20 Berkeley Square

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Arthur B. Benton designed three houses on Berkeley Square, none of them conforming to the conventional post-Victorian formula of symmetrical stucco austerity that was taking hold as one strain of Southern California domestic architecture, and apparent in some Square houses. Texture was important to Benton; the stone and timber in the Edwin James Brent house suggest a connection to Greene & Greene's work in Pasadena—done less imaginatively, perhaps, but here was one massive Craftsman bungalow. A fish pond, a fountain, and an aviary holding rare finches were enclosed in the angle at back; a porte-cochère led from the main drive of the Square to a large garage at the rear, the gates next to it allowing access from the private service alley. The shape of the house might have lent itself better to a corner lot, but presumably a 160-foot frontage gave it room for a porch view that was out into the Square and not just into the McReynoldses' living room next door.




The early view of the Brent house above the title
doesn't reveal its enormity; above and below are illustrations
showing the house's long east wing, oriented along a southeast/
northwest axis. The configuration of "Casa-en-el-Pedregal"
was unique among Berkeley Square houses.





While some entrepreneurs saw the path to riches in building houses for the ever-billowing tide of new Angelenos, others saw their fortunes coming from furnishing them. Some, such as the brothers Barker, cultivated a genteel trade, supplying suites of reproduction Sheraton to the upwardly mobile; others saw profit in outfitting the thousands of more modest cottages, and later Craftsman bungalows, spreading across city and county, understanding that even the humblest of Southland dwellings would require beds and shaving stands, a davenport of some description, a dining table and chairs, kitchen equipment, and perhaps a cuckoo clock if not a grandfather clock. While dozens of home furnishings concerns sprang up in the years following the Civil War, it was Englishman Edwin James Brent who arrived in Los Angeles in 1886 by way of Indianapolis to capitalize on the domestic needs of waves of fellow immigrants who by turns of socioeconomic status found themselves unable to resist the lure of the ever-lower fares of madly competing railroads in the mid 1880s. By 1887, the cost of a ticket from Kansas City to Los Angeles had famously fallen to $1. No matter that the inevitable bust came the next year—even if the émigrés could afford the much more expensive passage home, Southern California had seduced them, and they were staying under the palms. E.J. stuck it out too—and eventually all the ticky-tacky little boxes on the hillsides needed to be filled with his paraphernalia.


1887: The signs flanking the door trumpet Brent's bargains in new goods
and in second-hand items; under the potty chair appears to be 
E.J. Brent himself. This, his first store, was at the southwest 
corner of Fourth and Spring in downtown Los Angeles.



Brent's appeal to the masses, which began with a junk store he opened in 1887 with a total capitalization of $50, would by 1915 result in sales of more than $10,000,000. That's a lot of washboards. In the same way that F.W. Woolworth built his New York office building out of the nickles and dimes of his customers, so too did Brent use his prodigious proceeds to make a statement. His first thought once he was resting comfortably on his tuffet of hard-earned cash was to delegate some responsibility at his downtown store to be able to spend half the year in London. But when he saw the recently gated barley field out toward the western Los Angeles city limits, he saw paradise in the nascent tract and got on the phone to Square developer William R. Burke forthwith. In December 1906, with the paint on Burke's own house at #6 barely dry, Brent bought the first of the two lots that #20 would soon spread across; his next call was to the very talented architect Arthur B. Benton. It would be well over a year before Edwin and his wife Mary and their only child Edwin Jr., born in 1902, would be able to move into the resulting house. Though eccentrically shaped and sited, it was by all accounts beautifully executed—rather huge for a family of three, but perhaps not if one considers that room was needed for the retinue of servants outnumbering masters that was common among Square dwellers, especially among those wishing to make a statement. The Brents did take the in-town estate idea to the extreme by giving the house a name—"Casa-en-el-Pedregal"—the only one for a dwelling on the street. A bit over the top for people in—well, you know—trade...no? At least that's what Estelle Doheny, two minutes removed from the bog herself, said.


E. J. and Mary Brent, she photographed in the shadows of her vast
veranda, celebrated their 29th anniversary with an elaborate
dinner party at #20 in August 1910. "Covers"—Edwardian
parlance for place settings—were laid for 29 guests.



But in trade or not, the Brents were more or less old-line society by L.A. standards. Mary Brent heard lectures and played bridge and arranged flowers with her fellow members at the Ebell and the Friday Morning clubs. The Brents maintained a country house in Calabasas they called "Mountain Crags," which adjoined the Crags Country Club. Mr. Brent's downtown club affiliations included the Athletic Club, but, in spite of his once wanting to spend time abroad, he seems mostly to have cared about his business. His humble start at Fourth and Spring streets was followed by much larger stores selling new items as opposed to those previously owned—i.e., junk. Brent was a notable pioneer in credit sales. His "Great Credit House," as he promoted his business, was a boon to new Angelenos who needed an icebox before having the cash to put down on the barrelhead. His later, somewhat more upscale emporiums on South Main Street served the likes of his original customers as they became more prosperous.



