Los Angeles Times; Dec 20, 1912, p. II5

Morales, T.M. “Family Operated Stores Still Stand” Parkside Journal; Jul 25, 1979, p. 1

McGrew, Patrick and Robert Julian Landmarks of Los Angeles Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1994 New York, NY

Rubin, Joel and Monte Morin “Fire Chars Angelino Heights Homes” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 15, 2003

Up next: Hall Residence

No. 214 - (Site of) Mt Carmel High School Building

2009-02-10T23:08:00.001-08:00

(Site of) Mt Carmel High School Building
1934 – Barker & Ott
7011 South Hoover Street – map
Declared: 6/6/79

Construction began in the late spring of 1934 on this two-story, late Spanish Colonial Revival school building, designed by Merl Lee Barker and G. Lawrence Ott for the Missionary Society of Our Lady of Mount Carmel of the Carmelite Order of New York. It’s been gone going on nearly thirty years now, so if there are any Mt Carmel graduates out there, it’d be great to hear from you.

The thirty-four room structure, constructed of reinforced concrete, was the first school in Los Angeles built to new seismic standards following the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. Laurence J. Waller was the structural engineer, W.W. Petley got the general contracting gig, and the F.D. Reed Company handled the plumbing. The school’s size was 13,920 square feet, and it sported a stucco exterior.

The $85,000 to $100,000 building was dedicated on January 6, 1935. Rt Rev. John J. Cantwell, bishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles and San Diego, laid the cornerstone and gave the dedicatory address. Father Flannagan gets credited with the school’s founding.

The Reverend Niles J. Gillen announced in April 1976 the all-boys school, operated by the Catholic Fathers of the Order of Mt Carmel, would close due to decreasing enrollment, down to 276 from more than 600 in the early 1960s. A group of parents organized a petition drive to convince the Chicago-based Carmelites to change their minds but to no avail. Plans even called for asking Pope Paul VI to intervene. And hopes the L.A. Archdiocese would take over the school never panned out. Mt Carmel shut down with the end of the school year on May 26.

As part of its Historic-Cultural landmarking, South Central’s Mt Carmel High School was called by the city, “an excellent example of Mission architecture housing a school which has made a significant contribution to the community.” It looks like the 1979 monumental status was conferred primarily to ward off the school’s destruction by the Parks and Recreation Department which had owned the building by that time.

I’ll admit I’m more than a bit sketchy about how the landmark eventually met its demise. The gym remained until a fire brought it down in 1983. By this time, though, the school building had already been demolished, maybe the previous year? Perhaps it had served as a senior center in its post-school years? In any event, the city’s Office of Historic Resources has no record of any demolition permit being issued. If you know anything, fill us in, please.

The sole picture is from the L.A. Department of City Panning’s website.

Sources:

“School Constructions Ready To Be Launched” The Los Angeles Times; May 20, 1934, p. 21

“Catholics Today Will Dedicate New High School” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 6, 1935, p. 15

“Mt. Carmel High School to Close Doors in June” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 3, 1976, p. A27

Fanucchi, Kenneth “’It’s Too Late’ To Save School” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 18, 1976, p. CS1

Fanucchi, Kenneth “Parents Fight Mt. Carmel Closing” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 22, 1976, p. CS1

Up next: Bob’s Market

No. 213 - S.S. Catalina

2009-02-07T21:56:00.001-08:00

S.S. Catalina
1924, cut for scrap in 2009
Declared: 5/16/79

Talk about great timing. I missed visiting Monument No. 213, the S.S. Catalina, by this much. The bags were packed, the tank was full, the passport – eh, let’s face it. There’s not a chance in hell I would’ve made the 180-mile trip down to Ensenada to see and be saddened over what was left of the eighty-five-year-old “Great White Steamship”. Unfortunately, I (and you) will never get the chance now.

In 1919, five years after Doublemint’s debut, Cub-and-gum man William Wrigley Jr purchased Santa Catalina Island and the Wilmington Transportation Company from William, J.B., and Hancock Banning, sons of Phineas. To turn Catalina into the resort he envisioned, Wrigley needed a bunch of boats to ferry passengers between the mainland and the island’s city of Avalon. He had already gotten a pair of ships as part of the Wilmington Transportation Company – the Hermosa (1902) and the Cabrillo (1904). And, after World War I, Wrigley purchased from the U.S. Navy the U.S.S. Blueridge, built by the Globe Ironworks of Cleveland in 1891 and originally christened the Virginia. After a major refurbishment, this last ship was renamed the S.S. Avalon in 1920. But Wrigley wanted a fourth.

Here are pictures of the Cabrillo (courtesy of USC’s Digital Archive) and the Avalon (from the L.A. Public Library). Like the Catalina, both ships served in World War II, the Avalon staying in SoCal, the Cabrillo eventually making its way to Sacramento. The latter was left to rot and be cut for scrap near Napa. The Avalon was retired in February 1951. Nine years later, this ship, too, was cut for scrap, then suffered a fire, ultimately sinking off Palos Verdes in 1964.

William Wrigley Jr laid the keel of the million dollar S.S. Catalina at the L.A. Shipbuilding and Drydock Harbor on the day after Christmas, 1923. Just four and a half months later, on May 3, 1924, Mayor Cryer and 3,000 onlookers watched Miss Marcia Patrick, the sister of the Wilmington Steamship Company’s president, christen the ship. With A.A. Morris its captain, the Catalina left her Berth 185 homeport in Wilmington on June 30.

The S.S. Catalina stretched 301 feet long and fifty-two-feet wide. It weighed 1,766 tons. There were five decks, three of which were for passengers: the Promenade; the Saloon; and the Main. The top deck held the bridge with the pilot house and captain’s cabin.

During the Catalina’s two-hour trip to Avalon’s Steamer pier, its passengers (the ship had a capacity of 2,200) could dance to a big-band orchestra while clowns and magicians would entertain their kids. In 1929, the Cabrillo, Avalon, and Catalina, making a total of ten daily roundtrips, carried a combined half a million passengers between L.A. Harbor and Santa Catalina Island. (Wrigley sold the Hermosa in 1928.)

William Wrigley, Jr, died in 1932 and his son, Philip, inherited the company.

During World War II, the government drafted the S.S. Catalina into service, designating the ship as FS-99 for use as an Army Troop Transport. Employed in San Francisco Bay, the steamship wound up ferrying soldiers to larger warships. In her forty-four months of military service, the Catalina transported some 820,000 men, more than any other U.S. Army Transport. The ship was back to its old L.A. to Santa Catalina run on July 3, 1946.

S.S. Catalina, troops (L.A. Public Library)

At the beginning of 1948, the Wilmington Transportation Company changed its name to the Catalina Island Steamship Line. During the 1950s, there were now just single daily roundtrips made from Wilmington to Santa Catalina. In 1956 it would cost you around $6.00 for a roundtrip ticket. The Wrigleys sold the steamship line to Charles Stillwell and his M.G.R.S. Company, Inc., in 1960. Stillwell sold the Catalina – now with its terminal under the Vincent Thomas Bridge – in 1970 to Carolyn Stanalan and her family.

The S.S. Catalina completed her 9,807th and final crossing on September 14, 1975. Real estate developer Hymie Singer bought the ship for $70,000 at auction on February 16, 1977, as a belated Valentine’s Day gift for his wife, Ruth. The new owners struggled with docking fees, mooring the former ferry in San Pedro, Newport Beach, San Diego, and Santa Monica Bay, then settling the vessel off Long Beach for five years. An attempt at rehabilitation failed in 1983. Two years later, after the ship broke free of its moorings in a second instance – this time nearly causing a major accident, the Coast Guard had had enough and announced it was going to seize the Catalina. The owners opted to remove the ship from U.S. waters, and by the spring of 1985, the boat was three miles off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico. The Catalina Bar and Grill Restaurant opened on board the L.A. landmark in the summer of 1988, but didn’t stay in business long.

Over the next two decades, the S.S. Catalina, “the Great White Steamship”, slowly deteriorated, rotting, sinking, and listing, thanks to looters and thieves, the Mexican government (which had ordered the boat’s solid bronze propellers removed, allowing seawater to seep into the ship), neglect, and plain old ravages of time. Spare half a minute and watch this video of the Catalina in Ensenada, by this time a home for sea lions.

The Singers gave up ownership of the Catalina and, in 2000, the Mexican government donated the boat to the S.S. Catalina Preservation Association for non-commercial preservation purposes. Despite salvation efforts from a variety of concerned groups including the Raising the Catalina Association and the S.S. Catalina Steamship Fund, the Mexican government began cutting apart the ship for scrap just a few weeks ago.

It’s figured the S.S. Catalina alone carried 25 million people in its service of fifty-one years, maybe more than any other ocean-going ship in history. Besides being designated a city landmark in 1979, the ship was also listed on the National Register of Historic Places and declared a California State Landmark.

A very big thanks to Shawn J. Drake for his online essay, “The S.S. Catalina: the First 75 Years of a “Great White Steamer””. The shot at the top of the post is from the L.A. Department of City Planning, while the one below is from UCLA Library’s Digital Collection.

