25 Berkeley Square

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The penultimate house on our tour of Berkeley Square is a dwelling that, while designed by celebrated local architects and modern for its time, was rather nondescript. Perhaps what distinguished it more than anything is that it was home to one family for over 40 years.

William Henry Davis was born in 1868 in Clinton, New York, just east of the origins of his neighbor Francis Eugene Bacon across the street at #24—a region more Midwestern in some minds than Eastern, and as such a major source of 19th- and early 20th-century Angelenos. Davis didn't wait until retirement to come west as his neighbor had, however—he was just a year old when his parents brought him to California. He grew up in Marysville, north of Sacramento, was graduated from Berkeley in 1890, and would have about as exemplary a life as a bourgeois American man whose lifespan was divided by the Gilded Age could have. He studied law in the Marysville offices of his father, Judge Edwin A. Davis, and worked for Governor Henry T. Gage (yet another upstate New Yorker) before becoming general counsel of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company—the firm with the whale jumping out of the water in its television commercials today. The organization was founded by Leland Stanford in San Francisco the year of Davis's birth; in early 1906 it merged with Conservative Life of Los Angeles, a company counting esteemed West Adamsites Frederick H. Rindge and Dr. John R. Haynes among its directors. After the earthquake devastated its home offices up north just weeks after the merger, Pacific Mutual relocated its headquarters to Los Angeles, sending William Henry Davis along.


The William Davis house under construction, as seen in the Los Angeles Evening Herald
on November 23, 1912. At right is 21 Berkeley Square, completed three years earlier.



In 1896 William had married Berthe Samm, a native Iowan also brought to California as an infant. After settling in Los Angeles, they were among the first nontransient residents of the Hershey Arms at 2600 Wilshire Boulevard, opened in 1907; William's widowed father had also come down from up north to live with his son there. Even though they were at the time childless, and even though Edwin seems to have died by the time William and Berthe commissioned Sumner Hunt and Silas Burns to design their new house on Lot 14 in Berkeley Square, for some reason they decided that 6,000 square feet would be necessary so as not to be on top of each other. Perhaps they were hoping for more than their one child, Nadine, born in 1916. While they do not appear to have been at all aggressive socially, but rather quietly confident in such matters, the house, completed in early 1913, was no doubt meant to signify their status in the community—a bungalow certainly wouldn't do. William belonged to a number of the best California clubs, including the California, the Los Angeles Athletic, and the Midwick and Los Angeles country clubs, and as well as the Bohemian in San Francisco and the Sutter in Sacramento. A burgher of the first order, Davis would rise to a vice-presidency of Pacific Mutual by 1917, and was one of  the founding directors, along with Harry Chandler of the Times and producer-director Thomas Ince, of the Cinema Finance Corporation, capitalized at $2,000,000 to locally fund independent filmmakers. The usual entertainments took place at #25 over the years, and summers were often spent in Europe; Nadine grew up to attend Marlborough, and life was lovely until Berthe died suddenly of bronchial pneumonia at home on February 9, 1933, age 59. A sad turn of events, but rather than put #25 on the market, it seems that Bill Davis had in mind that the house might have a future within his own family.


The Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company moved its headquarters from San Francisco
to Los Angeles after the 1906 earthquake and fire, bringing the firm's general
 counsel, William Henry Davis, to the Southland. The classical building seen
 above was designed by John Parkinson and built at Sixth and Olive in
 1908; while it has been sadly altered, the 1922 addition to its left
 has been preserved. The Biltmore's south wall is seen at right.



Generally speaking, steady habits within a family are passed from one generation to the next, and offspring are attracted to them. Nadine's apparently stable upbringing would result in her marriage in 1936 to the steady yet adventurous aviation man James S. Ricklefs, one of the most interesting men ever to live on the Square. In spite of their Los Angeles residency, there had always been a Northern California orientation to the Davises' life. Bill had a ranch, Toyon Farm, in Los Altos; Nadine was born not in L.A., but in San Francisco, and when she was 19 she married Stanford man Ricklefs, a native Iowan, like her mother. As a wedding present, Bill Davis gave the newlyweds—both were pilots—a set of wings. The Fairchild Model 24 made its first public appearance when the couple buzzed their own wedding reception at Toyon Farm; afterward they flew down the coast to spend their honeymoon at Del Monte Lodge. By this time Bill stayed mostly on his ranch up north; after an unsatisfying stint in the investment business in San Francisco, Jim's interest in aviation was to take him south—and so #25 became the Ricklefs house and would remain in the family until 1955.


The original plan of Hunt & Burns for the first
floor and grounds of 25 Berkeley Square, above;
below, another view of the house, slightly northwest,
taken within a few years of completion for the
March 1915 issue of The Western Architect





By 1940 Jim Ricklefs was at Northrop Aircraft in Hawthorne and living on the Square. He then taught aeronautical engineering at West Coast University before joining the fledgling Landgraf Helicopter Company in 1944. Wartime advances in aviation brought about the perfection of rotor-driven flight—and Ricklefs was front and center, a pioneer in the industry. By 1948 he was in business for himself, receiving government contracts to take surveying in Alaska, previously done with donkeys, to the much more efficient air, calling the business Rick Helicopters Incorporated. His success soon permitted him to open a 44,000-square-foot hangar at San Francisco International, and within five years, he had the world's largest chopper fleet (35) and had the biggest commercial charter operation of its type in the world in terms of gross revenue. He started his Rick Helicopter Maintenance Company with bases in both San Francisco and Los Angeles; the 340 miles between offices meant little to a man who was his own pilot.