The façade of 20 Berkeley Square, 1908.
The main entrance is at left, porte-cochère at right;
 the arches, much of the first floor, and a surrounding low wall
were built of arroyo stone. Below: A closeup of the front door arch reveals
the charm of the house's huge porch, an outdoor living room with
a cool Adirondack feel somehow ideal for the salubrious
air of Los Angeles before cars ruled the city.



One might assume that after shooting their wad on name-brand architecture, the Brents might have looked farther than their own catalog of relatively modest furniture when it came to outfitting their new house. While they might have sought actual antiques on their travels, perhaps Barker Brothers gave them a corporate discount on the best Grand Rapids had to offer. Somewhat alarming is that when the Los Angeles Times featured the interior of the house soon after completion, it pointed out that Mrs. Brent herself had done the paintings of classical figures on velvet that lined the main stair hall. Not clowns or card-playing dogs, but, well...charming. Upstairs, presumably meant as a refuge for E.J. and his cigar-chomping cronies, was an impressive billiard room with a vaulted Gothic-style ceiling. The Times's overall verdict was "magnificent yet homelike." There were swellegant entertainments at #20, of course. In June 1912, Mrs. Brent, face powdered, bewigged and kimona'ed, entertained 200 of her nearest and dearest fellow matrons with a Japanese tea. Another, more conventional tea for 100 took place in November 1919—with Prohibition slated to begin in two months' time, one might have hoped upon receiving the hostess's invitation that the tea would be spiked for a last blowout. Doubtful—this wasn't the Llewellyn-Milner house, after all.


The entrance of #20 led into a beamed vestibule; an equally dark dining room,
 with tiny table for tiny people, is seen at center left—California's natural
 advantage of copious sunlight was somehow yet to be discovered
 as an interior design element. Arthur Benton's complicated
 floor plan shows the central staircase that led to the
 upper stair hall, where one of Mrs. Brent's velvet
 paintings hung. (How one yearns to see it up
 close, and in color.) The house's south-
ern exposure is as madly complex as
 its layout, with sleeping porches
 and textures that suggest
Greene & Greene—
sans delicacy.




"YOUNGSTER WINS WAY INTO PALACE" was how the Oakland Tribune of August 17, 1916, headlined the story of little Gladys Mary Brent's arrival at 20 Berkeley Square. Though details of E.J. and Mary's connection to the girl isn't made clear, the couple formally adopted the eight-year-old orphan in Inyo County, apparently at the urging of 14-year-old Edwin Jr. "Although Mrs. Brent explained to her son that a sister would mean the yielding of some of his privileges," young Edwin, a violinist and pianist, insisted on the adoption when he detected a similar musical talent in his new sibling. Gladys Mary became a typist.

The Brents' life at #20 began to change in early 1923. The parties hadn't let up, but an "at home" scheduled for January 7 had to be canceled due to E.J. having taken ill. Sadly and unexpectedly, he was to die in the house on February 8. After services were held at #20 a few days later, Mrs. Brent became the new president of Brent's Great Credit House, perhaps taking a cue from her next-door neighbor Alice Coulter, who had taken over the reins of her husband's department store after his death. Edwin Jr., barely 21 when his father died, would become secretary-treasurer. Apparently, however, things did not go well without the store's founder at the helm. By 1928, bankruptcy loomed; to compound the troubles chez Brent, Edwin Jr. died of pneumonia that year. The business was acquired, possibly at auction, by Samuel Rudolph, one of many established furniture dealers along South Main Street, and after 40 years the name Brent would disappear from the ranks of major Los Angeles retailers.




The Brent name would also disappear from Berkeley Square. Bankruptcy forced the sale of not only the store, but of #20 as well: A classified ad in the Times of July 15, 1929, titled "BERKELEY SQUARE SACRIFICE," offered a "Beautiful substantial home located in a private park known as Los Angeles' most exclusive residential district. Plot 160x250." Before that ad appeared, however, a widower named Winfield Scott was in residence along with his daughter Margaret, presumably as renters; both are listed at #20 on voter rolls for 1928 and 1930. As earlier in the decade when Scott lived in El Centro, his occupation was noted as "photographer." One source calls him a cameraman and suggests that he was associated with the movies, but he seems more likely to have been a commercial photographer of some sort. His daughter, curiously, is recorded as "Mexican" in annual censuses, with Spanish as her native tongue—one might then wonder if there was some connection to Mexican-American War hero General Winfield Scott, but this does not appear to be the case. The Scotts were gone by 1932, when attorney Montgomery Gordon Rice put in an appearance. But like the Scotts, Rice, his wife, Astrid, and her son Leonard C. Bowie did not stay long.

