660 East Adams Boulevard

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  • Built in 1893 on Lot 4 in Block 1 of Daman & Millard's Subdivision of the Shaw Tract by attorney Charles Udell and his wife Lizzie Bewley-Udell
  • On August 3, 1893, the Los Angeles Times reported the sale of Lot 4 to "L. B. Udell" the day before. The seller was real estate investor Mary E. Haynes
  • Lizzie Bewley-Udell was a sister of John C. Bewley, who in 1895 would be building the first 620 East Adams four lots to the west of 660 on property sold to him by Mary E. Haynes. Bewley-Udell styled herself presciently with a hyphen; she was a principal with her husband in Udell & Udell, stenographers and notaries public, with Charles Udell maintaining a separate office for his law practice. John Bewley, a stenographer, also worked at Udell & Udell. (John and Lizzie's sister Marietta Bewley, no less of a modern woman than her sister, would become a rare female M.D. when she was graduated from the U.S.C. College of Medicine in 1900.) Mildred, the Udell's eldest of three children, was born on October 16, 1893, just as the construction of 660 might have been finished
  • Kenneth Udell was born in November 1895, Dorothy Udell in November 1897. With motherhood, Lizzie Bewley-Udell appears to have given into convention, dropping the hyphenation and taking just her husband's surname. Udell & Udell was closed; Charles practiced law on his own for several years before adding the management of the Giles Mercantile Agency, publishers of the Daily Commercial Report, and then taking on Lowie Shelton as a law partner. By 1900, Charles Udell's business and civic interests had greatly expanded. He represented the Sixth Ward on the City Board of Education and served on several of its committees. The Udells and John Bewley were incorporating directors of the Sunset Power Company in April 1898; although capitalized at $2,000,000 per the Herald of April 8, the history of the company is unknown. Udell & Shelton appear to have specialized in mining law and mining brokerage; it was in regard to that line that the Udell family temporarily disrupted their lives at 660 East Adams in early 1900. Work would be taking Udell north in the spring of 1900 in anticipation of the gold discovery at the Bluestone Placer Mine 16 miles south of Teller, Alaska. While he was away, Lizzie and the children moved north to Jenny Lind in Calaveras County, where her parents lived and farmed, where the Udells were married in 1890, and which, coincidentally, had been a placer mining town as early as 1849
  • In May 1900, classified advertisements appeared in Los Angeles papers offering 660 East Adams for rent; handling the rental was John C. Bewley, who could be contacted at Giles Mercantile in the Laughlin Building (better known today as the Grand Central Market building) or at his home at 620 East Adams. Warren and Flora Vosler, recent arrivals in Los Angeles from Queens, New York, rented 660 while the Udells were absent. Mr. Vosler was employed as a driver by the Troy Laundry Company before going into the retail grocery business
  • Once his family was back in Los Angeles, Charles Udell added to his responsibilities by investing in an Arizona firm straightforwardly named the Non-Refillable Bottle Company (the success of that investment is unclear) and by becoming active in the reorganization of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, its original 1880 incarnation having fallen on hard times. In addition, Udell was the secretary of the Granite Securities Company, stock and bond underwriters, including those of mining companies
  • Apparently in order to finance their various ventures, the Udells took out a two-year mortgage on 660 East Adams on December 31, 1901. Six months after this mortgage was due, the Udells transferred the house, for $3,500 in June 1904, to the Safety Investment Company, which happened to share an office in the Bradbury Building with Granite Securities. The Udells would be moving to Hollywood, then a separate town not to be annexed to Los Angeles until 1910. Later in the decade the Udells were living in Lakeport; by 1920, Charles and Lizzie were living in Seattle, but divorced 
  • Renting 660 East Adams during 1905 was Anna M. Coffman, a divorcée, and her daughter, Beatrice, who is identified as an actress in the 1905 city directory. (Mrs. Coffman, whose former husband, Joseph Martin Coffman, was prominent in Butte County up north, does not seem to be related to the Coffmans who occupied John Bewley's 620 East Adams after he left that house. Neither is Beatrice to be mistaken for another Beatrice Coffman in South Los Angeles who, in 1904, was charged with "assault to commit murder" along with her twin sister after a dispute with a neighbor over time spent on a telephone party line)
  • On August 26, 1905, the Los Angeles Herald reported the Safety Investment Company's sale of 660 East Adams to Dr. Edward Everett Sherrard for $3,100
  • Dr. Sherrard was a physician and surgeon whose extracurricular activities included being among those who were instrumental in the development of the Victor Valley. Sherrard, his wife Katherine, and their two children had arrived in Los Angeles from Oakwood, Ohio—a suburb of Dayton—in 1904, choosing South Los Angeles as a neighborhood as did many newcomers. The family remained at 660 East Adams until early 1912, when they moved to 233 South Normandie Avenue (a large Craftsman house soon renumbered 133 in citywide street and address adjustment to accommodate recent annexations, and in 2020 being remodeled out of recognition). The Sherrards were following the typical westward migration of early residents of the East Adams district, next having architect Ray Kieffer build a house at 315 South Rossmore Avenue in Hancock Park in 1923 and then ending up in Beverly Hills
