3601 Wilshire Boulevard

PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES

BERKELEY SQUARE   ST. JAMES PARK   WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

For decades, it seems, if the name Doheny wasn't being cited by the Los Angeles Times in stories regarding the oil industry, it was the name Getty. And early on, the Getty mentioned most was the originator of the California family, George Franklin Getty, who built 3601 Wilshire Boulevard in 1908. As the house's style did for many a newcomer to Los Angeles, its half-timbered suggestion of English antiquity was meant to comfort the socially insecure and to preclude any discomfort among the already established that among them had come an arriviste—not that there really were many people in L.A. who weren't arrivistes back then.

George Franklin Getty in a portrait by Los Angeles
photographer Aaron Tycko, circa 1923.

George Getty, born in Allegany County, Maryland, on October 17, 1855, was trained as a lawyer in Ohio and at Ann Arbor, practicing first in Michigan before moving to Minneapolis and prospering in corporate law. In 1903, while on a business trip to the Oklahoma Territory as chief legal counsel of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company, Getty stumbled upon what would be his second, much shinier act. Moving his family south from Minnesota and buying the lease on a 1,100-acre tract for speculation, Getty began drilling. Within months his Minnehoma Oil Company had a gusher, then another and another. By the middle of 1906, having become one of the biggest and richest independent oil operators on the eastern Great Plains, Getty saw even greater possibilities still farther west. The family moved again, now to Los Angeles, the sunny prize after Minnesota and Oklahoma and a lot of hard work. Settling for the time being at the Hotel Frontenac downtown, Getty began looking for a permanent situation, in March 1907 buying, in Sarah's name, a 75-by-150-foot lot far out on Wilshire Boulevard in the sparsely populated Normandy Hill tract. (The first house in the area, W. D. Longyear's 3555 Wilshire a block east in the same subdivision, was just being completed.) By midsummer, in-demand architect Frank M. Tyler was commissioned to design a house for the lot, with a contract to build going out on September 1. On March 15, 1908, the Times reported that 3601 Wilshire had just been completed. In 1913, Homes and Gardens of the Pacific Coast, Vol II, described the Getty house thusly: "This is an attractive home along modern English lines.... Like most English homes the first story is of brick with half timber construction above. The interior is modified Colonial in design. Woodwork is oak and mahogany. The walls of the living room are of silk tapestry with Astrakhan rugs as floor coverings. The reception hall and bedrooms are finished in white enamel. The English type of architecture fits well in this coast country, and is most comfortable and pleasing."

The Getty house nearing completion, as seen in the

 Los Angeles Times on March 15, 1908.

As were a number of houses with Wilshire Boulevard frontage, 3601 was built facing its side street. As one of the first builders on still-unpaved Wilshire it doesn't seem as though Getty would have been worried about heavy traffic on the wider street, although maybe he was looking ahead. Perhaps it was simply a matter of the footprint of his new house fitting its lot better when placed perpendicular to Wilshire. At any rate, after five years, the house's address was changed to 647 South Kingsley Drive to conform to its orientation. After the annexation in recent years of Hollywood, the Colegrove Addition, and other territory, the City of Los Angeles made a number changes in street alignments, nomenclature, and house numbering. Wilshire, in these precincts, had been throwing off an orderly system; the 600 block of Kingsley, for example, once extended from Sixth Street south to Wilshire, with the 700 block extending from Wilshire to Seventh. It is unclear whether the changes were made in a single day or over time, but after 1912, the 600 block, or blocks, extended from Sixth south to Seventh. While this wouldn't have actually affected a 600-block designation of the Getty house, the Getty's address change from Wilshire to Kingsley was made at this time. Perhaps George Getty was learning the art of understatement, which he might have begun to feel he needed with a son who was proving to be no shrinking violet. 

George and Sarah Risher Getty were married in Ohio in 1879; they went on to have two children, the 1890 death at age nine of the older, Gertrude, perhaps explaining the later seriously uncharming personality of the younger, Jean Paul, born in Minneapolis on December 15, 1892. Not that the perhaps inevitably spoiled boy started out charmless, not at all. Not yet 14 when the family moved to Los Angeles, Jean Paul was high-spirited, precocious on many levels, and interested more in girls than in the tedious rules and rituals of the Harvard Military School. He got away with bucking the system at school and at home for years; he wasn't disinterested in acquiring an education, but he knew the subjects he was interested in and made certain he studied them his way, to the fullest. He wound up with a degree from Oxford by 1913, developing while in England quite a taste for a civilization he considered superior to Minnesota's, Oklahoma's and that of Los Angeles. He probably realized that he had little chance of coming near the inner circle of that superior civilization without a great deal of money. He returned to provincial L.A. to make that great deal of money in the family business, business being something he was attracted to as much as England, women, and independence. His story is, of course, told at length in many places, such as The House of Getty by Russell Miller; as for his life at 3601 Wilshire Boulevard, to which both before and after his time in England he was somehow able to bring girlfriends home for more than milk and cookies right under George and Sarah's noses, his attachment to it must have been strong. The house was in a district fast becoming the center of town, with Beverly Hills emerging five miles to the west and cars now the new way of life. Despite a great deal of tension between father and son over unshared values if not moneymaking prowess, Paul was to live at home until he was 30 years old and about to marry the first of his five wives. Between spouses, it appears that he lived back at 3601, where his father died on May 31, 1930.

The George F. Getty house in 1913, just as its address changed
from 3601 Wilshire to 647 South Kingsley Drive

It should be mentioned that there are a number of Getty houses in the area extending from Kingsley Drive toward Hancock Park. It is often written that J. Paul Getty grew up in the 1914 house at 600 South Rossmore of very similar design to 3601 Wilshire. J. Paul reportedly bought the house in 1936, though it appears that he may never have lived in it—perhaps the purchase had something to do with his fourth wife divorcing him that year. The enumerator of the 1940 Federal census has him living with his mother at 647 South Kingsley, ostensibly wifeless, despite his having married wife number five in 1939. Until just after Sarah died on December 26, 1941, he was listed in the city directory at 647 before moving to his Santa Monica beach house with Number Five.