Sources:

Pool, Bob “SS Catalina is Seaworthy No More” The Los Angeles Times, Jan 6, 2009

Up next: (Site of) Mt Carmel High School Building

No. 212 - Stimson Residence

2009-02-04T23:08:00.000-08:00

Stimson Residence
1891 – Carroll H. Brown
2421 South Figueroa Street – map
Declared: 5/16/79

Historic-Cultural Monument No. 212 is the sole remaining mansion on what was, a hundred years ago, a long stretch of stately homes known as “Millionaire Row” on South Figueroa Street. If there could be only one left standing, though, I reckon it should be this one, a home the Los Angeles Times once called “the costliest and most beautiful private residence in Los Angeles.” The city says it’s the only example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture remaining in Los Angeles.

Thomas Douglas Stimson was born in French Mills, Canada. He left his childhood home in New York at the age of fourteen, later working as a trader in a Muskegon, Michigan, lumber camp. He went on to further his fortune in Chicago before retiring to Our Fair City in 1890. Here he quickly set to hiring to design this three-and-a-half-story, thirty-room mansion on the eastern edge of West Adams a young architect by the name of Carroll H. Brown.

Brown was born in Illinois in 1863. By the time he worked on the Stimson Residence, although he was only twenty-seven-years-old, he was already a prominent SoCal architect, having designed downtown mansions for Louis Shiveley, H.L. MacNeil, and W.A. Clark. He also created a $7,000 monument in Wilmington for Gen. Phineas Banning. Within the next few years, the architect would go on to build the first home for the California Club, Santa Monica’s Keller Block building on Broadway, and T.D.’s six-story Stimson Block at 3rd and Spring, the largest office building in L.A. at the time (demolished in 1963). He was a charter member of the Architectural Association of Southern California, formed in 1892 and which became the Southern California Chapter of the AIA two years later. Brown became its president in 1907. He died in L.A. in 1920.

Brown’s Stimson Block

I know I’ve been including lots of Sanborn fire insurance maps lately, but here’s one more from 1894. Check out the “open cement zanja” running through Stimson’s front yard. And I don’t know when the city removed that big star lying in the middle of the street, but I’m glad they did.

Stimson’s new 12,800 square-foot home (the square footage not including the crenellated tower) covered in red Arizona sandstone cost him anywhere from $130,000 to $200,000, as I’ve seen it pegged at a few different prices (I’d think it were more toward 130 g’s; while that was still a lot of money in those days, 200 grand was a lot of lot of money). This new home of the former lumberman consisted of room after room paneled in an incredible variety of woods, including ash, walnut, sycamore, birch, gumwood, mahogany, oak, and something called monkeypod.

I’m including the following three vintage shots, each for a different reason. The top photo, from the CA State Library, is the earliest of the landmark I could find. It shows the northern side of the building, a view obscured today. The next, from the same source, is from around 1895. What’s extra cool about this one is it shows a glimpse of L.A. City Councilmember Frank Sabichi’s home next door. Frank’s house, like the rest of the mansions along South Fig, is long gone, today the parking lot for St Vincent de Paul’s. Finally, there’s a later picture of the Stimson Residence. This one, from the L.A. Public Library, shows off that zanja running along the front of the property.

The biggest event in the landmark’s 128-year history occurred just about this time of year in 1896 when, at 10:30 p.m. on February 6, someone placed “a stick of giant powder… against the foundation of the building on the south side, just in rear of the front veranda” causing a huge explosion “heard for miles around.” There were no injuries sustained in the dynamiting, and “the stately architectural pile was scarcely even shaken.” It was also reported T.D. came “out of the house… viewed the hole torn in the ground at the side of the house… laughed softly and retired to his castle.”

A month later, private detective Harry L. Coyne was arrested for the crime. The reasoning behind the deed seems the stuff of the better Columbo episodes. Coyne, having escorted Stimson’s son to Mexico City, told T.D he had uncovered a plot against the retired lumberman/financier. Following the dynamiting, Coyne offered to give information regarding the crime to Stimson, but for a price. After offering to police to implicate three men in the crime for sixty dollars, Coyne went back to Stimson and demanded $250. Ultimately, though, Coyne’s knowledge of the crime’s details did him in. He was sentenced to five years in Folsom.

T.D. Stimson died in the house on January 31, 1898, at the age of seventy (“the smoothest pickpocket in the city”, “Mother” McGarey, attended the funeral to practice her vocation, but was thwarted by mourner Police Chief Glass). Stimson’s family remained in the house until 1907 (or maybe 1904) when they sold it to civil engineer Albert Solano. Edward Maier, the owner of both the Maier Brewing Company and Hap Hogan’s Vernon/Venice Tigers of the Pacific Coast League, bought the home in 1918, hosting parties with guests including the likes of Jack Dempsey, Barney Oldfield, and Burbank’s Boilermaker, Jim Jeffries.

The Carriage House

In 1940, USC’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity bought the former Stimson estate for a cool $20,000, mere pocket change today. Eight years later, Mrs Edward Doheny, who had been living behind the building and was fed up with the frat-house racket, purchased the house for $70,000. She then bequeathed the home to the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondelet, an order part of the Roman Catholic Church (while the congregation’s origins go back to 17th-Century France, the Carondelet part comes from a town in Missouri). The Sisters used the home as a convent until 1969. For the next twenty years, the nuns allowed Mount St Mary’s College on Chester Place to use the house as a student residence. After returning to use as a convent, the home required a million-dollar restoration in the mid-90s due to damage sustained in the Northridge earthquake. You can see the landmark pop up in movies and TV shows now and then, including as the funeral home in Pushing Daisies.

I always wondered why the Stimson Residence wasn’t one of the first sites landmarked by the Cultural Heritage Board back in the sixties. Turns out it wasn’t for lack of trying. The first attempt at declaring the home an HCM happened in March 1965. The archdiocese resisted monument status to such an extent that it wasn’t until 1975 when the issue was again raised. Again, the archdiocese resisted, citing the designation would produce “undue restrictions on… [the] use and enjoyment of the property.” However, thanks mainly to a guy named Richard Mouck who really lobbied for dedication, the house of Stimson was officially landmarked in May 1979, a year after it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Finally, please see Don Sloper’s Los Angeles’s Chester Place for a bunch of interior photographs (and of this section of West Adams in general).

Sources:

“New Buildings.” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 20, 1885, 0_4

“Dynamite Fiends” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 7, 1896, p. 10

“Last Hope Gone.” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 18, 1897, p. 9

“Stricken Down.” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 1, 1898, p. 11

“Old Mother M’Garey.” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 4, 1898, p. 14

“Famous Figueroa St. Mansion to Be Converted to Convent” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 18, 1948, p. A1

Doherty, Jack “Castle Keep” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 2, 1994, p. 12

Sloper, Don Los Angeles’s Chester Place Arcadia Publishing 2006 Charleston, SC, Chicago, IL, Portsmouth, NH, San Francisco, CA

Cooper, Suzanne Tarbell, Don Lynch, and John G. Kurtz West Adams Arcadia Publishing 2008 Charleston, SC, Chicago, IL, Portsmouth, NH, San Francisco, CA

Up next: S.S. Catalina

No. 211 - Granite-Block Paving

2009-02-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

Granite-Block Paving
1913
Bruno Street between Main Street and Alameda Street – map
Declared: 3/7/79

If you’re ever on the Gold Line traveling to downtown from Pasadena, turn to the east when you hit the Chinatown stop. Here, you’ll look down on Bruno Street, containing a great – but small and getting smaller – example of vintage hand-hewn granite, cobblestone street-paving typical of Los Angeles around the turn of the last century (in this case, from 1913).

All of Bruno Street, from Alameda to Main.

Take a look at the section of an 1894 Sanborn fire insurance map below. On this, Bruno Street is a called San Francisco Street. I don’t know when the change was made to Bruno, but it was by 1900. As far as where the name Bruno comes from, it could be it’s from the Spanish word for a little black plum or plum tree. However, in this neck of the woods at the end of the 1800s, plum trees had to be few and far between.

What’s also of note in the above map is the site of Naud’s Ware House. After arriving in L.A. in 1850, baker Edouard Naud first opened a pastry shop on Commercial Street, selling ladyfingers at fifty cents a dozen. He later dove into the wool industry, building a warehouse on Alameda in 1878. The building – by then 600,000 square-feet, owned by Kaspare Kohn, and known as Union Warehouse – fell to a million dollar fire on September 22, 1915. Dozens of businesses were affected by the blaze, yet it appears the only uninsured loss was of $2,500 worth of toothpicks stored by the – heh – Breast Manufacturing Company (imagine a company by that name in Los Angeles, of all places).

From Thompson & West’s 1880 History of Los Angeles County California, here’s a lithograph of the warehouse by C.L. Smith. Below it is a shot of what the site looks like today.

Alameda and Alpine, starring the Gold Line.

You can see by 1906, in another Sanborn map, San Francisco had made the switch to Bruno, and it was Union Warehouse, not Naud’s. (Maybe a street name more appropriate than Bruno would’ve been Taller de Máquinas Street.) Also notice how nine different Southern Pacific spurs crossed Bruno at the time.

Looking up Bruno to Alameda.

