tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19760925090869051182024-03-05T23:38:45.837-05:00ST. JAMES PARK Historic Los AngelesTHE HEYDAY AND THE REMNANTS OF A WEST ADAMS ENCLAVEUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-73189697014766606642015-08-15T12:51:00.001-04:002021-03-30T14:42:27.872-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">Introduction and Contents</b></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/">BERKELEY SQUARE</a> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a> <a href="http://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/">ADAMS BOULEVARD</a></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/">FREMONT PLACE</a> </span><a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a><br />
<a href="https://hancockparklosangeles.blogspot.com/">HANCOCK PARK</a> <a href="http://www.windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://losangeleshistory.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-family: verdana;">HISTORIC LOS ANGELES</span></a></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">W</span>HILE NOT SURPRISING in a metropolis as far-flung as Los Angeles, the city's West Adams district is at best a dim entity to much of its populace—indeed, if known, it seems to be an embarrassing artifact, almost malevolent in its antiquity. Now somewhere near the lower end of the continuum between a poor cousin with bad teeth and a richer one from back East who prefers to keep her original chins and dress like a prison matron, West Adams is at odds with a certain self-conscious civic imperative demanding gaudy, ever-forward momentum. Walled off 50 years ago by freeways, resurgent only by fits and starts, the district, still home to the University of Southern California after 132 years, can nevertheless be found to speak in the hushed tones of dispossessed gentility. Mercifully, Chester Place, its signature gated street, was saved by the oily Dohenys and remains to this day. Genteel by L.A. standards, the Dohenys possessed the power to bend the path of the Harbor Freeway when it threatened to plow through their domain in the late 1940s. This power was part of the deep need of the matriarch to control her environment, a bent that would be the saving grace of the compound that is now Mount St. Mary's College. In bequeathing Chester Place to the school, Estelle Doheny—a telephone operator who rose to be a countess if only of the papal kind—gave West Adams a centerpiece that remains to suggest the once salubrious streetscape of its adjacent, threadbare older sibling, St. James Park.</span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z5iNEa_LLMA/Trc1tdCNbyI/AAAAAAAACRw/jV2-4-Ok9XE/s340/sjpheraldadbordersrev3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><img border="0" height="272" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-z5iNEa_LLMA/Trc1tdCNbyI/AAAAAAAACRw/jV2-4-Ok9XE/s320/sjpheraldadbordersrev3.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><b><i>Los Angeles Herald,</i> December 3, 1888</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">The dusty outpost of Los Angeles was already rich enough in promise to lure Americans on an uncomfortable ride west even before the railroad boom of the 1880s, but once competitive train fares from Kansas City reached $1.00 in 1887, scores of developers went into high gear to accommodate a deluge. The land dealings had begun earlier with, among others, Henry Hancock, a New Hampshire lawyer who had been hired to survey the young city of Los Angeles in 1853 and who had acquired a 35-acre tract, the southerly and easterly boundaries of which were Adams and Figueroa, respectively, in 1855. (Hancock's name would mark a neighborhood to which many West Adams families would later move.) New Jerseyan Nathan Vail bought part of Hancock's acreage in 1876, nine years on selling the tract and the house he had built on it to Charles Silent, a native of Germany and former federal judge in the Arizona Territory with whom Vail had various real estate dealings in the land frenzy of the mid 1880s. (One of their schemes may account for Chester Place's still-extant iron-and-stone Adams Street gates, built well before that subdivision opened in late 1898 and at odds with the simple wooden farmhouse Vail had built 20 years before.) Soon after buying Vail's property, Silent was persuaded to part with the western half of his holdings by wily investors <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/06/10-st.html">George Wilson King</a>, Frederick Harkness, and John Downey Harvey, nephew of former California governor John G. Downey. The trio went after the genteel set attracted to the more bucolic suburban reaches south of downtown that were opening up as the horsecars and the zanjas—the water-supply ditches tapping the Los Angeles River—were extended in this direction; improvements to their St. James Park subdivision began in 1887. Lots began to be offered that fall; the development opened officially the next year, centered on the small square of a new private residential park of the same name. St. James Park was advertised as "the most elegant location for private residences in the city." While typical of the commodious Victorians being built elsewhere in Los Angeles at the time, projects were only initiated at a slow pace, hampered by a late '80s housing bust and then the Panic of 1893. In a plan seemingly designed to eliminate their responsibility for the improvement and maintenance of the central greensward and cleverly shifting it to others, the developers, all the while keeping up the buzz of the tract's exclusivity, signed the square over to the city in a quit-claim transaction in 1891. Falling right into King, Harkness, and Harvey's scheme, the parks department remade the space into a lush garden with curving paths and arroyo stone features—now open to the public but of much more advantage to the homeowners whose properties surrounded it.</span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">As economic conditions improved in the '90s, Judge Silent, observing the revived activity in St. James Park from next door, decided in 1899 to move his house out of the path of his driveway, and, utilizing the grand gates at Adams Street built in the prior decade, extend the lane north to 23rd Street. This lane became Chester Place, named for one of Silent's sons; one source has it that St. James Park was similarly named for another of Silent's sons, though it seems likely that the son-inspired naming of St. James Park has been confused with Chester Place, as biographies of the judge do not include a son named James. More likely the name was bestowed on the park and the development just because it sounded dignified and redolent of aristocratic London precincts. To quote the <i>Los Angeles Herald</i> of September 4, 1887, on the subject: "Our readers will remember the beautiful St. James Park in London.... It is the intention of the owners of the delightful square in our good city of the Queen of the Angeles to reproduce, under fair skies and more lofty surroundings, this <i>chef d'oeuvre</i> of European landscape beauty."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Early on, St. James Park was a frequent destination of tourist excursions from</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">downtown </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Los Angeles. The name may have had a stately English air, but</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">the lamps added a </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Continental touch: Seen here is one of several</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">installed </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">when the Park was first </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">laid out. Their stone</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">bases were inscribed "18 ST. JAMES PARK 87."</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">While not completely vaporized as was West Adams's Berkeley Square two miles to its west, St. James Park today contains only one major intact house among the 15-odd that once surrounded the square. Here, as next door in Chester Place and just a bit later in Berkeley Square, lived scions, burghers, society matrons, and even, no doubt rankling the mere Papal Countess Doheny, an actual German baroness: high-toned Angelenos no doubt happy not to be subject to the dictates of Estelle Doheny in her fiefdom one street over. In any case, it is hardly arguable that without the civic vision and energy of the erstwhile denizens of the ancient private streets of West Adams, including the Dohenys, there would be, for better or worse, no modern Los Angeles—and no newer residential heights to the north and west from which to look down on its faded precincts. In due course will come the stories of the houses and the lives, and of the development and the demise, of St. James Park.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><img alt="Photo:" height="400" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/BtEE6cWhjKVwx1oOypFlJc4YyebLnl64BYpf8THI6O5haNx-tmFYCp0-0d2RTxzvfc7P1vJyMEKPLik=w1366-h768-rw-no" width="371" /></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">Set your GPS: The location of St. James Park</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">1 St. James Park: The Mercer / Wagar / Gates House</span></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/08/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">3 St. James Park: The Eugene Payson Clark House</span></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/07/please-visit-our-companion-histories_31.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">9 St. James Park: The Braly / Woolwine / Eli P. Clark House</span></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/07/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">10 St. James Park: The George Wilson King House</span></div>
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<img alt="Photo:" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXYw1UuJ33ynrII1KLkUNbjO5ylLce3N8uuPT45k0_Uq98jcSmZcpJ5LQpBeFIk4L3ag8l_Ms4Z-9wVjA1-a17cMgBba7i39e6vjLSuFUQ69pmImvJqBhf2J-4ndwXyg7nmrA8T49UI971/w1024-h576-rw-no/" width="400" /><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">12 St. James Park: The Day / Meyler / Cheap House</span></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories_15.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><img alt="Photo:" height="392" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_j_MSPY6M7b6jbeQOFn1O-gVTezPDXS9FiuzqqxRqULXpVKhlqx1bIj2YyIHM5a64aHIZzB8bbHdz2Y=w1366-h768-rw-no" width="400" /></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">13 St. James Park</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">17 St. James Park</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">19 St. James Park: The Creighton Houses</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><img alt="Photo:" height="281" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/BbNVQiYyp3hqxNKoNn91zAgatkA1rV0JC8dhq8-C5hn-xV6H0rBtzaf089WhPJ5nwZXqeWEYU4-OLjE=w1024-h576-rw-no" width="400" /></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">20 St. James Park: The Von Zimmerman / Perry / Keller House</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">24 St. James Park: The Major H. M. Russell House</span></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/03/26-st.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/02/32-st.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/05/34-st.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/09/please-see-our-companion-histories.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/01/44-st.html"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: xx-small;">CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY</span></a></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Illustrations: <a href="http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor/socal1.html">A Visit to Old Los Angeles</a>; <a href="http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=cl&cl=CL1.LAH&e=-------en--20--1--txt-IN-----" style="font-style: italic;">Los Angeles Herald</a>; <a href="http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search/controller/simplesearch.htm">USCDL</a>;</span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">others credited in individual posts </span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-9812657033947939882015-08-07T19:51:00.000-04:002017-03-22T09:53:37.625-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">Set your GPS: The location of</b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a> </span><a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FREMONT PLACE</a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a> <a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/">HERE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>S WITH MANY EXCLUSIVE REAL ESTATE developments in Los Angeles, there have always been those nearby that have hitched their wagons to the originals—think of the phrase "Beverly Hills adjacent" in some offerings of houses actually in West Hollywood, for instance—and St. James Park was no exception. The broader area to the park's north and west were often promoted as being "in" St. James Park, including properties above 23rd Street and in the Ellis Tract west of Scarff Street on the map above. Perhaps because St. James Park was older than it neighbor, Chester Place, and not dominated by one family as was that Doheny stronghold, its air of preeminence was greater. (Borrowed prestige was also now combined, true of <a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">Berkeley Square</a>, among other West Adams neighborhoods.) For our purposes here, however, we will confine ourselves to those residences—15 houses and two genteel, now-combined apartments buildings—that, by our powers of blog authorship, we deem the addresses claiming a legitimate St. James Park imprimatur. "St. James Park," we so decree, is within the polygon, boldly numbered, centered on the actual open space of the same name, and outlined in red on the map above. Just below is a composite of Sanborn insurance maps that further display the buildings we are covering.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You will notice that "St. James Park" comprises not just its central square and the roadways on its west and north sides but also the street between Adams Boulevard (née Adams Street) and 23rd, as well as the divided east-west roadway—originally designated as part of West 25th Street—between Chester Place and Scarff Street. As the rapacious Dohenys acquired as many of the original Chester Places lots as they could, they also bought more property along 25th/St. James Park and annexed it into their domain. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Gates were placed approximately 225 feet to the east of the north-south St. James Park roadway leading from Adams; by the spring of 1902, the east-west street had been divided between the two developments, underscoring their rivalry for social renown. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(To be noted is that one house built before the gating, the 1888 Victorian extravaganza of Walter Scott Newhall that many decades later became, in an art director's rendering, the home of television's </span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="https://21chesterplace.com/house-history/">The Addams Family</a>, </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">had its address changed at this time from 735 West 25th Street to 21 Chester Place.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In later years, the roadway leading from Adams would be designated St. James Place. The streets surrounding the park itself were later identified in city directories as, oddly, St. James Park South, and the east-west street, St. James Park West. Today, the roadway at the east side of the park and all of its houses are gone, replaced by buildings of the Frank D. Lanterman High School. All that remains of the original architectural ensemble of St. James Park are the storied 1900 Stearns-Dockweiler house at <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html">#27</a>; <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/05/13-st.html">#13</a>; <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/05/17-st.html">#17</a>; <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/05/19-st.html">#19</a>; and <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/01/44-st.html">#44</a>, the now-combined structures of the two original apartment buildings at Scarff Street.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: <a href="http://www.historicmapworks.com/">Historic Map Works</a>; </span><a href="http://proquest.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Proquest</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">; </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Google Street View</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-18662995466176980612015-08-01T14:41:00.000-04:002020-01-27T21:34:10.573-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">1 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a> </span><a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FREMONT PLACE</a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a> <a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>s would many of the lots that would constitute St. James Park in its maturity, that of #1 remained empty for many years after Messrs. King, Harvey, and Harkness established their subdivision in 1887. While in the long run the men would prosper, their timing in laying out West Adams's most exclusive district was not good—within months, the Los Angeles housing boom spurred by the competition of the transcontinental railroads into the city had gone bust. There was relatively little real estate activity through the '90s as bust gave way to the Panic of 1893. Once conditions improved, lots once again moved, resulting in some impressive dwellings surrounding the Park once the new century came. Richard Mercer, noted in various records as a "capitalist"—that Gilded Age mark of honor—was himself prospering by the end of the '90s; he built our subject house on the prominent southwest corner of West 23rd Street and Park Grove Avenue in 1899</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Number 1 St. James Park, pictures of which remain elusive, only came by its address after it was built. While <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_08_archive.html">#9</a> was originally addressed 2327 Park Grove Avenue, that house lay on lots 27 and 28 within the bounds of the original St. James Park tract; #1, on a lot measuring </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">75 by 169 feet </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">at the southwest corner of West 23rd and Park Grove was, like the lot of <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_31_archive.html">#3</a> built in 1916, part of the Ellis Tract Annex, whose parent lay just to the west and north. What did not come down in scale after the financial troubles of the '90s in terms of the houses of St. James Park was the original developers' hopes for a neighborhood of particular éclat: Even in its early sparseness and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">even prior to neighboring Chester Place's opening</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, a St. James Park address denoted one's having <i>arrived</i>. The developers of other tracts nearby were not shy about advertising their properties as being in the St. James Park neighborhood; eventually, at least two houses originally without Park addresses, #9 and #1, would change designations to feel the love. Within two years of completion, 2305 Park Grove Avenue became 1 St. James Park.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Foreshadowing a drift that would continue until the Pacific prevented Los Angeles from extending any farther, the center of gravity of the city's West Adams district would slide westward from Main Street after the turn of the century. Many families who once lived east of Figueroa would seek newer, less dense surroundings. St. James Park was part of what was being called West Los Angeles, a suburban district whose name was passed on in later years and supplanted by "West Adams" after its central, and finest, residential thoroughfare. The Richard Mercers were, as such early L.A. residencies went, practically old Angelenos, having come from the Nevada gold fields in 1883, with, presumably, a pile. Mercer first appeared in city directories in 1884, living at 147 South Olive Street. He moved south seven blocks within a few years, and then another five squares below that to <a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5-DWD8m7a7A/UCOz58Pk2AI/AAAAAAAAFck/1ucBNqirdMI/s720/Fullscreen%2520capture%2520892012%252085653%2520AM.bmp.jpg">314 West Pico Street</a> by the '90s.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>While Richard Mercer wasn't one of the famed Silver Kings, his success<br />
alongside them in the Nevada fields would afford he and his wife<br />
a top-drawer life in his adopted city of Los Angeles.</b> </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Richard Mercer was born in England in 1838. He appears to have come to America 17 years later, was naturalized in 1864, and eventually sought his fortune in them thar hills of the Comstock Lode. It is not entirely clear what his interests in actual mining were, but, of course, the actual treasure was not the only way to riches in the boomtown of Gold Hill, Nevada. To hedge his bets, Mercer became a major supplier there of groceries and provisions, wines and liquors, crockery and glassware and other house furnishings. His strategy of covering the bases in case he didn't strike it rich underground paid off: </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Richard Mercer would arrive in Los Angeles</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> not as a miner or merchant but as a holder of the butchest occupational title a man could have in late-19th-century urban America: </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">capitalist</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. In November 1869 he had married Mabel Louise Vanfossen in Gold Hill; she'd found her way to Nevada from California or Virginia, depending on the census year and enumerator. The couple had three children, none of whom survived childhood. Sad as this might have been, it appears to have left the Mercers ample time to pursue a vigorous social life: Over the next 25 years, they would prove themselves indefatigable partygivers and -goers, with dozens and dozens of appearances in the social columns of the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Times</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> and the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Herald</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. Richard Mercer </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">became a real estate investor in Los Angeles and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">helped start the Western Lumber Company in 1888; with his fortune made before arriving, he did not seek to become a builder of the city in quite the vein of, say, <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_08_archive.html">Eli P. Clark</a>, whom he counted as a friend and neighbor. But the Mercers were certainly accepted into the higher reaches of local capital-<i>S</i> Society. Throughout the '90s they were frequently counted at parties with the likes of the I. N. Van Nuyses, the William May Garlands, and the Walter Lindleys, as well as among the biggest names of St. James Park, Chester Place, and Adams Street—the Walter Newhalls, the Eli and the J. Ross Clarks, the Richard Days, and the William Hayes Perrys and Charles Modini-Woodses. Augusts were spent with many of these major L.A. players at the Metropole on Catalina. No doubt Mercer's friendships among them alerted him to the charms of St. James Park. Louise would certainly have heard about the subdivision's late-'90s revival at the many card parties she was part of—judging by the breathless reports of her social activities in the papers, the girl certainly seems always to have been up for the chance to shout "Gin!"...or whatever one shouts when triumphant at euchre or whist, games of fashion circa 1900. In 1898 the Mercers left Pico Street, an area becoming increasingly commercial, and took up residence at the Hotel Lincoln on Hill Street while they contemplated their next move. Before long, the couple purchased </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Lot G in the Ellis Tract Annex. While technically not part of the original St. James Park tract, it was within one of its city squares and within a few hundred feet of the park itself. Lot G was certainly</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> poised to bask in the revived cachet of the 1887 development, which may have mitigated its perhaps not being the quietest lot the Mercers could have chosen. The Los Angeles Railway's University line ran along 23rd Street, and the Marlborough School for Girls was immediately </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">to its west at 865 West 23rd </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">on the Ellis Tract Annex's Lot A. (The school </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">had been housed in the old Marlborough Hotel—from which it derived its name—since 1889, and would remain on the southeast corner of 23rd and Scarff until 1916, when it moved to Rossmore and Third, where it still is today.)