It could be that the Wall Street crash delayed for many years the sale of what was now quite the white elephant, accounting for the difficulty in finding the names of tenants who might have lived there for any length of time during the '30s. After being forced to leave #20 in 1928, Mary, despite having relatives in Northern California, remained in Los Angeles. She moved first to 501 South Manhattan, then spent over a decade at 456 South St. Andrews, where she took in boarders to supplement E. J.'s Indian War pension of $17 a month. (She has proven difficult to trace after that.) Perhaps #20 stood empty and unoccupied after the Rices left, save for a caretaker, as late as the war years, when the only verifiable subdivision of a plot on the Square took place. This alteration apparently involved either the demolition and replacement of the entire Brent house or the reconstruction of it by the removal of its angled east wing, confining its new footprint to Lot 18, and the reconstitution of a separate Lot 19 on which another new house was built at the rear of the property. The date of the new construction is uncertain, but it wasn't until the mid 1940s that the second house, addressed "20A Berkeley Square," appears in city directories and on voter rolls. Such listings have Vida Halliburton Woelz and Ruth Halliburton Hall, sisters who grew up at #19 across the street, living with their husbands at #20 and #20A, respectively; perhaps it was their father, Erle Halliburton, then still living at #19, who bought the Brent property and replaced or radically remodeled the original structure for Vida and built the new residence for Ruth.


The original Brent house is seen on a 1921 Sanborn fire insurance map at 
top; while the 1948 image below it is murky, it appears that a house—
lower right corner of the red lined space—has been built on 
Lot 19 quite late in the Square's history.



Voter rolls list members of the Halliburton family at #20A through 1954. Following them at that address was Kathleen Jones-King, who remained until 1962, joined by Chadbourne A. Wood and Warren S. Wilkins Jr. during the last two years. The altered Brent house at #20 appears to have been sold or rented by 1950; a Mrs. Eldridge D. Shannon claimed it as her voting address in November of that year. By 1952 and through early 1954, Edwin C. and Lois D. Carfagno were in residence. After Vida Halliburton Sr. died in 1951 and family patriarch Erle Sr. left Los Angeles a few years later, #19 and #20A, the remaining two Halliburton houses on the Square, were sold. 


§ § § § § § § § § §



Victor A. Nickerson, owner of #20 during its last 
decade, with his mother, Bertha Nickerson.



Victor and Rhetta Nickerson were living at #20 by April 1954. Mr. Nickerson, real estate man, was a son of the distinguished William Nickerson Jr., founder and first president of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, the Paul Williams-designed headquarters of which stood (and remains standing) four blocks from the Square at Adams and Western. Victor had arrived in Los Angeles with his parents and seven siblings from Houston in 1921. The Nickersons were listed at #20 in city directories through 1962 before moving to South Bronson Avenue. Others who appear to have occupied the various parts of #20 in its last years—by this time it seems that the 1908 Brent garage may have been converted into a residence, making three dwellings on the original double lot—were Magdalene Phillips, Graham Fain Jr., and Michael Strand. And then no one lived there—the last directory listings for #20 and #20A Berkeley Square appeared during 1963, the houses soon to be flattened under Firestones.



 Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; LAPL; Caslon/LAT; Proquest/Historic Aerials;
The Western Architect; Ebony
                                                                                                                                   



19 Berkeley Square

FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO BERKELEY SQUARE, CLICK HERE


As in the case of a number of Berkeley Square lots, the one on which #19 rose was likely acquired from the original developers in a speculative venture early in the history of the tract. In some instances such a lot was flipped in its unimproved state; in some, such as Lot 12 on which would sit #19, a house was built for eventual if not immediate resale. It's possible that real estate investor Hugh Barclay Brown and his wife Lucille intended to live in Berkeley Square longer than they did—after all, they hired a top architectural firm to design #19, building permits for which were taken out in Lucille's name on December 2, 1909; the attractive Colonial with vaguely Italian overtones was designed by David Wellington Terwilliger, who was then in partnership with Charles F. Whittlesey.  (Records are confusing, but some indicate that the Browns may have also built another house on spec, as yet unidentified, on the Square.) The Browns stayed at #19—addressed #12 before citywide changes during 1912 due to recent annexations—for less than two years before selling it to to Mrs. Melville Hamlin Hudson, widow of a successful Kansas City theatrical manager and theater operator, who had been living recently at 2914 Wilshire Boulevard. 

Mary and Mel Hudson had four children; their only son Melville Jr. and daughter Gertrude, who had married Walter M. Jaccard of the well-known Jaccard jewelry family of Missouri, remained in Kansas City while daughter Adah, and possibly daughter Bendena, made the move to California with their mother. Though they became well-connected socially in Los Angeles, the Hudsons appear to have lived quietly at #19 in comparison to some other Square families. About the most exciting thing to happen in the house during their tenure was a furnace fire in January 1914 that caused considerable damage.

