10 Chester Place
PLEASE ALSO SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES
PLEASE ALSO SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES
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- Built in 1899 on a parcel comprised of Lots 7, 8, and 9 of the Chester Place Tract by Colorado hardware and mining executive William Bayly; no house would ever be built between 10 Chester Place and Adams Boulevard, hence, with de facto Adams frontage, its inclusion in our inventory
- Architect: Seymour Locke; the Los Angeles Times of February 16, 1899, reported that Locke, in practice at the time with William A. O. Munsell, was preparing plans for Bayly to build a $25,000 house. The design is often mistakenly attributed to Theodore A. Eisen and Sumner P. Hunt, who, it was announced in the same Times article, were building 8 Chester Place next door for Mrs. Bayly's first cousin, Mrs. Oliver P. Posey (#8 would within two years of completion belong to oilman Edward Doheny)
- On April 21, 1899, the Los Angeles Times reported that Bayly had been issued a building permit for a "two-story, twelve-room frame residence, Chester Place, between Twenty-third and Adams streets"; the cost was now given as $16,000
- The 1900 Federal census, enumerated on June 14, included at 10 Chester Place Eva Bayly's parents, John and Sara Houghton, but not the Baylys themselves, who were at that time traveling in Europe and not due back in the U.S. until July 1
- 10 Chester Place would later be acquired, as would the entirety of Chester Place, by the Doheny family. The house was occupied by Doheny associate Dr. Norman Bridge from the fall of 1910 to the summer of 1916, perhaps at first in a lease agreement with Bayly and then in an arrangement with Edward Doheny Sr., who acquired #10 from Bayly; by late 1911, Bayly had engaged architect J. Martin Haenke to build a new house at 2025 West Adams Boulevard. In the summer of 1916, Bridge bought 718 West Adams Street, just outside the gates of Chester Place; Edward Doheny Jr., known as Ned, had married in 1914 and had since had a daughter. His family, who had been living with his parents at #8—Mrs. Doheny Jr. was pregnant again—settled into #10 while he was away serving in the Navy
- The Department of Buildings issued an alteration permit to Ned Doheny on September 27, 1916, authorizing the enlargement of north-side rooms upstairs and down
- In 1928, the Edward Doheny Jr. family left 10 Chester Place and his mother's eyes peering across the lawn from behind her Venetian blinds at #8 for a much grander and fateful pile in Beverly Hills, the famous Greystone; the house was then leased to the University of Southern California for use as a residence for its president, Rufus von KleinSmid, whose most recent quarters had been in the aforementioned Norman Bridge house at 718 West Adams. (It is interesting to note that staunch Catholic Estelle Dohey was willing to have Von KleinSmid, impressed with his own Saxon lineage and a staunch proponent of eugenics along with David Starr Jordan, chancellor of Stanford University, as a neighbor.) Von KleinSmid's wife died in 1947, the year he left U.S.C.'s top post to become its chancellor. He remained at #10 until Mrs. Doheny's death in 1958
- After Estelle Doheny's demise on October 30, 1958, Chester Place and its attached properties were deeded to the Archbishop of Los Angeles. The bulk of the gated street became the Doheny campus of Mount Saint Mary's College—now University—opened in 1962; 10 Chester Place is today the school's St. Joseph Administration Building
- The story of William Bayly and his family presence in West Adams appears below
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| As seen in the The Inland Architect and News Record, February 1903: A northward two-story addition was made later during the ownership of the Doheny family. Edward Doheny Jr., known as Ned, lived at 10 Chester Place with his family before moving to Greystone, the legendary Beverly Hills estate where he and his valet met strange deaths in 1929. |
WILLIAM BAYLY AND HIS FAMILY IN WEST ADAMS
William Bayly spent his entire life west of the Mississippi. Born in the Missouri River town of Lexington on February 28, 1855, and raised in St. Louis, he left school at 16 to become one of the men who was a match for the mountains of the west, as Irving Stone would have put it. Stopping first in southern Colorado, Bayly became associated in the hardware business with many of the state's pioneers, including Alva Adams (who would go on to serve three nonconsecutive terms as governor), the Van Gieson family—émigrés from New Jersey and owners of a lixiviation works servicing the burgeoning mining industry—and Oliver Perry Posey, a miner who would eventually build what would become better known as the Doheny house in Los Angeles's Chester Place. Bayly's ties to the Van Giesons and Posey would thicken when, as reported in the Del Norte, Colorado, San Juan Prospector, he married 18-year-old Eva Houghton there on December 31, 1878—the bride was a first cousin of Mrs. Posey, nèe Sara Van Gieson. By then, the young man once known as Billy Bayly, hardware merchant, was the dignified William Bayly, a man prosperous enough at the age of 23 to take his bride on a honeymoon to St. Louis, Chicago, and New York. During the next 15 years, as industrial mining in Colorado reached its fever pitch, the profits of extraction made Bayly and his confrères and family not merely prosperous but extremely rich. The big city of Denver called, if not for long. By the mid 1890s, snowless Southern California was calling louder; after winter sojourns in Los Angeles, the Baylys and Poseys became hooked and began to formulate domestic plans to henceforth look to Colorado merely for further business opportunities and dividend checks. The men had conquered the West; if they ever desired to see snow again, they could see it atop the San Gabriels from the north windows of warm houses the families would build next to one another in 1899 in just-opened Chester Place. Edward Doheny and his ambitious former telephone operator of a wife, Estelle, had not quite yet crashed the enclave's lovely gates with their bankroll of more recent derivation.
