800 East Adams Boulevard

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  • Completed in 1902 on Lot 26 of Grider and Dow's Adams Street Tract by blacksmith Heber Hamilton Balderston
  • On November 22, 1901, the Los Angeles Herald reported that Balderston had just bought the property, a 65.6-by-150-foot parcel at the southeast corner of Adams Street and Stanford Avenue
  • Heber Balderston had married Maud Carey in Santa Ana on June 30, 1895; her eight-year-old daughter, Pansy Carey, appears to have been adopted by Balderston. After Pansy married music-store salesman Worth Hathaway on November 10, 1909, Balderston built them a five-room cottage at 2612 Stanford Avenue, directly behind 800 East Adams; both houses survive. The Hathaways' marriage was short-lived; in August 1923, Pansy married traveling hardware salesman George E. Guinn, recently divorced from his second wife, and later moved to Riverside
  • Heber Balderston was able to remain in business as a blacksmith well into the automobile age; by 1922, he was transitioning into a new career as a salesman for a local auto supply firm and then as a traveling salesman for the J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company. By 1928, Balderston had set himself up as a cement contractor
  • On January 6, 1932, the Department of Building and Safety issued Maud Balderston a permit for a new one-car garage on the property
  • Although Heber and Maud Balderston would remain listed in the city directory at 800 East Adams into the 1940s, it is unclear as to just when they relocated to the house they built in 1939 on South Beverly Drive near the Hillcrest Country Club, a neighborhood typical of those to which many early residents of Adams Boulevard had been migrating since the 1920s. The move appears to have occurred soon after a fire at 800 for which Maud Balderston was issued a repair permit by the Department of Building and Safety on May 17, 1944
  • Now living at 1501 South Beverly Drive, Heber Balderston died in Los Angeles on July 23, 1945. Maud Balderston remained at 1501 for several years—the house would be moved to Buckingham Road in 1955—and died while living on Third Avenue, halfway back toward her old neighborhood, on March 29, 1953
  • Clubwoman Myrtle Paul Hutchinson occupied 800 East Adams Boulevard for nearly 40 years until her death on October 18, 1994





Illustrations: Private Collection