 No recorded weddings took place at #19; in 1925, when Adah became engaged at the age of 50 to her brother-in-law Ernest A. Jaccard, the nuptials were planned for the next year in Kansas City. It seems that rather than rattle around in a big house out in California all by herself after Adah's marriage, Mary Hudson decided that she would return to Missouri herself. One might imagine that the slick oilman who was to succeed her at #19 made her a prodding offer, if he didn't take the poor widder woman for a ride on the price, but one can only hope that she didn't leave the Square wondering what had hit her—probably not, as 20 years later there was much legal wrangling by descendants over various trusts. On September 27, 1925, the Times reported the sale of #19 to the Erle Palmer Halliburtons—who, despite a rather grand name, were living not long before in a one-room hovel in a one-horse Oklahoma town. The former Hudson house would become the scene of considerably more lively entertainments over the next 25 years.


From Erle to Ersters Rockefeller: The founder of Halliburton, a long way from
rope belts. Erle Palmer Halliburton Sr. was once among the world's
richest men, but his standing in the Midas club was greatly
 diminished through real estate speculation less clever
 than his oil ventures, #19 Berkeley Square not
 included. His lungs were greatly diminished,
too: A lifelong smoker, he died of
 emphysema in 1957, age 65.



The Halliburton Company, infamous later under the crypt-dwelling creep with the crooked smile, has since its 1919 founding in Duncan, Oklahoma, been a company of stellar capitalist cred but one never completely clever in terms of managing its overall image. Its founder, who with funds from his wife's pawned wedding ring, a few borrowed mules and wagon, began by cementing oil wells to increase the efficiency of their output. Not only was he to become a money-minting oilfield technology innovator who was also by turns a dabbler in the early passenger airline business, the mastermind in a nuts-to-orphans scheme, and a suspected rum-runner, but he was possessed of what appear to be narcisstic genes and somewhat exhibitionist tendencies. To be fair, as Clampettish as Erle Halliburton's arrival in Los Angeles in the early '20s was, it was perhaps more discreet than the nouveau pytrole riche Dohenys' displays of conspicuous consumption of 30 years before (not to mention their scandalous shenanigans during the '20s). After all, while Ed and Estelle were possessed to possess practically all of Chester Place, the Halliburtons showed almost Joadlike restraint in contenting themselves with only a lone though commodious house on a single lot in Berkeley Square. Yet clearly the Halliburtons wanted to live Oklahoma!-the-musical-large—perhaps a little too flashy by, say, Pasadena standards—but this was Hollywood-adjacent Los Angeles, after all. Though not without some charm, it would take a number of years of push before the family would be listed in either of the local competing Blue Books; one even suspects that the family employed a press agent, so many were their appearances in the papers between births, marriages, and deaths.


The original Whittlesey & Terwilliger design lost all delicacy in a 1936 remodeling by the Halliburtons



 Vida and Erle Sr. had been to California before—they were married in Riverside in 1915. They proceeded to have five children, including two namesakes: Erle Palmer Jr., Zola Catherine, Vida Jessie, Ruth Lou, and baby David John, born in 1926, just on their arrival in the Square. (Can one help but wonder if somehow James M. Cain was inspired to name one of his most famous characters after Vida?) As with almost all Berkeley Square families, one finds connections of friendship and business by Halliburtons with others who lived there, on corporate boards as well as in accounts of birthday bashes, teenage beach blasts, and wedding parties. William Gibbs McAdoo of #5, for instance, who might have originally introduced Erle to the Square, was a partner with him in a commercial airline venture at one time. The children mingled with other Square kids at the annual Halloween party between the gates, but the Halliburton children were probably more often in Mary Janes and lace-up cordovans rather than participating in any Our Gang sorts of escapades. (There were actual Dust Bowl Okies for the family to distance itself from, after all.) The teenage Zola and Erle Jr. threw a dance for 130 at the Bel-Air Country Club in 1934; rather than have summer jobs, the children were taken on extended cruises on the family yacht, perhaps inevitably christened the Vida. (Ship manifests, amusingly, listed Erles Sr. and Jr. as "pursers," David as a "cabin boy," and the ladies as "stewardesses.") The educations of the young Halliburtons were not neglected, however, any more than a sense of privilege was discouraged. In due course the kids got married, several in lavish weddings in the garden of #19 Berkeley Square.


A fur piece from Bugtussle—Mother's Day, 1947: Mrs. Erle Palmer Halliburton Sr., the first 
Vida of many, flanked by fellow family mothers and their children. From left to right: 
Jonathan Hall next to his mother, Zola Halliburton Hall, who is holding Zola Jr.; 
Vida Halliburton Woelz holding Palmer Woelz; Vida Woelz Jr. next to her 
granny Vida; Mrs. Erle Palmer Halliburton Jr., holding Elaine; Ruth Lou
Halliburton Hall with William Hall Jr.; Erle Palmer Halliburton III.