</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Richard Mercer might have made something of a bundle off the Comstock Lode, but once in<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Los Angeles Herald</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> of September 29, 1899, reported that "Mrs. Mabel L. Mercer" had just let a $3,000 contract for a two-story, 8-room frame residence on the "south side of 23rd Street, near Park Grove Avenue." Even in a time when women couldn't vote, it was not uncommon for a well-off couple to put a house in the wife's name or for her to maintain separate funds. The new house was completed by the spring of 1900, and the entertainments began almost immediately. More whist, more euchre, more hobnobbing with <i>le toute</i>-Los Angeles, who'd made the West Adams Street corridor its new domain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Perhaps the grinding of the Yellow Cars along 23rd Street and the screeching of the young ladies next door did finally prove to be too much for the Mercers; or perhaps Richard, still active in business despite nearing 70, hadn't lost his sense of when to buy and when to sell. At any rate, the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Times</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> reported on March 21, 1906, that, in exchange for $11,000, the Mercers had recently sold 1 St. James Park to a doctor newly arrived in Los Angeles from Ohio. Richard and Louise moved to </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Colegrove</span>—<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">now the southern part of Hollywood—to contemplate their next move. This came two years later when the<i> Herald </i>r</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">eported on </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">August 23, 1908, that a permit had been issued for a two-story, eight-room, $5,200 house—no smaller than #1—to be built at 987 South Manhattan Place in the new </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Country Club Heights tract 2½ miles northwest of St. James Park. Still active in real estate even in his 70s, it seems that Mercer may have built houses on spec, occupying them himself until he found a buyer. After living on Manhattan Place for less than a year, he and Louise moved to the Fremont Hotel on Bunker Hill. Mercer helped capitalize a new firm, the Huber Realty Company, in 1910; by 1912 he and his wife were living in a new house back in Country Club Heights at 1001 South Gramercy Place. This time they stayed put for a while—at least until 1921. The exact dates of the Mercers' deaths remain elusive, but both were definitely dead by October 1925 when the widow Louise's will was being contested by a niece.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Dr. Charles Price Wagar</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">W</span>hen a house is remembered by its name, it is usually by that of its longest-term or most interesting tenants, who take precedence even over the builder. By rights on both counts, then, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">1 St. James Park should be called the Wagar house. Dr. Charles Price Wagar was born in Cleveland on September 23, 1852, and spent the first 53 years of his life in his home state. In adulthood he pursued </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">advertising and then </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">journalism, establishing <i>Wagar's Official Railway Guide</i> in 1881. After marrying Theresa Marie Obermiller of Tiffin, Ohio, in 1883, perhaps at her urging, he entered the Northwestern Ohio Medical College, becoming prominent </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">in short order </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">in his new field of allopathy. Settling in Toledo, he managed to combine medicine with his love of words by continuing his railway guide and adding <i>The Medical and Surgical Reporter: A Monthly Journal </i>to his publishing efforts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Theresa Wagar came from a most interesting family. Her father, Johann Meinrad Obermiller, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">emigrated from Austria in 1848 and opened a medical practice in Seneca County, Ohio. Theresa's younger sister, Effie Barbara Obermiller, was also a doctor—no doubt father and daughter were inspirations to their new in-law Charles Wagar. Mrs. Obermiller, née Mary Anna Bork, was described as "artistically inclined"; so was the Obermillers' son Philip, who died at 28. Theresa's older sister Marie Louise became a painter of some note. Theresa and Charles Wagar</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> had four children, though only two daughters survived infancy. An unnamed child apparently died at birth; twins Mortimer and Marie Louise were born in 1890, though Mortimer didn't survive the year; Jessie was born in 1893. It is not known why the family decided to leave the bosom of Obermillers and Wagars—it could have been that it was all a little too bosomy, it could have been for reasons of the delicate health of Charles or Jessie or both, or it could have been simply to get away from the slush. But in 1905, the Wagars left for the coast. Their letters of introduction must have been impressive. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">N</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ot only did the family secure one of the nicest addresses in Los Angeles, but Charles was taken into the uber-poobah California Club forthwith. He also </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">immediately </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">became active in several other organizations where there actually were such things as grand poobahs and robes and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">secret handshakes, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">fezes and wizards, strange chants and manufactured claps of thunder. He kept his finger in journalism, taking on the managing editorship of the <i>California Medical and Surgical Reporter</i><i>. </i>There seems to have been no lengthy initiation period for the new Angeleno, which would turn out to be a good thing: After just two years in Los Angeles, Charles Wagar died on June 6, 1908. He was just 55.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Marlborough began on West 23rd Street in 1889, a stone's throw from the recently<br />
subdivided St. James Park. The school was early in the trend away from the<br />
already aging West Adams district when </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">27 years </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">later </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">it </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">moved</span></b></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Though she would spend periods of time back in Ohio </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">over the next 36 years</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, Theresa Wagar and her daughters carried on at #1 after Charles was buried at Rosedale. The Obermiller sisters had been sent to Paris for their educations—Theresa at age 13. The Wagar girls went to school locally at Marlborough, almost literally in their backyard </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">at the time</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. Marie was graduated in 1907; following Jessie's graduation and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">a European tour with her Aunt Louise, she</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> later </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">enrolled in the Institute Savaete in Munich</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. Sadly, and of unknown causes, Jessie died in Los Angeles at age 19 on February 2, 1913. And still Theresa and Marie stayed on at #1. There were trips back to Ohio for family reunions, but apparently, even without extended family nearby, the Wagar ladies chose to remain in Los Angeles. Their cultural pursuits—Theresa was considered a gifted pianist—earned them places in <i>Who's Who Among The Women of California;</i> their listing in the <i>Southwest Blue Book</i> indicates a degree of social popularity among the local bourgeoisie</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In terms of 1 St. James Park itself, change was to come that would be reflective of the growing population density of West Adams. The growth of Los Angeles during the '20s is legendary, with its population well more than doubling during the decade. The effect on aging, close-in neighborhoods such as St. James Park was negative in terms of many of the old houses. An increasing number were demolished and replaced by apartment buildings or themselves cut up into flats, creating a less attractive atmosphere. For property owners, however, this could be a boon. They could sell and then be set for moves to newer, more spacious neighborhoods to the north and west. Some St. James Park homeowners liked their surroundings enough to stay despite the nearby crowding or signs of urban decay exacerbated by the Depression. For a widow it would only be smart to seize the opportunity to capitalize on her real estate, and Theresa Wagar was lucky in that her lot was big enough to allow her to stay in her long-time home and at the same time develop half of it. Whether she sold the western half of her lot or built the apartment house at 845 West 23rd Street is not known, but either way it was apparently worth the loss of her garden to reap the profit or rents.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Louisa Obermiller, who came to live with her sister at</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b><i>Modern Peonies</i> while there.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Likely it was on a return trip to Ohio that Marie—at 33, seemingly set for spinsterhood—became engaged to 39-year-old grocer Frank Henry Rudd. The Chandler & Rudd Company was an old Cleveland firm that catered to the carriage trade, to which Rudd himself belonged. A particular feather in his cap was that one of his mother's brothers was John D. Rockefeller. Marie had hit the Ohio jackpot—it was Euclid Avenue all the way from now on. Even with her only child now having left Los Angeles, s</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ubdividing her property allowed </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Theresa to keep #1 and spend extended periods back east. She seems to have kept a house or apartment in Cleveland at various points in time, and there were years when she rented out #1, even when in Los Angeles. After Marie married, the house was occupied by Mrs. James Musselman, who was in residence into the early '30s. During that time, when in Los Angeles, Theresa lived in a bungalow at 1262 North Kenmore</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">; later, with her Ohio cousin Marie Bork, she was in Pasadena at 307 North Baldwin Avenue. By 1932 Theresa had returned to #1 on a more permanent basis. After years of study and work abroad, her sister Marie Louise, the now quite accomplished painter k</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">nown professionally as Louisa Obermiller, came to live at St. James Park. Her painting </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Modern Peonies,</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> seen just above, was done around this time. Louisa fell ill in the spring of 1940; she died at Queen of The Angels on October 4, 1940, at age 85. Theresa remained at #1 until her own death on January 18, 1944. She was 86. The sisters' remains were sent back to Toledo for burial in the Obermiller tomb. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he Wagars had owned 1 St. James Park for nearly 40 years by the time of Theresa's death. How long the house may have remained in the family is not known, but it appears to have once again become a rental property—during the war and after, housing was even scarcer than it had been in the '20s. One tenant in the late '40s was the playwright Eleanor Gates, who'd been living in the neighborhood for some time. Gates had had seven plays produced on Broadway, including an adaptation of her novel <i>The Poor Little Rich Girl; </i>later there were movie versions of it starring Mary Pickford and Shirley Temple. D</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">uring her l</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ong career s</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">produced many other books and newspaper and magazine articles </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">for such publications as </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Saturday Evening Post, </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Cosmopolitan</i> (before its focus on the hooker look), <i>The Delineator, Munsey's, The Century, </i>and<i> The Woman's Home Companion.</i> Her prolific output allowed her to indulge in her passion for horses. She was credited in her </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Los Angeles Times</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> obituary with having introduced Arabian horses to California; at one time she maintained a large ranch near Los Gatos, later sold to violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The 75-year-old Gates was hard at work on a number of projects when she died on March 7, 1951, after being struck by a car a few days before while alighting from a bus on Adams Boulevard two blocks from home.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">J</span>ust who might have owned and rented 1 St. James Park after Eleanor Gates's time is unclear. In the mid-'50s, Wiley Hines Lide was in residence; later, James F. Donely. E</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ventually broken into apartments and from 1961 listed in city directories as "Tremond House," Domingo Aguillen was among those living at #1 until its last directory appearance in July 1965. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">During the '60s, many Los Angeles neighborhoods that began as suburbs full of impressive houses were emptying of residents who had the resources to maintain them; t</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he wrecking balls began arriving in West Adams in force after the trauma of the Watts Riots, and the old Wagar house was among the casualties at St. James Park. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>2011: The southwest corner of West 23rd Street and what in 1899 was called Park Grove<br />
Avenue. When the first house was built here by the Richard Mercers that year, its<br />
address was 2905 Park Grove. Three years later, it became 1 St. James Park.<br />
The apartment building at right sits on the rear half of the original lot;<br />
the 1899 house was demolished for a parking lot in the late '60s.<br />
The Marlborough School was housed in the Marlborough<br />
Hotel at Scarff Street—where the tan building now<br />
stands at far right—from 1889 to 1916.</b></span></td><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Illustrations: <a href="http://proquest.com/">Proquest</a>; <a href="http://ancestry.com/">Ancestry</a>; </span><a href="http://www.askart.com/askart/o/louisa_obermiller/louisa_obermiller.aspx" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Ask Art</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">; </span><a href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Library of Congress</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">/</span><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7527289-the-poor-little-rich-girl" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Good Reads</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://latimes.com/">LAT</a>; </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Google Street View </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-45355511011353207302015-07-15T09:26:00.000-04:002016-11-25T13:50:42.260-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">3 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a> <a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/">FREMONT PLACE</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a> <a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">HERE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span>T SEEMS THAT ONLY THEIR FAMILY might have clear photographs of the Eugene Payson Clarks—perhaps one that might even contain a smile. Unlike some of their social peers, the Clarks appear to have adhered closely to the old dictum that one's picture must not be seen in the press more than once or twice during one's lifetime. There might be a newspaper announcement of one's birth, but only a trashy Hollywood movie star would include a picture of one's baby. An engagement or wedding portrait was acceptable, as was, if the newspaper editor deemed one important enough, a dignified shot to illustrate one's obituary. Occasionally one of your more exhibitionist fellow matrons might allow a <i>Times</i> photographer into a party, allowing him to snap away despite one's narrowed eyes—such seems to have been the case in Constance Clark's glare below at the 1959 Assembly Ball. S</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">imilarly, h</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">er husband, dutiful heir to his father Eli P. Clark's real estate interests, seems never to have been caught smiling in public.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Constance and Eugene Clark</span></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Interestingly, the very house the Clarks built at 3 St. James Park in 1916 has shown every sign of photographic reticence. This, despite its design having been attributed to the eminent Arthur Rolland Kelly, who had been employed by the equally formidable Letts and Janss families</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. There have been a few tantalizing bits of description of the Eugene Clark house; its motif seems to have been Colonial. It was one of the last houses, if not the last, to have been built in St. James Park, and it may have been a wedding present from Eugene's parents. Its lot was </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">one house from West 23rd Street, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">about 120 feet north of the parental domain at </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_08_archive.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#9</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Though there was a third Clark family household in later years designated #7—possibly a separate structure but more likely a duplexing of #9—the space between the homes of father and son appears to have been a private park for Clark children and grandchildren and one in which family celebrations were held.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Eugene Clark had merely to stroll to the corner of St. James and West 23rd Street—<br />
just beyond the streetcar above—to catch the Los Angeles<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Even if it wasn't proper while sitting for a studio portrait to mark the occasion, o</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ne hopes that Constance Byrne deigned to smile on her wedding day. She should have been beaming, capturing as she had a major prize of the neighborhood. Her father, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Canadian John J. Byrne, an assistant passenger traffic manager with the Santa Fe Railway, might have been more familiar with the Cheaps of <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-06-01T00:00:00-04:00&updated-max=2012-07-01T00:00:00-04:00&max-results=1">12 St. James Park</a>—Albert Cheap being also a Santa Fe man—than with the Clarks of #9. Certainly the Byrnes were nowhere near as rich as the Clarks. This is not to say that the Byrnes were from the wrong side of the tracks; they had been living in West Adams since their arrival in Los Angeles in the early '90s. After a decade at 2624 South Figueroa, the Byrnes moved around the corner to 630 West 28th Street, both houses</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> in prime West Adams and very near St. James Park</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. The self-made John J. Byrne had arrived, and now his daughter had hit the jackpot. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The house Constance Byrne Clark lived in from 1905 until her</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> marriage in </span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">1916 was at 630 West 28th Street, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">mere </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">blocks </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">from St. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">James Park. </span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> is now the site </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">of a parking lot on </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">U.S.C.'s fraternity row.</span></b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The Byrne-Clark nuptials took place on May 29, 1916; while 300 guests were in attendance at St. John's, the establishment Episcopal church just around the corner from the Byrne house, there was no reception due to the illness of the mother of the bride. The newlyweds set off on a summerlong honeymoon; their new house at #3 was under construction and they expected to move in by September 15. Constance Jr. arrived on August 27 of the next year; Joan turned up on May 20, 1920. The extended Clark family's near acre on St. James Park would provide the backdrop for a lush life for decades to come. Of course, we're talking about a lush life in a grand </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">bourgeois style, one without the gaudy excess and scandal of Hollywood that was beginning to symbolize Los Angeles in the '20s and that would draw still more new residents to the city. T</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he usual genteel parties favored by the Clarks' Los Angeles brethren took place with regularity i</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">n both family houses and in the garden between them. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The senior Clarks at </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_08_archive.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#9</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">—Eli and Lucy and Eugene's maiden sister Lucy Jr.—were able to enjoy watching Constance Jr. and Joan grow up next door. On weekday mornings Eli would walk up to meet Eugene in front of #3 and the two would catch a <b>U </b>line Yellow Car at the corner of 23rd Street to go to their offices downtown; once Eugene and Constance were settled on the Park, much of father and son's energy went into planning their crown jewel, the Subway Terminal Building, which would open in 1925 across from the family's Hotel Clark on Hill Street. It was not, however, all work for the boys. There were family trips to Europe and Mexico and to Hawaii, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">a common destination of prosperous Californians,</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> on the <i>City of Los Angeles</i> in the '20s, and on the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lurline</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> and </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mariposa</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> in the '30s.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">The "E P Clark" engraved on the cornerstone above refers to Eli P. Clark rather than his<br />son, Eugene P. Clark. After his father's death in 1931, Eugene became president of<br />the Subway Terminal Building; he was also president of the Clark and Sherman<br />Land Company, the Del Rey Company, the Main Street Company, and the<br />Building Owners' and Managers' Association. His vice-presidencies<br />included those of the Capitol Crude Oil Company and the Eli<br />P. Clark Company. He was part owner of the Hotel<br />Clark on Hill Street and the Central Building.</span></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Eugene and Constance's daughters were young ladies whose self-expression would be confined to the proprieties of the right schools, to the dainty rituals of subdeb- and debutantdom designed to preserve the complementary auras of virginity and male prerogative, and to matronly Junior League smartness. The girls attended Marlborough, the school for proper young ladies that had until 1916 been practically in the Clarks' backyard at 23rd and Scarff but was now (and still is) at Rossmore and Third. Later, Constance was sent east for a time to Ethel Walker's; she was graduated from the Katharine Branson School in Marin County before going east once again, this time to matriculate at the Garland </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">School of Homemaking in Boston,</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;"> where, presumably, the art of laundering little white gloves was included in the curriculum. Joan was apparently disinclined to venture far from Los Angeles, moving from Marlborough to the Carl Curtis School before attending Pomona College. While the Clarks were quietly very rich, if not as rich as other unrelated Los Angeles Clarks in the neighborhood, they seem to have been quite content in their provincial bubble. T</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">he family compound remained intact after t</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">he death of patriarch Eli in 1931, with the Lucys remaining at #9 and Eugene, Constance, and the girls at #3. A record of Arthur Rolland Kelly's projects indicates that he was recalled to #3 in 1934 for remodeling. The "Beau Peep Whispers" column of the <i>Times</i> described this as being done "to accommodate the family comfortably and artistically," though future family debuts and weddings were perhaps also being considered. Constance Jr. was feted in these ways in due course, and the ritual showcasing of maidens worked in her case: By the spring of 1940 she was engaged to proper Pasadenan John Laurie Martin, three years her senior, a descendant of old New York families and a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Law. The wedding was on September 18 in the family garden, with the bride presented </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">virginally </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">in something arcane called marquisette and finger-tip tulle. Joan was her sister's only attendant; the Reverend George Davidson of St. John's officiated. Thirteen months later son and heir Eugene Clark Martin arrived. Buttons busted from West Adams to Pasadena. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Smiles seem to have been doled out sparingly in the Clark family: <br />