J. Paul's many wives, once discarded, required the sort of housing to which they had become accustomed. The same year he bought the South Rossmore house, he acquired 641 South Irving Boulevard, at the northwest corner of Wilshire, for the now-estranged Number Five, famously the palazzo of Norma Desmond, which, presented even more in shambles, appeared five years later in 1955's Rebel Without a Cause. (J. Paul, never much interested in being a good neighbor, gave the residents of Windsor Square fits when he sought to tear down the house soon after its last film appearance; he, naturally, succeeded, adding insult to injury by building the huge, block-long, and still-extant headquarters for his business interests. In a bid to acquire the entire block, Getty Oil wound up with 605 South Irving, naming it in memory of J. Paul's oldest son George Franklin Getty II; this time thwarted by neighbors, Getty donated it to the city in 1976 for use as the official mayor's residence.

As for 3601 Wilshire Boulevard—one of the first houses west of Vermont Avenue was also one of the last to fall. Whether J. Paul Getty sold or leased what became 647 South Kingsley isn't certain, but by August 1942 the house had become one of a small chain of nursing homes, with its property at 647 being called Sunny Pines Lodge. The house remained the Lodge until 1961; some time after that, St. Basil Catholic Church, located around the corner on Harvard Boulevard, acquired the property and began to plan its imposing new sanctuary, dedicated on June 29, 1969.

St. Basil Catholic Church, built in 1969 on the site of the Getty house:
The Wilshire Boulevard Temple is at left; its right edge is
also seen in the 1956 photograph at top.

Illustrations: USCDL; LAPL; LAT;

 Homes and Gardens of the Pacific Coast, Vol II; Google Street View

2520 Wilshire Boulevard

PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES

BERKELEY SQUARE   ST. JAMES PARK   WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

While the fortunes of today often come from the ether, those of the late 19th century and into the 20th came from the earth. Many a Los Angeles plutocrat of the turn of the last century struck gold, literally, in fields on either side of the Sierra Nevada; some brought oil up from right under the city. Other men came by their wealth from minerals extracted from Eastern veins and then retired west or began new business ventures there. Nicholas Earl Rice had pulled a lot of coal out of Pennsylvania mines, enough to afford him as nice a life as could be had in Scranton, including, by 1898, a lovely new turreted Victorian, and, it seems, a blessed bit of travel to exotic sunny lands. One can only imagine Rice's and his wife Harriet's disinclination to return to the cold and dark and sooty east once they got an eyeful of Los Angeles, circa 1900—not to mention a noseful of orange-scented air. They never went east to live again, not even in their coffins. Would you have?

California did indeed work its predictable magic on the Rices. Mr. Rice decided to stay and invest in a new concern, the Pacific Coast Manufacturing Company, which would be fabricating irrigation- and oil-industry supplies. The Rices at first rented a house at 838 South Lake Street. Already with a number of acquaintances in Los Angeles, they were well entertained that first winter, their circle coming to include Dr. Henderson Hayward, a fellow Pennsylvanian who had come to L.A. in 1893 to improve his health. Rebounding in the sunshine, Hayward left medicine behind in the east to become an major figure in the oil business, investing his proceeds in city property including in Gaylord Wilshire's new subdivision. He built his own house at 2501 Wilshire in 1897; in early 1901, he sold a lot he owned across the street to Nicholas Rice. By the end of the year, Rice had commissioned prominent architect John C. Austin to design the modern, turretless, 15-room house at the southeast corner of Coronado Street that became 2520 Wilshire Boulevard.

As Nicholas kept busy during the day with his new business interests, Harriet began decades of throwing dinners, receptions, card parties, and charming afternoon teas. Wilshire Boulevard's peak of residential desirability came at about the same time that Rice decided to buy the remainder of 2520's blockfront in 1908. The southwest corner of Wilshire and Carondelet had come into the hands of E. M. Davis around 1900; Davis had in turn sold the corner in 1904 to pottery manufacturer Homer Laughlin, who began a foundation for a house there. Nicholas Rice removed the foundation and turned the lot into an extensive garden for 2520, giving him the largest single-family holding on the original four blocks of Wilshire between Westlake and Sunset (Lafayette) parks. 

The Rice house at 2520 Wilshire Boulevard is seen at left center, with its garden extending
to Carondelet Street, from which, atop the Hotel Shoreham, this view was taken for
 the Los Angeles Times of May 18, 1913. At top left is the Hershey Arms; at top
center is the newly completed Bryson. Effie Neustadt's house at
 2515 Wilshire is at right; 2525 is next door, with the
Rampart Apartments rising just to its left.

The parties were no doubt lovely, and perhaps she was perfectly happy, but Harriet Rice's life seems to be preparing to give one ladies' party after another during her years at 2520 and after. Another couple who seem to have had the need for a big statement house despite being childless, the Rices did decide to move after 10 years. It could be that they were unhappy when the four-story Hotel Shoreham opened on Carondelet Street overlooking their garden in 1911; perhaps they also got wind of Hugh W. Bryson's plans to replace four houses he'd bought a block west that same year with his fabled eponymous apartment house. These were likely the straws that broke the camel's back in terms of the Rices putting up with hotels in the neighborhood—the block-long Hershey Arms, which had opened across Coronado Street a year after they built 2520, was one thing, but it was clear that the tide was turning on Wilshire Boulevard even this early. Nicholas Rice the pragmatist also no doubt realized that he could make a bundle by selling his blockfront. When Helen Mathewson, proprietor of the Hershey Arms, offered him $70,000 for his house and garden in July 1911, nearly doubling his original investment, he took it. When Joseph W. Gray of Minneapolis offered Mathewson $120,000 for the same property less than two years later, she took it. Gray was reportedly planning yet another big building.