  • On February 19, 1908, the Department of Buildings issued Katherine Sherrard a permit to create living space in the attic of 660 and to add a garage
  • Rooms at 660 East Adams were rented to different individuals in 1913 and 1914—two house movers, a piano tuner, a gardener, and a nurse among them—before its sale to Dr. Amanda Maria Congdon, another of the 600 block's rare-for-the-era female physicians. (The first had been Dr. Marietta Bewley of 620, as mentioned above)
  • Maria Congdon received her M.D. from the University of Buffalo in 1892; by 1897 she had she left her husband, Dr. William O. Congdon, back east in Cuba, New York, moving to Pasadena, where her son Roscoe, an attorney, had settled. Dr. Congdon's particular field of medicine is unclear, but she was given to spiritualism, at least in her spare time. In a letter to the editor published in the February 1, 1906, issue of Suggestion—"A Magazine of the New Psychology," based in Chicago—another Pasadena physician, Hiram A. Reid, president of the Pasadena Society of Psychical Research, describes Dr. Congdon as "a reputable practicing physician...a lady of refinement, culture, and scrupulous integrity, with a very level headed and practical turn of mind." Dr. Reid included Dr. Congdon's earlier letter to him describing her having recently sat for pictures with a spirit-photo medium in a tent at a meeting of spiritualists near Los Angeles. In her testimonial to Dr. Reid, Dr. Congdon described the resulting photographs as containing not just her image but those of dead relatives, including that of a child she lost when eight months old. "I was not a spiritualist, and prior to these sittings...I was perfectly skeptical about all such phenomena. But these marvelous results, and some other equally strange incidents which have since occurred, have compelled me to admit that discarnate personalities do exist, and that they can and do sometimes manifest themselves and make proof of their identity and their intelligent interest in the welfare of their friends still in the body." ("Respectfully, Maria Congdon, M.D.")
  • Relocating her practice to Los Angeles by 1908, and likely then becoming known to both Drs. Sherrard and Bewley, Maria Congdon was in residence at 660 East Adams by 1915
  • The Department of Building and Safety issued Maria Congdon a permit on December 4, 1920, to add a second dwelling to her property at 660 East Adams; this five-room building, addressed on the permit as 642 East Adams, became 660½. A permit was issued to Dr. Congdon on January 9, 1923, for the addition of an outside stairway on the east side of the house to the second floor; although a permit issued on the following May 25 is unclear, Dr. Congdon appears to have then been adding a second new rental dwelling to her property, which became 660¾ East Adams
  • In response to housing pressures as the city grew and to original South Los Angeles homebuilders being lured away by ever newer neighborhoods to the west and now even to the San Fernando Valley, a bungalow court was built on the westerly adjacent lot next to 660 in 1913; in 1928 a large two-story apartment house was completed on the easterly adjacent lot, changing the streetscape of the 600 block of East Adams considerably. In the housing pressures in recent years there has been a push to demolish and replace smaller vintage dwellings along Adams Boulevard, both East and West, with multi-unit buildings
  • Dr. Congdon remained at 660 East Adams Boulevard (as East Adams Street was now officially designated) until her death. Per the California Death Index, this event might have come on December 30, 1934, though no obituary has been found; after a long and rare career as a woman doctor, Maria Congdon seems to have simply disappeared without much of a trace, though perhaps she will turn up in someone's future spirit photo
  • Ownership of the residential complex at 660 East Adams becomes unclear after 1934. A number of names are associated in various records with 660, 660½, and 660¾ from then into the 1960s; only one individual is listed at the property—a renter at 660½—in the 1940 Federal census. In some years, only 660¾ is listed in city directories
  • Clues to ownership of 660 East Adams after 1940 appear on building permits issued in 1952 and 1961. The Department of Building and Safety issued a Frank Dulin authorization on March 6, 1952, for the installation of a new foundation and other refurbishment work on 660½; on January 9, 1961, a Murry Lee Inez Dulin was issued a permit for the demolition of the same unit. (An Inez Lynch was associated with the property from at least 1946 until 1962.) Today, parking for six cars is on the site of 660½ and only the rearmost auxiliary building is on the lot in addition to the original residence
  • During the 1980s and into the '90s, J. Guadalupe and Josefina Navarro owned 660 East Adams; the roof was replaced in 1989. By early 2000, James Stovall, a property developer, owned the house; on January 31 of that year, Stovall was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety to convert the 1894 house into a proper duplex by adding interior walls. The address of the house then became 650-660 East Adams. In residence by 2003, the current owner has carried out further interior remodelings; in 2011, he made the aesthetically unfortunate choice to alter the façade of the 118-year-old house by closing in the front porch, facing it with faux stonework
Illustration: Private Collection