Constance Anne Clark's formal wedding portrait appeared in <br />
the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> on September 19, 1940.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The next family wedding was a low-key wartime affair in the chapel of St. John's on February 15, 1943, in which Joan married Trude Clark Taylor, who'd grown up in Bear River City, Utah, and attended Utah State. He was in Los Angeles working for Northrop; after his service in the Pacific theater he would receive an engineering degree from UCLA and an MBA from Harvard, followed by a long and distinguished career in the electronics and computer industries—a man of whom both Eli and Eugene would have been extremely proud. Joan and Trude lived in the Pasadena area for most of their lives; they had three children and 63 years together before she died on August 16, 2006; Trude followed on February 21, 2008.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Constance and John Martin had a rockier road of matrimony. After his war service, the couple resumed married life and had a daughter, Mary. They also increased the Clark presence on St. James Park by moving into #3 with Eugene and Constance. The house was further remodeled to incorporate a separate residence for the Martins: Telephone directories and social lists into the '50s gave this new St. James Park address as #3½. Southfork living is not for everyone, and it can be especially tedious for in-laws. The <i>Times</i>'s latest social-gossip diva James Copp began to report odd bits regarding John Martin, whom he seems not to have liked, in his "Skylarking" column, including mentions of the petroleum lawyer laughing at his own jokes. In late 1953 Copp quoted Martin on his definition of marriage: "It's that point in time when the neuroses of two neurotics are in harmony." With that kind of harmony it is perhaps not surprising that the Martins were kaput by the next year. By 1955 they had moved out of #3½ and were living apart though not far from one another, perhaps for the sake of the children, in the Westlake district. John remarried in short order—one imagines his ex-mother-in-law's raised eyebrows—but he died suddenly in Washington, D.C., on December 28, 1957. Despite the divorce, his death was no doubt difficult, at least for his children, coming as it was on the heels of Eugene's fatal heart attack six months before—he'd died at home at #3 on June 27. The Clark presence on St. James Park, already having lasted well past the prime of West Adams, was drawing to a close.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>The Hotel Clark was opened in 1914 as the family transitioned from rail to stationary<br />investments. After its Clark ownership and with the long decline of both rail mass<br />transit and of downtown Los Angeles, the building became practically derelict.<br />The government of the People's Republic of China bought it in the 1980s,<br />trying unsuccessfully to create a business and cultural center. But<br />with new owners (and, interestingly, with the return of rail</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">history, as the Hotel Clark</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span></b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Eugene had succeeded his father as a director of the Citizen's National Bank in 1931, though this was only a small part of his business life that included running the family interests in oil and real estate. His other directorships at the time of his death included those of the local Red Cross chapter and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Traffic Association, as well as of Rosedale Cemetery—though he would be buried, as were all Clarks, at Forest Lawn. A tribesman down the line, he was a member of the California and Bohemian clubs, to name just two. Constance Sr. was still listed at #3 in the 1963 <i>Southwest Blue Book,</i> published in late 1962, but nearly 60 years of Clarks on St. James Park were ending. After a long illness, she died in Los Angeles on December 11, 1969.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Constance Jr. married William D. Blanford in 1959 and later lived in Pacific Palisades. Despite neither side of her family having been in Los Angeles in its first hundred years, she seems to have always been fond of the ancestor-worshipping First Century Families, at whose luncheons she romanticized forebears with several other St. James Park members including <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-05-01T00:00:00-04:00&updated-max=2012-06-01T00:00:00-04:00&max-results=1">Dockweilers</a> and <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-06-01T00:00:00-04:00&updated-max=2012-07-01T00:00:00-04:00&max-results=1">Meylers</a>; she went off to Clark Valhalla herself on July 2, 2004.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Number 3 St. James Park had some life left in her yet: From 1964 to 1969, the Reverend J. A. Francis was in residence. The house was listed in the July 1973 city directory as the Christ the King Center. But soon, #3, now 50 years old, would give way to asphalt. Two mature palms remain to mark its front walk.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: <a href="http://proquest.com/">proquest.com</a>; </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://latimes.com/">LAT</a><i> </i></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">1, 5; </span><a href="http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/lary.htm#stats" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tom Wetzel</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> 2; </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adams-Images-America-Arcadia-Publishing/dp/0738559202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343680726&sr=8-1&keywords=west+adams"><i>Images of America: West Adams</i></a> 3; <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/honeybeejen/3298214723/">PhotoJenInc</a> 4; </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/wavesjax/">Art of The Luggage Label</a> 6; Google Street View 7</span></div>
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">9 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">W</span>HILE IMBRICATED SHINGLES AND even a few turrets would appear on new American houses up to the turn of the 20th century, and on some Los Angeles houses even after the 1901 death of Victoriana's namesake, most new domestic construction was evolving along lines more horizontal than vertical. The American Colonial Revival style was sparked by its appearance at the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia; in rigidly symmetrical permutations, it would last for generations. T</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">horoughly modern when it was completed in 1894, free of Victorian excess, 9 St. James Park would have been ahead of the architectural curve even if it had been built on the East Coast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Untangling the addresses of some St. James Park houses has presented something of a Gordian knot. When West 25th Street was ultimately divided between the Park and adjacent Chester Place, there were periods when some addresses of the Place were claimed in official records as being those of the Park, though ultimately </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">these</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">were returned to the Doheny fiefdom. All of the intersecting roadways around the park itself have changed names over the years, some slightly, some to designations altogether different from the originals. All became variations on "St. James Park" as the neighborhood's prestige grew. Our subject house on the north side of the the park, for instance, was built as 2327 Park Grove Avenue, a street stretching from the park north to West 23rd Street and beyond to Washington Boulevard. The Park Grove block to 23rd was eventually designated St. James. In what must have driven postmen, census takers, and </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Blue Book</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> editors crazy, 2327 Park Grove seems to have been briefly both 9 Park Grove Avenue and 2327 St. James Park around the turn of the century, before the designation "9 St. James Park" was finally settled upon. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To the extent that the history of #9 has been considered over the years, it has been associated with the family of railroad man Eli P. Clark, without whom Los Angeles would undoubtedly have been slower off the mark in the new century. His story is well chronicled elsewhere; while we will give the gist in due course, it should in the meantime be noted that Clark did not build #9, as some, possibly due to its modernity—appearing more 1904 than 1894—have assumed. The knot of ownership involves two other noted builders of Los Angeles, the more noted of these being banker John Hyde Braly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">John Hyde Braly's biography will be related as we visit his other Park property at #38, but he did in fact build what became known as the Clark house at #9. Braly began assembling his first Park holding in the summer of 1892, acquiring the initial land from J. Downey Harvey and George W. King, the tract's developers. It could be that the Panic of 1893 delayed Braly's plans; it wasn't until October of the following year that he acquired from Harvey and King more land to complete his 131-by-160-foot lot. No architect was cited in newspaper reports, but plans were being prepared at that time for a 10-room house expected to cost Braly $5,500. It seems curious that rather than face south onto the park itself, the house was built facing east and given a Park Grove Avenue address. While that decision was no doubt personal preference, it also contributes to aspects of the Park's hodgepodge development, in which enormous houses, such as the Baroness von Zimmerman's pile to be built across the street 10 years later, were built adjacent to considerably more humble frame structures (with Braly's 2327 Park Grove Avenue house somewhere in the architectural middle). Likely the country's financial vicissitudes of the '90s muddied more specific plans for Harvey and King's development scheme in terms of lots, addresses, and minimum building requirements.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Braly's tenure at 2327 was rather brief, though it seems that the wives and children of many Los Angeles capitalists of the time often had to endure their patriarchs' real estate whims. Settling too comfortably in what one's husband considered more of a commodity would have been a mistake. In the case of John Braly, more than a few years in a house seemed to bore him, or perhaps he was given to overextending himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Prior to port and industry, Terminal Island, situated between Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors, was more residential. While known as a home for Japanese Americans before the Second World War, in the late 19th century the former Rattlesnake Island was apparently something of a fashionable waterside resort alternative to Catalina for some. Braly owned a house there, as did his great friend and business partner William David Woolwine. (Woolwine's daughter, born on April 2, 1896, was named Martha Braly Woolwine after John Braly's wife.) Woolwine was born in Virginia on October 19, 1855; in 1873, he moved with his family to Nashville, where he began his career in the counting rooms of wholesale and manufacturing concerns. By 1886 he was in San Diego on the first leg of his California banking career. Moving to Los Angeles in 1894, he held a variety of hands-on positions as well as directorships with various banks. Woolwine's extended family, some of whom had followed him west, gained considerable Old Guard cred in 1900 when his nephew, future combative Los Angeles district attorney Thomas Lee Woolwine, married Alma, a daughter of Old Angeleno Samuel Calvert Foy. As with any sentient buck in the salad days of Southern California—depressions of the '90s be damned—real estate became a sideline. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For some reason, a deal was struck between friends, swapping Woolwine's Terminal Island residence for the Braly house on St. James Park. By 1900 the William David Woolwines had settled into 2327 Park Grove Avenue and the Bralys were stopping temporarily at the Van Nuys Hotel Annex downtown. I'm sure that the Braly and Woolwine wives and children didn't have to lift a finger, but </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">quel bore, </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">all this picking up and resettling!</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Not that there wasn't excitement during the Woolwine tenancy at #9: </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>From the <i>Los Angeles Sunday Times,</i> April 20, 1902</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Like Braly, William Woolwine was one to get itchy after a few years; this time, though, his next move seems to have been for reasons of ill health, which had recently forced him to curtail his business activities. The <i>Los Angeles Times</i> of October 16, 1904, reported the sale of 9 St. James Park to its third owners, a family who would be happy to stay awhile. Woolwine retreated to the nine-acre estate in Downey he'd bought from Baroness Rogniat, yet another of the the motley crew of European aristocrats, real or imagined, attracted to Southern California in its orange-grove years; Eli P. Clark and his family moved into #9 for a good long stay after some years nearby at 823 West 23rd Street.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">While the tiny enclave of St. James Park could claim more than its share of mucky mucks, perhaps the biggest muck was the visionary Eli P. Clark. A native of Iowa, that incubator state for California, Clark was born at Solon on November 11, 1847. After matriculating at Grinnell, he started west, pausing in southwest Missouri before crossing the plains to Arizona. It was in Prescott as merchant, lumber manufacturer, and postmaster that he came to know generals: In addition to territorial governor General John C. Fremont, he met Vermont-born General Moses Hazeltine Sherman, a Phoenix banker and street-railway developer and the man with whom he would one day share a Forest Lawn tomb. In the meantime, Clark married Sherman's sister Lucy Helen in Prescott on April 8, 1880. Eleven years later, General Sherman, who had left Arizona for Los Angeles in 1889, beckoned Clark to the Southland when he saw an opportunity to seize the future in the imperial sense that the character Noah Cross advocated in the movie <i>Chinatown. </i></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>From the mountains to the sea: Once tourists saw the sights along the<br />famous Balloon Route connecting downtown Los Angeles with the<br />Pacific, the dramatic sweep of the city came into focus. As<br />Clark and Sherman envisioned, many thousands of<br />spellbound visitors renounced the East and<br />became passionate Angelenos.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Rapid transit was the key to growth in any region, subject only to the pace of technological development. San Francisco-style cable railways were running in Los Angeles by 1885, followed by</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> some fledgling electric efforts, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">which were starts in relieving the horse of some of its burden. Moses Sherman's awareness of advances in electric traction on the East Coast coincided with the technical difficulties that local cable lines were experiencing, such as sand washing into the conduits. Clark arrived in Los Angeles in January 1891, moving quickly to acquire financing and franchises for various city horsecar and cable lines and electrifying them to give form to the Los Angeles Consolidated Electric Railway that Sherman, ever with his eye on the ball, had chartered in Phoenix in 1890. Soon after, Sherman and Clark inaugurated the region's first electric interurban line between Pasadena and Los Angeles. Through a dizzying array of acquisitions and and manipulations and reorganizations, by 1899 the local lines were part of Southern Pacific mogul Henry E. Huntington's "Yellow Car" Los Angeles Railway. Meanwhile, Sherman and Clark managed to hang on to their interurban operation, now called the Los Angeles–Pacific Railroad and stretching from Pasadena to Santa Monica and down the coast. This system would eventually come under Huntington's aegis as part of his "Red Car" Pacific Electric empire, but it was from the electric vision of brothers-in-law Sherman and Clark that the modern civilization of Southern California would spring. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Rapid transit attracted vast numbers of new residents and helped pull Los Angeles out of the economic doldrums of the '90s by greatly encouraging new investment in manufacturing, generations before freeways.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was not for </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">transportation in and of itself that Sherman and Clark wheeled and dealed. Railroading, especially the </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">short-distance</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> transport of passengers, was a business notoriously difficult to operate at a consistent profit. Railroading's value lay in its enhancement of the real estate investments the railroaders made. And invest Sherman and Clark did—West Hollywood was once called Sherman for its founder; similarly in the San Fernando Valley, the southern half of which was bought by Sherman when only he envisioned suburbs there, we find today Sherman Oaks and Sherman Way. While the two men would maintain interests in railroading, in their own Los Angeles–Pacific as well as for many years in Huntington's operations, land became their primary focus. But it seems that no land was quite as dear to Eli P. Clark as the lots composing his city fiefdom at 9 St. James Park. He and Lucy and many of their descendants would remain on the Park, in #9 as well as at other addresses, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">for decades.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Just turning 57 when he</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> m</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">oved to St. James Park, Eli P. Clark wasn't thinking about retirement, which seems never to have been in his bones. It would be another five years before he and his brother-in-law would divest themselves of the Los Angeles–Pacific to the Huntington interests, but soon after, Clark and Sherman's land empire—heretofore vast but less concrete, so to speak—gained a jewel in the new Hotel Clark, still standing downtown on Hill Street. Clark and Sherman understood better than anyone that once Southern California's rail transportation system was in place, to be shadowed and supplanted by the freeways of the future, it was to the owners of land to whom the riches would flow, via rails in terms of lot buyers but also via the waters. The Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens Valley would open in 1913, much encouraged by the fabled land barons of the San Fernando Valley at the southern end of the new water conduit. The Valley barons were encouraging the annexation of their holdings into the City of Los Angeles, which was accomplished in 1915. Adding water and civic identity was the icing on the land, much of which was already rewarding in terms of the oil underneath it. All of his success in no way caused Eli P. Clark to rest on his laurels. He went on to envision a subway system for Los Angeles, with its principal station on land he owned across the street from the Hotel Clark. It wouldn't be until 1925 that the Subway Terminal Building would be built, but it was the culmination of a lifetime of titanic Clark energy.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Not the cook: She was probably richer, but Lucy Sherman Clark was<br />obviously not out to compete with Theda Bara, who lived around<br />the corner at 649 West Adams Street in the late 1910s.<br />Especially after the Hollywood scandals of the early<br />'20s, "Old Guard" Los Angeles strove to keep<br />its distance from movie folk, even if its<br />own money was not exactly <i>vieux.</i> </b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the meantime, the Clark domestic front at 9 St. James Park was being tended to by Lucy. She and Eli had had four children by the time they left Prescott, the youngest of which, Eugene Payson Clark, was 14 when the family moved to the Park. His eldest sister, Lucy Mason Clark, was 23; she would never marry and would live with her parents at #9 for much of her life. Mary Sherman Clark was 21 on moving to the Park, and would marry Dr. Henry Owen Eversole in the garden at home in 1910. Katherine Tritle Clark was 19 when she moved to #9; like her sister, she was married there, to Wilfred Keefer Barnard in 1912. As with much of their socioeconomic peerage, there were frequent trips to Europe and Hawaii, but only when time could be found between numerous card parties, luncheons, dinners, and family celebrations of weddings and the eventual arrival of Eli and Lucy's six grandchildren. While the Eversoles and the Barnards would establish themselves in the Pasadena area, Eugene and his wife, née Constance Byrne, chose to remain closer to home after marrying at St. John's in 1916. They moved into a house built for them that year, with the new address of <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_31_archive.html">3 St. James Park</a>, right next door to his parents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">During the 1920s, as the population of Los Angeles County grew by 136 percent thanks in good measure to Eli P. Clark, life at 9 St. James Park was maintained at a steady pace. The card and tea parties and the receptions, none of which the family ever seemed to tire of, went on. There were summers spent abroad by various family members, though usually it was just the womenfolk who were interested in drinking nasty water at German spas or sightseeing for months at a time. Clark father and son kept noses to the grindstone to pay for it all, though it doesn't really appear that they needed to, not with oil gushing and land values soaring. Eli P. Clark was happiest working hard and living without ostentation. He walked a short block to catch the Los Angeles Railway's <b>U</b> line Yellow Car down to the office every morning.<b> </b>He maintained an office in the Subway Terminal building 10 floors above Pacific Electric Red Cars ferrying thousands of commuters in and out of downtown each day. He was feted with especially large birthday parties as he grew older, tes</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">taments to his popularity that </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">honored his efforts on behalf of the metropolis. Active to the last, he tended to business affairs alongside his son Eugene, attended various boards-of-directors meetings, and lunched with cronies at the California, among other of his clubs. His own companies were an octopus of land and oil interests: In addition to the Eli P. Clark Company, there were the Clark and Sherman Land Company, the Del Rey Company, the Main Street Company, the Capitol Creek Oil Company, and the Empire Oil Company. <i>Empire</i> seems to have always been the operative word, even if old Eli forsook a chauffered Packard for the streetcar to the end, which, six months after he and Lucy celebrated their 50th anniversary, did come on January 16, 1931, following a heart attack several days before. He was 83 years old.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>The measure of a man in ink: Eli P. Clark's 1,500-word obituary began with a picture<br /> above the fold on the front page of the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> on January 17, 1931.<br /> Similar tributes appeared in all of Southern California's dailies,<br />with national newspapers also taking note.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">While the worst years of the Depression seemed not to have affected the Clarks financially, there was sadness in addition to the demise of the great bull father. General Moses Hazeltine Sherman followed his brother-in-law to Forest Lawn following his death on September 9, 1932. Eli and Lucy's 21-year-old grandson Malcolm Clark Eversole was killed on September 10, 1933, when the car he was driving plunged down an embankment near the Mulholland Dam. Those prone to prurient thoughts might imagine that an emergency brake was knocked off its lock in the midst of Lovers' Lane gymnastics; at any rate, the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Times </i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ascribed to young Eversole heroic attempts to rescue the doomed damsel, a Miss Goeser, daughter of an </span><a href="http://www.berkeleysquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/2011/09/33-e-m-smith-house.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Emsco</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> executive, before he died.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Mother and daughter Lucys lived on at #9 through the '30s, buoyed by the young daughters of Eugene and Constance living just next door. There were parties for the grandchildren when they left for boarding school in the East, parties when they came back for holidays; there were debutante rituals and there were proper marriages in the garden between the two Clark houses on the Park. Living to the ripe old age of 91, Lucy Sherman Clark died on June 10, 1942, at her daughter Katherine's house in Pasadena.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Despite the death of its matriarch, 9 St. James Park carried on. It seems that Henry and Mary Eversole decided to move into the parental home with Lucy Mason, now, 60, at least for the duration of the war, during which a house in town would have been more convenient than one in the northeastern suburbs. The Eversoles were later back in La Canada full-time, with Lucy sharing their listings there in the two area <i>Blue Book</i>s through 1956 in addition to her own at #9; </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the Eversole family, along with maiden aunt, were in Santa Barbara full-time by 1957. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Eugene died at #3 that year, and the extended Clark family made plans to vacate the last of their St. James Park holdings. Constance Clark was still listed at #3 in the 1963 <i>Southwest Blue Book,</i> published in late 1962, but nearly nearly 60 years of Clark presence on the Park had came to an end. She would die on December 11, 1969; in 1963 Henry Eversole Sr. died at home in Santa Barbara, as did Lucy Mason Clark on March 1, 1970. She was 88.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">John Ramirez was listed as living at the Braly/Woolwine/Clark house at 9 St. James Park in city directories from at least 1962 until at least July 1965; no listing for the house appeared in the next available issue, that of April 1967. Number nine is presumed to have been demolished, along with several other Park houses, around this time; from the old days, it was only the Dockweilers of </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_06_01_archive.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#27</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> who hung on.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Brothers-in-law from the heart forever:<br />Eli. P. Clark, his wife, née Lucy Helen Sherman, her<br />brother Moses, and his daughter Hazeltine are among the<br />extended Clark family at Forest Lawn. Below, Eli and<br />Moses, builders of Los Angeles, above ground.</b></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: <a href="http://yesjones.com/HGLA/index.html"><i>Homes and Gardens of the Pacific Coast</i></a> 1;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=INcEAAAAIAAJ"><i>Memory Pictures, An Autobiography</i></a> 2; <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Men_of_the_Pacific_Coast.html?id=I3wrJlNr02cC"><i>Men of The Pacific Coast</i></a> 3, 11;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://latimes.com/"><i>Los Angeles Times</i></a> 4, 8, 9; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=YMUUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA189&lpg=PA189&dq=los+angeles+from+mountains+to+sea+eli+p+clark&source=bl&ots=_X5hGtiXw9&sig=pPeIDFjIiRItQgKSUpVAG4WBlRM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=h9b9T66fDYjm6wHUsYD5Bg&ved=0CFIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=los%20angeles%20from%20mountains%20to%20sea%20eli%20p%20clark&f=false"><i>Los Angeles From The Mountains to The Sea</i></a> 5;</span><br />