Perhaps Mr. Gray of Minneapolis wasn't able to get financing to build "one of the largest and finest tourist hotels west of Chicago," as the Times put it. The property would flail in search of a use for many decades to come; at any rate, the Rice house would remain standing for 10 more years, though its brief decade as a suburban estate had ended. When Joseph Gray's ambitious plan for a hotel came to nothing, it appears that he retreated to Minnesota, renting 2520 in 1916 to oil man Frederick O. Funk and his family, newly arrived from West Virginia. After a couple of years, the Funks bought a house in Windsor Square. Without being replaced by a hotel, the Rice house succumbed to the multi-unit trend of the neighborhood, its rooms being divided into a genteel boarding house—by 1920 there were at least eight individuals occupying the house, mostly young, including Lewis H. Martin, a 25-year-old bond salesman, and several school teachers. A young tuberculosis specialist connected with the Barlow Sanitarium in Chavez Ravine, Dr. E. Richmond Ware, had rooms for a few years in the early '20s. Finally the end came.

It is unclear if it was Joseph Gray who had sat on the property for a decade or if he had sold to another owner, but when a buyer came along proposing a height-limit, block-long athletic club in January 1923, the Rice property was sold. The tenants got their notice, and an auction was announced in August 1923 issues of the Times. But whose belongings were being auctioned off? Had the Rices sold the house furnished when they moved nearby to Occidental Boulevard? (Did they leave their personalized horseblock on Wilshire or take it with them?) Did the furniture once belong to Helen Mathewson? 

Unfulfilled ambition: The Southern California Athletic and Country Club had big plans for
the old Nicholas Rice property, beginning with Edwin Bergstrom's 1923 design.

The newly formed Southern California Athletic and Country Club announced its ambitious plans well before the house came down. The club commissioned a design by Edwin Bergstrom; the Times would go on to report that work on it was to begin "imminently" more than once. But the delay would turn into years—there were many revisions to the plan, including, when Wilshire in these precincts was rezoned for business, one for street-level shops. Then the architects Meyer and Holler were brought in for a complete 13-story redesign. But the empty blockfront remained hideously fenced off, much to the dismay of neighbors. Constant public solicitations for club members went on into 1928, and still only some foundation work was accomplished by then. Plans for the club must have appeared fishy to newspaper readers of the time: Was it all just a scam to gain financial commitments from prospective members? No one could have been too surprised when club organizers announced bankruptcy in February 1929, well before the stock market crash eight months later.

Within months the old Rice property was for sale, not finding a buyer until two years later when the Citizens National Bank bought it to flip. The Depression had yet to reach its nadir; nothing happened when conditions improved, and the war further delayed any development of the site. It remained vacant at least until Harriet Rice died at home on Occidental Boulevard in her 100th year in 1948, after which it appears that a taxpayer may have been built. A large, charmless 13-story office building finished in 1970 occupies the site today.



Illustrations: LAPL; LAT

3101 Wilshire Boulevard

PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES

BERKELEY SQUARE   ST. JAMES PARK   WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

Looking more like something flown in from East Hampton or Cape Cod, the Dutch Colonial house built in 1907 at 3101 Wilshire Boulevard clearly reflects the Yankee sensibilities of its principal architect rather than the Midwestern roots of his partner or of the family that commissioned it. As related in the story of 2515 Wilshire, the driving force behind the Los Angeles identity of the Neustadts was heiress Effie Gardner Neustadt of the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois. Her father, Robert W. Gardner, had made a fortune by perfecting the fly-ball governor for steam-driven pumping equipment used in the burgeoning oil and gas industries. Coupled with a lifelong passion for building her own houses, Effie also doled out her legacy most generously to her two children. When her son Robert Gardner Neustadt married Altadena Green of Pasadena on March 14, 1907, Effie presented the couple with not only with a 60-by-170-foot lot in the Shatto Place tract she'd bought from Clara Shatto herself, but the funds to finance a house on it by one of the top architectural firms in the city. Since having designed Effie's own house at 2515 Wilshire five years before, Myron Hunt had partnered with Elmer Grey, another Midwesterner, born in Chicago. Still, it seems that Myron Hunt persuaded Effie and her son to accept what he might have observed on the seacoast of his native Massachusetts: something rather humble in appearance for what was to become, if briefly, the grandest residential street in town. Robert Neustadt was just 21 when he married, and he'd also already formed a business partnership with Charles E. Richards in the Richards-Neustadt Construction Company. The vast real estate holdings inherited by his mother after the death in 1896 of his father, Louis C. Neustadt, provided Effie with the canvas for her building whims; Robert's construction firm brought the plans of the architects she chose for her projects to three dimensions. The collaboration appears to have been very tidy and lucrative, especially as repeated in and around the booming City of Angeles.

Hunt & Grey's 3101 Wilshire Boulevard soon after completion in 1907, as compared to 22
 years later at top: By 1929, Wilshire had been widened, Bullock's-Wilshire was
poised to open across the street that fall, and the residential
 boulevard was deep into its eclipse.