The Poseys appear to have made the first moves toward permanent residence in Los Angeles by renting 2530 South Figueroa Street, at the northeast corner of Adams, just east of Chester Place. From there, Sara Posey, an ebullient, socially ambitious woman—possibly given to spending more of her husband's large income than was actually wise—began to look for a building lot for her florid dream of a house. Though still based in Denver, the Baylys were transitioning to Los Angeles, having taken for the time being the John Wigmore house at 949 West Adams; Eva Bayly, apparently under the benevolent sway of her by all accounts formidable older cousin, wanted to build something permanent herself, having spent years moving all over southern Colorado and from hotel to hotel in Denver. Opportunity would soon present itself to the ladies when Judge Charles Silent decided to subdivide his estate behind handsome and still-extant stone-and-iron gates on fast-developing Adams Street; Silent was calling his tract Chester Place after his beloved and ill-fated teenage son. On February 16, 1899, the Los Angeles Herald reported that Judge Silent had sold two large lots in his tract to Sara Posey, who already had in hand plans from architects Theodore A. Eisen and Sumner P. Hunt for an extravagant $40,000 house; reported in the same article was Silent's sale of Lots 7, 8, and 9 of the Chester Place Tract to William Bayly. While it is widely written that Eisen & Hunt designed the Bayly house as well as that of the Poseys, the Herald further reported, more accurately, that "Architect Seymour Locke is now preparing plans...for the residence which Mr. Bayly intends having erected" in Chester Place.
The Poseys would be persuaded to leave their new house within three years of buying its Chester Place parcel; there were rumors of Oliver having overextended himself, which coincided with Edward Doheny's deep need to impress. It was Mr. Doheny and not his wife who was by all accounts determined to have the castle-like 8 Chester Place as a statement of his success; Estelle Doheny thought it dark and forbidding. He won out over her objections and made the Poseys an offer they couldn't refuse; the Dohenys took possession on November 1, 1901; per the Herald, their $125,000 check included "all but a few of the personal furnishings that have served to make the home one of the beauty spots of Los Angeles." The Poseys would never live in so extravagant a house as #8 again; while Sara boasted that she was going to build another palace at the northeast corner of Adams and Figueroa—the Dohenys would alter that dream as well, eventually building St. Vincent de Paul Church there instead—the Poseys rented the Victorian at 421 West Adams for a winter and then moved to another in a declining residential neighborhood northward on Figueroa toward the encroaching business district. By 1920, they were renting a house in Pasadena, he described in census records of that year as a mining promoter and she as the manager of an "Oriental curio shop."
The Baylys would stay put in Chester Place for a decade. Once the former telephone operator had settled into her house next door, she found she quite liked the idea of controlling her environment down to the last rosebud, even on bushes in front of other people's houses in the neighborhood. Eventually she would buy up every other residence in Chester Place, and more, installing loyalists as renters in them. William and Eva Bayly were still at #10 in May 1910; while they may have simply wanted a newer house in a newer neighborhood and may have tolerated the whims of Mrs. Doheny well enough, they decided to leave once an offer came in from the their acquisitive neighbors, who would before long install their associate Dr. Norman Bridge for a time, with Edward Doheny Jr. and his family then taking up residence. By the fall of 1911, the Baylys were planning a new house in an ungated neighborhood; 2025 West Adams would be be ready for them by late 1912. After leaving the house 10 years later, their next Los Angeles address was a house at 325 South Ardmore Avenue before moving on to apartment living. Eva died in the city on August 2, 1936, at 75; William was 91 when he died there on May 27, 1946.