<a href="http://www.dohenyllc.com/west-hollywood-2.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Doheny LLC</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> 6; </span><a href="http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search/controller/simplesearch.htm" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">USCDL</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> 7; </span><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/waltarrrrr/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Waltarrrr</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> 10 </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-68783868237562255052015-06-15T14:57:00.000-04:002018-06-02T11:28:30.178-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">10 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-03-01T00:00:00-05:00&updated-max=2012-04-01T00:00:00-04:00&max-results=1">HERE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>O WHOM SHOULD BE GIVEN the ultimate credit for having created St. James Park might depend on the obituary one reads. While John Downey Harvey seems to have been the primary moneybags—funding development of the Park while at the same time owing $100,000 to a </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">litigiously impatient </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">uncle, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">former California governor John G. Downey—</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the <i>Los Angeles Herald</i> of July 13, 1905, cites Frederick Harkness</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> in <i>his</i> obituary </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">as the man to whom "is given the credit of planning and arranging the present St. James Park." Tell that to George Wilson King, whose obituary 11 years later referred to him as "the man who laid out beautiful St. James Park." While</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Harvey, based in San Francisco, was all along more of a drop-in investor in terms of Southland real estate, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Harkness lived in Los Angeles and within the larger parameters of the Park, they appear, at any rate,</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> to have moved on from their association with the Park fairly early on. All in all i</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">t would therefore seem fair to deem King the King if not the Father of the Park. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">While it is often assumed, by Easterners at least, that everyone who crossed the country to settle in Los Angeles reached the city spent and in rags via freight car or dilapidated Studebaker, George Wilson King and his extended family were among the many thousands who arrived well-upholstered and highly accomplished. By no means ready to loll among the orange groves, these men, attuned as if by telepathy to the masculine romance of Manifest Destiny, proceeded to literally build Southern California once the transcontinental railroads extended their tracks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Perhaps it was the view west over the Ohio River from Wheeling, Virginia, where he was born on January 18, 1830, before the creation of West Virginia, that first inspired King to wander. He left for California via Panama in 1848, just another young man with gold on his mind. It seems that he might have been one of the lucky ones who made at least something of a packet; having done so, he returned east, drawn to the new challenge of the promising boomtown of Chicago. At some point King went into the wholesale grocery business there, meeting in his dealings his future brother-in-law (and another future Angeleno) Samuel K. Lindley. Through this alliance George met Samuel's sister Mary Lindley; the siblings' father Giles, late of Missouri (where Samuel and Mary were born), was prominent in politics in—and soon to become mayor of—LaSalle, Illinois, southwest of Chicago, where George married 18-year-old Mary on September 6, 1855. Likely it was King who brought to his new in-laws stories of the West, prompting Lindleys in some number to migrate to California over the next few decades and providing Los Angeles with some of its most distinguished citizens. Among these were Mary's cousins Dr. Walter Lindley, who would go on to organize the medical school at U.S.C. (the first in Southern California) and to co-found the California Hospital; his son, attorney Francis Haynes Lindley of <a href="http://www.berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/2011/06/15-albert-llewellyn-cheney-house.html">Berkeley Square</a>; and Philo L. Lindley, who was in partnership in the real estate business with his father, Samuel, Mary King's brother, who had also come to Los Angeles to live. In the meantime, the combination of personal and civic drive allowed expansion of King's grocery business from Chicago to St. Louis and then to New York, to which he moved with Mary and two of their eventual three daughters after the Civil War. Living at 131 East 60th Street and commuting to the tip of Manhattan, King prospered still further before retiring from business at the age of 51. Even with his Gold Rush stake now multiplied many times over and his social position in New York solidified, he hadn't forgotten his years in California. There was still another boomtown to conquer, this one back out in the Golden State—the snowless eden of the City of Angels. There, land was the gold, real estate the perfect retirement occupation: You didn't work for it, it worked for you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">King's first home in Los Angeles is unclear. Though he had likely arrived by 1883 when Walter Lindley was first listed in the city directory, King was by 1887 in residence at the Marlborough Hotel, which opened that January on West 23rd Street near the north side of St. James Park, the development of which was also </span>getting off the ground in 1887 in preparation for its official opening in 1888. (As for the Marlborough, General John C. Fremont also was in residence there in 1888. The hotel would fail after a year or so; by 1890 its building and name would be assumed by the private girls' school that is today in Hancock Park.) </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">King and his family moved down the street to </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">917 West 23rd Street—a house still standing—</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">in 1890 and remained there </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">until moving into #10 in the latter half of 1904. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Photographs of the new house have remained elusive; all we have to go on at present is a drawing seen in the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> on October 25, 1903, and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the footprint of the house as represented on early Sanborn fire insurance maps along with a </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Times</i> description of it being a </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">two-story, 10-room frame dwelling</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. It was of rectangular plan, longer on its lot than wide in urban rather than suburban fashion, with</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> a large round turret at its southwest corner. At this juncture in the Victorian age—technically now over—</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the turret was falling out of favor </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">in domestic architecture </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">in the rest of the country. But in the architectural time zone of Los Angeles, such appendages signaling affluence would remain popular for a few more years. The design of #10 was the work of the local partnership of Jasper N. Preston and Ira H. Seehorn; a building permit for it was issued in November 1903.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The continuation of the story of 10 St. James Park up to its demolition in 1967 will appear in due course.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: <a href="http://latimes.com/">LAT</a>; </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Private Collection; </span><a href="http://www.sanborn.com/sanborn-fire-insurance-maps/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Sanborn Maps</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-82219974455410877892015-06-01T13:09:00.000-04:002018-09-14T18:37:25.666-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">12 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">HERE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">R</span>ICHARD VINCENT DAY could be said to be the embodiment of Manifest Destiny: Born in southwestern Virginia on November 16, 1842, he moved west with his family to Iowa at the age of six. The Days were the first settlers of Decorah, in the northeastern corner of the state, and are credited with securing for the town its status as the seat of Winnesheik County. Decorah would become a family business—father and sons would deal in livestock and produce as well as in real estate. Most significantly, after the death of their father, the brothers would pragmatically become lumberman to provide the materials needed to put houses on the land they sold. Eventually there were offices of Day Brothers Lumber Company in cities as far-flung as Duluth, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon: All corners of America were building. Richard married one Decorah damsel (who died in 1877) and then another, Cordelia Noble, with whom he'd have three daughters. Although he would remain the titular head of Day Brothers until his death, along about the turn of the 20th century Richard decided to shake the Iowa slush off his boots and settle in his retirement under the sun and palms of Southern California. No doubt he'd seen many a Decorahan leave on the Union Pacific only to send back hand-tinted postcards of roses in January. That, and the fact that money has a way of driving its possessor toward where it can be spent—how much could the emporiums of Decorah offer his financially empowered wife and daughters in their small town? How much glamour could there be in Podunk? While for some the grail was in New York or Chicago, neither were very sunny: Naturally, the Days looked west. San Francisco was even by this time an insular society, but Los Angeles, though inevitably honing its hierarchy, remained more open, still with the orange-scented air of a resort. And it would be only the best of the best for the successful Richard V. Day and his girls: St. James Park in the West Adams district just south of downtown Los Angeles.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Mrs. Richard Vincent Day, upper right, and her three daughters:<br />clockwise, Gretchen, Virginia, and Kathryn.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">The brief residence of the Baroness von Zimmerman in St. James Park is the subject of <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/08/20-st.html">20 St. James Park</a>; suffice it to say here that this somewhat fickle woman—fickle in terms of her domestic arrangements, at least—made her mark on the Park architecturally, and, once done, left available the lot on which Richard V. Day would settle in Los Angeles. The grand turreted pile the baroness built in 1903 on her property (lots 22 through 25 on the east side of the Park), first addressed #16 and later #20, was sold in May 1905 to Watson Hill of Chicago, who in short order sold it to William H. Perry, whose St. James Park story will be told here in due course. It was during these transactions that lot #12 was separated from the baroness's original holdings and sold to Richard Day. The architect for the Von Zimmerman house was San Francisco–based Frederick K. Heinlein, who would also be the designer of the Day house. The employment of Heinlein by both the baroness and Day, with an interim owner of the property, is curious; o</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">ne source, however, suggests the unlikely possibility that the baroness, somehow shy of space in her six-bedroom palace next door, may have originally commissioned what became #12 to house her surplus artwork—and that perhaps the plans for such a private museum, though having little in common architecturally with the Victorianesque #20, came with the sale of #12's lot. Whatever the derivation of the plans for the Day house, another curiosity is that the resulting building appears to share some design cues </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">with the extant and well-known 1904 residence of his new son-in-law's father, Pomeroy W. Powers, at <a href="http://bigorangelandmarks.blogspot.com/2007/11/no-86-powers-house.html">1345 Alvarado Terrace</a>, though it was designed not by Heinlein but by Arthur L. Haley. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">At any rate, whether the baroness had plans to build something on the plot on which Richard Day eventually built his granite-faced house, building permits for a residence and barn at 12 St. James Park (on the southerly 45 feet of Lot 25 and the northerly 15 feet of Lot 24) were issued to Day on June 28, 1905. T</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">he result wasn't an especially pretty house, but rather something of a graceless box, in our estimation. Not that to have actually seen it might not have given a more favorable impression, and not that we don't wish it was still standing. It is, of course, a shame that #12 and most of its neighbors have disappeared, whatever their various architectural miscues might have been. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>January 3, 1909: Each day the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> was full of "fashionable functions."<br />Their sheer frequency must have been enough to drive an intelligent woman,<br />corseted in the role of provincial Society lady in a pre-suffrage era,<br />to reach for the sherry, if not the laudanum. Let's hope<br />someone at least spiked the punch.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Richard and Cordelia (Caddie to her intimates) Day were living at 2721 Portland Street, not far from the Park, when their daughter Virginia married John Raymond Powers on May 3, 1905, just before the family purchased their slice of the Von Zimmerman property. Once the new house was completed later in the year and the Days had moved in, the card and supper parties beloved by Caddie, Kathryn, and Gretchen resumed, some given together and some separately; in the natural order of things feminine and social, Kathryn's engagement to Los Angeles furniture manufacturer Royal DeWitt Bronson was announced in June 1907. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Two Day sisters as featured in the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> of May 15, 1910, and<br />June 25, 1907, respectively: Gretchen's long wait to be married<br />allowed her to accompany her parents on months-long<br />travels to Europe and westward around the world.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">The entertainments at #12 proceeded apace for some years. Virginia and Kathryn and their two families appear to have been close to the girls' parents, living within blocks of #12. A shadow of sadness crept over the family in the 1910s: Roy Bronson died suddenly of heart failure on June 5, 1916, leaving Kathryn and their two young daughters, Kathryn, 3, and Betty, not quite a year old. While the family was coping with the loss, Caddie, long active in the Friday Morning Club and various philanthropies, expired at home on November 29, 1916. Kathryn and her children moved into commodious #12, joining her father and Gretchen. There three generations lived together until July 29, 1919, when Richard Vincent Day died at home at the age of 76. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Gretchen appeared to be settling into spinsterhood by the time of her father's death, but it was perhaps his demise that freed her to announce to her sisters by wire from Portland her sudden marriage to an acquaintance, Lieutenant John Ross of Vancouver, B.C. By this time Kathryn had remarried, her new husband being divorced neckwear manufacturer Marion R. Gray, who moved into #12; it seems that the Bronsons and the Grays had known each other socially for some years. So many events in the life of #12 in just five years! But there would be still more comings and goings of Bekins vans: By the time the Grays moved </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">to Hollywood in 1922</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">, the Powerses had moved in to #12. Mr. Powers, however, soon flew the family coop. There was a divorce, and the Day tenure on the Square was becoming tenuous. Within a few years, the house was put on the market. Divorcée Virginia then lived with the Grays on Franklin Avenue when she wasn't traveling, and before long a new family was in residence at #12 St. James Park. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>lthough the faintest stirrings of </span><a href="http://www.berkeleysquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/04/word-on-maturation-of-west-adams-there.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;">decline</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"> were settling over West Adams, 12 St. James Park was not yet a candidate for being broken up into apartments. It would continue to be a home for top-drawer West Adamsites: The Robert Gephard Meylers, long of the neighborhood, would soon be in residence. If anything, the Meylers could be said to represent the history of West Adams, from a time when it included the area east of Figueroa, toward the old Main Street demarcation of east and west Los Angeles. While the Meyler line itself was not Old California, having only been in Los Angeles since the early 1890s, the Gephards added the bona fides to the family's heritage, as did the forebears of #12's new chatelaine, Helen Pendleton Jones Meyler.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Robert Meyler's father, though an Easterner, came to Southern California with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers two years after being graduated from West Point in 1887. He was charged with preparing the original surveys for improvements to the new harbor being developed for Los Angeles at San Pedro. James J. Meyler's affinity for the Southland included at least one of the proper young ladies to whom he, as an Army officer, would be introduced. During his tour of duty he married Frances Gephard at St. Paul's in downtown Los Angeles, with a reception afterward at the bride's home on Bunker Hill. The couple then followed Lieutenant Meyler's career in the Corps; their son Robert Gephard Meyler was born in Thomasville, Georgia, on March 5, 1894. Eventually the now Captain Meyler returned to California to construct the new breakwater at San Pedro (where Meyler Street is named for him) and to assist in the mining of San Francisco Bay during the Spanish-American War. It was on a trip home to Newark that he died of pneumonia in 1901. His widow and son took his body to Los Angeles for burial in Evergreen Cemetery and settled in West Adams, the successor high-toned neighborhood to Bunker Hill.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Depression chic: The ever stylish Mrs. Meyler, organizer of the Assembly<br />Ball that year, graced the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> of October 30, 1932.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">After his Los Angeles youth, Robert went east to Cornell, receiving his engineering degree in 1916. We do not know how long their courtship lasted, but his marriage to Helen Pendleton Jones of West Adams took place on November 8, 1917, at the bride's home at </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">801 West 28th Street, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">a few blocks from St. James Park. Owing to the groom's sudden call to war duty, the wedding was a quieter affair than </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">originally </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">planned. After the Armistice, resettled in Los Angeles, the Meylers lived first at 826 South Normandie and later at 1708 South Figueroa, just few blocks from the house in which Helen was born at South Grand and 20th Street in 1893.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Robert Meyler kept Los Angeles steamed. He was president of his firm<br />for nearly 40 years before retiring in 1962, coincident with<br />the end of his family's long tenure in West Adams.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Robert Gephard Meyler Jr. arrived on August 9, 1920, and Helen Evadne Meyler on February 11, 1923, around the time Robert Sr. was about to strike out on his own in business. Following a stint as a mechanical engineer with the Baker Iron Works, he formed the R. G. Meyler Corporation dealing in boilers and boiler accessories, including such mysteries as Jenkins valves, Penberthy injectors, Lonergan guages, and roto tube cleaners. Helen was a young mother preparing to establish her family in new quarters suitable for her own career outside of the house: Society Matron. This was a serious role in the urban haute bourgeoisie, even if emancipation had recently brought women the vote: Just as with men, the leaders of Society's distaff side were expected to raise money, though for charitable causes rather than to spend on furnishing a new house or buying a Marmon or producing entertainments. To her great credit Helen took the role seriously and unflinchingly throughout her entire life. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Society toils: Helen Meyler appeared in the <i>Times</i> a bit more than the<br /><i>de rigueur</i> three times. At left, the gavel is passed to her as the<br />new arbiter of Los Angeles debutantes in 1945. The vicious<br />rumors of virginal demoiselles being auctioned off with<br />a bang of this gavel have been denied. At right,<br />Helen and her daughter, Eve, pour tea at<br />12 St. James Park in support<br />of tennis in 1935.