Speaking of Naud’s, this area of Los Angeles, thanks to M. Naud and his warehouse, is today still known as Naud Junction. In fact, when boxing promoter Uncle Tom McCarey left Hazard’s Pavilion he built a large barn for matches in the area called, varyingly, Naud Junction Arena, McCarey’s Pavilion, and the Pacific Athletic Club. This was in 1905. I’ve been unable to pin down exactly where it was, but The BAWLI Papers (Boxing as We Like It) reports it was “near the confluence of Main Street, Alhambra Avenue and Macy Street”, while William David Estrada, in his very fine book, The Los Angeles Plaza, says it was “slightly northeast of Alameda Street on Chavez and Quierolo Streets.” (A 1908 city directory lists McCarey and the Pacific Athletic’s office at 102 South Spring, room 331.) In any event, the venue lasted only to 1910 when McCarey put up the outdoor Vernon Arena, competing with Jack Doyle’s indoor Vernon Arena. (Tangent to a tangent: McCarey was the the father of Hollywood director Leo McCarey.)

From USC’s Digital Archive, here’s McCarey’s Pavilion in Jaud Junction. A regular L.A. Live.

McCarey's Pavilion

More of the cobblestoned Bruno, the point of the post:

Homeboy Industries and Homegirl Cafe

In between where once stood Naud’s Warehouse and today’s partially-cobblestoned Bruno Street stands Homeboy Industries and the Homegirl Café. And in between Homeboy Industries and Hollywood Beauty Supply, lies a big pile of Bruno Street’s 96-year-old granite paving-blocks, cut by hand. Hey, landmarked or not, sometimes they need to be removed and “stored”, right?

Sources:

Thompson & West History of Los Angeles County California; Pacific Press 1880 Oakland, CA

“Cause of Large Fire Under Sharp Scrutiny.” The Los Angeles Times; Sep 23, 1915, p. II1

Newmark, Harris Sixty Years in Southern California 1853-1913; The Knickerbocker Press 1916 New York, NY

Kenyon, J. Michael, editor The BAWLI Papers (Boxing as We Like It); May 24, 1999, Issue 84, New York, NY

Springer, Steve “This City Was Full of Fight” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 30, 2006

Estrada, William David The Los Angeles Plaza; The University of Texas Press 2008 Austin, TX

Up next: Stimson Residence

No. 210 - Terrace Park and Powers Place

2009-01-29T21:05:00.001-08:00

Terrace Park and Powers Place
1904
Powers Place and 14th Street – map
Declared: 2/21/79

Back in July 1904 the Los Angeles Times reported the Alvarado Terrace Company had bought the handful of acres between Pico and 14th and Iowa and Alvarado Terrace for $7,000. The paper went on to say, “a portion of the strip is already set out in grass, and the Alvarado Terrace people are to put a $500 fountain on the property. The land will make a very pretty little park.” Officials broke ground on what was then called the Alvarado Terrace Park at the end of the month.

Soak in this morsel of a Sanborn fire insurance map from 1900. (Sanborn’s surveyors must’ve loved coming upon barren blocks like this.) Just a few years later it would bear Terrace Park and Powers Place. Remember Iowa Street? I sure don’t.

For a bit of backstory, at this time the city councilman for the Fourth Ward, in which the park was located, was a man by the name of Theodore Summerland. In early 1903 he ran his campaign promising he’d bring his constituents two things: a street railway line on West 11th Street and a park. He delivered of both of these promises, earning a bucket of good will. So much so, from the very announcement of the city’s buying a chunk of Fourth Ward land for a park, it was assumed it’d take the name of the popular councilman.

However, in August, the city went ahead and named the new park Terrace Park. Upon hearing what council had done, the Park Commission, on August 25th, raised its hackles. The commission rescinded the City Council’s action, saying naming parks was its territory, not the council’s. The Park Commission thereby christened the park after our old friend, Mr Summerland. The City Council balked and repealed its ordinance.

But get this. By early September, with his political enemies’ scorn making waves, councilman Summerland was modestly filing a statement with the city clerk asking the name revert to Terrace Park, claiming he was in San Diego when it was decided the park would take his name. The city council, though, ignored Summerland’s request! On Halloween 1904, ultimately, the name was switched from Summerland Park back to Terrace Park.

From a 1906 Sanborn map. Even though the name had changed two years earlier, the park here still bears the name Summerland.

The 1.17-acre park held a cobblestone fishpond with that cobblestone tower/fountain “upon which elephant ears were gracefully entwined.” The park was also home to rose bushes, fan palms, geraniums, deodar cedar, Norfolk Island pines (some of which were standing as late as a 1982 park remodeling), and Australian willow trees. At the north end, on Pico, stood a large, shell-shaped horse trough. Here’s what the Pico end looks like today:

You know what’s cool? The park had at one time an underground storage shed where the full-time gardener kept his tools. I wonder where that was (and if the remains of said gardener have decomposed within).

An extensive remodeling in 1921 was followed by smaller scale revisions throughout the years.

As for the original brick-laid Powers Place, its namesake is Mr Pomeroy W. Powers, the manager and a principal owner of the original Alvarado Terrace tract. City Council president from 1900 to 1904, Pomeroy built L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument No. 86, his Mission Revival home bordering the park. Here’s a picture of his old house, put up right around the time the city first bought the parkland:

I like this park real well. A tiny oasis, it benefits by the seven HCMs on its westside, of course. If it were up to me (and it’s not), I’d scatter smaller neighborhood parks of this sort across the city of Los Angeles rather than lay out grandiose projects like the city’s State Historic Park currently in the works. But, again, it’s not up to me.

Sources:

“Along Owners and Dealers” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 10. 1904, p. D1

“New City Park.” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 31, 1904, p. 12

“Clever Scheme of Official.” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 26, 1904, p. A2

“Ordinance No. 9873” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 29, 1904, p. 11

“Saratoga Chips” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 30, 1904, p. A2

“Fight over Street.” The Los Angeles Times; Sep 7, 1904, p. A2

“School Nurse” The Los Angeles Times; Sep, 1904, p. A2

“Now Terrace Park.” The Los Angeles Times; Nov 1, 1904, p. A2

Up next: Granite-Paving Block

No. 209 - Wilshire Christian Church Building

2009-01-25T21:25:00.000-08:00

Wilshire Christian Church Building
1927 – Robert H. Orr
634 South Normandie – map
Declared: 1/17/79

Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 209, the Wilshire Christian Church Building, originates from the late 1920s, but the roots of the church itself stretch back 135 years.

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) held its first service on August 9, 1874, in the city’s Court House. The church was chartered a few months later, at the end of February 1875. In December 1881, the organization set up its first chapel on Temple Street property donated by dry goodsman Rev. B.F. Coulter between North Fort (Broadway) and Buena Vista. The Temple Street Christian Church became the First Christian Church of Los Angeles when it relocated to 11th and Hope Streets in July 1894 (this church building was razed in 1961). The congregation consisted of 1,200 members at this time, the largest church in the west.

Jump forward a decade to 1904, when Magnolia Avenue Christian Church was founded as a mission church at 25th and Magnolia.

Six years later, on February 13, 1910, thirteen members of Magnolia Avenue Church established the Wilshire Boulevard Christian Church. Their first meeting took place in a private home (rumored to be haunted and “carefully avoided by superstitious persons”) at 351 – later renumbered 255 – Normandie. They then held services in a large tent at Normandie Avenue and 4th Street. On the northeast corner of Wilshire and Normandie, on land donated by the Chapman Brothers Company – S.J., Charles C., and Col. Frank M. Chapman, the Wilshire Congregation opened a $30,000 bungalow church on June 4, 1911. It was the first church on Wilshire Boulevard. (The congregation also purchased an additional 125 feet on Normandie.)

Now, the landmark…

Architect Robert H. Orr had already designed a few Los Angeles-area churches – including the First Baptist Church in Sawtelle, the Hollywood Christian Church, and the Japanese Christian Church – by the time of the September 6, 1925, groundbreaking of Wilshire Boulevard Christian’s new Romanesque Revival home. When first announced, it was figured the building would run $400,000. This was at the start of spring 1924 when plans called for an “English Gothic” building comprising two units – the auditorium, with 1,500 seats, and Sunday school. Also to be included were and social hall and banquet room, a stage, gymnasium, lecture room, classrooms, and general offices.

By February 1925, the cost was now estimated at half a million. The Wurster Construction Company received the building contract later that August.

Dr M. Howard Fagan, pastor since 1919 when the congregation was made of less than 300 members, along with Dr J.H. Garrison, turned the first shovelful of earth at the 9/25 groundbreaking.

S.J. Chapman laid the cornerstone on May 23, 1926, with more than 600 people in attendance. Joe Crail, chairman of the official board, was the chief speaker. By this time, the church boasted more than 1,100 members. (This, trivially and for a bit of historic perspective, was a day before groundbreaking of the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.)

By the building’s dedication on April 3, 1927, its cost was pegged at $407,000. Dr Charles S. Medbury, pastor of the University Christian Church and “the most useful citizen of Des Moines” according to a newspaper contest, gave the dedicatory sermon. Also part of the ceremony, Miss Julie Keller led an ensemble of seven harps and a violin. Mr and Mrs Lewis E. Grigsby presented a set of twenty-one chimes, installed at a cost of $14,000. Dedicatory meetings were held every evening for the following two weeks.