While Effie Neustadt employed a chauffeur to get her around town, it was she who was most definitely in charge of her family's domestic arrangements, despite the increasing lack of personal mobility that would confine her to a wheelchair. Her impairment did not keep her from pursing her hobby of building houses; if anything, it seemed to intensify her interest. On the way to building a precociously handicap-accessible house in Altadena for herself and her son and daughter-in-law, Effie had Hunt & Grey design a palazzo that would stand prominently on the northwest corner of West Adams Street and Western Avenue (seen here), a house seemingly out of character when compared to her usual self-effacing architectural choices; perhaps it was just an early exercise in McMansion spec housing. How long Effie may have lived in the house is unclear, but she sold in 1909, the year after its completion. Also sold that year were her houses at 2515 and 2525 Wilshire; likewise, with the multi-generational Altadena house the next stop for all, Robert and Altadena, apparently unsentimental about wedding presents, likewise disposed of 3101 in late April 1909 to nouveau Angeleno Orra Eugene Monnette and his wife, née Carrie Lucile Janeway, both late of Ohio. 

After a stint at the Hershey Arms on Wilshire, and before moving to 3101, the younger Monnettes lived in a big mission-style house his father Mervin J. Monnette, had bought out at 951 South Western Avenue. An attorney back in Toledo, Orra had come west in 1907 at the behest of mining-mogul Mervin, who'd recently made a big-as-the-Ritz bundle speculating in Nevada mines and needed help managing his bounty. Putting his father's bonanza to work, Orra began investing in Southern California banks. After several quick mergers, he became became chairman of the Citizens Trust and Savings Bank, which, in 1923, in anticipation of possible national expansion, was renamed Bank of America. It was that name that Monnette and his fellow stockholders brought to the bank's merger with Amadeo Giannini's Bank of Italy in 1929. No slouch either when it came to civic matters, Orra Monnette was a driving force behind the expansion of the Los Angeles Public Library system. Under his aegis, the great main library was built downtown, along with another 48 branches.

Monnette was also quite the ancestor-worshipper. He was a member of the Mayflower Descendants (that was one crowded boat), the Huguenot Society, the Baronial Order of Runnemede, and a "son" of this and that society. In 1910 he completed his florid 1,000-page Monnet Family Genealogy, an Emphasis of a Noble Huguenot Heritage. Noble, naturally. (His assumption of nobility even extended to his Boston Terrier, named "Monnet Le Duc.") It seems that Orra held more immediate relatives in less lofty regard. Long about 1916, after 21 years of marriage, Lucy filed for, and was granted, a divorce. A nurse, one Anna Downey, was named as the Other Woman. The complaint, the Los Angeles Times reported delicately, mentioned "an incident at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco, in which Monnette and the corespondent were alleged to have figured." Lucy's  attorney, Neil McCarthy—who lives on as a Polo Lounge salad—didn't have much trouble winning her a large settlement.

A year later, Orra remarried, but his new wife, rather than being the nurse, was Helen Kull, who had been his secretary. One child and five years later, Helen sued for divorce, citing in her complaint cruelty, along with another of her husband's former secretaries, one Myrtle Cooper. The directors of the Citizens Trust and Savings were not amused; the comings and goings of the wives of Mervin J. Monnette during the teens—he was also an officer of Citizens—can't have helped the family image, despite generations of alleged illustriousness. The name Monnette now clearly stood not for noble heritage but a certain sort of odious behavior unbecoming an institution promoting thrift and industry. The board of Citizens fired Orra. Helen came around, no doubt thinking long and hard about what might be her prospects as an impecunious divorcée.

But it was in the wake of his first marital disaster in 1916 that 3101 Wilshire came under new ownership. The boulevard, even as it moved closer to its decade of transition to commercial use, could still attract the Big Swinging Dicks of Los Angeles.

By all accounts, Ferdinand Randall Bain, born in Upstate New York in 1861, was as big of a Big Swinging Dick as Poughkeepsie ever saw. At one time he owned and was president and general manager of the Poughkeepsie street railway system. Later he was president of Poughkeepsie Gas and Electric. He was a bank director, and he had a large interest in an entire square block of downtown Manhattan. According to his biography, he became recognized as a leading figure in New York State utility, banking, and railroad circles. After 1904 Bain reduced his business activities and began to travel—an attempt at early retirement, much like William E. Hampton of 2515 Wilshire. Apparently he was given to leaving his wife, Hattie, and their three daughters behind in Dutchess County, and, it seems, he finally left for good. Though appearing to base himself on Wall Street, he was at least nominally living at home in Poughkeepsie as late as 1910. Yet the next year, there was a new Mrs. Bain, a widow by the name of Gertrude Benchley Miller. There was also Santa Barbara—a combination of a lady and a landscape that was a far cry from Dutchess County and the grimy canyons of Lower Manhattan. Hattie and the girls were toast. While the climate and the glamour may have been seductive, Santa Barbara society no doubt proved stultifying after a while; Ferdinand began to look for new business challenges. (Not that he was unsociable—he retained membership in numerous clubs, among them the California and the Los Angeles Country clubs, as well as the very exclusive Downtown of New York.) Long about 1912 he discovered that the towns south of Los Angeles were in need of better gas service. Taking over the delivery systems of Anaheim, Fullerton, and Santa Ana, he began in short order to create the Southern Counties Gas Company, of which he became president and a large stakeholder. When not home in Montecito, which seems to have been most of the time, Bain based himself at the Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles and then at Fullerton. The untimely death of Gertrude in Santa Barbara in 1916 allowed Ferdinand to leave the somnolent resort more or less for good and remain close to the action in L.A. At about this time, Orra E. Monnette, also losing a wife, put 3101 Wilshire on the market. Bain moved in.

Ferdinand apparently lived alone in his big new house, more befitting a large family than the childless owners it always seems to have had. It did, however, befit an man of his station. He lived in the "old" Neustadt-Monnette house for seven years, nose in grief to company grindstone. Long about 1924, he married again, this time to Elizabeth Stoops. By now, the Miracle Mile was in formation, signalling the residential demise of Wilshire Boulevard. Ferdinand decided to cash out of or rent 3101 and move to the country—Overland Avenue near National Boulevard—where he built a hybrid Georgian–Southern Colonial house on his ranch. Though most likely overrun by development almost as quickly as Wilshire turned commercial, the house still stands. By 1940 the Bains had accepted the suburbanization of Westside Los Angeles and retired to Holmby Hills.