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">If you will excuse the pun—the Meylers were a <i>boilerplate</i> Los Angeles Society couple, right down to the © symbol. Robert peddled his boiler thingies by day, lunching at the California Club or the Athletic Club; Helen, over the years, involved herself with the Assembly Ball, the Patroness Committee of the Hollywood Bowl, the Navy Committee of the Pacific Southwest Tennis Tournament, and she headed up the Las Madrinas of Children's Hospital, which presented Los Angeles's best-bred debutantes at a charity ball each year. She produced teas and luncheons and dinner parties for friends and entertainments for the children—James Albert Meyler arrived between courses on June 15, 1928—at #12 or at the California, Athletic, or Beach clubs. Judging by the coverage in the <i>Times,</i> this girl had energy as well as a sense of duty to her provincial heritage—she was quoted in 1952 as boasting that she was sixth-generation Californian (they must have married awfully young in California in the old days). The Old Guard of Los Angeles did seem to appreciate her talents as a hostess with the mostess: The names at Meyler functions were invariably the oldest in the <i>Southwest Blue Book, </i>those of the owners of the old ranchos and those found on buildings and street signs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>The Meylers at home before attending<br />a 1948 Assembly ball. The dress...the corsage...that<br /><i>chair</i>.... Makes you want to throw it all out for a something,<br />say, <i>Eamesian,</i> doesn't it? Below: "Will the annual meeting of the Helen<br />Hokinson Society please come to order!" This is in actuality a gathering in<br />support of the Los Angeles Orphans' Home on August 1, 1951. Helen Meyler<br />is standing second from the right; by this time she had moved from<br />St. James Park to a house nearby on West Adams. Her<br />onetime closer neighbor, Julia Stearns Dockweiler of<br /><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html">27 St. James Park</a>, is seen at left.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Considering the effects of the Depression on housing on the heels of the pressure of explosive population growth in Los Angeles during the '20s, not to mention the lure of the newer, now more fashionable neighborhoods to the north and west, it is significant that when the Meylers left #12, it was merely to move around the corner. At some point in the mid-'30s, Helen's parents had acquired 745 West Adams Boulevard (upgraded in the '20s from mere "Street"), perhaps with the intention of housing their extended family; Albert Carlos Jones, described as a pioneer Los Angeles opera impresario, died on October 13, 1937. It was within the next year that the Meylers did vacate 12 St. James Park to move into 745 West Adams; her mother, Anna Pendleton Jones (who described herself as an "authoress of fiction"), was an invalid who would live with her daughter and son-in-law at 745 until she died at home on June 30, 1956. In the meantime, </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;">her grandchildren left as they were married: Eve Meyler to Whittier boy Robert Craig; Robert Jr. to Barbara Broatch of Moosejaw, Saskatchewan; and in 1958, Jim to Valley Girl Dorothy Leifson...all liaisons that gave more evidence of the youthful urge to expand beyond the provincial social delineations of the upper-middle-class </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;">Bachelors and Spinsters </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;">Los Angeles of the day. </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;">The senior Meylers—loyal West Adamsites in league with the Dockweilers of </span><a href="https://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;">27 St. James Park</a><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;"> and the Garlands of </span><a href="https://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/2011/08/815-west-adams-boulevard-please-also.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;">815 West Adams</a><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;">—would stay on, not leaving their house until as late as 1961, when the Santa Monica Freeway finally walled off their half of the West Adams district from the long-since more fashionable northerly neighborhoods to which they would finally retreat.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>As seen yet again in the <i>Times:</i> The Meyler children and their spouses<br />threw a party at the California Club to celebrate their parents' 50th<br />anniversary on November 8, 1967. Helen wore her wedding<br />dress, as she had when celebrating the couple's 30th;<br />Robert couldn't find all the pieces of the morning<br />suit he'd worn in 1917. Maybe they were<br />still back in the attic of #12.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Robert Gephard Meyler Sr. died on December 23, 1967, just a little more than a month after he and Helen celebrated their golden anniversary. In a grim postscript, it was in her apartment in Hancock Park, one of the neighborhoods supposedly now more secure than West Adams, that 79-year-old Helen was murdered on August 27, 1972. The weapon was a six-pound metal-and-glass triple candelabrum, the motive assumed to be robbery, though the case remains unsolved. </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: center;">Sic transit gloria occidentalis Adams.</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">A</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> most curious name was the next to be engraved on the knocker of 12 St. James Park: Cheap. The word </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">chepe</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> refers "marketplace" in medieval English, and the London neighborhood called Cheapside was built on the site of produce markets. Perhaps the Cheaps of #12 were descended from London produce sellers; perhaps naming their house "Cheapside" was a wry reference to their origins. The insecure and snobbish Miss Bingley refers to the social inferiority of Bennet relations living in Cheapside in </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Pride and Predjudice;</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> in the same way she might have cast a critical eye on the Los Angeles Cheaps, a teeming, Kennedyesque clan to whom, curiously, family seems to have been more important than caste.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Albert Henry Cheap was a Hoosier, born in New Albany on November 11, 1880. As one of eight children born to a prominent brick manufacturer, he was used to a crowd—and he liked them. But it would be understandable that he would want to strike out on his own. After his schooling in New Albany, he set out to see the world by ship, eventually landing in New York at the turn of the 20th century. During his three years there he met the woman he would marry, Miss Alice V. Smith. Presumably they came to a romantic understanding </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">before he left for the west to begin his long career with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe; in any case, wise Alice was not going to drop her musical studies before completing her </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">college career at Hunter to move across the country before Alfred got himself sorted out with a job and a home, wherever it may be. Alfred's brother Hubert was already in California. In 1903 he was employed by a brickworks in the city; no doubt exhorted by his brother to come west for the climate and the opportunities, within a few years Albert was in Los Angeles and both brothers were employed by the Santa Fe, Hubert as an electrician and Albert as a clerk. A clerkship was enough to lure Alice and her mother west to live—no doubt they both saw in Cheap a great drive that would not keep him selling tickets for very long. Records vary slightly as the marriage of Albert and Alice; one source indicates that their wedding took place in New Albany on February 28, 1906, another that the marriage was in Los Angeles on February 13, 1906. At any rate, Albert was 25 and Alice was 19. There began a long habit of the couple extending shelter to various family members—to Hubert; to Charles, another of Albert's brothers; to Mrs. Smith; and eventually to George Cheap, who came west to live with his sons. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Hubert, interestingly, would later marry Alice Smith Cheap's aunt, just six years older than her niece and also, confusingly, named Alice. (The two Alices even had the same middle initial V.) The Hubert Cheaps lived in the same house for 45 years in Boyle Heights before he died in 1960.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">a new generation of Cheaps began to come in short order: Angela Cecilia arrived on Christmas Eve, 1906. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As Albert and Alice's family grew to no less than 13 children, there were successive moves to ever bigger houses. Albert Cheap was always on the lookout for a wise investment that would gain an extra bedroom; the family started out in Boyle Heights, eventually living at 715 South St. Louis Street from 1909 until the early '20s, when Albert's real estate acumen afforded a move "uptown" across the river </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">to the West Adams district. After several addresses there, most notably at 2627 South Van Buren, there was a stint in the mid '30s in Windsor Square. When the opportunity to own one of the largest St. James Park houses arose in late 1937, Albert seized it, moving his family back to West Adams from <a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/2016/04/for-introduction-to-windsor-square_3.html">637 South Windsor Boulevard</a>, in reverse of prevailing trends of intracity migration, to settle for the next 26 years at </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">12 St. James Park</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was in the first half of 1938 that the Cheaps moved into the 19 rooms of </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Cheapsid</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">e</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>From the <i>Times</i> of October 13, 1952</b></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Real estate was a sideline for Albert—he had a talent for it, and, of course, he was creating a serious demand for income with so many mouths to feed. Over the years he bought lots in several different part of town, improving each with a house or apartment building before selling. He invested in 40 acres near Fresno to start a vineyard; presumably the apartment house he built at 206 South Catalina and retained for many years provided more of a regular supplement to his Santa Fe paycheck than did grapes. Not that Albert didn't rise though the ranks of the railroad; Alice had been right: He was much too energetic remain a clerk, moving on to the position of coach-yard foreman on his way to the executive suite. In an accolade in <i>California and Californians</i> published in 1932, nevertheless, Albert's greatest contribution to Los Angeles was his "gracious and talented" wife and having reared with her "their fine family of 13 children." By all accounts the vitality of both Mr. and Mrs. Cheap was astounding. Together they regularly attended the opera, concerts, and theater. In addition to having given birth to a baker's dozen and mothering them with only one in help, Alice somehow found the time for active extracurricular participation in the chorus of St. Vincent's Catholic Church, in the Reciprocity club, the California Chapter of Hunter College Alumnae, the Big Sisters League, the National Flower Guild, as well as being active in the efforts of the Community Chest. Downright dizzying, but Mrs. Cheap still was able to entertain regularly at home, not just to gather her burgeoning family but on behalf of her civic endeavors. And she did so right up to her untimely death on November 7, 1945, while a trip to San Diego. Her family carried on in her memory, however, recovering from their grief to celebrate more weddings and other gatherings at #12. The multi-generational, multi-sibling Southfork aspect of Cheap family living arrangements also carried on: Uncle Charles Cheap was still living with the family in the '40s. Charles died in November 1948, nine months after Albert and Alice's son Vincent had married Mary Helen Palmer and moved into #12. Two more Cheap daughters and their families lived at Cheapside during the '50s: Dorothy and Vincent McDonough and Alice and John Ruggiero. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Remarkably, Cheapside would remain the family seat until Albert Henry Cheap died on February 9, 1965, at age 84. There was considerable sadness at Cheapside in the '60s: Vincent Francis Cheap died in February 1963 at age 40, leaving Mary Helen and four children. Alice had divorced her husband and married James Pedigo in 1962, with whom she was also to live for a time at #12. In what might be a sad indication that not everyone growing up in an enormous family turns out happy, she divorced Mr. Pedigo in 1968 and then married Frank I. Green in 1971 and divorced <i>him</i> a year later. Holy Monsignor!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The last Cheaps to occupy 12 St. James Park were Alice</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, then on husband number two, and her sister-in-law </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Mary Helen</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. Curiously, despite his having retreated to Calvary Cemetery in February, demolition permits for the house and barn-now-garage were issued by the city in the name of Albert H. Cheap on December 6, 1965. The property became part of the Frank D. Lanterman High School, which, in an obscure, convoluted connection, had been named for a California state assemblyman who was a grandson of a founder of La Cañada, where his father had had architect Arthur L. Haley, previously mentioned here, build a <a href="http://www.lcf.ca.gov/parks-rec/lanterman-house">well-known house</a> in 1915.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: <a href="http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042462/"><i>Los Angeles Herald</i></a>; <i><a href="http://latimes.com/">Los Angeles Times</a>; </i></span><a href="http://lapl.org/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">LAPL</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> ; </span><a href="http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search/controller/simplesearch.htm" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">USCDL</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-69602440921562743212015-05-21T08:11:00.000-04:002016-11-25T10:30:08.469-05:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">13 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">F</span>ew houses have signaled the changing fortunes of St. James Park more than #13—and it wasn't one built after Wall Street crashed, when after a decade's slide, genteel West Adams could no longer pretend that its face wasn't falling. While there were holdouts by the tenacious <i>Blue Book</i> set such as the Dockweilers of <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html">#27</a>, the Clarks of <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/07/please-visit-our-companion-histories_31.html">#3</a> and <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/07/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html">#9</a>, and the Kellers across the green at <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/08/20-st.html">#20</a>, by 1921, when #13 was built, Hancock Park had opened alongside Windsor Square and Fremont Place to draw the bon ton to the new "West End" of Los Angeles.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">When the St. Lawrence and Mayfair apartment houses opened on the park in 1906 during a national economic downturn, one exacerbated by the San Francisco earthquake and leading up to the Panic of 1907, there was some unhappiness with the idea of flats invading a neighborhood of big single-family houses. The St. Lawrence and the Mayfair were, however, nothing like the dingbat shitboxes that would come to West Adams in the '50s. They were solid, beautifully detailed buildings. Post–World War I, the big West Adams houses began to be subdivided or given over to institutional use, such as <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/04/24-st.html">#24</a> was (it was, first, a sanitarium and then a fraternity house). </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">By the time real estate investor Julia M. Powell, a widow late of Brooklyn, acquired </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the parcel made up of Lot 29 and half of Lot 30 of the St. James Park Tract, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">extending to Scarff Street—</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">in the late 1910s, it already held a small apartment building, one apparently built by the son-in-law of Richard V. Day of </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories_15.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">12 St. James Park</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> around the time of the construction of the St. Lawrence and the Mayfair. Mrs. Powell added a garage to 2326 Scarff, a building permit for which was issued on August 29, 1919. Then, with a permit issued on September 19, 1921, she added to her lot what became addressed #13 St. James Park, a diminutive house adjacent to the garage, the last single-family residence built on the Park. Six days before Julia Powell received her permit, George Wuster was issued two for the twin duplexes at <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/05/17-st.html">17 St. James Park</a> and 2336 Scarff Street. It is not known why Mrs. Powell did not or could not choose to fully exploit her building site as had Wuster.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Thirteen St. James Park is also one the handful of houses surrounding the square that still stand, running from the grand columned <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html">#27</a> to tiny #13. In documentation for the nomination of the larger St. James Park neighborhood to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, which occurred on September 27, 1991, #13 is described thusly: "This is a one story frame/board and batten Craftsman bungalow with a </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">low-pitched widely overhanging gable roof. The design is</span> <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">asymmetrically </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">organized and is based loosely upon an L-shaped plan. Fenestration </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">consists of paired casement sash (wood) with extended lintels and sill</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. Security grilles of inappropriate design have been </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">installed over all the windows." There are no clear photographs of the house, tucked as it is behind the streetfront garage. The images here suggest its size relative to its neighbors. Long may it stand beyond its approaching 100th birthday.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: <a href="http://proquest.com/">Sanborn Maps</a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-3537447852966670312015-05-15T08:12:00.000-04:002016-11-25T10:41:58.319-05:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">17 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">O</span>NCE 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 <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/09/please-see-our-companion-histories.html">Mayfair and the St. Lawrence</a> 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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: Private Collection; <a href="http://proquest.com/">Sanborn Maps</a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-78572887806930374932015-05-01T08:15:00.000-04:002017-05-22T17:28:14.858-04:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">19 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">O</span>ne of only four surviving original houses of those that surrounded the greensward of St. James Park, #19 was not, in fact, the first residence to occupy its lot. The first to sit on the eastern half of Lot 32 was built for the Creighton family in 1896; one of the earliest and most charming examples of Colonial Revival domestic architecture in Los Angeles, it was designed by the esteemed team of Oliver P. Dennis and Lyman Farwell. Curiously, nine years after it went up, the house—at one point designated 21 St. James Park—was moved some yards westward to the rear of its own lot and turned 180 degrees to face Scarff Street. (The original eight full</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> lots of the St. James Park Tract </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">north of the east-west St. James Park roadway—originally designated West 25th Street and terminating at Chester Place at its eastern end—</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">were doubled-ended, facing east as well as toward Scarff; four of these lots remain part of the surviving southfacing house at 27 St. James Park, while the other four came to be occupied by at least two buildings apiece.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Remarkably, the original Creighton house, now 2342 Scarff Street and seen below, remains standing in excellent repair. For unknown reasons, rather than build a second house facing Scarff, the family chose to go to the expense of relocating the first and build a second where it had stood. The new one was in total contrast to the first; while itself a Revival, what became #19 was in the fashionable Mission style complete with elaborate Alamoesque gables (as seen above). Now considerably altered, the whole house is identifiable as original but seriously muted. Over the ensuing decades the Creightons would variously occupy #19 and 2342 Scarff and at times rent them to others. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As can be seen in the image above—taken from the Harold Lloyd film <i>A Gasoline Wedding</i>—#19 may not have been purely Mission Revival, with a front entrance portico apparently in a style more closely related to the house it replaced. This curious feature has gone missing in the house's current reduced profile.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The full story of #19 St. James Park will appear in due course.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /><br />The house at 2342 Scarff Street today (above) backs up to the<br style="font-size: 12.8px;" /><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">dwelling that replaced it in 1906, seen below; 2342 Scarff stands</span><br style="font-size: 12.8px;" /><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">in a leafy streetscape reminiscent of New Orleans's Garden District,</span><br style="font-size: 12.8px;" /><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">to which the St. James Park neighborhood as a whole might have</span><br style="font-size: 12.8px;" /><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">come close to resembling had it survived in a more intact state.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: </span><a href="https://silentlocations.wordpress.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Silent Locations</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">; Google Street View; </span><a href="http://victorianhomes.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Victorian & Craftsman Homes</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-28406914496714099372015-04-15T13:56:00.000-04:002018-01-15T14:00:49.807-05:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span></div>
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<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a> <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/">ADAMS BOULEVARD</a> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a></span><br />
<a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FREMONT PLACE</a> <a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">WINDSOR SQUARE</a> <a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">S</span>t. James Park developer George W. King sold an assemblage of lots totaling 30,000 square feet to Baroness Rosa Von Zimmerman in August 1902. Built with a fortune derived from munitions manufacturing, the house at #20—f</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">irst addressed #16—</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">would be just one of </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the German nobelwoman's</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> grandiose projects during her time in Los Angeles; a</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ttributed to architect </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Frederick Heinlein, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">its retardataire appearance was that of a turreted Victorian design at least a decade older. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A restless sort, the Baroness sold the rambling house a </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">little more than two years after completion. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">In an item correcting an article that ran five days before, one describing the dwelling as being 12 years old rather than the correct two, the <i>Los Angeles Herald</i> of May 21, 1905, reported the house's sale to real estate investor Matson Hill of Chicago for $75,000. On June 4, the <i>Herald</i> ran an illustrated article describing Hill's sale—also for $75,000—to lumberman William Hayes Perry, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">whose colorful family would later include actor Robert Stack. Architectural salvage from the house is reported to have found its way to Disneyland's Red Wagon Inn, now called the Plaza Inn. T</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he full story of the house will be told in due course.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As seen in the <i>Los Angeles Herald,</i> June 4, 1905</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: <a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/greaterlosangele00burdrich#page/n5/mode/2up" style="font-style: italic;">Greater Los Angeles and Southern California</a><i>; </i><a href="https://cdnc.ucr.edu/">CDNC</a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-33644480673321388742015-04-01T08:18:00.001-04:002023-04-05T15:00:44.272-04:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">24 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/">BERKELEY SQUARE</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> <a href="http://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/">ADAMS BOULEVARD</a></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a></span><br />