Here’s a shot of the monument’s Rose Stained-Glass Window, the recipient of the afternoon sun, by our friends at Judson Studios. Why didn’t they orient the building so this would face Wilshire, I wonder?

Orr’s three-story, reinforced concrete church building featured a seventy-five foot tall ceiling (still does, I guess), oak woodwork, and a floor covered with a “heavily padded Wilton carpet”. The organ case surrounding the bapistry had been ornamented with hand-carved panels. Today, the Sanctuary seats 950, and the smaller Mosely Chapel holds 110. The building’s Fellowship Hall contains a stage, dance floor, and gourmet kitchen. This last hall seats 350.

In 1935, the Wilshire Boulevard Christian Church merged with the Magnolia Avenue Christian Church. On May 19, 1940, the First Christian Church of Los Angeles then combined with Wilshire Boulevard Christian Church becoming, on May 23, 1945, the Wilshire Christian Church we know it today, still serving members of the Disciples of Christ congregation.

So, to re-cap: First Christian Church of Los Angeles (formerly Temple Street Christian Church and, before that, Christian Church) + Magnolia Avenue Christian Church + Wilshire Boulevard Christian Church = Wilshire Christian Church.

The Wilshire Christian Church Education Building replaced the 1911 bungalow in January 1959. The Wilshire Christian Manor retirement home next door was built in 1969.

(The black and white pictures are from the L.A. Public Library's online photo archive.)

Sources:

“Launch Local Improvements” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 23, 1924, p. D1

“Anniversary for Church” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 7, 1925, p. A2

“Contract is Awarded on New Church” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 30, 1925, p. G5

“Start New Church Sunday” The Los Angeles Times; Sep 5, 1925, p. A2

“Church Will Celebrate” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 6, 1926, p. A2

“New Church Dedication on Sunday” The Los Angeles Times; May 21, 1926, p. A14

“Church Corner-stone Laid” The Los Angeles Times; May 24, 1926, p. A11

“Church Dedicated April 3” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 18, 1927, p. A8

“Church to be Dedicated” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 2, 1927, p. A2

“New Church Gets Aid at Dedication” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 4, 1927, p. A2

“Harp Ensemble Marked Success at New Church” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 6, 1927, p. A5

Up next: Terrace Park and Powers Place

No. 208 - Bernard Residence and Carriage House

2009-01-22T21:29:00.000-08:00

Bernard Residence and Carriage House
1902 – John Parkinson
845 South Lake Street – map
Declared: 1/17/79

Today Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument is the Casa Libre/Freedom House, “an emergency and long-term shelter for minors without homes, including unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children.” The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, Inc., bought the landmark in 1996, opening a shelter there for homeless children in 2002.

John Parkinson designed this two-story, thirty-five-room mansion for Mrs Susana Merchao de Bernard in 1901. Susana was born February 8, 1839 in Los Angeles. Her dad, Augustin Machado, and his brother, Ygnacio, along with the brothers Talamentes laid claim in 1820-1821 to the 14,000-acre Spanish land grant Rancho La Ballona, now Marina del Rey, Playa del Rey, and parts of Culver City. Now, going back even further, Augustin’s pop was Jose Manuel Machado. Jose came to Southern California in 1781, and, following Governor Felip de Neve, was one of the forty-four pobladores who hoofed it from the San Gabriel Mission on September 4, 1781, to found Our Fair City, El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles. Good bragging rights for Susana, like if your great(x18)-granddad came over on the Mayflower.

Susana Merchado married rich Swiss-French businessman Jean Bernard on November 27, 1865. Bernard died in 1889 at the age of 64, leaving Susana and eleven children (not all of whom were his widow’s).

Grape leaf motif.

From a 1906 Sanborn fire insurance map. Bernard Residence at bottom, center.

Parkinson created this 10,000 square-foot mansion – along with its carriage house – with elements of Gothic, Art-Nouveau, and Moorish styles, situated on Ninth Street fronting South Lake Street. The house cost the widow Bernard $50,000. (Don’t forget: John Parkinson, alone and with partners, is all over the list of the city’s Historic-Cultural Monuments like white is all over rice – Union Station, the L.A. Athletic Club, Bullock’s Wilshire, and City Hall to name but four.) The contractor on the Bernard residence was John Rebman.

Alley side.

In April 1902, a front-page L.A. Times article reported:

“The entrance is across a spacious recessed porch, and through massive doors into a reception hall, 20x20 feet. On the first floor is a library, 22x22 feet; a drawing room 19x24 feet; a sitting-room, den, two dining-rooms, the principal one of which is oval and 18x27 feet, and a kitchen and refrigerator room.

On the second floor are ten bedchambers arranged both singly and en suite, with staeionary [sic] marble-top washstands and similar conveniences for each; and two bathrooms.

The attic contains rooms for servants.

The basement contains a gymnasium, 20x50 feet; a billiard-room 21x20; a wine room, bathroom, storage-room and furnace-room. The building heated by hot air, which is conveyed from the furnace-room to different parts of the house by pipes, and the temperature is regulated by registers in the rooms and dampers in the basement. Fireplaces are also provided for the principal rooms of the building, and the massive mantels, with handsomely-carved woodwork, add much to the beauty of the interior decorations. Those in the drawing-room are of exquisite design. Heavy beamed ceilings, handsome art glass windows and decorations that indicate artistic study and cultivated taste without and attempt at ostentatious display give a charming completeness to the interior of the dwelling. The rooms of the first floor are finished in quarter-sawed white oak, birdseye ample and cedar. Those of the second floor are in cedar and Oregon pine, stained to oak. The best arrangements in the way of lighting and ventilating the building are provided, together with the latest modern conveniences, so that the house is not only a beautiful piece of architectural workmanship, but is also a model of substantial comfort and convenience as a dwelling.”

c. 1912 (L.A. Public Library)/2009

Susan Machado de Bernard passed away on April 8, 1907, but the home stayed in the Bernard family until 1962. Subsequent owners included Leslie Grant and Jim and Gloria Gindraux, the couple who had the house designated a city landmark thirty years ago this month.

The carriage house/barn/garage.

As the Susana Machado Bernard House and Barn, the site was added to both the list of California’s Landmarks and the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

Source:

“Doings of Builders and Architects.” The Los Angeles Times; Apr 6, 1902, p. A1

Up next: Wilshire Christian Church Building

No. 207 - Fonnell House

2009-01-19T22:15:00.001-08:00

Fonnell House
c. 1899
1334 Kellam Avenue – map
Declared: 1/17/79

Okay. So we’ve visited all but one of Carroll Avenue’s Historic-Cultural Monument homes in Angeleno Heights (as I’m writing this, there’s one more to go, at No. 399). Now it’s time to go one street north to Kellam Avenue. The homes here are much more hit and miss; some buildings are in poorer shape, either in disrepair or “renovated” feloniously. However, there are some real gems to be found on Kellam – like this one, built around 1899 for painter John Fonnell.

Fonnell bought Lot 16 of Block 5 in Angeleno Heights for $450 in gold coins in 1899. (Fonnell – if it’s the same guy – has the distinction of having owned two L.A. landmarks. For more on Fonnell’s penchant for paying in gold pieces, go to this nice piece on his buying Monument No. 724, the Venice of America Home.) Here are a few Fonnell notes from the Los Angeles Times:

Licensed to Wed. John Fonnell, a native of Germany, aged 30, and Emma Johnson, a native of Sweden, aged 31, both of Los Angeles. (7/28/1896)

IS NOW A CITIZEN. John Fonnell, a native of Germany, was admitted to citizenship by Judge Allen in Department Six yesterday. (1/30/1897)

A $3000 residence has begun at No. 1328 Kellam avenue [sic] for John Fonnell. (8/24/1903)

That Fonnell was from Germany and his bride from Sweden would make a lot sense, looking at the landmark today. I know the guidebooks and such say this is late Queen Anne architecture with Colonial Revival elements (i.e. the six-columned porch), but the cottage, with its flower and garland over the bay view window, wouldn’t be too out of place in small, German village, no?

Louis Jacobson, his wife, Minnie, and daughter, Jeanette, from Massachusetts moved into 1334 Kellam in 1915. Jeanette died in 1974 at age 87. The 1939 household census below, from USC’s Digital Archive shows two people living in the six-room cottage.

Nino and Amelia Guerrero bought the home in 1976. If you’ve heard of Nino, it’s probably as “the Latin Magician”. He won the 1969 Grand Prix of Magic.

One of the coolest things (to me, at least) about HCM No. 207 is it wasn’t the Guerreros who petitioned the city for the home’s landmark status, it was of neighbor of theirs – artist/author Leo Politi. He was one of the Heights’ (and L.A.’s) biggest boosters, living just a few doors away at 945 East Edgeware (HCM No. 218). Everything I hear about Politi just makes me like him that much more.

Thanks to local historian Tom Morales for his research providing a chunk of the information in this post.