 Zola's engagement to John Elwin Hall in early 1941 was celebrated with a party for 150 at which "myriad lights twinkled from the windows of #19 Berkeley Square," according to the Times; Mrs. James Ricklefs of #25 gave the affianced pair a dinner soon after. The wedding took place in the garden of #19 on April 5; almost exactly eight years later Zola would tell the judge that John, by now a struggling young doctor, had become "completely indifferent in the face of my love." So he might have become to her desire for the high life; on granting the divorce, the judge mercifully ordered him to pay only $1 a month in support for the new grass widow and little Jonathan and Zola Jr. No doubt Papa Erle took care of the rest. 


Zola, Zola, Zola: Engagement and wedding, 1941; Splitsville, 1949



 Two weeks after her big sister married Dr. Hall in April 1941, Vida Jr. eloped with film editor John B. Woelz, better known as Softy, to Yuma, Arizona. Whether or not this was an unpleasant surprise to Big Vida and Papa Erle is not recorded, but it seems that the newlyweds were taken care of at least in that they lived at #19 for a time in the '40s—and there was a French governess for Vida III (or Vida IV, if you count the boat) and little sister Palmer Catherine when they came along. With the arrival of the boob tube, Softy's ship must have come in—he was soon a producer in that medium, and, despite his primary legacy being Clarence, The Cross-Eyed Lion, he apparently did well enough in Hollywood, if not without a stipend from the oilfields, to build a $100,000 house in Mandeville Canyon...which, on the basis of his chronic "nocturnal absences," Vida was to get when the divorce came through in 1953. 

Zola became a decorator and a friend of fellow Square divorcée Jeanne McReynolds; in October 1952 she married architect John Leon Rex, a native Angeleno who appears to have been quite a near neighbor to Zola and Softy in the Canyon and was at the time associated in business with Sumner Spaulding, who had built Harold Lloyd's Greenacres in Beverly Hills in the '20s. Within a few years a number of significant Midcentury buildings had been added to the Los Angeles streetscape and there were five children between the Rexes.


1953: Vida, post-decree



 After some speculation in the gossips columns that she and Softy might reconcile, Vida remarried. But not to Softy. She and second husband Artie Wayne were producers who, in 1959, were hoping to bring to stage and screen the life story of Mae Murray—silent pictures' Girl With the Bee-Stung Lips—but I don't remember ever seeing any such productions. Do you?

In 1945 Ruth became another Halliburton bride to be married in the garden of #19; she married William Meredith Hall of Tupelo, Mississippi—apparently no relation to Zola's first husband—and the two were married for many years. Later, according to the 1950 Southwest Blue Book, Ruth and Bill lived across the street at #20, the old Brent house, as did Vida and Softy before their divorce. (The Square was always a protective draw for its families, even in its dotage.) Erle Jr. had married Jane Miller in 1940, though rather than live in West Adams the couple built in Westwood. Among the cronies who hung around the Portuguese Bend Club with them were Donald Douglas Jr. of the DC-3 Douglases; Frank Vanderlip Jr., whose father was the original developer of Palos Verdes; Robert Stack, who was just getting his start in movies and who one day play would Eliot Ness on the small screen—a rare establishment-bred Angeleno who would go into the business; Barbara and Virginia Bekins, daughters of the moving and storage clan; Alphonzo Bell Jr., whose father had developed Bel-Air; Cobina Wright Jr., who became famous for being famous in the '40s; and Erle Jr.'s fellow wild young Berkeley Square scions: Hal Roach Jr. (#22), Willis Hunt Jr. (#3), and the notorious Reese Milner (#7).


April 1952: Joan Halliburton, 19, sought more than a blender 
after marrying and divorcing David within a few months.



 According to the writer of the particularly inane "Skylarking" gossip column in the Times, when brother David married his first wife Joan Taylor in 1951, Erle Jr. sprang for a Waring Blendor as a wedding present. While it certainly was the de rigueur countertop appliance of the day, perhaps its choice was based on his expectations for the union. And danged if David wasn't divorced and at the altar again a year and a half later with Suzette Gagnon. David, one of those men whose rascally charm got him far, was later an early player in the development of Cabo San Lucas. At a party for his 53rd birthday at his Hotel Twin Dolphin there, he wore his favorite old Yellow Cab driver's cap; his companion was not, perhaps unsurprisingly, Suzette but rather (according to Jody Jacobs in the Times) "lean and long-legged Barbara Comfort, who appeared in a gold bikini with green rollers in her hair," and, later that evening, presumably sans Spoolies, in "a diaper-cut skirt to show off her legs." (Barbara Nichols might once have portrayed her in the movies.)