<a href="http://www.hancockparklosangeles.blogspot.com">HANCOCK PARK</a> <a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/">FREMONT PLACE</a> <a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-size: x-small;">HERE</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-large;">M</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">ajor Horace Marvin Russell was by all accounts a superstar Westerner. While not a native, Major Russell was practically an Old Angeleno by the time he built 24 St. James Park in 1900. Having already compiled an exhausting résumé by the time he arrived in Los Angeles in 1882, he would spend the next 45 years behaving just as energetically. Born on May 13, 1846, in Jamestown, New York, Russell moved west with his parents to grow up in Baraboo, Wisconsin. After training as a blacksmith and after Fort Sumter, he joined the Third Wisconsin Cavalry at age 15, serving the Union cause for 3½ years before returning to Baraboo. Having had time off the farm, Russell was soon restless—it was not long before he set off alone across the plains with a yoke of oxen and a wagon, reaching Denver five months later. From there, the adventurer crisscrossed the West and northern Mexico prospecting for gold, launching stagecoach lines, and operating lumber mills that </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">helped create the towns of Leadville and Cheyenne and </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">supplied ties for the Union Pacific. Settling briefly back in Denver, he added real estate to his business pursuits, an endeavor he resumed once he arrived in Los Angeles. His first office there was at Spring and Temple streets in what was then the center of downtown; Russell is credited with being first to build a brick office block south of First Street. Another first attributed to Russell is producing illuminating oil from California crude—he had entered the oil business—and somehow, in addition to petroleum, insurance, real estate, banking, railroads, mining on an even larger scale, and actively participating in the National Guard, this human dynamo's participation in the civic and social life</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> of </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Los Angeles was no less prodigious</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">. He was a charter member of the Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Municipal League. Described in his biographies as a happy man with great charisma, Major Russell enjoyed the company of others, and they him. </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">He was both a Mason of high degree and a Shriner. </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">A profile in the </span><i>Los Angeles Herald</i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> of July 29, 1906, went so far as to say that "it is seldom given to any one man to be so signally blessed, to be so remarkably successful in business life and so universally admired socially as is Major Russell."</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> Not just having friends but organizing them also came naturally: He was a charter member of both the California Club and the Jonathan Club.</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">And somehow </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">he </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">found still more time for wives and stepchildren.</span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">In the manner of many real estate operators in Los Angeles at the time—including John Hyde Braly of <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/09/please-see-our-companion-histories.html">38 St. James Park</a>, which would be one of Russell's own residences in the near future—the Major kept his family moving more in pursuit of the deal than domestic permanence, which is not generally in the DNA of the adventurous soul. Marvin and his first wife Hannah moved several times from the time of their marriage in 1883 to her death in 1895, as did Marvin and Laura Keating for 30 years after their marriage in 1898. Among the houses Marvin and Hannah lived in was 1316 Carroll Avenue, still standing in Angelino Heights. After marrying Laura, Russell found housing deals in the considerably nicer West Adams district, the first of which was a rental a block from St. James Park at <a href="https://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/2011/08/854-west-adams-boulevard-please-also.html">854 Adams Street</a>. On December 15, 1899, the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> reported that Laura Russell—perhaps using her separate funds—had let contracts for a new house at at</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> 2362 Park Grove Avenue—a house facing west onto the green rectangle of St. James Park that by 1902 had been readdressed as 24 St. James Park. There the Russells remained until May 1904, having the month before sold #24 to Juliette Graham Bixby, the widow of Harry L. Bixby of the Long Beach Bixbys. Real estate man Harry Lombard, who lived across the street at <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/03/26-st.html">26 St. James Park</a>, brokered the deal. The Russells would be moving to the 10-room house on the other side of the park at <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/09/please-see-our-companion-histories.html">#38</a>, which the Bralys had built less than two years before. (Never not restless, less than a year later, in April 1905, the Russells sold #38 and were back around the corner on Adams Street, having bought the S. B. Lewis house at #718 for $30,000.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Juliette Bixby did not make personal use of her new house for any length of time. While away on an extended trip in 1906, she rented it to Henry E. Huntington's son Howard, the general manager of the Los Angeles Railway, while he was building his own house in Pasadena. Then, in August 1908, Mrs. Bixby married Lieutenant Commander Ashley Herman Robertson, attached to the Pacific fleet. Moving with her husband to</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> Bremerton, Washington, Mrs. Robertson briefly rented #24 to Dr. George Martyn. By early 1911, George L. Raymond was in residence.</span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">By the 1920s, 24 could be seen as something of a bellwether of the postwar changes coming to St. James Park and the West Adams District as a whole. The house appears to have been broken up into flats after the departure of George Raymond; by 1922, it had become a sanitarium, the treatment specialty of which is unclear. Two years later, in one of the earliest occupancies in the Park by a U.S.C. fraternity, Zeta Kappa Epsilon was in residence. Then, apparently having reverted to being a single-family home, it became for a time the residence of the very social Kingsley and Pearl Macomber, later of <a href="https://www.berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/2011/06/14-walter-r-leeds-j-kingsley-macomber.html">14 Berkeley Square</a>. The neighborhood was fraying as West Adamsites decamped for the new suburbs out on Wilshire Boulevard and beyond; an exception was Henry Workman Keller, who lived next door at <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/08/20-st.html">20 St. James Park</a> and who would remain into the 1940s. Curiously, Keller was prevented from converting his house into rental apartments in 1944 on the grounds that the neighborhood was zoned for single-family residences; it is apparent from available records, however, that 24 St. James Park, at least, housed more than one family—or recovering alcoholic or fraternity boy—from the 1920s until its demolition in 1972.</span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">Illustrations: <a href="http://proquest.com/">Sanborn Maps</a>; <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=OopDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=men+of+achievement+in+the+southwest&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjj-uHHhp3VAhWCKCYKHcnJB_gQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=russell&f=true"><i>Men of Achievement in the Great Southwest</i></a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-85951002592129280702015-03-15T08:17:00.000-04:002016-11-25T12:40:50.308-05:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">26 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a> </span><a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FREMONT PLACE</a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a> <a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span>mages of houses surrounding St. James Park are rare; as for photographic evidence of </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the house built at the southeasternmost corner of the tract, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">only a very blurry shadow of it appears in a high-altitude aerial view taken in 1964, 63 years after it was built. A better illustration is the insurance-map representation seen above, taken from a larger map of the neighborhood, seen below.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Harry Dana Lombard was a Boston financier who had arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1890s after working as a banker for some years in Tacoma; his speculations in Southern California oil and property made him even richer in short order. While he would be a key player in the development of, among other tracts, Pacific Palisades, he had settled in the city at a time when the Adams District was considered, and often referred to on maps, as West Los Angeles. St. James Park, developed in 1887, promised a bit of Brookline, if not Boston itself, in terms of an aristocratic air. It was soon after the turn of the century, with the neighborhood's central greensward having blossomed into a lovely square centered on a fountain, that Lombard bought Lots 17 and 18. On October 13, 1901, the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> reported that he had hired Arthur B. Benton to design a two-story, nine-room house at 804 West 25th Street; by the time the house was completed, conforming to address standardization finally coming to the Park, the house had become 26 St. James Park.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Harry Lombard had married Oakland-born Henrietta Cole in 1891; once the couple arrived in Los Angeles, they became tireless socialites, with their entertainments at #26 much chronicled in the dailies. Their residence on St. James Park coincided with the neighborhood's heyday, which could be said to have begun drawing to a close by the mid 1910s. What was being termed Los Angeles's "West End"—where tracts such as Windsor Square and Fremont place were opening—beckoned, as did the resort of Beverly Hills, the actual hills of which had been enticing some West Adamsites to build country houses. In 1911, Lee Allen Phillips of <a href="http://www.berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/2011/05/4-second-lee-allen-phillips-house.html">4 Berkeley Square</a> built a retreat there that evolved in to the famous Pickfair. Nearby, after a celebrated round-the-world automobile tour, the Lombards acquired a large property in 1913. Having had the well-known design team of Sumner P. Hunt and Silas R. Burns do some alterations to #26 and apparently been quite pleased with the results, Harry and Etta commissioned from them an entire veritable palace on their Beverly Hills parcel. Completed in 1916, they stayed at the still-extant 1100 Carolyn Way until 1919—the same year Phillips sold his house to Douglas Fairbanks—when they swapped houses with Silsby Spalding, who had built 1006 North Crescent Drive (also still extant) in 1911.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Meanwhile, planning on a long circumnavigation of the globe, the Lombards had sold 26 St. James Park to banker Robert Irwin Rogers, who was in residence by 1913. Rogers and his wife, Josephine, remained in the house until 1929. Then, #26 was caught up in old West Adams's downsloping trajectory, in which residents had been decamping for newer suburbs in droves during the '20s, the bigger houses divided up into flats or demolished for particularly remunerative apartment houses, the exponential growth of Los Angeles during the decade having made housing very tight. The saving grace of West Adams had always been U.S.C., and its presence would save #26 for another 42 years, beginning with its Delta Sigma Phi fraternity inaugurating it as its chapter house on March 15, 1930. Apparently never again, if not surprisingly, a single family house, it was demolished between 1964 and 1972. The parking lot that replaced it remains today.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustrations: <a href="http://proquest.com/">Sanborn Maps</a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-2595468775785011412015-03-01T16:02:00.001-05:002023-05-03T23:01:29.592-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h1><b><b style="font-size: xx-large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">27 St. James Park</span></b></b></h1>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/">BERKELEY SQUARE</a> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><a href="http://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/">ADAMS BOULEVARD</a></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a> </span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><a href="http://www.hancockparklosangeles.blogspot.com">HANCOCK PARK</a> <a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a> </span><a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/">FREMONT PLACE</a></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-size: x-small;">HERE</a></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">C</span>OLONEL JOHN ELDREDGE STEARNS, of Eastern stock by way of Chicago and Nampa, Idaho, was one of many thousands of Midwesterners who chose Los Angeles for retirement before the city itself was retired from the list of desirable California localities for passing one's golden years. The Colonel, described in some accounts as a Civil War veteran though he would have been 13 years old at the time of Appomattox and was now just 48, allowed himself plenty of golden years, though he was no dilettante. He'd left Chicago as a young man to pursue mining, agriculture, and railroading in Colorado and Idaho, helping to establish and serving as the first mayor of Nampa. He was at one time manager of the Boise, Nampa, and Owyhee Railroad that contributed to the growth of the town by bringing in the buyers of the real estate in which the Colonel also dealt. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Mary Pickford arrives at the Boston home of "Jarvis Pendleton" in </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">1919. Perhaps it was </span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">daughter of the house</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Katherine and her new husband, recently settled at #27, who talked</span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> her parents into allowing their home</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">to stand in for the East Coast in </span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><i>Daddy-</i></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><i>Long-</i></span><i>Legs. </i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Actually, Hollywood had already invaded the</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">neighborhood: </span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Fatty Arbuckle </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">had moved in around the corner at 649 West Adams</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Street that year. The famous </span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">scandals </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">came two years later—with few</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">exceptions, </span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">actors would </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">no longer </span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">be </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">received </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">in local</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Society.</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Whatever the mythology or reality of his adolescent participation in the Civil War, Stearns apparently always maintained a hunger for adventure. Quitting his various interests in Idaho, he looked west again—southwestward, that is—arriving in Los Angeles in 1897 with his wife, Julia, and the youngest of their four daughters, Katherine, who'd been born in </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Nampa seven years before</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">. As a young man, the Colonel was not interested in living in a downtown hotel and whiling away his time on a bench in Central Park (later Pershing Square). Apparently Stearns had done well in developing Nampa. He sought out the most promising young architect in Los Angeles, a man who was poised to bring the city architecturally and thus economically out of the shadow of San Francisco: John B. Parkinson, </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">an Englishman </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">who had himself arrived in town recently, just five years before, </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">by way of Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Napa, and Seattle. He was the architect of several major downtown buildings by this time, the Homer Laughlin/Grand Central Market among them; his residential commissions, including his own (the history of which is </span><a href="https://losangeleshistory.blogspot.com/2012/06/please-visit-our-companion-histories_12.html">here</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">), would turn out to be few as the demand for his designs for large office structures multiplied. But it seems that Colonel Stearns's charm, or his budget and domestic ambitions, perhaps, persuaded Parkinson to come up with a sober American design for the substantial ¾-acre lot Stearns had bought in St. James Park. </span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Essentially unaltered to this day, </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">27 St. James Park </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">has a</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> counterpart in Beverly</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Hills (if not as old, </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">in a </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">different architectural style): the history</span></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">of the Frank C. Winter house is <a href="http://losangeleshistory.blogspot.com/2012/05/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html">here</a>.</span></span></b></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">It is not unlikely that when Colonel Stearns visited Parkinson's downtown offices to discuss his new house, he might have seen some preliminary sketches of the architect's own house that would be built on St. Paul Avenue in 1901. In spite of his Chicago roots, it seems that the advanced Prairie-influenced Mission Revival of Parkinson's house did not appeal to Stearns, who decided on a Colonial Revival design for his own. This newly popular (and socially safer) American style was symmetrical and gingerbread-free but retained the vertical lines of the Victorian style it superseded—vertical lines </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">the Prairie Style radically repudiated. The Colonel, Julia, and 10-year-old Katherine moved into 27 St. James Park when it was completed in 1900, and with their lavish and columned new calling card, seem to have quickly assumed Old Guard status in Los Angeles without ever having to undergo any sort of lengthy vetting process by Society gatekeepers—such was upward mobility in the not-so-old New West. Parkinson included in his designs for #27 sympathetic outbuildings for cook and carriages; the Colonel also had a greenhouse built for the orchids he tended when not trying to catch the biggest tuna of the year, every year, off Catalina. Life was grander and lusher under the palms than it could ever have become if the Stearnses had remained in Idaho.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">The 1900s proceeded at a genteel pace at #27 as Katherine grew up; while they had made a splash with their house, there is actually only the tamest of newspaper coverage of the Stearns household, unlike that of some of their neighbors such as the ostentatious Baroness von Zimmerman and the Modini-Woods, who had not heard of the rule that one's name should appear in the paper just three times in life. As the Colonel puttered among his orchids and reeled in tuna and Julia entertained other smart Los Angeles matrons regularly at home or saw them at the Friday Morning Club, Katherine attended Marlborough, then just around the corner, before she was sent east to Farmington. There was considerable travel. The summer season happily coincided for the Stearnses with tuna season; happily, for the Colonel,</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">at least, </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">who could revel among the testosterone of the Los Angeles oligarchy at the Tuna Club. He was immediately accepted by the local pooh-bahs into the best clubs upon arrival in the city—perhaps in no small part due to the sobriety and good taste of his house at 27 St. James Park. White columns have that effect—would acceptance have been so speedy had he chosen something flat-roofed and "arty"? At any rate, it was a genteel existence, one that ripened the family for capturing the biggest tuna of all in an eventual merger with true members of the Los Angeles </span><i>ancien régime</i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Duels to debutantes in three generations: B</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">efore </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">the transcontinental </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">railroad arrived</span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> in </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Los Angeles,</span></b></span><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Buffalo </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">might </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">not </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">have </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">seemed </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">so </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">bad </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">after all: </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">L.A.</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> was one rough </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">and </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">dusty t</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">own. </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Henry </span></span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Dockweiler's </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">saloon </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">interests lasted into the 1880s, by </span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">which time his sons</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> </span></b><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> bookkeeping, surveying, engineering, plumbing, and law.</span></b></span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">As did multitudes, the Dockweilers came to California for the gold and the sun if not the tuna. After the progenitors, Henry Dockweiler and Margaretha Sugg, arrived in Upstate New York, separately from Bavaria and Alsace, respectively, they no doubt wondered where the promised land was. The two met in Buffalo, with Henry then setting out to seek his fortune with the Forty-Niners. The odds of success in the High Sierra were about as good as winning the Powerball today, and Henry didn't succeed. But his pioneer drive and reports of California gold in other forms wooed Margaretha to Los Angeles—tiny, dusty, and the antithesis of Buffalo—and they were married there in 1861. Henry's great vitality was then put toward establishing the family name in civic, political, and religious endeavors. His business interests came to include the Lafayette Hotel and, despite serious Catholic piety, a saloon. Two of Henry and Margaretha's four sons were no less builders of L.A. than their father: John Henry dealt in the supply and drainage of water, building the city's first sewer. He served as City Engineer for much of the '90s. He and his wife, Mattie, had no children. But that's where his brother Isidore came in. In addition to becoming a powerhouse attorney in Los Angeles, a serious force in California and national Democratic politics as well as in local Catholic politics, Isidore and his wife, Gertrude (née Reeve), had 13 children. Of the 11 who survived infancy, many took up the family call to civic duty. Very few families anywhere could count on such discipline from even one child, much less many. Isidore, born in 1868 and baptized in the Plaza church, lived in a serious house with his brood at <a href="https://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/2011/09/957-west-adams-boulevard-please-also.html">957 West Adams Street</a>; his son Thomas Aloysius Joseph Dockweiler likely eventually became aware of a certain Miss Katherine Stearns of the big white house just two blocks away at 27 St. James Park. Katherine was 17 months older, and not getting any younger. One can only imagine the commotion in the Stearns household when Thomas came calling, and not this time to ask if she wanted to roll hoops through the Park; the stakes were high: Either Katherine, ancient in her 28th year, would enthrall her family with a brilliant marriage, or she might just become Catherine Sloper. She did good: Thomas and Katherine were married on December 10, 1917, at the old St. Vincent's Church at Grand Avenue and Washington, where most solemn family occasions were celebrated. The war was on, and Lieutenant Dockweiler departed in short order for Kelly Field in San Antonio. After the Armistice, he returned to #27; most young couples wish to establish their own homes, and many who grew up in West Adams did, nearby in the recent subdivisions of starter houses on the numbered avenues in the western reaches of the district. But when one set of parents have a big house in its own park, <i>on</i> a park, and there are only three people living in it...perhaps inevitably, #27 thenceforth became the Stearns-Dockweiler house. To mark the union of families, a ironwork "D"s were placed over "S"s on some chimneys of #27, </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">where the monograms remain today—it's not like is has been very long since </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">a "D," at least, has lived in the house.