Sources:

Marriage Announcement 1 (No Title) The Los Angeles Times; Jul 28, 1896, p. 12

“Flotsam and Jetsam.” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 30, 1897, p. 14

“Angeleno Heights” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 24, 1903, p. 5

Up next: Bernard Residence and Carriage House

No. 206 - Libby House

2009-01-16T20:41:00.000-08:00

Libby House
1887
724 East Edgeware Road – map
Declared: 1/3/79

The mansard tower is such a distinguishing feature of this 1887 Queen Anne home, the landmark is sometimes referred to as the “Tower House”. The moniker Libby House, though, namechecks its first owner, Caleb Libby.

Libby moved from Scarborough, ME, to Brooklyn, IA, at the end of the Civil War. In Brooklyn he was the president of the local school board. (How large a school system could Brooklyn, IA, have had in the late 1860s?) By the mid-80s, Libby had relocated with his family to Los Angeles where he was doing just great in the grain business.

Nevada speculator Robert T. Briggs sold Libby three lots of Angeleno Heights land for $1,500. In 1887, Libby, by now dealing in real estate himself, built this three-story house (maybe from a plan book, maybe designed by architect Cecil Dover, or maybe in some third way). Libby also constructed a large carriage house.

Caleb wound up selling 722-724 Edgeware to attorney J. Sayles Brown who, with his spinster sister, Betina, had lived down the street at 714 Edgeware. Caleb moved to Westlake Park. (This is according to Tom Morales’s history of the house. A 1902 L.A. Times article, however, reports sisters Mrs Sayles Brown and Mrs Bettie Brown each inherited $50,000 from a third sister who inherited her money when her millionaire husband was murdered. Now, this raises more questions than it answers, like did each of the sisters marry a Brown? And there’s no such thing as a married spinster, so maybe Betina/Bettie was an ex-spinster. Or maybe Betina Brown and Bettina were two separate people. But then why would – eh, who the hell cares?)

By 1916 Betina had inherited the house and, as is so often the case with spinster sisters, began to take in boarders. One of these men, as is so often the case with boarders, became romantically involved with his landlady, and he eventually inherited the house.

Here, from the USC Digital Archive, is a pair of 1939 household census reports for 724, both for the house and what I’m assuming was the carriage house, converted for apartments. I don’t understand why the house is checked as a ‘single family detached’ yet is home to six ‘roomers’. And the ‘year built’ is off by more than a decade. More intrigue.

You know who lived here from 1954 to 1958? Anna Louise Strong, that’s who. Strong was a journalist, scholar, activist, and avowed communist (I didn’t know who she was, either). I have no idea if this was her last U.S. residence before she expatriated to China. She died there in 1970. Yet more mystery.

Tom and Peggy Levine were the owners of the Libby House at the time of its HCM designation just more than thirty years ago. Thanks to the CA State Library, here’s a photo by William Reagh taken around 1982. Compare and contrast with the shot beneath it.

Much of the information I wrote here is from an article written by local historian Thomas Morales – who lives in the Phillips House across the street and wrote the history portion of 2004’s “Angelino Heights Preservation Plan” – in an article for the Parkside Journal. “Residents’ Commitments Today to Determine the Future” appeared on August 15, 1979.

Source:

“Los Angeles Women Have Claim on Fortune.” The Los Angeles Times; Nov 12, 1902, p. 4

Up next: Fonnell House

No. 205 - Los Angeles Stock Exchange Building

2009-01-13T23:38:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles Stock Exchange Building
1931 – Samuel E. Lunden
618 South Spring Street – map
Declared: 1/3/79

Quick! What was the first transaction held in the brand new Los Angeles Stock Exchange Building on its first day of business, January 5, 1931?

If you said the transfer of 200 shares of Claude Neon Electrical Products, you win! (Man, if only I had those today...)

What’s the banner’s VS mean?

On December 7, 1899, a group of oil men lead by Wallace Libby Hardison met to organize the Los Angeles Oil Exchange to promote their industry, figure out how to get more investments, and set up a marketplace for related securities. The Exchange’s first trading session was on February 1, 1900, in the Yosemite Building on South Broadway, with seats selling for fifty bucks. At the end of the year, on December 23, the powers-that-be broadened the market’s services and renamed it the Los Angeles Stock Exchange.

The object of the L.A.S.E. was to “furnish Exchange rooms and other facilities for the convenient transaction of their business by its members to maintain high standards of commercial honor and integrity among its members and to promote and inculcate just and equitable principles of trade and business.” Whew!

Twelve-foot tall bronze doors/orange traffic cone.

The Exchange had relocated to half a dozen different locations in the city (including the Buildings Tajo, Hellman, and Chamber of Commerce) when, in early May 1929, the market bought the Strong & Dickinson (formerly Meredith) Building at 618 South Spring for $680,000. Nearby property owners wanted the Exchange on their block so much they collected $300,000 among themselves and handed it over to the Exchange as incentive to be their neighbor. Here’s a picture, courtesy of the CA State Library, of the old Strong and Dickinson Building which at that time housed several businesses, including some Western Union offices, a tailor, a hat-cleaners, a barber, and Mrs Elizabeth Sellheimer’s cigar shop:

(More on the building site: during the Civil War, the L.A. City Council voted to give the land to Ozra W. Childs as payment for the construction of an irrigation ditch.)

The architect for the future landmark was Samuel E. Lunden. (I know this all seems like ancient history now, but Lunden, born in Chicago and raised in Pasadena, died relatively recently, in 1995, at the age of 97). Donald and John Parkinson were consulting architects, and Roger Hayward, Lunden’s future partner, gets the assist. While the Exchange’s board wanted a neo-classical design like that of the New York Stock Exchange, Lunden felt that look out of date, so they agreed to more of an Art Deco design. The project’s general contractor was the P.J. Walker Company. And talk about good timing: ground-breaking was held October 21, 1929, just three days before Black Thursday.

From the CA State Library's online photo collection.

There’s a limestone and gray granite front portion fifty-three-foot tall, while a reinforced concrete and terra cotta construction of eleven stories – the city’s height limit in 1929 – stands in the back. It must’ve been somewhat reassuring in the early 1930s to know the Exchange was housed in such an austere, fortress-like building.

From USC's Digital Archive

Included in the $1.75 million structure was a fifth floor clearing-house, a statistical department, and a large auditorium in addition to a smaller lecture room with space for fifty. Offices were on the sixth through ninth floors, and a club with a library, card room, billiard room, and reading rooms were planned for the top two floors. A 2,660-square-foot printing room was located in the basement. The building’s highlight was its 90’ x 74’ balconied trading room with a forty-foot ceiling and sixty-four booths.

The top image below is from a 1939 pamphlet published by the Exchange’s Public Relations Committee.

From USC's Digital Archive

I’d love to see the basement’s vault, its ten-ton door having been set up to emit “choking clouds of smoke and tear gas” in “the presence of an oxy-acetylene torch”. Actually, I’d like to see any of the interior, the decoration of which sported ancient Near East and Indian influences via the hand of designer Julian Ellsworth Garnsey. Too, there’s the entrance lobby’s ceiling with four sculpted figures found in its corners, courtesy of the Wilson Studio. They represent Speed (Mercury), Accuracy (the archer), Permanence (a figure contemplating the universe), and Equality (the figure bearing scales).

However, we all get to see the tri-sectioned frieze on the building’s Spring Street façade. The eight-foot-tall bas-reliefs, chiseled right into the granite, are by Italian sculptor Salvatore Cartaino Scarpitta. The center panel, Finance, represents the personification of the Exchange. Note not only the ticker tape in the men’s hands, but also, at either side of the throne’s base, a bull and a bear (that looks more like a lioness to me). On the left panel we have Research and Discovery with a couple of scientists (tough to see behind the tree), and on the right there’s Production, featuring a pair of workers doing some sort of molding (you can barely make out the modern factories in the background of this one). Here they are, top to bottom, Research and Discovery, Finance, and Production:

The Los Angeles Stock Exchange opened for business in their new home on that winter day with its president John Earle Jardine presiding. (J.E.’s dad, John Jardine, was a Civil War gunboat designer and NYC architect who drew the plans for Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Baptist Church and several Carnegie libraries. He killed himself in 1924.) Transactions that inaugural day were valued at about $545,000.

On New Year’s Eve 1956, the Los Angeles Stock Exchange and the San Francisco Stock Exchange merged to become the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. The registration became official two days later. Renamed the Pacific Stock Exchange in the seventies, the market’s L.A. branch moved out of the landmarked Classical Moderne structure in February 1986. (The Pacific Stock Exchange’s L.A. trading floor on Beaudry Avenue closed in May 2001. Four years later, Archipelago Holdings, Inc., bought the market, by then called the Pacific Exchange. The New York Stock Exchange gobbled it all up the following year.)

Starting about a year after the Pacific Exchange vacated the city monument, the building briefly served as the nightclub ‘Stock Exchange’ (Samuel E. Lunden was reportedly a consultant). Does anyone know of any plans for the building these days?