In this ad in the January 27, 1955, Los Angeles Sentinel, the 
Davis/Ricklefs house was offered for sale for the first 
time since it was completed in 1914.  



In the midst of her husband's great success, Nadine was to die much too young; she was just 37 on her death in 1953. She left Jim with three young daughters, twins Naja Louise and Berte Marie, born in 1937, and Claire, born in 1945. The time had finally come for #25 to be sold. While the family was still listed there in late 1954 by the editors of the Los Angeles Blue Book and on voter rolls, by January the house was on the market and not long after passed into new hands. Melvin R. White was in residence at #25 by 1956 and appeared in city directories there through 1960; after that, the house can no longer be found in listings of any kind, and was soon to be reduced to elegant Hunt and Burns rubble.

 
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James S. Ricklefs with a Bell 47D helicopter in 1952; 56 years later,
he posed with the wedding present he and wife Nadine received
 from her father, William Henry Davis, in 1936. Ricklefs found
 the Fairchild Model 24 in a barn not far from his home
and restored it to flying condition in the 1980s.



Jim Ricklefs returned to Northern California after leaving Berkeley Square, marrying Dorothy Major Van Horn in 1965 and remaining active in multiple pursuits—including, of course, aviation—into his 90s. Over the years he has supported and participated in many flying-related organizations and has restored a number of antique aircraft to flying condition, among them an example each of the World War I-era Spad Scout and Sopwith Pup. In the 1980s he found a particular treasure in a barn near his home—his own Honeymoon Fairchild. Somewhat worse for wear, it too was restored to perfection. If only houses and streets could similarly be brought back to life.


Slight glimpses of #25 appear in Hal Roach's 1926 Charley Chase 
comedy Crazy Like a Fox; at left is part of Alfred 
Rosenheim's Gramercy Place gate.



Illustrations:  The Western Architect; LAPLLos Angeles Sentinel;
HAI/Ricklefs/OsborneKino



24 Berkeley Square

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While sequentially it would be the next logical address after #22, there was no 23 Berkeley Square; inexplicably, the house on Lot 14 was to become #25. But there was a #24, built by Francis Eugene Bacon in 1911 on Lot 16 at the subdivision's southwesternmost corner. Bacon had bought lots 16 and 17 from William R. Burke in late 1909 for a total of $22,500, first building his own house on Lot 16 and, two years later, what became #22 on Lot 17, which he then sold. The two starkly similar houses were designed by prolific Los Angeles architect Frank M. Tyler and were the only example on the Square of the practice of building similar adjacent houses, which was more common in less expensive developments. While the entrance canopies differ, the arrangement of the bays of the front elevations and of the porches flanking the entrances are the same. The only differences in lower-floor building materials that Times real estate writers describe are granite for #22 and sandstone for #24, which in their estimation rendered #22 to be of Italian Renaissance design and #24 to be Spanish Mission. At any rate, it seems odd that an architect as well regarded as Frank Tyler would have been happy with such "badge engineering" (as later automobile-industry practices would turn a Ford into a Mercury, say); was Bacon able to talk Tyler into giving him something of a twofer? The Department of Buildings issued permits for #24—originally #16 for its lot number before citywide annexation-related renumberings during 1912—on December 10, 1910.


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While Los Angeles was famously built in large measure by Midwesterners and Berkeley Square followed suit, Francis Bacon was more of an Easterner, born in Fulton, New York, north of Syracuse, in 1851. Though from a long line of physicians, young Bacon seems to have had a fascination with the dry goods business. His passion for millinery and haberdashery led to his building very successful stores in both Fulton and Syracuse, though after 40 years in the business he was ready to ditch the thread game and rest on his laurels in a sunnier clime. He and his second wife, née Cora May Hiscox, had been wintering in Los Angeles for several years, so when the neuralgia and the rheumatiz began to kick in, they decided to stay and make the snowless City of Angels their full-time home. In those days, the charms of Los Angeles were such that people actually chose the city as a place to spend their retirement, much in the way they might have later chosen Santa Barbara or Palm Springs.


From Syracuse to sunshine: Francis Eugene Bacon, 1915



Perhaps to celebrate a lifetime of hard work, the Bacons went all-out in hiring Frank Tyler, who lived nearby at 1817 South Harvard. The architect came up with a vernacular design giving no indication of its intended occupants' origins. The first floor of the Spanish Mission-inspired house—or, as one source calls it, Spanish architecture combined with Mission (perhaps only Frank Tyler ever knew)—was constructed of Chatsworth Park sandstone, a grand name for rock brought over the hills from the Valley. Inside, there was a note of the Arts & Crafts movement in the lavish use of quartersawn oak, with a few exotic design elements other than the Spanish, including the Square's seemingly obligatory Japanese tea room for the ladies to complement the expected billiard room for the boys. I know that as a noun the word mangle refers to something like the wringer on an old Maytag—I can find no other definition for the word as a noun--so the description of a "fine ruby tile mangle" in the living room is intriguing. But one begins to appreciate Elsie de Wolfe's innovative sweeping away of the bric-a-brac back East when the overall picture of rooms of scratchy-looking tapestries and heavy mustard-colored velvet curtains on iron spears is described as being in "good taste." Even after the demise of the King, local interior desecrators seem not to have figured out that Edwardiana wasn't far enough removed from its predecessor to open interiors to California's great advantage: the light of the great outdoors.