The only certain fate of fate of 3101 Wilshire after 1924 is that it eventually disappeared. Ownership after Bain is unclear. Perhaps it was retained by him as a rental property as he awaited an ever higher commercial value. It was apparently used as such at least up to the Depression. In November 1929 the Mozumdar Fellowship—a sect involving swamis—moved into 3101 and conducted services advertised weekly in the Times. Today, at least, like the Neustadt houses at 2515 and 2525, the one the family built at 3101 Wilshire Boulevard has given way to a parking lot.

1928: With excavations under way for the new Bullock's-Wilshire, the
 days of 3101—seen in the distance at right—were numbered.

Illustrations: USCDL; The American Architect; srcalifornia.com; Google Books

2515 Wilshire Boulevard

PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES

BERKELEY SQUARE    ST. JAMES PARK   WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

Native Missourian Louis C. Neustadt married flyball-governor heiress Effie Gardner of Quincy, Illinois, on Halloween in 1878; their daughter Edith was born the next year and their son, Robert Gardner Neustadt, on the Fourth of July, 1885. Upon his marriage Louis became associated with his father-in-law, Robert W. Gardner, who had made a fortune developing an improved type of engine governor and other equipment needed by the emerging oil- and gas-producing industries. While Neustadt was still serving as secretary and treasurer of the Gardner Governor Company at the time of his death in 1896, it appears that his true calling was 1,600 miles to the west in Los Angeles. Though maintaining a household in Quincy, the Neustadts began to establish at least a wintertime presence in Southern California, Mr. Neustadt becoming associated with John A. Pirtle in real estate and securities speculation in L.A. as early as April 1889. Despite the economic upheavals of the '90s, the rise of the oil industry had a positive effect on the Neustadts' investment purse. Following Louis's demise, Effie began to transition to full-time life on the West Coast, fueled by her share of the proceeds of her family's business in Quincy and her husband's dealings in L.A. real estate, to which Mrs. Neustadt seems to have paid particular attention. After a few years, and by now with entrée into the hoity-toitiest houses in town, the widow Effie established herself and her children in Los Angeles permanently, and on what was emerging as a boulevard meant, before its later commercialization, to rival West Adams Street in domestic opulence. 

The Los Angeles Times reported on July 5, 1903, that Caroline Bumiller Hickey had just sold Effie an unimproved 150-by-150-foot lot at the northeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Coronado Street. The eager new owner had engaged Myron Hunt—already in demand during his first year in the city—to design an 11-room house for her on the east side of the lot, to be addressed 2515 Wilshire Boulevard.  

Mrs. E. M. Neustadt, as Effie would be styled in accounts of her real estate and social activities, moved into 2515 with Edith and the high-spirited Robert in 1904. Real estate speculation by nature seems to breed restlessness if not recklessness—or is it just having a lot of money? Robert appears to have been hauled into court on several occasions on charges of reckless driving, usually defending himself arrogantly; but then he was barely 20, spoiled, and could afford a powerful machine (in later years it would be reckless polo and marriage-management, although these were beyond his tenure on Wilshire Boulevard). 

Both Edith and Robert were married while still living at 2515. Edith was married in San Francisco in October 1904 to stock and bond broker Luther Herbert Green, brother of Beverly Hills developer Burton E. Green. The couple settled in Los Angeles at 2525 Wilshire, which Effie built next to her own house on half of her original lot. The Greens had two children, Effie and Robert. Edith died in 1910; Luther would be murdered in 1927 by gangsters seeking the $10,000 stash of prewar booze he kept in his Bonnie Brae Street cellar.

As for Robert, the timeline is confusing, if one considers that he was somehow, before online education, also matriculating 3,000 miles away at Princeton (class of 1908, per his 1934 New York Times obituary). According to other records, he was at the same time getting his professional feet wet in partnership with Charles E. Richards in the Pacific Cement Waterproofing Company in Los Angeles, which by 1907 had become the Richards-Neustadt Construction Company. Despite Robert's young age, he seems to have done well with his mother's money—there were a number of lots in fashionable precincts bought by Effie, improved by Robert, and sold to their mutual benefit. On March 14, 1907, 21-year-old Robert married the apparently geographically-named Altadena Green (not known to have had a twin named Pasadena and apparently no relation to her new brother-in-law). The ceremony was held at 2515 rather than in his bride's hometown of Pasadena due to the recent ill health of the groom's mother. Commensurate with her means, Effie gave the couple a lot a half-mile to the west on Wilshire, throwing in the funds for Myron Hunt, now partnered with Elmer Grey, to design a house on it as a wedding present. This was to become 3101 Wilshire Boulevard.

Perhaps just an exercise in a new mode, consummate planner and builder Effie Neustadt
had Hunt & Grey design this house once standing prominently at the northwest
 corner of Adams and Western, sold a year after completion to J. T. Fitzgerald. 