In the meantime, the patriarchal Halliburton, a man with a strong belief in an individual's right to do as he damn well pleases, was arrested and briefly jailed on Federal charges of smuggling liquor in 1931 when it was found that he was using his private Tri-Motor as an airborne rum-runner. Seemingly ever testing the limits of the dastardly government, seven years later he ran afoul of authorities when he tried to ship a ton of walnuts from his Riverside grove to orphans back home in Oklahoma; California state officials suspected the peculiar donation of being a ruse to circumvent state laws regarding agricultural shipments. (Surely not....) Indefatigable Erle also found the time to design the original aluminum suitcase, still sold today by Zero Halliburton. Vida Sr., who presumably got back her pawned wedding ring in spades, and who was content over the years to play family matriarch, died of a heart attack at home in December 1951; services were held at #19. Not long after, all the myriad lights of the lively Halliburton clan went out on the Square, only hastening its final decade of decline. By mid 1953, Erle was living in Scottsdale—he died in L.A. four years later—and the Reverend Pearl C. Wood had become the mistress of #19.


Memorial Park, Duncan, Oklahoma: Born in Tennessee, 
long of California, a favorite son of Sooners.



§ § § § § § § § § §



 The Reverend Pearl C. Wood (variously Dr. Pearl C. Wood and Mother Pearl C. Wood) had come to Los Angeles from Arkansas in 1930, founding her Triangular Church of Truth—the name perhaps a take on Aimee Semple McPherson's Foursquare Gospel Church—two years later. Now known as the Triangular Church of Religious Science and long a pillar of South Los Angeles spiritual life, the congregation, after many years at 52nd and Wadsworth, moved in 1960 to its current building designed by architect Albert Butts at Western and 20th, close to Reverend Wood's home on Berkeley Square. The Triangular Church was the first African-American interdenominational congregation in Los Angeles, and is today headed by sculptor Gregory P. Pitts, a grandson of the founder, who succeeded his father in 1998. (The preacher-artist's work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as at the Studio Museum of Harlem.) 


As seen in the Los Angeles Sentinel on January 29, 1948:
Reverend Wood walks down the aisle of her church
with her groom after a 6 a.m. ceremony at the
Triangular Church four days before.



On the 16th anniversary of the Triangular Church, January 25, 1948, Reverend Wood married her second husband, Frank Veasey of Little Rock, at the sanctuary on 52nd Street; afterward the couple settled into the large house still standing at 1910 South Harvard near the Square. When Reverend Wood married again in 1971, it was to Reverend A. Z. Riley of Decatur, Michigan, at Triangular on Western Avenue. She died in 1974.

One of the last large social functions at #19 was the the Regalettes' Annual Garden Festival in June 1960. Deloris Wilson is listed at 19 Berkeley Square in the 1960 Los Angeles city directory; the address disappears from subsequent issues and was soon under the 10.


Among the 1,000 guests who enjoyed the music of strolling troubadours at the
Regalettes' Annual Garden Party in June 1960—probably the last party
of its size on Berkeley Square—were, from left to right, Vivian
Morris, Mikki Moore, Zee Maddox, Adella Farmer, Georgia
Carr, Betty Griffin, and Virginia Johnson.









Photo:


18 Berkeley Square

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


The Berkeley Square homeowner with the most serious interest in architecture was likely the man who built #18, one of the most sophisticated and distinctive houses on the street. Dr. Robert Phillips McReynolds seems to have been a man of varied interests—everything from human reproduction to the marketing of dry goods to sophisticated trends in design. Born in 1871 in the Kentucky town of Elkton—closer to Nashville than Louisville—his background seems as though it would have been enough to send anyone with an iota of a sense of the larger world high-tailing it out of a one-horse town, to at least as far as the continent would allow: His fundamentalist parents were strict and unyielding in terms of moral behavior; his father, a rich surgeon and planter in Elkton, was considered by locals to be insufferably high-handed and snobbish. One imagines the transformative allure of turn-of-the-century Los Angeles for an intelligent and adventurous young man from a benighted Southern bog who had received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1895, had studied obstetrics at schools in Europe, and was practicing in Philadelphia before arriving in Los Angeles at age 35. But his move west seems to have been more geographic than a bid for freedom from pulpitudinous oppression. It appears that through the Disciples of Christ young Dr. McReynolds already knew the shopkeeping Coulter family of Kentucky before arriving in Los Angeles in 1906 to marry the only daughter of Benjamin Franklin Coulter, better known as B. F., a key member of his clan who had come to California 30 years before to establish a hardware store followed by a famous dry-goods emporium in 1878—a timeline that by L.A. standards would qualify his family as pioneer stock. Robert and Frances were married at high noon on December 12, 1906; a report of the wedding appeared the next morning on the front page of the Herald, prominently above the fold, complete with pictures of the bride and groom. 