Francis's Bacon, Chappell and Company emporium back in Syracuse continued to prosper in the first decade of the new century, and it wasn't until after his move to Los Angeles that he sold the business on a high note. After years of being a very active civic booster of Syracuse, once permanently settled out west, Francis "sought no outlet for his business energies," as one profile put it. He and May led the quiet life of California retirees in grand bourgeois style on the Square, though they were social enough to have been included in the Southwest Blue Book. Francis occasionally wandered downtown to the exclusive Los Angeles Athletic Club or attended to his memberships in various ancestor-worship organizations, the Sons of This War or That Revolution. It's not clear who joined him in his billiard room to rack 'em up—it could be that one of his three sons (of five children) by his first wife, Gertrude, would visit from back East from time to time. Twenty-three years her husband's junior, May Bacon was perhaps more active, making use of her tea room for, well, tea, and, sometimes, cards. She and Francis had married in 1902, a year after Gertrude died. They did not have any children of their own.

One oddity in the history of #24 is the listing of prominent Progressive-era reformer and Superior Court judge Russ Avery and his first wife, also named May, in the 1923 Southwest Blue Book alongside the Bacons. I can find no family relationship between the two couples; perhaps it was a rental or perhaps the shelter was a friendly gesture, the Averys being between their residences at 345 South Oxford Avenue and 214 North Rossmore Avenue residences that year.


§ § § § § § § § § §



The Bacon house was, over its life on the Square, rather staid. Francis died at home on February 28, 1931; May stayed on at #24 for another nine years, until her death on July 25, 1940. After nearly 30 years, perhaps (one hopes) with its interior lightened up, the house was ready for a new family. Enter that of electrician Frank A. Russell and his wife, Ida, about which little is known. Frank Russell was on voter rolls at #24 intermittently through 1954; John N. McMahon Jr., possibly a Russell relative, is at #24 from 1952 through 1962. Vernon N. and Martha A. Battle claimed it as their voting address in 1956. Oddly, #24 does not appear in available Los Angeles city directories from 1956 through 1962, but it does reappear in 1963, listing Howard Petty in residence. Then, along with its neighbors and the grand Rosenheim gates hard by its front door, oblivion.



Illustrations: Homes and Gardens of the Pacific Coast; Press Reference Library




22 Berkeley Square

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While those toiling in show business were not unknown to put in cameo appearances behind the gates of Berkeley Square—there were, as we've seen, Thompson Buchanan, Douglass Montgomery, Carole Landis, and, most notably, the great Ann Miller—for the most part Hollywood wasn't attracted to the street. Too stuffy, too bourgeois. While the likes of Theda Bara and Fatty Arbuckle once challenged the patience of the establishment when they lived in West Adams in the early 1920s, stars soon found that life could be lived far more grandly in the hills of Beverly. After Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks bought the Beverly Hills country place of Lee Allen Phillips (he of 4 Berkeley Square) and the press dubbed it Pickfair, West Adams was largely the back forty as far as Hollywood was concerned; the district was already being challenged for exclusivity by swankier suburbs even among the establishment beginning in the '20s. One big movie personage did have a long presence on the Square, however. Not a Duesenberg-driving screen star, but, rather, a producer: Hal Roach of #22, who drove a Chevrolet.




Using his own neighborhood for location
shooting, Hal Roach has left us with rare glimpses of
Berkeley Square on film: Above, Stan Laurel and Helen Gilmore appear
in a still from Mother's Joy, released in 1923, which shows detail of the producer's house,
 including its entrance medallion and granite pillars. Below, the southern Gramercy Place
 pedestrian gate, 1926: Comedian Charley Chase, right, with Al Hallett in Roach's
 Crazy Like a Fox. A bit of #22 is seen at right; title cards seen during
 the film refer to it as "22 Mozart Square."




Roach did not build #22; he didn't arrive on the Square until 1920. Lot 17 was first acquired from William R. Burke along with Lot 16 by retired eastern merchant Francis Eugene Bacon in December 1909. Bacon then built his own house on Lot 16, later addressed #24; on July 5, 1912, he was issued permits to build what was to become #22 next door, apparently on spec. As is suggested by images of their façades, Bacon used the same architect, the esteemed Frank M. Tyler, for both houses. We know that #22 stood empty after it was completed until it was sold in April of 1914 to George Merritt Jones, owner of the Merritt-Jones Hotel at Ocean Park. The arrangement of the bays and porches of both #22 and #24 is the same, as is the glazing on both façades. Only the entrance canopies seem to differ; somehow Los Angeles Times real estate reporters decided that the design of #22 was Italian Renaissance and that of #24, Spanish Mission. Jones, described, perhaps inevitably, as a "capitalist," was a Kentuckian born in 1861. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1895 and began as a developer; a partnership he formed soon after was responsible for much of the subdivision of Ocean Park, now mostly a Santa Monica neighborhood, and parts of Venice. While he lost heavily in the great Ocean Park fire of 1912, apparently he still had the $37,500 to shell out for #22. Later in the decade Jones rented to the William Walden Grays, who were in the process of building their new house at 1 Berkeley Square.