Other members of the Bayly family who migrated to Los Angeles along with William and Eva and the Poseys also lived in West Adams during its fashionable years, and beyond, a few on Adams itself. William's younger brother, George, lived early in the century at 1007 West Adams before building on West 28th Street in 1905; George's son Harold kept the presence up in the last fashionable section of the declining boulevard—anchored by Berkeley Square—when, in the mid '30s, he acquired 2055 West Adams next door to the house his Uncle William had left years before.
The Poseys appear to have made the first moves toward permanent residence in Los Angeles by renting 2530 South Figueroa Street, at the northeast corner of Adams, just east of Chester Place. From there, Sara Posey, an ebullient, socially ambitious woman—possibly given to spending more of her husband's large income than was actually wise—began to look for a building lot for her florid dream of a house. Though still based in Denver, the Baylys were transitioning to Los Angeles, having taken for the time being the John Wigmore house at 949 West Adams; Eva Bayly, apparently under the benevolent sway of her by all accounts formidable older cousin, wanted to build something permanent herself, having spent years moving all over southern Colorado and from hotel to hotel in Denver. Opportunity would soon present itself to the ladies when Judge Charles Silent decided to subdivide his estate behind handsome and still-extant stone-and-iron gates on fast-developing Adams Street; Silent was calling his tract Chester Place after his beloved and ill-fated teenage son. On February 16, 1899, the Los Angeles Herald reported that Judge Silent had sold two large lots in his tract to Sara Posey, who already had in hand plans from architects Theodore A. Eisen and Sumner P. Hunt for an extravagant $40,000 house; reported in the same article was Silent's sale of Lots 7, 8, and 9 of the Chester Place Tract to William Bayly. While it is widely written that Eisen & Hunt designed the Bayly house as well as that of the Poseys, the Herald further reported, more accurately, that "Architect Seymour Locke is now preparing plans...for the residence which Mr. Bayly intends having erected" in Chester Place.
The Poseys would be persuaded to leave their new house within three years of buying its Chester Place parcel; there were rumors of Oliver having overextended himself, which coincided with Edward Doheny's deep need to impress. It was Mr. Doheny and not his wife who was by all accounts determined to have the castle-like 8 Chester Place as a statement of his success; Estelle Doheny thought it dark and forbidding. He won out over her objections and made the Poseys an offer they couldn't refuse; the Dohenys took possession on November 1, 1901; per the Herald, their $125,000 check included "all but a few of the personal furnishings that have served to make the home one of the beauty spots of Los Angeles." The Poseys would never live in so extravagant a house as #8 again; while Sara boasted that she was going to build another palace at the northeast corner of Adams and Figueroa—the Dohenys would alter that dream as well, eventually building St. Vincent de Paul Church there instead—the Poseys rented the Victorian at 421 West Adams for a winter and then moved to another in a declining residential neighborhood northward on Figueroa toward the encroaching business district. By 1920, they were renting a house in Pasadena, he described in census records of that year as a mining promoter and she as the manager of an "Oriental curio shop."
The Baylys would stay put in Chester Place for a decade. Once the former telephone operator had settled into her house next door, she found she quite liked the idea of controlling her environment down to the last rosebud, even on bushes in front of other people's houses in the neighborhood. Eventually she would buy up every other residence in Chester Place, and more, installing loyalists as renters in them. William and Eva Bayly were still at #10 in May 1910; while they may have simply wanted a newer house in a newer neighborhood and may have tolerated the whims of Mrs. Doheny well enough, they decided to leave once an offer came in from the their acquisitive neighbors, who would before long install their associate Dr. Norman Bridge for a time, with Edward Doheny Jr. and his family then taking up residence. By the fall of 1911, the Baylys were planning a new house in an ungated neighborhood; 2025 West Adams would be be ready for them by late 1912. After leaving the house 10 years later, their next Los Angeles address was a house at 325 South Ardmore Avenue before moving on to apartment living. Eva died in the city on August 2, 1936, at 75; William was 91 when he died there on May 27, 1946.
Other members of the Bayly family who migrated to Los Angeles along with William and Eva and the Poseys also lived in West Adams during its fashionable years, and beyond, a few on Adams itself. William's younger brother, George, lived early in the century at 1007 West Adams before building on West 28th Street in 1905; George's son Harold kept the presence up in the last fashionable section of the declining boulevard—anchored by Berkeley Square—when, in the mid '30s, he acquired 2055 West Adams next door to the house his Uncle William had left years before.
Illustrations: Private Collection; Mount Saint Mary's University; HathiTrust