Five years in one house was an eternity to Effie Neustadt. As her 1914 Los Angeles Times obituary has it, "Her passion was the building of splendid homes. Each of these she would occupy for a time and then build another, still finer, in some other part of her extensive real estate holdings." After deciding to leave 2515 Wilshire in 1908, Effie would have Myron Hunt build her an altogether different and much, much bigger house than those he'd designed for her on Wilshire Boulevard. Set high above terraced gardens, a grand, symmetrical (and now long-gone) petit trianon-ish house—in vogue with the Los Angeles rich of the period—rose at the northwest corner of Adams Street and Western Avenue; she would sell it to music dealer J. T. Fitzgerald just a year later. It seems that Effie, though still just in her 50s, was now confined to a wheelchair and in need of ramps. After selling 2443 South Western Avenue to Fitzgerald, she built a house at 1050 East Mariposa Street in Altadena, reportedly built to accommodate the rolling Effie. While she had built her first house in Los Angeles with Myron Hunt as her architect, and had used him again, after his partnering with Elmer Grey, for Robert's Wilshire Boulevard house and then for Western Avenue, after the architects dissolved their partnership late in 1909 she went with Grey alone for her Altadena house, which still stands. According to her obituary, at the time of her death on July 17, 1914, she had just completed "the fourth, most magnificent of them all" on five acres in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena. 

Returning to a more rustic English mode after a brief fling with grandeur, Effie Neustadt moved
 into 1050 South Mariposa in Altadena. Despite now being confined to a wheelchair, her
 energies for planning and building were uninhibited; at the time of her death in
 1914, she was building at least her sixth house in the past decade.

The plan that evolved was for Effie and her son and daughter-in-law to move together to the new house in Altadena. Robert and Altadena sold 3101 Wilshire in April 1909; that same month, Luther H. Green, acting as broker, sold 2525 on the west half of his mother-in-law's original Wilshire lot to attorney Timothy Wilfred Coakley, recently arrived from Boston. Manufacturer William Edward Hampton would acquire 2515. 

A man of that certain postbellum American drive, William E. Hampton, born on August 8, 1852, began his career as a teenager in central Illinois, eventually becoming a highly successful dry-goods merchant. He was much less successful in his attempt to retire early to the Pacific Coast in 1886. Having grown restless after a few years spent traveling, he settled in San Francisco and restarted his career in a new direction. He built a plant in his new hometown to manufacture "non-shrinking" wooden water tanks and those used in the mining industry. Eventually, Hampton established branches up and down the West Coast, including one in Los Angeles, to which he moved in 1898. Adding to a reputation that would have him later called a "lumber king," Hampton extended his manufacturing activities by organizing the highly successful Pacific Planing Mill Company; there seems to have been little that the man failed at save his attempt to retire at an early age. 

The modest look of great success:
William E. Hampton, circa 1912.

In addition to attending to his businesses, Hampton found time to hold directorships in at least a half-dozen other enterprises, including several banks. He was also active in civic organizations, among them the Special Harbor Committee charged with exploring the development of the port of Los Angeles in anticipation of the opening of the Panama Canal. As a mover and shaker, Hampton was naturally elected a member of the top clubs of the muckety-muck class, including the California, Jonathan, and Los Angeles Country clubs.

Hampton was not without a wife during the years of building. He'd married an Illinois girl, Frances Wilhoit, in 1880. The couple seems to have had no children; Frances ran a quiet household on Wilshire Boulevard, entertaining at home with the occasional "bridge-tea" both before and after her husband's death in 1928. Thirty-three years after moving into 2515, Frances died there on January 3, 1943. How long the house remained standing and what it might have been replaced with is unclear; today, the lot Effie Nuestadt bought in 1903 and on which she built both 2515 and 2525 Wilshire is given over to—what else?—parking.

Illustrations: LAT; The American Architect; Altadena Online; Press Reference Library

666 South Berendo Street

PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES

BERKELEY SQUARE   ST. JAMES PARK   WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

The most distinguished of Wilshire Boulevard survivors, the deceptively unassuming Earle C. Anthony house moved to Beverly Hills in 1923, was also one of the few houses along the thoroughfare that took modest side-street addresses. Originally numbered 708 before the citywide address realignments of 1911, 666 South Berendo remains standing—albeit eight miles to the west—as one of Charles and Henry Greene's few legacies outside of Pasadena.

Earle C. Anthony was an early automobile enthusiast who, in partnership with his father Charles E. Anthony, founded the Western Motor Car Company in Los Angeles on March 8, 1904. Not a little self-promotion resulted in the Anthonys eventually becoming almost synonymous with Packard on the West Coast. Earle further encouraged Southland motoring with an intercity bus line and a chain of filling stations, which, along with its chevron logo, was sold to Standard Oil of California in 1913.

This advertisement appeared in the Los Angeles Times within days of Western Motor's
incorporation; the company's success would enable both Charles E. Anthony and
 his son to build on Wilshire Boulevard within a few short years.

The newest technologies were always a passion of Earle C. Anthony, who brought the first neon to Los Angeles ("P A C K A R D"); once California was thoroughly motorized, he turned precociously and perhaps most famously to the development of local radio. His clear-channel KFI began broadcasting in Los Angeles on April 16, 1922. It was at about this time that Anthony decided that the ambiance of his first major residential commission, his Greene & Greene house at Wilshire and Berendo, had been thoroughly compromised by the noise and fumes of the exponentially increasing numbers of the cars he himself had brought to rapidly commercializing Wilshire Boulevard.

A little more than a decade before—back before radio and, in the days when Gaylord Wilshire's original concept of a residential boulevard still held—Earle C. Anthony decided to build a house at the southeast corner of Wilshire and Berendo. His father had recently built at the southwest corner, moving to 3300 Wilshire with his family, including Earle, from Menlo Avenue by 1908. After Earle married Irene Kelly on December 1 of that year, he began to look around for an architect to design a house of his own—and eventually, if not surprisingly given his imagination, he chose the Greenes, architects of innovation. As described by the Greene & Greene Virtual Archives, the house Anthony moved into in 1909 "had many of the characteristics of previous Greene & Greene commissions but without expensive materials and elaborate details. The house plan is L-shaped and designed for an urban lot.... The exterior has split-shake-cladded open porches.... The living room fireplace has a raised hearth of thick paving tiles.... Off the living room, a small den provides a secluded retreat and French doors offer outdoor access and garden views. A darkroom was included in the original plan but not executed. Additions of leaded art glass, a more expansive sleeping porch, and breakfast room were commissioned in 1913. Lanterns and living-room mantel carvings were designed at this time but not executed. In 1917, a bath was added to the residence and a garage constructed." According to Randell L. Makinson in his Greene & Greene: Architecture as a Fine Art, some of the alterations to the interior of the house were to appease Mrs. Anthony, who had become "disenchanted with the dim interiors, the abundance of wooden expression, and the bungalow character of the house."