The man himself about to drive home to Berkeley Square from his Culver City studios



Enter the Roaches. Hal and his wife, actress Marguerite Nichols, had been living at 1624 South Van Ness before paying George Jones $45,000 for #22 in August 1920. Hal arrived in Los Angeles just seven years before he bought his Berkeley Square house to find work as a movie extra. While he was certainly athletic and pulchritudinous enough at 21 for starring roles, his fascination with film was with the scene behind the camera, where he rose rapidly to become a major producer of comedies. Born in Elmira, New York, in 1892 to relative affluence, his arrival in Hollywood was by way of mule-skinning in Alaska and selling ice cream in Seattle. His association with Harold Lloyd is legendary, and was his Charley Chase series, not to mention the timeless little rascals of his Our Gang comedies. It is not known how the life of privileged children on a genteel gated street influenced the latter, but no doubt Hal Jr. (born 1918) and Margaret (born 1921) had their gangs of adventurous pals on Berkeley Square, perhaps not as ethnically diverse, unmaterialistic, and parent-free as their screen counterparts, but children with clubhouses and passwords just the same. Hal Jr. and his Square cronies did grow up to be a bit more sophisticated than the Our Gang urchins might have. Before Willis Hunt Jr. of #3 had married and divorced starlet Carole Landis—who had been Hal Sr.'s employee in the late '30s before her infamous affair with Rex Harrison and 1948 suicide—he was married to Hancock Park oil heiress Dolly Brewer. Dolly obviously had a thing for the young rakes of Berkeley Square; her next husband was none other than Willis's pal Hal Roach Jr. Such goings on.


When gangs were gangs: Little Rascals Harold "Slim" Switzer and his brother 
Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer at left; Darla Hood on Hal Roach's lap; George 
"Spanky" McFarland; and William "Buckwheat" Thomas.



While film was his primary interest, Hal Roach was a smart enough businessman to know not to put all his assets into one field of endeavor. In the early '20s he became a partner in Clippinger-Kincaid Chevrolet, with showrooms downtown at Seventh and Central. For his own car, instead of a big showoffy Isotta-Fraschini, Hal had Bohman & Schwartz—who would later do the custom Buick seen in the Roach-produced Topper of 1937—create an oxymoronic Chevrolet town car, complete with exposed driver's seat. While he may have had a car with a speaking tube, Hal Roach seems to have been a popular figure around town, at least for a while, for his down-to-earth affability and, not surprisingly, good humor. He  knew his way around Hollywood but was equally at home among the establishment, playing golf with downtown burghers and keeping a cabin among them at the Uplifters Club out in then-rustic Pacific Palisades, sort of a Bohemian Club with wives. Roach enjoyed the ponies with the big boys, too, serving as the first president of the Los Angeles Turf club, which owned and operated the track at Santa Anita.


Not so swift moves: Vittorio Mussolini dancing with
Mrs. Hal Roach at a 1937 celebration for his 21st
birthday and her 21st anniversary. The party
did not help the producer's standing in
Hollywood any more than did his

alliance with the birthday
boy's father, Benito.



One serious misstep in Roach's career was his formation of RAM Productions, the "M" standing for Mussolini. This widely criticized American-Italian venture with the rising fascist dictator lost him a great deal of respect among his Hollywood peeps. While he would be remembered by most in his later years for his contributions to film and entertainment, it is of interest (if not suggestive of a chink in his character) that Roach retained pride in his relationship with Il Duce, reportedly displaying a signed portrait of his friend in his home until he died in 1992 at age 100. But RAM or no RAM, Roach had made the pile that would afford his departure from Berkeley Square and inevitable move to Beverly Hills.


The name doesn't have quite the ring of Van Cleef, and it wasn't exactly as
though a glamorous personage such as Cary Grant suddenly decided to
 push expensive jewelry—but for some reason, in addition to
diversifying into Chevrolets, Hal Roach went into bijoux
(now "bling") with a shop at 9167 Sunset Boulevard. 
At right, Roaches junior and senior, 1942. 


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"TREMENDOUS SACRIFICE" began the classified ad in the Times that ran for months in the first half of 1939. "Exclusive Berkeley Square—completely rebuilt 2 story, 5 bedroom, 4 bath, with PROJECTION ROOM at a small fraction of the orig cost." Roach's asking price of $25,000 was $20,000 less than he had paid for the house 19 years earlier and a quarter of its valuation in the 1930 federal census—an indication of the Depression, nervousness about war in Europe, as well as of the decline of West Adams. The district's houses were getting too expensive to maintain and, like the Victorians before them, had become increasingly unfashionable. While the Square would remain exclusive as long as it lasted for whomever lived there, and some old-timers would stand fast, others sought newer and more stable neighborhoods such as Hancock Park or Pasadena, others less-dense surroundings such as Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Brentwood, and Palos Verdes.


