17 St. James Park
PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES
BERKELEY SQUARE WILSHIRE BOULEVARD FREMONT PLACE
WINDSOR SQUARE WESTMORELAND PLACE
PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES
BERKELEY SQUARE WILSHIRE BOULEVARD FREMONT PLACE
WINDSOR SQUARE WESTMORELAND PLACE
FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK HERE
ONCE THE COUNTRY'S ECONOMY ADJUSTED to peace after World War I and made it through a postwar slump, signs of the eclipse of the genteel West Adams district and its grand, emblematic single-family houses began to appear in earnest. With newer tracts of expansive lots having opened to the west out on Wilshire Boulevard even before the war (among them Windsor Square and Fremont Place, both inaugurated in 1911) and the emergence of the even more westerly Beverly Hills, the denser neighborhoods flanking Adams Street (as the boulevard was then designated) began to seem cramped, the houses dated and drafty. While some old Angelenos would cling to the old district for decades to come, some of their number even building the occasional new house, the pragmatic began to understand that Los Angeles's phenomenal growth was going to resume and redouble and that their old, expensive-to-maintain barns could be exploited financially by cutting them up into flats, or by them being demolished and replaced with apartment buildings. What were originally two-family buildings at 17 St. James Park on the east half of its lot and its twin facing west toward Scarff Street, built together in 1921, were actually improvements of lots apparently unoccupied since the 1887 inception of the Park. (It should be noted that they were also not the first to be built within the immediate area; the Mayfair and the St. Lawrence had a half-block to the south had gone up 15 years before.) The fortunes of St. James Park would more or less hold during the '20s until a precipitous decline came with the Depression, when what money was left followed the unsentimental to the newer, more modern Los Angeles neighborhoods that had now been platted as far the Pacific.
While little is known about him, one George Wuster was the developer of the parcel made up of the St. James Park Tract's Lot 31 and the southerly half of its Lot 30; he was issued building permits for both 17 St. James Park and 2336 Scarff Street on September 13, 1921. Local contractor John J. Riddell was the designer and builder. Now each accommodating four families, the buildings are among the few survivors of old St. James Park, apparently popular with students and faculty of nearby U.S.C.—long the saving grace of West Adams—in the same way that the Park had been supported since at least the '20s when fraternities and sororities first began to occupy its original houses.
Illustrations: Private Collection; Sanborn Maps
