2055 West Adams Boulevard

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The house once at the northeast corner of West Adams and St. Andrews Place started its life a block west at 2155 West Adams Street; it was completed in 1904 for Louisa S. Janvier, who had employed as architects the firm of Sumner Hunt and Wesley Eager. In the early 1920s, as William Andrews Clark Jr. sought to take over his entire block of Kinney Heights, he made a deal with wholesale grocer William Spencer Hook Jr., who then owned 2155, to buy its site; the house was moved east in 1923. Hook hired the firm of Morgan, Walls & Morgan to build a foundation on the new lot and to drastically remodel what appears to have been been a steep-roofed shingle-style house with into a steep-roofed French design, one very much in vogue in the '20s. During this period, there was fierce competition for the residential dollars of affluent Angelenos, with dozens of developments vying for the crown of most fashionable neighborhood. In its real estate reportage, the Los Angeles Times at first mistakely placed Hook's remodeled house in fashion-forward Beverly Hills, where it could easily have been imagined; although the immediate neighborhood anchored by the Clark Library and Berkeley Square would fade dramatically during the coming economic crisis and war years, it was in 1923 still a favored district for the city's social Old Guard even if not of its most forward-thinking cohort.

The house was built facing east toward Gramercy Place (née Hermosa Street); in its new location it was oriented west toward St. Andrews. It was demolished in 1972.



 The front of the house faced St. Andrews Boulevard;
at right is the rear garden. Below it is seen newly built and in
its original guise one block west at 2155 West Adams.





 Illustrations: LAPL; LAT