Ralphs Westwood store around the time Walter B. Ralphs lived at #22 Berkeley Square



While aging Berkeley Square houses might have been expensive to maintain, civil engineer Daniel M. True saw the bargain in Roach's loss. He and his wife Hazel were living at #22 by 1940, as was her father, an Old Angeleno who no doubt had supplied many Square households with their potables and comestibles over the years. Walter Benjamin Ralphs of the pioneer grocer Ralphses was born in San Bernardino in 1854, soon after his Mormon parents' arrival in California by Studebaker (Studebaker Conestoga, that is). Walter would grow up to enter the nascent family business in 1875 in the town still not much bigger than its beginnings as tiny, gunslinging El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles. He joined his brother George, who had opened the store two years earlier at Sixth and Spring.

Walter Ralphs, old in years as well as old-guard, was long retired from the grocery business by the time he moved into #22 with the Trues. Sadly, after only a short time on the Square, Hazel Ralphs True was to die on October 17, 1940, at age 51. Daniel wasted little time in acquiring her replacement, Josephine Graham, who arrived on Berkeley Square with her mother, Clara. By the end of 1942 Walter had moved into 366 South Hudson Avenue in Hancock Park with his son Walter W. Ralphs. (Dad, like his #22 predecessor Hal Roach, would live into his 100th year, expiring just five months shy of his centennial in 1954.) Curiously, "beauty operator" Angelina Seyffert was listed in city directories in the early '40s alongside the Trues; perhaps the eldest lady of the house needed frequent permanent waves, at least as long as she lasted: To round out a busy few years of life transitions at #22, Mrs. Graham expired at home on October 6, 1943. The new Daniel M. Trues would remain in-law free on the Square until 1955, the longest tenancy at #22 aside from the Roaches.

Berkeley Square was changing rapidly, with new buyers coming online after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictive property covenants in 1948. Many of these reprehensible practices were instituted in the 1920s to preserve property values in West Adams as it was just beginning its slide; in a reminder that nostalgia is perilously blind, their institution was accepted and even praised in the national press. While the market for the big houses of Berkeley Square had now opened up, and prices had fallen, the old barns still had to be maintained—and prices for that had only gone up. If there was any principal tenant after the Trues departed, I have not found him. Leola Baxter was listed in the 1956 city directory at #22, but she was also listed at #8 that same year at the home of her employers since at least 1950, the Paul Nourses. A Frances Jordan is also at #22 in the 1956 directory; the address does not appear at all in the next available issue, that of March 1960. It could be that by the mid-'50s #22 was something of a boarding house, as might several Square houses have been, judging by the number of names attributed to them. Los Angeles voter rolls from 1956 through 1962 indicate that Nathan and Bell Z. Harley, Strother E. Floyd, Louie Muse Jr., Henry McClain, Aaron L. Taylor, Alfred Simpson, and Emelia Hernandez were at various times claiming residence in the old Roach place.

Once the route of the Santa Monica Freeway was finalized to run through the north side of Berkeley Square in the late '50s, much of the south side, including #22, was acquired by the Los Angeles school board for expansion purposes. The board received permits to demolish the Roach house on May 15, 1961. All its brick and granite, all its oak and mahogany and tile, was soon shattered and carted away in the name of progress.



Illustrations:  LAT; John Bengtson; Kino; LAPL; Jeff Overturf; Corb
is



21 Berkeley Square

PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES
FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO BERKELEY SQUARE, CLICK HERE


What may have been the most modern house on Berkeley Square—in form, certainly, but particularly in its construction—was the house on Lot 13 commissioned in 1909 by Los Angeles real estate man C. Wesley Roberts. Architect B. Cooper Corbett's resulting design was a prime example of what was to become a standard formula in Southern California upper-middle-class domestic architecture for the next 15 years or so: symmetrical façade, shallow roof, and stuccoed-brick outer walls—or in the case of #21, precast concrete outer walls. The use of concrete in construction was not new, having, in fact, been used by the ancients; locally, it had been employed in building since the 1870s. There were constant efforts to make the material more economical and to lessen the need for elaborate forms and scaffolding. There were, of course, individual concrete blocks, a method brought to a particular level of sophistication a bit later in the Los Angeles area by Frank Lloyd Wright with his textile blocks. (While Wright's houses built of them appear to have the integrity of the pyramids, they were to become maintenance nightmares and somewhat less solid than one might have thought—the 1924 Ennis house on Glendower Avenue is a famous example of the drawbacks of Wright's method.) Some concrete buildings were actually poured in place in virtually one unit; others were built by pouring one circumferential ring of concrete atop another. In some cases, concrete panels were cast horizontally on the ground and raised into place. In his house for Roberts, Corbett used upright precast concrete panels for his forms, which were not removed after inner walls were poured but left in place to become permanent parts of the structure, with some detail molded in. Though it is hard to determine if concrete was a major component of other houses on Berkeley Square other than in foundations, a number of architects who built there—including Charles Whittlesey, Arthur B. Benton, and the Myron Hunt–Elmer Grey partnership—were known to have used concrete in residential work elsewhere in the city.