Sources:

“John Jardine a Suicide.” The New York Times; Jun 24, 1920

“Stock Exchange Buys Site” The Los Angeles Times; May 4, 1929, p. A1

“Stock Exchange Building Plan Told” The Los Angeles Times; May 19, 1929, p. E1

“Plans Altered for New Home of Stock Mart” The Los Angeles; Jul 17, 1929, p. 15

“New Exchange Contract Let” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 6, 1929, p. A11

“New Home of Mart Ready” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 1, 1931, p. 15

“New Exchange Building Ready” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 5, 1931, p. A1

“Market Opens New Quarters” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 6, 1931, p. 10

“Pac. Coast Stock Mart Merger OKd” The Los Angeles Times; Dec 27, 1956, p. B9

Ryon, Ruth “Developers Gamble on Spring Fever Former Stock Exchange Slated for Nightclub, Restaurant, Offices” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 12, 1986, p. 1

Hamilton, Walter “Closing Bell Rings End of Era at Pacific Exchange” The Los Angeles Times; May 26, 2001, p. C1

Los Angeles Stock Exchange 1939 The Los Angeles Stock Exchange Public Relations Committee, Publishers

Up next: Libby House

No. 204 - Lederer Residence and Immediate Environs

2009-01-10T20:51:00.001-08:00

Lederer Residence and Immediate Environs
1934
23134 Sherman Way – map
Declared: 11/15/78

You really can’t see a whole heck of a lot of Monument No. 204, the old Francis Lederer home. It’s perched well on top of a hill (the view must’ve been awesome seventy years ago), the base of which today is surrounded by fencing and warnings to stay away.

Francis Lederer built this home on his 300-acre Canoga Park ranch over a period of years beginning in 1934. (We visited his old converted stable at No. 135 back in April, remember?) It’s worth noting that the Czechoslovakian Lederer, who had spent most of his life in Europe, had arrived in the U.S. only two years earlier to appear on Broadway – the guy must’ve fallen in love very quickly with all things American Southwest to undertake such a project. With the help of builder John R. Litke, Lederer went to great pains to have his estate appear as much a historic Mission-style homestead as possible. For a few years during the house’s construction, Lederer was married to actress Margo (who later married Eddie Albert). He married Marion Irvine in 1941. The home was finished sometime in the early 1940s.

Francis Lederer

You can see some color shots of the house by clicking here. And below is a very fine shot of the landmark by Mr Julius Shulman, plucked from the city’s Department of Planning website.

A big factor in the residence’s 1978 declaration was the decorative and antique furnishings throughout the home. The city called the Lederer Residence

“a distinguished example of Mission Style architecture in which interior and exterior detailing is of museum quality. The Spanish and Italian furnishings are of particular interest, dating back from the 14th century.”

I’m not sure how much of that antique furniture remains. And I’m not sure what “environs” in the city’s declaration refers to, as it seems the land surrounding the home is getting more and more cluttered with buildings that’d make Francis, once the Honorary Mayor of Canoga Park, spin in his grave (he died in 2000 at the age of 100). And, finally, I’m not sure why we drive on a parkway and park in a driveway (ask Gallagher).

The home is still in the hands of the Lederer family. It’s currently undergoing a major renovation.

Up next: Los Angeles Stock Exchange Building

No. 203 - Baird House

2009-01-07T22:33:00.001-08:00

Baird House
1921
14603 Hamlin Street – map
Declared: 10/18/78

Owner of the Van Nuys Nursery Company, Robert J. Baird was one of the San Fernando Valley’s first nurserymen, specializing in fruit and walnut trees. He built this bungalowish home for his wife, Florence, in 1921.

Just a bit more about the Bairds: he also served as president of the Van Nuys Kiwanis Club; and Flo not only taught voice at the Van Nuys Branch of the Hollywood Conservatory of Music and Arts, she was also a soprano soloist at the First Presbyterian Church of Van Nuys.

Mark Sutton, an active community advocate, moved in after the Bairds. Sutton was the Valley’s second pharmacist, buying Wayne Beck’s business in 1913.

Formed in summer of 1952, the Volunteer League of the San Fernando Valley had its headquarters down the street at 14428 Hamlin Street until termites and dry rot forced them to look for a new center of operations in 1975. The organization moved into its current home in 1977, a year before the city declared the old Baird House Historic-Cultural Monument No. 203.

Up next: Lederer Residence and Immediate Environs

No. 202 - Valley Municipal Building (Van Nuys City Hall)

2009-01-04T23:10:00.000-08:00

Valley Municipal Building (Van Nuys City Hall)
1932 – Peter K. Schabarum
14410 Sylvan Street – map
Declared: 10/18/78

This post is dedicated to the LAPD officer who stopped me from taking pictures of this landmarked building, saying photography of the monument wasn’t allowed in the wake of 9/11. My arguments to the contrary proved futile. However, I did get a handful of shots before I was forced to stop. So, no, I didn’t get any views of the building’s southside.

Anyway…

At the very height of the Great Depression, Peter K. Schabarum, an architect who’d wind up working for the City Bureau of Buildings for twenty-five years, designed this Zigzag Moderne building using downtown’s City Hall as his model (Schabarum’s San Pedro City Hall, HCM 732, has also been described as a smaller version of the downtown landmark, but I can’t figure a resemblance). At the time of his death on March 23, 1950, Schabarum was residing at 13018 Chandler Boulevard in Van Nuys, not too far away from his most famous work.

Courtesy L.A. Public Library Photo Collection

Plans for the $275,000 City Hall branch to serve as a San Fernando Valley annex were completed by the end of 1931. (I’ve seen $400,000 pegged as the cost in at least two Los Angeles Times articles, but the $275,000 price-tag, including $110,000 in labor, is more often mentioned.)

Van Nuys City Hall contains more than 49,000 square feet of space within an eight-story tower on a two-story base. Originally, it housed the Bureau of Engineering and a hospital in one wing, with the Police Department and Municipal Court, complete with a jail, in the other wing. The Department of Building and Safety was on the third floor. Other municipal departments located here included fire, health, humane, prosecutor, clerk, civil service, engineering, and assessments.

Construction began in the spring of 1932 with the Herbert M. Baruch Corporation as the general contractor. On October 6 of that year, Mayor John Porter officially laid the cornerstone following a three-mile parade – complete with ox wagons, of course – down Van Nuys Boulevard. One of the many guests of honor at the ceremony was Tarzana’s Edgar Rice Burroughs. Van Nuys declared a holiday that afternoon, observing the town’s biggest celebration in its history.

Dedication Day was February 22, 1933, twenty-two years to the day of the founding of Van Nuys by William P. Whitsett and company (we just missed the 75th anniversary, it turns out). Festivities began at the Van Nuys Woman’s Club with a joint Kiwanis and Rotary Club luncheon with the latter’s president, Cliff D. Carpenter, presiding. 10,000 people turned out for the ceremonies at the new City Hall annex that afternoon. There was music by the L.A. Police Band and a bunch of drill exhibitions from groups that included the Canoga Park Girls’ Bugle Corps. LeRoy Johnson, Universal’s head of publicity, was emcee, and there were talks from the likes of George Sidney and Boris Karloff. (Seriously – you gotta love a town where Boris Karloff stops by to dedicate your public buildings.) Attorney Joseph Scott had kicked things off with a patriotic Washington Birthday address and he closed the day with another after a series of speeches courtesy of various officials including (former) KKK-member Mayor Porter.

Van Nuys City Hall got its seismic grade in 1996 to 1998 after the Northridge earthquake. Four years later, facing a threat of demolition, the landmark was the recipient of a major rehabilitation culminating in a re-dedication in 2005. In the meantime, the city moved many of its services into the $33 million Marvin Braude Constituent Center next door.

I really wish I had the opportunity to take a few more photos of the building. Sure, I could’ve gone back another day and snapped a few more, but I was just too pissed off (still am!). However, you can check out these awesome galleries, including some recent restoration shots and tremendous vintage construction views by Mr Raymond B. Knudsen, at the city’s official website. (The Knudsen shots are, apparently, pre-9/11.)

Sources:

“Van Nuys To Get Branch City Hall” The Los Angeles Times; Dec 21, 1931, p. A8

“Valley City Hall Work Near Start” The Los Angeles Times; May 1, 1932, p. D1

“Van Nuys Area in Firm Trend” The Los Angeles Times; Jun 12, 1932, p. 19

“Valley All Set for City Hall Fete” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 2, 1932, p. C10

“City Hall Fete Today” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 6, 1932, p. 8

“Van Nuys has City Hall Fete” The Los Angeles Times; Oct 7, 1932, p. 13

“City Hall Rites at Van Nuys Set for 22nd Inst.” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 13, 1933, p. A5

“City Hall Fete Set for Today” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 22, 1933, p. 4

“New Van Nuys City Hall Dedicated by Notables” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 23, 1933, p. 6

“Peter Schabarum” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 24, 1950, p. B13

Up next: Baird House

No. 201 - Van Nuys Woman's Club Building

2009-01-01T18:06:00.001-08:00

Van Nuys Woman’s Club Building
1917 – Reginald Harris
14836 Sylvan Street – map
Declared: 10/18/78

Hey, how about a little landmark love for Van Nuys?