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-family: verdana;">Before he married Katherine, Thomas had joined his father at Dockweiler, founded 1889. The firm became became Dockweiler & Dockweiler—repeating the name in the title six times might have been overkill, but at one time the firm did include five of Isidore's sons. Life at home was fairly quiet, though the population of #27 did expand by two. Julia Stearns Dockweiler was born on July 12, 1919; John Eldredge Stearns Dockweiler arrived on December 23, 1925. The 1920s at #27 were not an unbroken series of standard life events, however. There was mayhem:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">As reported </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">flippantly</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> in the </span><i>Los Angeles Times,</i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> August 8, 1924</span></b></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Once the bodies were removed, the Chinese rug was cleaned, and the walls were washed, life settled down to normal, though there was another, if less dramatic, expiration: Colonel Stearns died on March 23, 1927, at age 75. After services at #27, he was sent east to be buried in his native Chicago. In addition to his days at Dockweiler & Dockweiler downtown in the Van Nuys building, Thomas served as president of the city’s Social Services Commission and was for several years a member of the State Committee of Bar Examiners. As was his father, he was a prominent Catholic layman; both were appointed Knights of St. Gregory. No word on whether Katherine was ever considered to be a papal countess, as was her neighbor Estelle Doheny over in Chester Place. (Add the Baroness von Zimmerman across the park at <a href="https://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/08/20-st.html">#20</a>, the Countess von Beroldingen, and the Princess Pignatelli, who would come on the West Adams scene later—who knew Los Angeles had a Mardi Gras' worth of tin royalty?)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Julia Stearns went to her reward at the age of 75 on November 18, 1935, dying at home. A mass was said the next day at St. Vincent's. The "S" remained on the chimney, but Dockweiler was now the name on the doorbell: Thomas, Katherine, Julia, and John showed no signs of leaving St. James Park though West Adams was declining (for reasons described </span><a href="http://www.berkeleysquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/04/word-on-maturation-of-west-adams-there.html">here</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">) and fashion had moved on to newer districts such as <a href="https://hancockparklosangeles.blogspot.com/">Hancock Park</a>. Julia would soon be attending Manhattanville in New York, returning to make her debut with a tea in her honor at #27. She would be asked to join the Junior League. Then war would come and bandages would be rolled alongside other young ladies of good breeding. Her volunteer work continued for a lifetime: In later years her efforts would include the presidency of the Los Angeles Orphange Guild. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>December 3, 1939: Miss Otis Regrets? An exemplary daughter of</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">parents </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">in </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">1939. Remaining on the shelf,</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> Miss Dockweiler</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">went on </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">to </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">lead </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">a full life. </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">After 70 years at #27, she</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">died at 87 in Los Angeles on November 7, 2006.</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">John would be sent east for his education, Catholic all the way: boarding at Canterbury in Connecticut, and then on to Notre Dame. After receiving his M.D. from Cornell and doing coursework in Cuba, he returned dutifully to settle in Los Angeles, marrying Winifred B. Longyear in 1951—a girl perhaps predictably in the loop of all things locally, conventionally top-drawer </span><i>haute bourgeoisie</i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">. Although...sometimes the mating rituals of this often reactionary ilk can actually sound radical, even </span><i>avant-garde—</i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">to wit,</span><i> </i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">the latest Mrs. Dockweiler's outfits for her bridal attendants, per the </span><i>Times:</i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> "Taffeta, in an electric sky-blue shade, was worn uniformly.... Made with a bouffant ballerina effect, the gowns bore pleated panels edged with embroidered scallops...the short-sleeved fitted bodices had scalloped necklines and were all over embroidery in self-toned [?] silk. Small caps bound with velvet in an irregular line, short gloves and faille [?] pumps completed the costume." The mind reels, but God bless matrimonial tradition. One supposes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">The 1950s saw the decline of West Adams turn precipitous; more big houses were cut up into apartments or demolished and replaced with boxy apartment buildings. The Harbor Freeway came though just blocks to the east. The crowning blow to West Adams came in the form of another freeway opened in the early 1960s, the Santa Monica, four blocks to the north. It cut the district asunder, and any idea of St. James Park surviving as a pocket of fashion was gone. But the mother and daughter still at #27 carried on unfazed. Thomas had died young on November 11, 1978; Katherine lived to age 98. After her mother died on March 14, 1988, Julia, who never married, chose to bring to a close nearly 90 years of family life at #27, once and always the signature house of St. James Park. She sold it to </span><a href="http://www.robinsonresidences.com/">the Robinson family</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> in 1990. Into better hands, it seems, the house could not have fallen. It is lovingly maintained by the Robinsons, who offer some rooms for rent that are coveted by students from U.S.C. The house is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #434 and is rightly described by its owners as the finest private residence in the area, changed though the district may be from the day #27 was completed in 1900.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>The west side of the house today</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>The north side</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>A small original building, presumably once the cook's quarters, which</b></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">The portico of 27 St. James Park, 112 years after it </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">was </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">built and 93 years</span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">after Mary Pickford called. The screen career of the house, begun in</span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">the silent era, extends to recent appearances in, among other</span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">television productions, "JAG", "Cold Case", "Judging Amy",</span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">"Six Feet Under", "House", "The District", and "NCIS".</span></span></b></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Illustrations: <a href="http://lapl.org/">LAPL</a> 1; <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/SilentMovieArchive">Silent Movie Archive</a> 2, 3; <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kansas_sebastian/">Kansas Sebastian</a> 4, 6, 9-14;</span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><a href="http://michaeldorausch.com/">Michael Dorausch</a> 5; <a href="http://latimes.com/"><i>Los Angeles Times</i></a> 7, 8</span></span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br />
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">32 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a> </span><a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FREMONT PLACE</a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a> <a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>ddresses for the houses surrounding St. James Park were vague in the tract's early years; households were listed in city directories with such inexact locations as "ws St. James Park" or simply "St. James Park." Later, there were attempts at numbering that tried to align with the city's general practice elsewhere. There would also be confusion with house numbering vis-à-vis Chester Place, the famous subdivision that opened next door in 1899. It wasn't until after the turn of the century that addresses began to formulate around the park, still a bit random but, with only a few of them, apparently manageable by postmen, delivery boys, and visitors. The house eventually designated 32 St. James Park appears to have been built in the mid-to-late '90s and was at the southeast corner of the short stretch of roadway between the greensward and Adams Street (as the boulevard was then designated) and what was early on designated West 25th Street; it survived until 1938.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the view above—toward the southwest from the park, over its central arroyo stone fountain—the twin peaks of #32 are seen at left center. At right is <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/05/34-st.html">34 St. James Park</a>; just visible in the distance between #32 and #34 is the Capen house once at <a href="http://losangeleshistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/818-west-adams-boulevard-please-also.html">818 West Adams Boulevard</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The full story of 32 St. James Park will appear in due course.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-49572585747220324382015-02-01T08:20:00.000-05:002016-11-25T14:28:27.907-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">34 St. James Park</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a> </span><a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FREMONT PLACE</a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WINDSOR SQUARE</a> <a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">A</span>pparently the earliest house built in the St. James Park Tract, #34 was completed in 1889 on Lot 14 for Mrs. Margaret Hughes to the design of architects Curlett, Eisen & Cuthbertson. Mrs. Hughes died in the house on December 27, 1915; the next day, the <i>Evening Herald</i> ran her obituary at the center of its front page, with an enormous picture, and decribed her as a "PIONEER OF SOCIETY AND WORK OF CLUBS."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The house remained standing until soon after a demolition permit was issued by the city on February 10, 1972. The full story of 34 St. James Park will appear in due course.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustration: Private Collection</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-16571956830561676062015-01-15T09:48:00.003-05:002022-05-07T12:48:25.765-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">38 St. James Park</b><br />
<br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><a href="http://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/">ADAMS BOULEVARD</a> </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a></span><br />
<a href="https://hancockparklosangeles.blogspot.com/">HANCOCK PARK</a> <a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FREMONT PLACE</a> <a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">WINDSOR SQUARE</a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-large;">W</span>HILE HUNDREDS OF EXPANDING CITIES in postbellum urban America had their own civic visionaries, Los Angeles around the turn of the 20th century seems to have had more than its share of indefatigable nabobs, both those self-made after arriving in the city as well as those who already had it made. In her essay "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles," Joan Didion describes the instinct of these men to find that golden land where money could buy what Americans really want from it—not things or power, but rather "absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy." Once they found the holy grail in Los Angeles, many of them went farther: The novel challenges and luminous promise of California seem to have brought out a particular strain of progressive thought that civilization was perfectible, or at least honeable. Among those with such vision was John Hyde Braly, something of whose contribution to St. James Park we have already seen in the history of <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012/07/please-visit-our-companion-histories.html">#9</a>. You'd almost think that there should be not a Wilshire Boulevard traversing Los Angeles but a Braly Boulevard. As it is, there is only the Imperial County town of Brawley, originally named for John Hyde Braly; his refusal of the honor resulted in the clever alteration of the spelling of the town's name to the actual pronunciation of the surname. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>From log cabin and muslin to white tie and tails: John Hyde Braly's arc from backwoods Missouri</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b> to St. James Park makes for fascinating reading in his roseate 1912 <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=INcEAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA172&lpg=PA172&dq=southern+california++savings+bank+union+trust+los+angeles+braly&source=bl&ots=L_lbTkjD5l&sig=HRAgVJNPD-fC9syWIG7kNNugJ6U&sa=X&ei=WDIxUMGsCMXg0QGI-YCQAg&ved=0CCcQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=southern%20california%20%20savings%20bank%20union%20trust%20los%20angeles%20braly&f=false">autobiography</a>.</b></span></span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Practically all of the romance of California can be found in the life of John Hyde Braly, from the hardscrabble journey across the plains by Conestoga wagon, to the Gold Rush, to agriculture, to urban business prowess and great wealth. Born on January 24, 1835, in Franklin County, Missouri, Braly came by his acute sense of Manifest Destiny through the example of tough forebears who'd already left North Carolina and crossed the Mississippi by the 1820s. The Bralys' push to the Pacific came in April 1847, when John, his parents, and six siblings set off for California. After a colorful, circuitous route over the plains, with stops in Laramie, Boise, and Oregon, the family reached California in the fabled year of '49. Their first stop was Fremont, from which the men began a business to provision the new towns of the mining operations in burgeoning Gold Rush country—"eating, drinking, smoking and swearing places," as Braly put it in his autobiography. Money quickly made allowed the Bralys to move on to a 160-acre farm in the Santa Clara Valley by the next year. Braly then went east for an education at Tennessee's Cumberland University; on his return to California he began a career as an educator. Taking charge of several schools over the next decade—with a break to return to the Nevada gold fields to become something of an unsuccessful loan shark that nearly ruined him—Braly also married. His bride was Martha Jane ("Mattie") Hughes, whose family had followed a track to California nearly identical to the Bralys', via North Carolina and Missouri. It would be many years before the family would settle in Los Angeles, however. There were stops in San Jose and in Fresno, where Braly farmed raisins and, apparently having learned his lesson from his recent Nevada debacle, embarked on a banking career. In this new endeavor, Braly managed to prosper enormously. He set up banks in Fresno, Selma, and Tulare. He and Mattie had seven children by 1879, though only three would survive beyond 1888. Josephine died in 1887. It was at this time, for the health of delicate daughter Millie, that the family moved yet again, now to San Diego. Another bank was set up there; after Millie's death despite the move to a better climate, and after more financial hardships due to the bust of the Southern California boom, there was a stop again in San Jose. Finally, by early 1891, Braly rallied from near total defeat and shouted "Eureka!" He'd found the amalgam of all California promise in Los Angeles, where the Bralys would, almost overnight, rise from setback to the ranks of seemingly long-established burghers.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Mr. and Mrs. John Hyde Braly on the occasion of their Golden Wedding anniversary.</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> Fifty years to the day, on November 24, 1911, a celebration was held at the</b></span><br />
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</span> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">One wonders if John Hyde Braly might have been at times a bit melodramatic in telling his life's story, if there might perhaps have been more cash stashed away than his tales of woe would suggest. Somehow, within two years of arriving in Los Angeles with a tin cup </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">seemingly</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> in hand, Braly was assembling his initial St. James Park lots and planning the 10-room house that became </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_08_archive.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">#9</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">. In that house the Bralys came to live as though they had been in residence in the finest neighborhood in the city for decades. Local Society, used to, made up of, and indeed impressed by rags-to-riches stories, embraced the Bralys and attended their entertainments at St. James Park that served to establish their mutual respectability and clout. Now instead of a rather vagabond life closer to the Bralys' covered-wagon years, there was foursquare bourgeois grandeur. New money only looks old to us now; at any rate, what took generations on the East Coast took only a year or two on the West, where the senses stimulated by beauty coupled with limitless opportunity sped things up.</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">After swapping #9 with William David Woolwine for a vacation retreat on then-fashionable Terminal Island in 1899, John and Mattie Braly, their children grown, moved into the Hotel Van Nuys before taking a house on Hartford Avenue. It seems they very quickly missed the rarefied air of St. James Park. Or at least they missed the thrill of speculation: After acquiring the 75-by-160-foot lot 12, the Bralys had the architectural firm of Dennis and Farwell draw up plans for a house more modest appearing than #9 but, at 10 rooms, really no smaller. The Bralys were in residence at 38 St. James Park by early 1903—not that any sentient being was holding his breath for domestic permanence. John Hyde Braly's idea of a permanent edifice lay—and still lies—downtown on the southeast corner of Spring and Fourth streets. Braly and his business associates, son Arthur chief among them, had acquired the plot not long before #38 was built. On it was erected, to the Italian Renaissance design of the new century's local darling of an architect, John Parkinson, headquarters for the Southern California Savings Bank, of which Braly was president. At 12 stories, it was the tallest, most modern building in Los Angeles. While pleasing some civic boosters, it alarmed others, who pressed the City Council to pass an ordinance limiting any new building to a height of 150 feet, an edict that stood until 1957. While at the same time rebuffing dusty backwater Brawley's gesture of naming itself after him—a snub answered by the town's subtly giving him the finger by adding a couple of letters—Braly accepted the naming of the new building in his honor. The Braly Building later went by other names, among them the Union Trust Building, the Continental Building, and the Hibernian Building. At 109 years old, it is now the Old Bank District Lofts. </span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>by architect John Parkinson. Los Angeles's first</b></span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Between #9 and #38, the Bralys' time on St. James Park actually totaled less than eight years. The three surviving children of John and Mattie, once farm children from the California hinterlands, grew up to be to-the-manner-born Angelenos themselves. Having become established in town at St. James Park and finding their places in the rather smug local firmament of the <i>jeunesse dorée,</i> Arthur, Emma, and Harold married—with one exception—spouses who would bolster the Braly position in Society and business. In 1895, Arthur married Mina Jevne, whose father would seven years later partner with the Bralys in the construction of the Spring Street skyscraper. The family's next personal alliance with a business associate came in 1903 when Harold married Henrietta Janss of the prolific real estate family. The Bralys would forge strong ties with the Jansses both at home and at the office; after a disastrous marriage to polo-playing rake—and embezzler—Howard Graham Bundrem, Emma saw the wisdom of toeing the line and did so in spades when she married Henrietta Braly's brother Dr. Herman Janss in 1908. The third California generation of Bralys was now firmly established far from pioneer struggle, but would be, as were many high-toned Angeleno families, ever mindful of the cachet of having come west in dirty clothes even before the '49ers. Harold and Etta Braly would go on to build in the neighborhoods that became successors to St. James Park as older districts of Los Angeles became déclassé, including <a href="https://hancockparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2021/01/please-see-our-companion-histories_29.html">165 Muirfield Road</a> in <a href="https://hancockparklosangeles.blogspot.com/">Hancock Park</a> and in the Jansses' Westwood, specifically, in their case, preeminent Holmby Hills.</span></div>
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</span> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Never seeming to need or want a long-term home, which they could have easily established, no one was surprised when John and Mattie left 38 St. James Park just 18 months after moving in. Selling to Major Horace Marvin Russell in May 1904, they moved to the Hotel Angelus before taking a house on Arapahoe Street near Arthur and Mina. By 1910 the elder Bralys were living in Pasadena in an extended family arrangement with Arthur and Mina, their children, and five servants. John and Martha traveled around the world in 1908; on their return, Progressive-minded John became heavily involved in the fight for women's suffrage. It was a tribute to his understanding of the strength of pioneer women that, unlike many men of his patriarchal ilk, he championed the cause. In no small part due to the efforts of John Hyde Braly, California women gained the right to vote on October 10, 1911. The victory won, the Bralys set off on a European tour to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Having caught a cold while crossing from Naples back to New York on the <i>Adriatic, </i>70-year-old Mattie died at the Waldorf-Astoria on February 17, 1913. Pushing 80, John Hyde Braly was certainly grief-stricken but, far from defeated, remained ever adventurous. In July 1914 he eloped with 71-year-old <a href="http://theusgenweb.org/ca/losangeles/GlendaleBios/Braly_Mary_Howard_GridleyMrs.htm">Mrs. Mary Howard Gridley</a>, a bustling woman of nevertheless impressive résumé. Coming from New York in 1909, an ardent member of the D.A.R., she soon became president of the Glendale Shakespeare Club and vice-president of Los Angeles's Fine Arts League, of which Braly was president. The evil-minded might imagine that poor Mattie died at the Waldorf of a broken heart—or of a spiked glass of bedtime milk aboard the <i>Adriatic—</i>but with life waiting for no man, and despite the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand the month before, the newlyweds planned a long European honeymoon and on spending a winter in Algiers. After returning from their honeymoon to live in Glendale the couple had nine years together; both died in 1923, John Hyde Braly, the remarkable American pioneer and embodiment of Manifest Destiny and California Progressivism, on October 6 at age 89. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>In a tone both obsequious and scandalized, several issues of <i>Los Angeles Times</i> in July 1914</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b><i> </i>devoted considerable space to the elopement of 79-year-old John Hyde Braly and</b></span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>the widow could not be found in the <i>Blue Book.<br />