A building permit was issued by the city to Wesley Roberts on December 3, 1909, to begin the foundation of the Corbett design on Lot 13 of Berkeley Square; adding to the complicated changes of the tract's addresses due to the city's 1912 annexation-related renumberings, Roberts—perhaps a superstitious man, or a pragmatic one, anticipating resale—decided to designate the new house differently. What would normally be designated 13 Berkeley Square became #14, evolving into #21 in 1913, with the former #22 across the Square becoming the new 14 Berkeley Square. The Los Angeles Times of December 26, 1909, described the Roberts house vaguely as "Italian Renaissance" in style and as having two stories and 12 rooms. Roberts, a contractor and a real estate operator who began his career as one of the city's most active subdividers of residential properties at the turn of the 20th century, later built significant downtown office buildings as well, including the Broadway Arcade. While he often built houses for sale, it was the one on Berkeley Square that he chose to move his family into upon completion in 1910.



Architect B. Cooper Corbett's drawing of the house slated
for Lot 13 of Berkeley Square appeared in the January 1, 1910,
issue of Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer. The entrance portico 
of the completed house differed in detail, as seen in the photograph
above the title and below as it appeared in the Sunday real
estate pages of the Los Angeles Herald on May 4, 1912.




Wesley Roberts was an establishment man, a member of the California Club and the Los Angeles Country Club and one of the founders of the very exclusive Bachelors Club. During his busy career he managed to get into a few scrapes, including once having been charged with knowingly renting apartments to the proprietors of a bucket shop and later being sued by a former business partner who claimed to have been swindled. Real estate in a boomtown was never for the faint of heart, however, and Roberts didn't miss a beat. As for his own houses, which he changed with some regularity, he seems to have maintained an affinity for concrete construction. When he left #21 in 1920, he moved to 241 South Norton, a house still standing, and then in short order to 2151 West 21st Street, a house also still standing one block north of the site of Berkeley Square, on the very north edge of the freeway (the south side of the block is walled off and under the Western Avenue on-ramp). The house on 21st Street is, interestingly, a near twin of 21 Berkeley Square. Wesley Roberts and his wife, née Ivy Gardner, began their family while living at #21; daughters Eleanore and Katherine would grow up to be glamorous gals about town, darlings of gossip columns at one point, though not in any unpleasant ways. About the only misstep was Katherine's marriage to Russell W. Thaw, ace-aviator son of none other than Floradora Girl Evelyn Nesbit and Harry K. Thaw, he infamous for shooting to death Stanford White atop Madison Square Garden in 1906, unable to forget his wife's teenage affair with the fiftysomething architect. Apparently Russell's charms and airplanes were enough to overcome such an outré background, and Katie's propeller-set life between New York, Long Island, and Palm Beach was swell enough, at least until Harry dumped her to fly off with his lady copilot after three years. While Katherine and her sister were often featured in the Times's "Chatterbox" column—it helped that Eleanore wrote it at times—other editors at the paper seemed to enjoy reporting the antics of the aging Evelyn and Harry, divorced since 1916. She was back to doing burlesque and nightclub floor shows while telling reporters that what she really wanted to be was a stripper. Harry—accounts vary as to whether he was actually Russell's father, the child having been conceived while Dad was incarcerated in the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane after the shooting—was frequently in the news for his legal troubles, and seemed to enjoy being interviewed for no reason other than his tedious notoriety. Katherine married again, to John Swigart; Eleanore married Franklyn Phillips, and at one point lived in her parents' last house at 505 South Irving Boulevard in Windsor Square.

Union Oil would be well represented in Berkeley Square over the years, Gurney E. Newlin of #3 and Robert D. Matthews of #12 among the company's associates living there at one time or another. Union vice-president and general manager Elmer West Clark and his wife Sarah, who was Ivy Roberts's aunt, lived at 2140 South Western Avenue near the east gates of Berkeley Square in the 1910s; the Clarks were solid Angelenos, all very establishment and known for their philanthropy, including the gift of the largest church organ west of Chicago to Immanuel Presbyterian on Wilshire Boulevard. In July 1917, perhaps after a glass of champers or two, Mrs. Clark was involved in an automobile accident, her chum Mrs. Charles Wellington Rand of Wilshire Boulevard at the wheel. Though the plunge off a coastal roadway near Portuguese Bend was thought in initial reports to be fatal for Mrs. Clark, it wasn't. She spent her convalescence at #21 under her niece's care; by 1921 she was well enough to christen Union Oil's tanker La Placentia, although, with Prohibition now in effect, ginger ale was probably the bubbly involved. The Roberts/Clark connection to #21 was to last for five more years. Next up was a man in showbiz.