That’s what city councilman Ernani Bernardi asked in 1977 when he organized a committee to figure out what sites in his district – the 7th – possessed the potential to join Los Angeles’s inventory of Historic-Cultural Monuments. The following year, the group recommended five buildings: the Woman’s Club Building; City Hall; the Baird House; the post office; and Van Nuys Hotel (not the downtown Van Nuys Hotel, the Van Nuys Van Nuys Hotel). While the last two never achieved monument status (though the post office is on the National Register of Historic Places), the other three were declared HCMs, all on October 18, 1978.

Van Nuys was founded on February 22, 1911. The next year – on April 3, 1912 – sixteen women, who had been meeting as the Mission Study Class of Van Nuys, gathered in the home of Mrs Lucy Lee Trotter to organize a woman’s club for the “promotion of mutual information of its members along social, literary, and civic lines.” The Van Nuys Woman’s Club would be one of the first social institutions in the San Fernando Valley, whose clubhouse would go on to host hundreds of social, religious, and political gatherings, including garden parties, card games, public hearings, and Bible readings.

The club’s first regular meeting was held two weeks later in a Mrs Bachtelheimer’s home. Lucy Lee was made the first president, and dues were established at a buck (cheap!).

The Van Nuys Woman’s Club was federated that July, later incorporated on October 3, 1916.

In 1917, Ida Bailey donated a chunk of land on Sylvan Street (then known as West Virginia Street) and proffered the club the option to buy the adjoining lot for $550. With $3,000 lent to it by Mrs Elizabeth K. Houghton, the Van Nuys Woman’s Club built a $5,000 all-wood bungalow clubhouse with Reginald Harris the architect.

Harris designed the building with “a large auditorium, dining-room, committee-rooms, restrooms for both ladies and gentlemen and a model kitchen. A fully-equipped stage with dressing-rooms on each side is a feature much appreciated by the music and dramatic sections of the club.” Or was, back when the L.A. Times first reported on the project.

The clubhouse’s exterior is primarily redwood, its interior features rosewood. Then there was the dance floor made of maple. The favorite spot in the clubhouse, the solarium, was removed after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake.

1,000 folks turned out to watch the club’s first two presidents, Mesdames Trotter and Houghton, and its current chief, Mrs Fred Kellogg, lay the buildings’s cornerstone on March 16, 1917, the sixth anniversary of the ground-breaking for the town of Van Nuys. (The cornerstone contained contemporary newspapers, three 1916 coins, the club’s year books, and photos, folders, and publications showing the six-year history of town; it may still contain this stuff for all I know.) After the cornerstone ceremony, the crowd moved inside where they listened to the obligatory speeches as well as a few tunes warbled by Mrs Robert P. Elliott and Ellen Beach Yaw, the "California Nightingale”.

The building took another hit during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The city yellow-tagged the clubhouse, and the cost of repairs – more than $30,000 – sapped the organization’s savings (at the time of the earthquake, the club was down from its peak of 250 to just fifty-six members, most of whom were more than seventy years old). Thanks to a loan from a club-member’s son and a pair of $1,000 gifts from the Westlake and San Fernando Woman’s Clubs, the building was saved.

Even though the organization was fully behind the building’s 1978 landmark designation, in the spring of 1996, the Van Nuys Woman’s Club lobbied the city to remove the building from its list of monuments, maintaining, among other things, its architecture, use, and area were not of “major historical significance.” Dollars to donuts the turn-about had to do with the search for a new owner (potential buyers will often shy away from landmarked buildings, especially if they’re wanting to renovate the structure in any significant way). Records show the last change of ownership occurred in July 1997.

Today, the former Van Nuys Woman’s Club Building serves as home to the congregation Iglesia de Jesu Seristo Fuente de Amor.

Sources:

“Van Nuys Woman’s Club To Lay Its Corner-Stone” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 11, 1917, p. II6

“Corner-stone Laid on Notable Anniverary.” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 17, 1917, p. II3

Schnaufer, Jeff “Van Nuys Woman’s Club Seeks Quake Repair Help” The Los Angeles Times [Valley Edition]; Mar 1, 1994, p. 2

Schnauer, Jeff “Van Nuys Donations Help Save Woman’s Club” The Los Angeles Times [Valley Edition]; Mar 26, 1994, p. 3

Up next: Valley Municipal Building (Van Nuys City Hall)

I'm Taking A Break

2008-12-07T19:49:00.000-08:00

I'll be checking comments and answering email, just not posting. Have a great Holiday Season and a Happy New Year. See you in 2009.

-- FBB

Chemehuevi Indian man dozing in his sleeping shelter in the field, ca.1900, courtesy of USC's Digital Archive.

No. 200 - Second Baptist Church Building

2008-12-01T21:26:00.001-08:00

Second Baptist Church Building
1925 – Paul R. Williams
2412 Griffith Avenue – map
Declared: 10/18/78

When The Los Angeles Times announced in February 1925 that excavation work had begun for a new house of worship for the Second Baptist Church, the paper made no mention of the building’s architect, Paul R. Williams, who would go on to be one of the city’s premiere builders in the 20th century. The Times did mention, though, the new building would be “conveniently located for the entire Negro population of Los Angeles.”

Founded in 1885 with Rev. S.C. Pierce as pastor, the church was the first black Baptist church in Southern California. Its first building was on Maple Avenue between 7th and 8th Streets. Under the leadership of Dr Thomas Lee Griffith, Sr, pastor from 1921 to 1940, the congregation saw a rapid increase in membership. When church officials decided to build a new home a block west of South Central Avenue, Griffith made sure to employ African-American businesses for the construction. So, not only did he hire Williams, but he saw to it the excavators, carpenters, and brick and cement masons were all there through black owned companies.

At the time of ground-breaking, the church was figuring on spending $125,000 on the brick Romanesque Revival structure, including the Sunday school quarters large enough to hold 1,500 students. The main auditorium today seats 2,200.

The Second Baptist Church Building was dedicated in January 1926 with Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr, pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, presenting the dedication sermon.

Rev. Dr Martin Luther King preached here on St Patrick’s Day 1968, three weeks before his assassination. The subject of his sermon was “The Meaning of Hope”.

As home to the city’s oldest African American Baptist Church, the congregation’s 83-year-old landmark is in the final stages of a $5 million restoration and renovation project. Until this is wrapped up, the group is holding its Sunday services in space out on West Florence Avenue in Inglewood. (By the way, when I called the church to get some information about visiting, the woman I talked to invited me back after work is finished, and I really appreciate that.) Since 1987, the congregation’s pastor has been Rev. William S. Epps.

These days, in addition to serving as Second Baptist’s headquarters, the church rents out to other, diverse congregations. I like the fact that, despite the neighborhood’s dramatic shift in make-up since the building was constructed (it’s predominately Latino today), the Second Baptist Church is committed to stay and rehabilitate the historic building rather than move on, even as most of its parishioners today are forced to commute for worshipping.

Sources:

“New Church Started” The Los Angeles Times; Feb 7, 1925, p. A2

“Church Dedication Today” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 3, 1926, p. B3

“Dr. King Urges U.S. to Admit Vietnam War is ‘Mistake’” The Los Angeles Times; Mar 18, 1968, p. 3

Anderson, Susan “Only the Walls Will Change; Steeped in L.A. History, Second Baptist Church is Getting Ready for the Future.” The Los Angeles Times; May 20, 2007, p. M8

“Historic Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles Incorporates a Walkway of Tributes” Sentinel; Los Angeles, CA, Jun 19 – Jun 25, 2008, Vol. 73, Iss. 25, p. C5

Up next: Van Nuys Woman’s Club Building

"West Adams"

2008-11-24T23:43:00.001-08:00

We take a break from our regularly scheduled posts (or not so regularly, lately) for a quick plug for West Adams, yet another local history compendium from our favorite South Carolinians, Arcadia Publishing (the company has published more than 4,000 of these books – just scan the Los Angeles-related editions if you need to kill an evening).

Suzanne Tarbell Cooper, Don Lynch, and John G. Kurtz have done a fantastic job assembling West Adams, all about the neighborhood that, “by the end of the 20th century… had become one of the first bedroom communities in fast-growing Los Angeles.” The authors, pictured above, all live in West Adams, and the work they’ve done here covers the gamut from cottages to mansions, from St Vincent de Paul’s to St Paul’s. And there are more than a few Historic-Cultural Monuments highlighted.

(If the L.A. City Nerd were still with us, he could tell us why so many of the HCMs in West Adams are not in the designated planning community of West Adams, but rather South Los Angeles.)

A book signing was held on Saturday, November 22, at the Miner Residence next to Chester Place, thanks to the West Adams Heritage Association. The Miner Residence, named for Randolph Huntington Miner and his wife, Tulita Wilcox Miner, was also home to Theda Bara and Fatty Arbuckle. Joseph Schenk and Norma Talmadge owned the mansion, too. Today the home is the AMAT House.

Congratulations, Suzanne, Don, and John on a job well done.

Buy your copy of West Adams on Amazon here.