Dr. Robert Phillips McReynolds, center, and his father-in-law, the
Reverend B.F. Coulter, left, were in the habit of looking toward
the future; the doctor's brother James Clark McReynolds,
an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme
Court from 1914 to 1941, couldn't face it.



Frances Coulter was not from a family of agnostics or layabouts—far from it. A man whose multi-tasking ways would be an inspiration to his new son-in-law, her father was not only an energetic merchant but an ordained minister. His great success with Coulter's Dry Goods Company, the hallmark of which was always attentive customer service, allowed him to finance several houses of worship, including one for the Disciples of Christ on Temple Street in 1881, which he then headed for the next three years. He was also able to build a grand house on Grand Street atop Bunker Hill, fashion's neighborhood of choice before the development of West Adams. It was at 219 North Grand, a short walk to store, church, and medical office, that newlyweds Robert and Frances lived for a time with her parents, soon buying Lot 20 in Berkeley Square. Not that a well-connected obstetrician might not have been able to afford it himself, but one wonders how much of a dowry B.F. might have provided to make his daughter and son-in-law's new house possible—whether bound by money, religion, or their Kentucky roots, clearly this was a unified family. In any case, not only did Robert choose to build in the choicest new subdivision in town, but he had the aesthetic sensibility to seek out the design services of architect Robert D. Farquhar early in his career—a man whose paradoxically powerful but delicate way with bricks would result in some of the most beautiful buildings in Los Angeles—#18 as well as the still-extant downtown California Club and Clark Memorial Library in West Adams among them. The Department of Buildings issued McReynolds a permit to begin construction on August 25, 1909.




Robert D. Farquhar's 1909 design of almost radical
 modernity could scarcely have been further removed from
 the asymmetry and complicated textures of Victorian houses still being
 built in Los Angeles as recently as 10 years before. Above is the view from
 the northwest, with a sliver of #16, the Charles O. Nourse house,
 at left; below, as seen from the northeast, with a slight
 view at right of furniture merchant E.J. Brent's #20.





 In 1913 Homes and Gardens of the Pacific Coast described the house Farquhar designed for the McReynoldses in 1909 as "a very attractive example of...Colonial architecture.... The long French windows arched on the first floor, with the iron balcony on the second floor are particularly pleasing. The hooded entrance is a very interesting feature of the house. The interior is finished in hardwood and mahogany, the second story being in white enamel. The furnishings have been carried along the style of the architecture, with many pieces of fine statuary and old armour." I don't know about the statuary and armor, which don't jive with the clean anti-Victorian symmetry of the exterior, but perhaps the remodelings by Pasadena's esteemed firm of Greene & Greene between 1912 and 1916, mostly of the interior—followed by a few changes in the mid '20s by Henry Greene alone—were intended to clear the dust-catching detritus away. 


A "Notable Residence" featured in the Los Angeles Times of February 27, 1910



Within three years of its founding, the coffers of Coulter's Dry Goods were churning to the extent that the Reverend B.F. Coulter was able to fund the Temple Street Christian Church; a year after that congregation moved to Hope and 11th streets in 1894, the store's cash trolleys were zipping along their cables at such a rate that B.F. was able to build the offshoot Broadway Church of Christ, which he headed until his death in 1911. In honor of Coulter, a later Disciples of Christ church at Pico and Arlington was called the Coulter Memorial. After B.F.'s death, his widow Alice was to move into #18 Berkeley Square to live with her daughter and son-in-law; in an early and rare instance of distaff executive power, she also assumed the presidency of Coulter's Dry Goods, albeit later with the help of Dr. McReynolds, who was to officially succeed her at the helm in 1924.


Frances Coulter appeared on checks issued by the store her husband would one day lead



While a household of greater industry than some on the Square, #18 was to follow the standard haute bourgeois template when it came to entertaining. One soirée in 1940 honored the newly married Erle P. Halliburton Jr., whose parents lived across the street at #19; there were also luncheons, teas, dinner dances, musicales, and a wedding reception, the latter for the McReynoldses' daughter Alice Cornelia in October 1930. Interestingly, the family chose to have the ceremony not at the new church dedicated to B.F. Coulter, of which they were members, but at St. John's at Adams and Figueroa, the Episcopal church of the Blue Book set. The Disciples of Christ back in Tennessee must have shuddered at such heretical worldliness out in Hollywood. Eleven years later, Alice's brother Robert Coulter McReynolds married Jeanne Hobgood, described impressively by the Times as "prominent in society circles at home in Concho, Oklahoma," in a Presbyterian ceremony. Alice remained married to Edwin L. Harbach until he died a few months before her in 1982 (the couple lived for many years at 322 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square); Robert, later a marine physicist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, divorced Jeanne and had three more wives. Jeanne, mother of Robert Coulter McReynolds Jr., went on to marry one of the ex-husbands of King Vidor's daughter Suzanne, whose mother married violinist Jascha Heifetz after divorcing Vidor. Corpses in Tennessee graves spun even faster, which was probably more fun than they ever had while alive.