The Greenes were not only called back to tweak the Anthony house over its first decade; in 1920 Earle had the brothers design a house in Hollywood for Mrs. Anthony's mother, Kate A. Kelly. Only a few years after Anthony made the latest changes to 666 South Berendo, no doubt putting two and two together when he took notice of increasing Wilshire traffic and developer A. W. Ross's purchase of the beginnings of the Miracle Mile not far to the west along Wilshire, he determined that any residential peace and quiet on the boulevard was doomed. While of course Anthony also understood Ross's boon to the potential value of his lot, it appears that he may not have been ready to simply flatten the house. Stories of what was on Anthony's mind at this time vary; according to the Greene & Greene Virtual Archives, "Anticipating the sale, relocation of the house, and redevelopment of the expensive Wilshire Boulevard property for a multi-story luxury apartment building, Mr. Anthony asked Henry Greene to design a model and topographical map of the property in 1921." According to Makinson, "At this time the original Earle C. Anthony house was set for demolition [our emphasis] to allow for the construction of a multi-story apartment building when it was rescued by the distinguished actor of the silent screen, Norman Kerry. He and his wife had the house moved in three sections to Beverly Hills and engaged Henry Greene to handle the re-siting and rejoining of the structure and to design the grounds and gardens."

Thankfully, the house wasn't demolished and did finally make its move to 910 North Bedford Drive, where it stands today nearly as originally built on Wilshire Boulevard. Master Los Angeles house mover George R. Kress was in charge of transport for the Kerrys, though where the house would go and the details of what would replace it on Wilshire weren't always clear after Anthony decided to move.

While not clear enough to read in this early photograph of what became the
 Talmadge Apartments, the name above the door reads FRANCESCA.

What did rise on the site of the Earle C. Anthony house was a 10-story red-brick apartment house of Georgian detail, much touted as being the equal of buildings going up at the same time along Park Avenue in New York. Originally known as The Francesca, with that name carved above the entrance, it was designed by the prolific Curlett & Beelman. Reference to The Francesca and a plan for it to be ready for occupancy in June 1923 was made by the Times as early as July 25, 1922. The same article states that the Anthony house (including, as with the Drake house, its walks and gardens) would be moved by real estate man A. C. Blumenthal, manager of The Francesca, to a lot he owned at the northeast corner of Wilshire and Lucerne boulevards. It seems that as plans evolved, it was decided that the house would be spared, if its new ownership and the site to which it would be transferred remained unconfirmed. On September 24, two months after announcing The Francesca, the Times was reporting that Anthony himself had hired George Kress to truck his Greene & Greene to property he'd bought in the Hollywood foothills north of Los Feliz Boulevard. (This may have been a reference to the property on which the Kate A. Kelly house still stands at 2550 North Aberdeen Avenue; Anthony later had Bernard Maybeck design a well-known house nearby at 3431 Waverly Drive, now the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent.)

Large advertisements for The Francesca, referring to its already being occupied "by representative families," began to appear in the Times soon after and continued even as late as four days before the same paper reported the formal opening celebration of "the new Talmadge apartments" on July 10, 1924. Presumably it was before the party that the carving above the door was changed to THE TALMADGE, though some indirect advertisements, one as late as January 1, 1925, still referred to 3278 Wilshire as The Francesca. The exact timeline of its construction, naming, and opening (openings?) is obviously unclear, but "The Talmadge" the building became and remains. Silent-screen star Norma Talmadge owned it, reportedly having received it as an income-producing present from her husband, producer Joe Schenck; curiously, perhaps coincidentally, the actress had appeared in a 1911 release called Paola and Francesca. 

The Talmadge became the address of several former owners of large single-family Wilshire Boulevard houses, among them Mrs. Walter H. Fisher of 3043.

 After spending its first 13 years on Wilshire Boulevard, Greene & Greene's 1909
 Earle C. Anthony house has been at 910 North Bedford Drive
 in Beverly Hills for the past 90 years.

Illustrations: you-are-here.com; LAT; LAPL; Google Street View

3043 Wilshire Boulevard

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BERKELEY SQUARE   ST. JAMES PARK   WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

Walter Harrison Fisher was your standard-issue Los Angeles plutocrat of the early 20th century. Born in Illinois and raised in Nebraska, he was described by his son in his obituary as having arrived in the city in 1894 with his wife, three children, and five dollars in his pocket. Despite his apparent penury, Fisher managed on arrival to open an office for the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company in the new Bradbury Building on Broadway. As with any commodity on the market in the booming Southland, sales of insurance policies was excellent; before long, Fisher's profits allowed him to expand his business into stocks and bonds and, in a big way, into oil. 

After a lot of hard work and several changes of home addresses including a stint on unfashionable Santee Street, it was time to truly arrive in Los Angeles. On February 16, 1905, the Herald reported the sale of no fewer than four prime lots at the northeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Miami (later Westmoreland) Avenue to Walter Fisher. Up went a dwelling of very similar appearance to the Elizabeth Nash house finished around the same time a block east at 3001 Wilshire. 