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New in town: As seen in the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, September 12, 1920 



Thompson Buchanan was a journalist turned novelist turned celebrated New York playwright before coming to "the Coast" in 1920 to try his hand in pictures. In 1915, in the midst of his years of Broadway hits—which included shows such as A Woman's Way and Civilian Clothes that could have been been set among the bosomy matrons and debutantes of Berkeley Square, he married 31-year-old über Chicago socialite Katharine Winterbotham. With their young daughter Katharine, the Buchanans settled—for a time, at least, and appropriately enough—among the bosomy matrons and debutantes of Berkeley Square when they moved in to #21. The usual frothy dinner parties ensued, though this was not the typical Square household headed by a starchy downtown businessman—even if Mrs. Buchanan was a bona fide Social Register matron, given its Hollywood connections, #21 was a bit arty. A son, Thompson Jr., arrived in 1924. Thompson Sr. spent his days in the scenario department of the Goldwyn Studios, on whose lot a bit player named Joan Lowell also hung out. The scenario then writes itself: the Mrs. splits for points East, 24-year-old Joan and 50-year-old Thompson marry in October 1927. Joan gets literary herself, publishes an oceangoing autobiography that is a bestseller until exposed as mostly fanciful; May-December dissolves. "Sea Writer's Love Bark Hits Rocks" was the Los Angeles Times's headline after Joan and Thompson parted amicably after a Mexican divorce in 1929. In spite of her worldliness, both real and invented, she claimed to be fonder of country life at her stone house in what she called, appropriately enough, Cradle Valley in Bucks County than of the Rhapsody in Blue Manhattan that her husband preferred. In an amusing postscript, Time magazine reported on July 10, 1933, that "when blonde beauteous Katharine Winterbotham Buchanan, 49, married an Indian Oxonian from Madras named Kumar Jehan Seesodia-Warliker last May, Chicago society, startled, warmly debated the race issue. But the union outraged the bride's divorced husband, Thompson Buchanan, who had himself meantime displayed an adventurous spirit by marrying Authoress Joan (Cradle of the Deep) Lowell. He marched into a Kentucky court, asked and got custody of his 9-year-old son and namesake on the ground that Seesodia-Warliker, no Caucasian, was unfit to keep the boy. With Thompson Buchanan Jr. the Seesodia-Warlikers went to Ontario, closely followed by Mrs. Buchanan-Warliker's brother who also laid claim to his young nephew. Before an Ontario Supreme Court Judge last week was the Solomonic question of turning the youngster over to his Hollywoodish father, his coffee-colored stepfather or his socialite uncle from Chicago." It seems that Thompson Sr., a notable snob to begin with, was more of the xenophobic mind of sometime visitor to #18 Supreme Court Justice McReynolds than an a freethinking artist; at any rate, it was no doubt that the staider elements of Berkeley Square were glad to have seen the backs of the Buchanans by this time.


The young woman in this picture is not the old man's daughter seen in the 
newspaper illustration above it—it is his second wife: Mr. and Mrs.
Thompson Buchanan, version II, Christmas 1927. Who was
the cradle for? In any case, perhaps it had something
to do with Joan Lowell's later tome—published
after an unsurprising Mexican divorce
in 1929—Cradle of the Deep.



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Unstable is too strong a word for it, but it's true that #21 saw more comings and goings of Bekins vans than did the average house on the street; if the Square was the New York co-op building to which the previous tenant fled, it would have accrued a fortune in flip taxes on #21 alone. It is not clear whether the Frank H. Reilleys bought or rented #21 from the Buchanans, who'd left in 1926, but, of course, they weren't strangers to the 'hood. When the Reilleys left #10 in late 1925, their children grown, their move to the Gaylord on Wilshire was described by the Times as permanent. But Berkeley Square inspired homesickness in more than a few residents, and after a year of apartment living in Los Angeles—which the medically minded might say is a contraindication—Frank and Flo and her mother, Mrs. Cummins B. Jones, were back in the fold, across the street and five houses down from their old place. After Frank retreated to Rosedale in the early '30s, Flo, who it seems might have been the one who preferred apartment living all along, left the Square and moved downtown to the Biltmore, where she died in 1943. Her mother preferred the Huntington in Pasadena, where she lived until she died at 99 in 1952. Then things turned French at #21.


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The Ville de Paris in the Homer Laughlin Building at 317 South Broadway, ca. 1910. The
Grand Central Market now occupies its space. The Waverly Electric at center belongs
to Mrs. Walter Leeds of 14 Berkeley Square. After the Fusenots sold the store
in 1915, new owners, with an interest in San Francisco's Emporium,
moved it to Olive and Seventh streets across from Coulter's;
the business was taken over by the B. H. Dyas Company
in 1919 and the name Ville de Paris disappeared
fom the Ville de Los Angeles a decade later.



Pioneer Los Angeles department stores were well represented on Berkeley Square. Coulter's Dry Goods was ably shepherded through many decades by Alice Coulter and Robert McReynolds of #18. While Georges and Germaine Fusenot's association with the family store was long over by the time they arrived on Berkeley Square in 1930 and the store name itself had just vanished from the retail scene, the Ville de Paris was once one of the largest department stores in town. Coming from France in 1873, Germaine's father Auguste Fusenot settled in San Francisco and became a partner in that city's famous City of Paris store;  with a slight twist of name, he founded the Ville de Paris in Los Angeles in 1893. His wife Marie was the nominal vice-president of the business, but when Auguste's health began to deteriorate around 1905, an able nephew of his was recruited from France to head the Ville de Paris and, while they were at it, marry Germaine. So it was just four months before Auguste's death in May 1907 that cousin married cousin and Germaine became Germaine Fusenot Fusenot. 