An interesting if reprehensible character in the form of an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court visited his brother at #18 Berkeley Square on occasion over the years. James Clark McReynolds served on the court from 1914 to 1941, during which time he managed, like his father, to charm no one, even in those less enlightened times, with his blatant anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny that makes even he of the hirsute Coke can seem almost acceptable. Drew Pearson called him "Scrooge"; Chief Justice William Howard Taft thought him grouchy and priggish (McReynolds considered men who wore wrist watches to be "fruits" and women who wore red nail polish to be vulgar strumpets). Taft also thought that his cohort could be irresponsible in matters of Court business, especially during duck-hunting season, as well as selfish and "fuller of prejudice than any man I know." Justice McReynolds refused to speak to or sit next to Justice Louis Brandeis, and when Benjamin Cardozo was appointed to the court, he urged the White House "not to afflict the Court with another Jew"—this ignorant appeal coming after years of his virulent opposition to any New Deal legislation and once having called Roosevelt "Nero at his worst." Not to put too fine a point on it, but other characterizations of McReynolds included boorish, rude, impatient, angry, mean, sarcastic, intolerant, petty, reactionary, and Puritanical. In other words, a real charmer. While he did leave his estate to charity and some kindnesses, tellingly always to strangers, are attributed to him, the lifelong bachelor—oh the Freudian inquiry that could be made on just that one item—died alone in 1946, with no friends or family in attendance, the world mercifully having made an effort to leave his sort of inflexible, antediluvian mindset behind. Not a single Supreme Court justice attended his funeral; when his frequently demeaned African-American factotum Harry Parker—who was sometimes used by the Justice as a human bird dog on hunting trips and who was always outwardly respectful but who along with others referred to McReynolds as "Pussywillow" behind his back—died seven years later, his memorial service drew Chief Justice Vinson and five Associates.


1938: Stiles O. Clements's cutting-edge Streamline Moderne design for
the new Coulter's at 5600 Wilshire Boulevard on the Miracle Mile
resulted in an appropriate updating of the emporium's name:
Coulter's Dry Goods was now Coulter's Department Store.
The building is now gone along with the distinctive
"Wilshire Special" streetlamps on this stretch
of the boulevard, hundreds of which were
at one time seen in blocks as far
west as Fairfax Avenue.



Back in Los Angeles, Alice Coulter had died at #18 in 1937 at age 86, with services at the Coulter Memorial. Firmly at the helm of Coulter's Dry Goods, and ever cognizant of design and retail trends, Robert McReynolds commissioned the estimable Stiles O. Clements to design a new store for the firm on Wilshire Boulevard. Just as residents of West Adams, including of course Berkeley Square, were moving north and west out the new Wilshire spine, so too had many downtown merchants established branches on the Boulevard over the prior decade. But lone among downtown merchants, McReynolds made the brave and prescient decision not to build a branch store for Coulter's on the Miracle Mile but to move the flagship there, leaving downtown Los Angeles altogether. 




Above: Dr. McReynolds's bold decision to leave
downtown Los Angeles and move to the Miracle Mile,
coming not long after the death of the founder's wife in
1937, set off rumors of liquidation. Once reassured of the store's
viability, shoppers flocked to the new store. Coulter's was later absorbed
by The Broadway chain. Below: The old-line Los Angeles real estate
firm of William May Garland marketed #18 with an ad in the
Times in January 1938. The offering was withdrawn
soon after; the McReynoldses were not to leave
Berkeley Square for another 15 years.




After Alice's death, #18 was put on the market. Whether Robert and Frances had a change of heart or whether plans for the new store and the slump of 1938 complicated a sale is not known, but the family was to retain ownership into the '50s. Frances Coulter McReynolds, clubwoman and patroness of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, died at Good Samaritan in 1942, a native Angeleno who had been born in her parents' house on Bunker Hill in 1882. Robert continued as president of Coulter's Dry Goods until stepping down in May 1951 after 27 years; his son James O. McReynolds—who once attended a 50th anniversary party dressed as a gold Cadillac Eldorado (get it?) with hubcap as hat—took over store reins at that time. After a series of abdominal operations begun several months later, Robert lingered until December 19, 1952. After services attended by hundreds at the Arlington Avenue Christian Church—the Coulter Memorial—he was buried alongside Frances and her parents in the venerable Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights.




§ § § § § § § § § §


Only one other family besides the McReynoldses lived at #18 Berkeley Square in its 54 years. Hong Wong, apparently a real estate operator, was listed in city directories there for the seven years after 1955, moving from 737 East Adams Boulevard. The address disappears after 1962, the same year the photograph at top was taken. The school board had acquired most of the south side of the Square for expansion; on June 3, 1963, the board was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety to demolish #18.



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