While perhaps a bit too provincial to be considered top-drawer Los Angeles, for the next twenty years, the Fishers did their best to exemplify the haute bourgeoisie. There were the usual mentions in social columns of various entertainments and club meetings. Elizabeth Fisher appears to have understood which side her bread was buttered on (and how it was through her husband's efforts that she came to be living in a big house on Wilshire Boulevard): A woman's place was in the home; suffrage was for men only, she believed. Walter Fisher belonged to the Athletic Club, the family to the Los Angeles Country Club and the First Methodist Church. Elizabeth, in accord with her new status as a well-to-do matron, became a pillar of the Ebell Club rather than the W.C.T.U., although she didn't approve of booze any more than she did of women having the vote. Let's just say that the parties at 3043 were likely dull affairs, reflecting propriety, not sophistication. On the plus side, Elizabeth's tight ship at home, unlike some new money, appears to have prevented any untoward scandals among the Fishers—there seem to have been no affairs with secretaries or divorces or bumptious children. 

Walter Fisher worked hard all his life, perhaps too hard. Two months after he sold his oil interests to the General Petroleum Company in order to retire, he died at home on June 6, 1926. Hailed as a pioneer in the Signal Hill and Athens oil fields, a veritable Doheny, the five dollars he arrived with had become $5,000,000 on his departure from Los Angeles.

Circa 1930: Bullock's-Wilshire was now across the street, the Town House just to the
east. The unique Wilshire Special street lamps now lined the boulevard through the
Miracle Mile to Fairfax Avenue: Commerce now ruled. Interim uses for the street's
old houses included restaurants, beauty parlors, dress shops, and sales offices. 

By the mid '20s, the die had been cast as to the future of Wilshire Boulevard, and the big houses, the wood of which was barely beyond green, were entering an interim phase of awkward commercial uses before demolition. Elizabeth Fisher appears to have left 3043 a year or so after her husband died.  The house very soon became the Los Angeles sales office for Dana Point, the deluxe new oceanside development 60 miles south of the city. Sharing the space in 1930 was the San Juan Water Company. The house appears to have been replaced with a commercial structure by the mid '30s.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth spent a few years up the street in an apartment at the Talmadge before spying an ad in the Times for a $75,000 house in Beverly Hills in 1930—big houses were apparently a source of comfort, apartments too small, and the burgeoning traffic of Wilshire too much. Now calling herself Mrs. Walter Harrison Fisher and living among movie stars, one wonders if she loosened up in her widowhood. At any rate, she seems no longer to have been out marching against freedom or pleasure but rather seeking a lovely life in luxurious districts. After she sold 906 North Bedford Drive to none other than Artie Shaw, who brought Ava Gardner to live with him there, Elizabeth wound up in Santa Barbara, where she died in 1955. She is buried at Forest Lawn.




Illustrations: USCDL

3001 Wilshire Boulevard

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BERKELEY SQUARE   ST. JAMES PARK   WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

Back in Massachusetts, William Nash appears to have butchered enough animals over the years to leave his widow comfortably fixed when he died in Springfield in 1897. Mrs. Elizabeth Nash, as newspapers would henceforth refer to her, soon began a series of trips to Los Angeles to put her sadness—and the abattoirs and winters of New England—behind her. The contrast of coasts worked its predictable magic. By 1903, after a long stay at the Hotel Rosslyn, Mrs. Nash and her two grown children were living on fashionable Park View Street, planning a permanent Southern California future.

Fortuitously, another Los Angeles widow was peddling lots not far out Wilshire Boulevard, which at the time must have been a noisy place to live. Clara Shatto, whose husband George owned a great deal of Los Angeles (and, for a time, all of Catalina), was busy adding to the rapid if short-lived residential development of Wilshire beyond the pre-1896 city limits at Hoover Street. Hammers blows rang daily throughout the district as dozens and dozens of houses went up. On December 11, 1904, the Los Angeles Times reported that Mrs. Shatto had sold Mrs. Nash a 110-by-180-foot lot at the northeast corner of Virgil Avenue in addition to a large lot nearby on the west side of Juanita Street (soon renamed Shatto Place). Mrs. Nash chose the Wilshire lot to build her own house, which was completed in 1906. While it was perhaps not one on the scale of a Swift or an Armour, the house that the Springfield Provision Company financed was a lovely example of the popular big-gabled Los Angeles dwellings of the era.

Laura Nash had married Los Angeles window dresser John B. Cornwell in 1898—he would have a number of occupations over the years—which was naturally a factor in her family's move west. Mr. and Mrs. Cornwell and her brother, Arthur, before he married in 1909, all lived at 3001 Wilshire with Mrs. Nash. The Times and the Los Angeles Herald reported on the matriarch's social life fairly extensively; she liked to play cards. Aside from bridge parties, the most exciting thing to happen at 3001 over the years was a confrontation with a burglar on April 26, 1911, reported by the Times. John Cornwell, by this time a real-estate salesman, "went to the mat" with the intruder—"that is, the carpet of the best room of the home. They rolled here and there, trying strangle holds, hammerlocks, toe holds, half-Nelsons and plain choke holds." The porch climber fled. 

Mrs. Elizabeth Nash played her last game of cards some time after 1922; by the end of the decade, her son-in-law had also died. In 1930, Laura Nash Cornwell was living alone at 3001 with servants. While the commercialization of the boulevard had been under way for years, it was after the opening a half-block west of Bullock's-Wilshire in September 1929 that the "old" houses along the thoroughfare (most not much more than 20 years old) fell like dominoes. It appears that the house was sold to commercial interests soon after; 3001 Wilshire was demolished in 1936.

Laura Nash Cornwall moved from her old house to an apartment just up Virgil Avenue and remained there until at least 1940. 

3001 Wilshire Boulevard, circa 1907

Illustrations: LAPL; LAT; Library of Congress