No. 199 - David Familian Chapel of Temple Adat Ariel

2008-11-16T20:59:00.000-08:00

David Familian Chapel of Temple Adat Ariel
1949 – Herman Charles Light
5540 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Valley Village – map
Declared: 9/20/78

This is the first structure built as a synagogue in the San Fernando Valley. It’s also the site of the Valley’s first bat mitzvah. The David Familian Chapel was dedicated by Rabbi Aaron M. Wise on November 7, 1949, but its congregation first congregated nearly a dozen years earlier.

On January 21, 1938, fifteen of the San Fernando Valley’s 100 Jewish families (15/100 = 15%) met in a private home and, to put together religious services and establish a Sunday school for kids and a social club for adults, founded the Valley Jewish Community Center. The congregation met in a variety of places – homes, the American Legion Hall on Magnolia Boulevard, the North Hollywood Women’s Club – before buying a former speakeasy at 12800 Chandler Boulevard around Coldwater Canyon. In 1944, Universal president Nate Blumberg and his wife, Vera, donated to the congregation a two-acre plot at the corner of Burbank and Laurel Canyon Boulevards.

Five years later, Isadore and George Familian donated the $75,000 (the single largest gift to a West Coast synagogue at the time), 350-seat chapel to VJCC in memory of their father, David. David Familian was a Russian immigrant who, after running a junk business here, switched to dealing in plumbing supplies, forming the Familian Pipe and Supply Co. One of Los Angeles’s leading philanthropists, he later bought out Price-Pfister Brass Mfg. Co.

Herman Charles Light designed the synagogue. Alfred Lushing built it, and Mischa Kallis, an art director at Universal, with Rabbi Wise designed the eleven stained-glass windows depicting major Jewish holidays. I wish I could’ve gotten a better picture of them. (I left a phone call there, but never was called back.)

The congregation outgrew the Familian Chapel and by 1968 a new, 1,500-seat sanctuary had been built and dedicated. The Valley’s oldest synagogue continues to be used for services, weddings, lectures, and concerts. Today the Valley Jewish Community Center is known as Adat Ari El (Hebrew for ‘Lion of God Congregation’), and this section of North Hollywood is called Valley Village (Angelino for ‘No, Really, Not North Hollywood’).

Governor Gray Davis proclaimed November 7, 1999, “David Familian Chapel Day”. Two months earlier The David Familian Chapel was made a California State Landmark. Unfortunately, Rabbi Aaron M. Wise, who not only was responsible for VJCC’s national reputation but also championed equal rights for women and marched with Martin Luther King, had died that July.

Sources:

“Familian Chapel Consecrated at Jewish Center” The Los Angeles Times; Nov 9, 1949, p. A3

“Valley Jewish Center Celebrates 25th Year” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 18, 1962, p. B8

“Valley Jewish Center Dedication Scheduled” The Los Angeles Times; Jan 7, 1968, p. O12

Oliver, Myrna “Aaron Wise; Civil Rights Leader, Rabbi of Influential Synagogue” The Los Angeles Times, Jul 8, 1999, A16

Andres, Holly J. “Valley’s Oldest Synagogue; Dignitaries to Gather Sunday at Chapel’s 50th Anniversary” Daily News; Nov 6, 1999, p. N.20

Liu, Caitlin “Jewish Cahpel’s 50th Anniversary Marked” The Los Angeles Times; Nov 8, 1999

McLellan, Dennis “Isadore Familian, 90; Philanthropist” The Record; Jun 16, 2002, p. L.07

Up next: Second Baptist Church Building

No. 198 - KCET Studios

2008-11-13T18:44:00.001-08:00

KCET Studios
1920
4401 Sunset Boulevard – map
Declared: 9/20/78

The ample, red-brick building fronting the south side of the 4300 block of Sunset Drive in Los Feliz holds nearly ninety years of Hollywood history. But while the structure dates back to 1920, the property’s ties with Hollywood filmmaking go back a few years farther, to 1912.

Born in 1851 in present-day Poland, Siegmund “Pops” Lubin emigrated to the United States in 1876. Edison film distributor, theater owner, studio head, and maker of cameras, projectors, and printing machines, Lubin set up his Lubin Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia around the turn of the century. In 1912, Lubin opened a west coast branch on a chunk of land at 1425 Fleming Street (now Hoover). Lubin made just a couple of films here before selling the property to the Essanay Film Company the following year, moving on the East Los Angeles. “Pops” Lubin died near Atlantic City in September 1923.

Essanay, which got its name from the ‘S’ and ‘A’ initials of its founders, George K. Spoor and Broncho Billy Anderson, lasted on Fleming Street for just a couple of months, but long enough to churn out twenty one-reel westerns.

Vacant throughout the summer of 1913, the property saw the Kalem Company move in that October. (Kalem was named for owners George Kleine, Samuel Long, and Frank Marion. Folks back then really liked their initials, apparently.) Kalem made films here into early 1917, going out of business by year’s end.

By the beginning of 1918, theatrical agency Willis & Inglis had moved onto the property, building a couple of stages and setting it up as a rental studio. With that August’s arrival of movie producer Jesse D. Hampton, the lot was soon known as Hampton Studio. Jesse split about five months later, but not before having made more than two dozen films with stars including William Desmond and H.B. Warner.

Willis & Inglis founded Charles Ray Productions with Ray in 1920. (Charles Ray, it turns out, was a pretty big cheese as an actor in the late teens and early twenties. Why didn't I know he was so famous?) It was when Charles Ray Productions took over the property that this good-looking brick building was built. (KCET uses a Sunset Boulevard address, but to get a look at the exterior of the old studio, you need to drive around the block – something I had never done.)

Charles Ray Productions – along with Charles Ray – went bankrupt by 1923 after a string of failures, most notably that year’s The Courtship of Myles Standish. (Although the studio’s reconstruction of the Mayflower became a local tourist attraction, no copies of the film survive.) It was the Bank of Italy (later the Bank of America) which took the lot into receivership and re-addressed the property from 1425 Fleming Street to 4376 Sunset Drive.

The bank returned the lot to its days of the late teens when it became once again a rental studio. It remained rental after former actress Jean Navelle bought the property in 1927. She lost it after the Crash of ’29, and the studio went back into the hands of the Bank of Italy. In 1933, Martha J. Like, the mother of sound engineer and head of International Recording Engineers, Ralph M. Like, bought the lot. This was after Ralph had converted Stage A for sound and just a year after he built what is today’s Stage B of KCET. The lot became home to Like’s Action Pictures and, later, Mayfair Pictures.

W. Ray Johnston’s Monogram Pictures Corporation, a company who’s history stretched back to 1915, bought the lot from Like in 1943, having rented the studio for years (they had been based at the former Tiffany Studios nearby at 4516 Sunset). While under the Monogram moniker, the studio produced tons of movies, mostly in the ‘B’ and ‘C’ categories. Charlie Chans, Joe Palookas, Bowery Boys, and Cisco Kids were produced here, along with those Jiggs & Maggie and Bomba, the Jungle Boy, films. And don’t forget all those western: Jimmy Wakely; Whip Wilson; and more than sixty Johnny Mack Brown westerns.

In 1946, Allied Artists was formed as a subsidiary company to Monogram. While Allied was created to concentrate on bigger budgeted films, I know them mainly for such movies as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (but Love in the Afternoon and Friendly Persuasion were theirs, too). Allied retired the Monogram name in 1953.

So are the bars over the brick wall left over from when there was a door there, or are they there to protect the air conditioner?

Allied Artists gave up producing for distributing and fled to New York City in 1964. The property became a rental lot once again. ColorVision bought “Pops” Lubin’s old property in 1967 but went bankrupt two years later. In the summer of 1970, the L.A. Times announced public television station KCET was buying the 3.5 acre lot for $800,000. Community Television of Southern California the station’s parent company, finalized its purchase of the property in 1971. KCET relocated from its original home at 1313 North Vine Street in October 1971. The new $3.2 million studio was dedicated November 18, 1971.

One last note about the studio: in 1979, an employee’s errant karate kick exposed behind a damaged wall an ornate screening room dating to the Charles Ray days. It’s now being used as a meeting room.

I lifted maybe 79% of the information in this post from KCET’s history page on its website. Go to it for a lot of lot history along with photos of the property through the years. I emailed them to find out who assembled the article so I could give him or her an extra thanks, but I didn’t hear back. (Update: As I expected, the piece was written by Marc Wanamaker. Thanks, Marc.)

The Vista Theater close by.

Oh. And when you swing by HCM No. 198, make sure you visit the old Vista Theater at 4473 Sunset Drive nearby. Designed by Lewis A. Smith, it opened as Bard’s Hollywood Theater in October 1923 on the site of the filming of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance.

Sources:

Knapp, Dan “Allied Artists Studio Purchased by KCET” The Los Angeles Times; Jul 27, 1970, p. D14

“Koch, Sharon Ray “Fete Hails New Home of KCET” The Los Angeles Times; Nov 17, 1970, p. G1

“$3.2 Million Studio Dedicated by KCET-TV” The Los Angeles Times; Nov 19, 19171, p. A26

Turpin, Dick “KCET Will Build Administrative Plant” The Los Angeles Times; Aug 10, 1975, p. D1

Kaplan, Sam “Remnant of Old Hollywood” The Los Angeles Times; May 6, 1979, p. K1

Up next: David Familian Chapel of Temple Adat Ariel