Georges and Germaine lived full-time at #21 only briefly before throwing dustsheets over all the Louis this and that in 1933 and spending the next few years in Paris. They returned in 1936, and were to maintain their presence on the Square until the early '50s. During the war years, Georges was president of French War Relief Inc. After his death in 1963 and Germaine's in 1974, the couples' loyalty to Los Angeles has remained in their Georges and Germaine Charity Foundation, which continues to benefit dozens of social service organizations in the city each year.


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The family of Flipper Tate Fairchild Sr. succeeded the Fusenots at #21 and saw the house through its last decade. According to his son Halford's profile in History of the Association of Black Psychologists available online, Fairchild was born in Little Rock in 1912; it appears that he arrived in California in the mid 1930s. He was listed in the 1942 Los Angeles city directory as living at 2133 South Harvard, two blocks from the east gates of Berkeley Square. (That house no longer stands, possibly a victim of the freeway. But it appears to have been across the street from the still-extant dwelling at 2203 South Harvard, once the home of Hattie McDaniel—the woman who was instrumental in opening the neighborhood to all.) At the time of his move to the Square, Fairchild was living with his young family on 37th Drive near Normandie; over the course of his career he was a gardener, a postal carrier in the area of the Farmers' Market, and an insurance salesman, all of which hard work would lead to his being able to own rental properties later on. He and his Japanese American wife Yuri had three children, Tate, Bonnie, and Halford, the youngest, who mentions in his profile having attended the 24th Street School next door to the Square. Among the entertainments during the Fairchild years at #21 was a lavish Japanese Tea Party benefit in 1957 reported by the Los Angeles Sentinel. Mrs. Fairchild was a businesswoman as well as a hostess, wife, and mother; while living on the Square she founded Fairchild Tax Service, a firm still in family hands after more than 50 years. Dr. Halford H. Fairchild not only runs the company today, but is also a distinguished professor of psychology at Pitzer College in Claremont. His father would live until 2001; his mother until 2003.

The last city directory to list the now 50-year-old concrete house at #21 Berkeley Square was issued in 1960 and included the Fairchilds. After leaving the Square, the family moved to 1651 Virginia Road in Lafayette Square, taking their phone number—REPUBLIC 2-3223—with them.

As with all addresses on the north side of the Square, #21 was gone from directories afterward.


The original first-floor plan of 21 Berkeley Square, B. Cooper Corbett, architect






A word on the maturation
of Berkeley Square

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There are many reasons for the decline of West Adams; as for that of Berkeley Square and similar Los Angeles neighborhoods, the main cause may have been the prosperity of the 1920s, which resulted in the proliferation of the automobile (allowing even servants to live beyond the radius of the old Yellow Car system) and in the desire of the affluent for the luxury of more space around their houses. Berkeley Square was one of several small  enclaves of large houses in the city that were surrounded by less glamorous, denser neighborhoods, a profile unlike many of the newer, more expansive and cohesive districts of larger lots and houses. The general prosperity of many West Adamsites in the Roaring '20s was augmented by their good fortune of living in a city that saw its population more than double during the decade, resulting in a housing shortage that drove up property values enormously and caused saavy families—some of them resident in West Adams for generations—to sell at a high profit and decamp to newer, roomier parts of town to the north and west (or to consistently fashionable Pasadena). The new owners of West Adams houses often divided them into apartments or replaced them with larger multi-unit buildings. Also, with Los Angeles expanding so rapidly, there were some West Adams building lots on which single houses had never been built and so were perfect for apartments once a determined developer succeeded in altering the zoning of his lot. Later, the Depression held back maintenance on the aging housing stock, increasing demolitions; the war years repeated the housing pressures of the '20s and renewed the wisdom of exploiting land for all it was worth. When the U. S. Supreme Court struck down race-based deed restrictions in 1948, white flight from West Adams (and other neighborhoods close to downtown ) to the north and west accelerated at an even faster rate, especially as the San Fernando Valley became attractive to the middle class. The desire to find racially homogenous new neighborhoods was the story across the country in the '50s and '60s, and Los Angeles was no different than any other American city. As far-flung as the city was becoming, the freeway was written on the wind. Almost continuous white flight since the '20s had dealt West Adams a mortal blow in terms of its political clout, which makes plausible the theory that the route of the Santa Monica Freeway was moved south into declining West Adams and away from its original projected path near such neighborhoods as Hancock Park and Windsor Square—the rich precincts of many former West Adamsites. While it has been suggested that there may have been an attempt to make a point by demolishing the high-profile ambitions of some African Americans, the relatively low density of Berkeley Square in particular seems more likely to have been a reason for its having been targeted, offering a path of least resistance in the scheme of freeway builders. Some observers have suggested that in addition to its placement, the freeway was designed with limited south-north access—restrictive housing covenants in another form.

Berkeley Square has vanished, but West Adams, anchored by the University of Southern California, thrives, even if it is only a hazy entity to many Angelenos whose families began their lives there generations ago.



Photo: LAPL