</i>How quickly they'd forgotten Fresno....</b></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Major Horace Marvin Russell</span></td></tr>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-large;">T</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">hirty-eight St. James Park, now barely a year old, had at least another 60 years to stand. Enter for a cameo Major Horace Marvin Russell, another superstar Westerner. While not a native, Major Russell was practically an Old Angeleno by the time he moved into #38. Having already compiled an exhausting résumé by the time he arrived in Los Angeles in 1882, he would spend the next 45 years behaving just as energetically. Born on May 13, 1846, in Jamestown, New York, Russell moved west with his parents to grow up in Baraboo, Wisconsin. After training as a blacksmith and after Fort Sumter, he joined the Third Wisconsin Cavalry at age 15, serving the Union cause for 3½ years before returning to Baraboo. Having had time away from the farm, Russell was soon restless—it was not long before he set off alone across the plains with a yoke of oxen and a wagon, reaching Denver five months later. From there, the adventurer crisscrossed the West and northern Mexico prospecting for gold, launching stagecoach lines, and operating lumber mills that </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">helped create the towns of Leadville and Cheyenne and </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">supplied ties for the Union Pacific. Settling briefly back in Denver, he added real estate to his business pursuits, an endeavor he resumed once he arrived in Los Angeles. His first office there was at Spring and Temple streets in what was then the center of downtown; Russell is credited with being first to build a brick office block south of First Street. Another first attributed to Russell is producing illuminating oil from California crude—he had entered the oil business—and somehow, in addition to petroleum, insurance, real estate, banking, railroads, mining on an even larger scale, and actively participating in the National Guard, this human dynamo's participation in the civic and social life</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> of </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Los Angeles was no less prodigious</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">. He was a charter member of the Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Municipal League. Described in his biographies as a happy man with great charisma, Major Russell enjoyed the company of others, and they him. </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">He was both a Mason of high degree and a Shriner. </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">A profile in the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Los Angeles Herald</i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> of July 29, 1906, went so far as to say that "it is seldom given to any one man to be so signally blessed, to be so remarkably successful in business life and so universally admired socially as is Major Russell."</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> Not just having friends but organizing them also came naturally: He was a charter member of both the California Club and the Jonathan Club.</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">And somehow </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">he </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">found still more time for wives and stepchildren. </span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">In the manner of many real estate operators in Los Angeles at the time—including John Hyde Braly—Russell kept his family moving more in pursuit of the deal than domestic permanence, which is not generally in the DNA of the adventurous soul. Marvin and his first wife Hannah moved several times from the time of their marriage in 1883 to her death in 1895, as did Marvin and Laura Keating for 30 years after their marriage in 1898. Among the houses Marvin and Hannah lived in was 1316 Carroll Avenue, still standing in Angelino Heights. After marrying Laura, Russell found housing deals in the considerably nicer West Adams district, the first of which was a block from St. James Park at <a href="https://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/2011/08/854-west-adams-boulevard-please-also.html">854 Adams Street</a>. In 1900 the Russells moved to a house they built 2362 Park Grove Avenue; it faced west onto the green rectangle of St. James Park and was readdressed as <a href="https://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2015/04/24-st.html">24 St. James Park</a> in 1902. There the Russells remained until May 1904 when they bought the 10-room house on the other side of the park that the Bralys had built less than two years before. The door of #38 was not finished revolving, however: Less than a year later, in April 1905, the Russells sold the house and were back around the corner on Adams Street, having bought the Samuel B. Lewis house at #718 for $30,000. </span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-large;">O</span>ddly, the family that would own 38 St. James Park for the next 25 years is the most obscure in almost any respect other than its social life. The <i>Los Angeles Herald</i> of April 30, 1905, reported that the Russells had just sold the house and the half of adjacent Lot 13 they had acquired to the William Wylie Johnstons; to this lot-and-a-half the Johnstons would soon add Lot 11. Wylie Johnston, now a true Angeleno, seems to have been transitioning at this time from his long career in dry goods to real estate investment and speculation. Born in Madison, Indiana, on May 24, 1855, and educated at Miami of Ohio (where he was a Deke) and Princeton, he had come west only recently to repeat the successes in dry goods wholesaling he'd had in Indianapolis and Wichita. Partnering with the Kentucky wholesale grocer Alexander Buchanan Barret, Johnston incorporated the Johnston-Barret Dry Goods Company Los Angeles in the fall of 1902. The business, which was headquartered at 123 North Los Angeles Street—now the site of the Parker Center—didn't last long. In 1906 Barret sold his interest </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">in the company </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">to his partner</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">, who closed the business and decided to use</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> the proceeds </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">to build the Mayfair Apartments on Lot 11 next door to his own house on St. James Park</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>The architect Thornton Fitzhugh's drawing of W. W. Johnston's new apartment building</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> appeared in the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> on November 11, 1906. It was next door to</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Johnston's own house at 38 St. James Park, the northwest corner of which</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>appears at left. At far right is a bit of the St. Lawrence Apartments,</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> being built at the same time; the arrival of blocks of flats on</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> the Park was not well received at first. Unlike most of</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> the neighborhood's houses, however, both the</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> Mayfair and the St. Lawrence—now</b></span><br />
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</span> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">The Johnstons' interest in St. James Park might appear to have first been speculative. While the social columns of the <i>Times</i> and the <i>Herald</i> reported that they were in residence by mid-May 1905—with Mrs. Johnston receiving at home on Wednesdays—it was not long before they had vacated #38 and began to rent their new house. Perhaps Major Russell had gotten wind of the plans for the St. Lawrence during his brief tenancy at #38 and neglected to disclose this to Johnston; perhaps it was when Johnston realized the plans afoot for Lot 10 that he bought Lot 11 and decided to capitalize on it by building a multiunit structure himself. At any rate, he and Josephine may have decided to avoid the construction noise of two large buildings going up next door by traveling; there were indeed trips to Europe over the next few years. During the winter of 1910-11 the couple rented #38 and took an apartment in the Mayfair. Would they be selling #38?</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">The hinges of #38 were by now heated to white-hot with all the comings and goings since it was built in 1902. Following occupancy by the Bralys, the Russells, and the Johnstons, at least two more families were in residence between 1907 and 1911. First there was Dr. and Mrs. George Martyn, late of San Bernardino, who lived at #38 during 1908 and 1909, after which they moved for a brief stay at 24 St. James Park before settling in Pasadena. Number 38 was once again described as being the home of the Johnstons, but not for long. It was to well-known hotelier Milo Milton Potter that they rented the house over the winter of 1910-11. Potter was a Michigan native who had managed the Hotel Westminster downtown for many years before planning and building the swanky Hotel Van Nuys. After moving to Santa Barbara, he built his crown jewel, the Hotel Potter, though for business and social reasons he and his wife Nellie maintained an apartment in Los Angeles at the Van Nuys. It was after the sale of the Van Nuys to the unrelated Edward L. Potter that the Milo Potters rented #38. </span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Re-enter the Johnstons, who, perhaps tired of traveling and shifting their home back and forth between #38 to the Mayfair—and perhaps having discovered that the Mayfair and the St. Lawrence were attracting the proper sort of tenant—decided not to leave St. James Park after all. B</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">y the end of 1911 t</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">hey were back to stay in the house they'd bought six years before. Their social life kicked into high gear, or at least Josephine's did. Wylie seems to have stayed upstairs, at least figuratively speaking, while his wife entertained her friends at teas and luncheons and musicales. The Johnstons were not of the fast set in local society; Josephine was happier entertaining her guests with small genteel orchestras—no ragtime or jazz—that would sometimes even accompany a soprano singing one of the hostess's own compositions. Lending glamour to such sedate functions were her cousin Mrs. Claus Spreckles, when up from San Diego; also present on occasion was Princess Lazarovich Hrebelianovich, formerly Eleanor Hulda Calhoun of San Jose and lately of West 110th Street in Manhattan. </span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">There was, of course, the occasional sour note. Among the most discordant was the 1914 scandal of Wylie's brother Charles L. Johnston, who had come west with the family to open Johnston-Barret:</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>As reported in the April 14, 1914, </b></span><b style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">issue of the <i>Los Angeles Times</i></b></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">After William Wylie Johnston retreated to Inglewood Park Cemetery in 1920 at just 65, Josephine stayed on at #38 until joining her husband after she died at home on January 3, 1930. It was not long before #38 was occupied by its fourth owner. </span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he arrival of Berlin-born Paul Otto Tobeler on St. James Park signaled the demographic changes in West Adams that had begun in the mid-'20s. Not that the very cosmopolitan, even rakish, Mr. Tobeler moved into #38 like a Joad or put his Maytag on the front porch—he was, if anything, considerably more sophisticated than even self-appointed Establishment society folk such as the Dockweilers across the street at <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-05-01T00:00:00-04:00&updated-max=2012-06-01T00:00:00-04:00&max-results=1">#27</a> or the various Clarks on the other side of the park at <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_08_archive.html">#9</a> and <a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/2012_07_31_archive.html">#3</a>. As the district and the Park emptied of all but the most stalwart of the Old Guard in pursuit of homes on larger suburban lots in more fashionable parts of town to the north and west, the aging turn-of-the-century houses of West Adams were ripe for conversion to accommodate the huge population growth of Los Angeles over the course of the last decade. During the boom of the '20s longtime owners saw their chances to cash out and move on; the onset of the Depression then made bargains of the old barns. With the Crash having occurred just a few months before Josephine Johnston died, her executors were no doubt anxious to unload #38 to the first buyer. Enter Paul Tobeler, who though he would immediately subdivide the house, was no transient speculator: He and his family would make it their home base for nearly 40 years.</span><br />
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</span> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">With family connections in South America and Michigan, Paul Tobeler had traveled from Peru through New York to Detroit in 1924 as a student. His time in America apparently convinced him to return after finishing his education in Germany. Applying for citizenship in Detroit in 1926, he pressed on to Los Angeles, arriving on June 23, 1927. Described in official documents variously as a merchant and patent broker, his polish, multilingualism, and good looks found him representing the Republic of Guatemala as its consul by 1934, a position he'd hold for the next seven years. Barely 28 years old, it seems he might have brought a few family reichsmarks with him to be able to buy #38, even if it was in a neighborhood whose incipient decline included fewer and fewer large single-family houses on St. James Park. That he was a bachelor—though distinctly not a confirmed one—made his choice of such a large house seem curious at first. But Tobeler followed the prevailing economic trend by carving #38 into at least three separate apartments: Accompanying him on his move west was his sister Wally and her husband Otto Friedrich—not the author of <i>City of Nets</i> but rather a construction engineer—who at first lived with Paul in his quarters. Renting at #38 for $70 a month was the attorney in private practice who was representing Tobeler in his naturalization process, Thomas D. Long, and his wife Josephine. An apartment with the newly created address of 36 St. James Park was rented, also for $70 a month, by architectural designer Arthur F. Alexander and his family. Eventually three addresses would be assigned to the Braly/Russell/Johnston/Tobeler house: #38, #36, and #36½—the proliferation of "½" and even "¼" addresses beginning in the '20s indicating the increasing density of old West Adams.</span><br />
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</span> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Paul Tobeler had actually arrived on St. James Park the year before he bought #38. He took an apartment at the Mayfair in early 1929, rooms he appears to have retained along with the house next door for decades. His Mayfair apartment or apartments served variously over the years as his personal quarters, his offices, and also at times commercial space for his brother-in-law's engineering firm. Some sources indicate that Tobeler might have acquired the Mayfair from the Johnston estate when he bought #38 in 1930. The apartments he carved out of #38 itself were let to a number of tenants aside from family members: After the Longs and the Alexanders, those making the house their home over the next 35 years included William Frez, Ethel Cunrath, Lillian Jones, Betty Lou Coolbaugh, Brown and Martha Musselwhite, W. L. Welbourn, and nurse Agnes Gordon. There were also U.S.C. fraternity boys in occasional residence, whole chapters of them at times. Phi Kappa Sigma rented an apartment at #38 as its headquarters in the late '40s while their new house on 28th Street was being built, and Beta Sigma Tau occupied rooms in 1953.</span><br />
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</span> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">All the while, particularly as a young man about town before the war, Paul Tobeler cut a wide swath. With charm and diplomatic skills and credentials to add to his appeal, he was no doubt versed in the particular grammar of the remnants of Establishment society who lived on St. James Park alongside him. But with the stiff bourgeois life of the Clarks and the Dockweilers deadly boring to anyone but their own, Tobeler wasn't about to limit his social life to country club propriety or provincial debutantes, not with the parties and starlets of vastly more sophisticated Hollywood just a few miles away. From the '30s to the '60s the <i>Times</i> covered the worlds of big-league burghers and denizens of movieland with separate reportage, and only rarely were the names of one camp mentioned alongside those of the other. All to the good of local industry, columnists never divulged the deepest secrets of either set, even if Hollywood had to work much harder at constructing acceptable scenarios for the lives of some of its stars. A case in point would be the convenient marriage of actress Janet Gaynor and dress designer Adrian, a couple that no doubt, for all the flummery, attracted a less uptight circle of friends than might be found at the seriously stuffy Assembly balls. Paul Tobeler was mentioned in columns of all stripes but not infrequently alongside Janet and Adrian and other privately louche entertainment figures. And all the while he remained single, if not exactly alone.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>With a Kissingeresque voice and a considerable glint in his eye, the rake got from the lady</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> at left half a "fabulous borax mountain," half a power-tool manufacturing business,</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> and, whether he liked it or not, half a child: Still with killer eyebrows if less of</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> a smile under the circumstances, Paul Tobeler faces a former lover's—</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>and benefactress's—accusations of paternity in 1956.</b></span></td></tr>
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</span> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Perhaps having something to do with Tobeler's German background, Guatemala replaced its Los Angeles consul as war approached. The now staunchly—and bona fide—American ex-consul had had his big 'ole iron in other fires for some time, however, described variously in the early '40s as an importer, a mineral purveyor, and an industrialist. It was in the latter capacity in particular that he achieved serious business success, though he would manage to let the chief habit of a diplomatic career—mixing business with pleasure—get a bit out of hand as scandal some years in the future would reveal. Tobeler was acting as the executive manager of the nonmedical business interests of Dr. John K. Suckow, including a mine in the Mojave termed a "fabulous borax mountain" by the <i>Times,</i> when the 72-year-old physician died in February 1942. From Tobeler's dutiful—not to say horndog—perspective, the doctor's widow, 30 years her late husband's junior, would of course fall under the category of nonmedical interests. And so as was finally confirmed in 1957 there had come in 1943 a child of what we'll just say was one of those encounters born of mutual grief, and of working closely together: It would be rude to suggest that he used his Teutonic magnetism to affect the transactions, but Mrs. Suckow had sold to him half her interest in her husband's borax mine and air-tool factory. The randy Tobeler was still disinterested in marriage, to say nothing of parenthood, and he managed to put off public acknowledgement of having fathered the child until Ruth Suckow brought him to court 12 years later. In the meantime, Paul finally did marry in 1951.</span><br />
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> The <i>Los Angeles Times</i> of April 9, 1955,</b></span></div>
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</span> <span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">It was a bad few years for Paul Tobeler in the mid-'50s: His wife, Phyllis—</span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">tempestuous and/or fed up, was </span><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">complaining of his attentions to his secretary. She divorced him in 1956 and was suing him for alimony at the same time the paternity suit was being tried. Apparently, and understandably, while Paul Tobeler kept a low profile from that point on until he died on March 6, 1981, one doubts that he lacked for female company between the paternity suit and his burial at Forest Lawn. His ownership of 38 St. James Park may have been transferred to his brother-in-law Otto Friedrich somewhere along the line. Tobeler himself moved by 1945 to the old Bilicke house at </span><a href="http://msboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/2011/08/825-west-adams-boulevard-please-also.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">825 West Adams Boulevard</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">, which still stands just behind what's left of his Mayfair Apartments, while Friedrich was listed in city directories as living at #38 as late as 1967. There would still be miscellaneous directory listings for the house John Hyde Braly built in 1902 as late as July 1973, but its days were numbered. While Julia Dockweiler remained at </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-05-01T00:00:00-04:00&updated-max=2012-06-01T00:00:00-04:00&max-results=1" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">#27</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"> across the street in the house her family had built in 1900, and would do so until 1990, #38 finally came down with most of the rest of the houses on St. James Park. </span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Sic transit gloria St. James Park</i><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>38 St. James Park with a fragment rear view of <a href="http://msboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/2011/08/825-west-adams-boulevard-please-also.html">825 West Adams</a> at</b></span><br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> left, both owned at one time by Paul Otto Tobeler.</b></span></td></tr>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">Illustrations: Private Collection; </span><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Memory_pictures_an_autobiography.html?id=INcEAAAAIAAJ" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Google Books</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">; </span><a href="http://lapl.org/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">LAPL</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">; </span><a href="http://latimes.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">LAT</a><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif">; </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=rAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA330&lpg=PA330&dq=major+horace+marvin+russell&source=bl&ots=FvXVHmCjVi&sig=zjEEz8Py_fZ5WRJmg0QIaDyedz0&hl=en#v=onepage&q=major%20horace%20marvin%20russell&f=false">Out West</a></i><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1976092509086905118.post-13773873289189299332015-01-01T08:09:00.000-05:002018-10-09T09:51:05.281-04:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">44 St. James Park:</b><br />
<b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-large;">The Mayfair and the St. Lawrence</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES</span><br />
<a href="http://berkeleysquarelosangeles.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">BERKELEY SQUARE</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> <a href="http://adamsboulevardlosangeles.blogspot.com/">ADAMS BOULEVARD</a> <a href="http://wilshireboulevardhouses.blogspot.com/">WILSHIRE BOULEVARD</a></span><br />
<a href="http://fremontplace.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">FREMONT PLACE</a> <a href="http://windsorsquarelosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">WINDSOR SQUARE</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><a href="http://westmorelandplacelosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">WESTMORELAND PLACE</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO ST. JAMES PARK, CLICK </span><a href="http://stjamesparklosangeles.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">HERE</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he Mayfair and the St. Lawrence apartment buildings that some single-family households in the St. James Park neighborhood felt were an intrusion were both built in 1906, and both still stand. The full story of the combined structures now addressed as 44 St. James Park will appear soon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Illustration: <a href="http://latimes.com/">LAT</a></span></div>
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