665 East Adams Boulevard


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  • Built in 1889 by Dr. Andrew Stephen Shorb on 10 acres bounded by Adams, 25th, and San Pedro streets and Maple Avenue    
  • Architect: Robert  B. Young, per a summary of construction projects during 1889 that appeared in the Los Angeles Herald on January 1, 1890. During the '90s Young would also build investment property for Shorb
  • As of this writing, no images of the Shorb house have surfaced; above is an illustration based on a 1906 Sanborn insurance map
  • Dr. Andrew S. Shorb practiced homoeopathy, a system of alternative medicine being discredited increasingly as better-educated doctors embraced modern science
  • When 665 East Adams was built, the easterly reaches of Adams Street (as the Boulevard was then designated) were still bucolic, dotted with orange groves and vineyards and the occasional farmhouse in the middle of the plantings. While Adams Street had been applied to a line on maps since at least 1857, South Los Angeles would be further platted and developed during the 1890s; it is unclear as to whether Dr. Shorb at first expected to live in his new house on something of an exurban estate, but it seems clear that he and his wife Mattie liked money. In addition to the couple being accused of bilking an elderly patient out of his fortune, Dr. Shorb appears to have had history of being an abortionist, the cost of the legal proceedings—including murder trials—pertaining to these alleged crimes eventually forcing the sale of his "homestead." While not surprisingly unclaimed as a relation by his more upright cousin Dr. J. de Barth Shorb of Bunker Hill, Andrew and Mattie nevertheless kept appearing on local social lists and in news of society, even after much compromising and even medically gruesome evidence was presented in court and in the press among ads for his practice; seeming to have amazingly low standards even then, with perceived power still trumping scandal, whatever could have then constituted capital "S" Los Angeles society closed ranks
  • Exhaustive research on the Shorb family, including Dr. Andrew Shorb's unsavory history, has been carried out by Noel V. Bourasaw, editor of the Skagit River Journal of History & Folklore, and can be read here
  • In the often unfiltered way of the press of the day, the Times of June 11, 1890, reported that Dr. Shorb—his initials coming to describe him in many ways—"confined to his home for the past five weeks with a severe attack of inflammation of the bowels, is able to be about town again"
  • In the fall of 1903, the Shorb property was purchased for $60,000 by Alexander Culver and the real estate firm of Strong & Dickinson (Frank R. Strong and George W. Dickinson); Shorb's house at 665 East Adams was now confined to Lot 10 in Block B of what became known as "Culver's Adams Street Subdivision of the Shorb Homestead." The doctor and his wife appear to have then rented 665 until departing a year later
  • On June 12, 1904, the Times reported that Dr. A. S. Shorb had been issued a permit for a frame flat building at 126-130 North Flower Street on Bunker Hill; the Shorbs left 665 East Adams for an apartment there upon the building's completion
  • New landlords would be renting 665 East Adams to Lewis E. Grigsby, a retiring Pomona citrus farmer turning Los Angeles real estate investor, who was in residence from 1905 until 1910. Grigsby left the house to move to 1483 West Adams Street
  • By 1912, 665 East Adams had been sold to Alexander Shishmanian, a tailor; settling in Los Angeles in 1904, he bought a double house at 701-703 Temple Street that year. Moving from Bunker Hill with Shishmanian and his wife Beatrice were their daughter Eunice and her husband Matthew G. Ferrahian, an Armenia-born polymath whose achievements include having been issued a patent for a paper-cutting machine in 1903 while living in New York; he had arrived in the United States in 1896 as a political refugee. In California, Ferrahian went into the cleaning and dyeing business and joined his father-in-law to work as a tailor. In time he went into real estate—and then he became a lawyer. Eunice Shishmanian Ferrahian made a name for herself as a music teacher and earned a master's degree in music from U.S.C. in 1932. Alexander Shishmanian died in 1931, his wife before 1940. The Ferrahians remained at 665 East Adams until moving to Mid-City in 1943. Long a pillar of the Armenian community in Los Angeles, Matthew Ferrahian died in 1955; after Eunice died five years later, the Mid-City house was left to a fund, later augmented by a bequest of $235,000, that benefited the founding of Holy Martyrs Armenian High School in 1964 and resulted in a name change to Holy Martyrs Ferrahian High School the next year
  • In 1944, 665 East Adams was acquired for use as a church building by fireman Horace C. Green and his wife, the Reverend Norma H. Nelson, who were living a block west at 433 East Adams (there is no 500 block of East Adams Boulevard). The couple had been using their home at 433 as a venue for church and community fundraisers for several years, naming it "Nel-Green Manor." Reverend Nelson became the pastor of the Spiritual Fellowship Church that would now occupy 665 East Adams until it was demolished in 1949
  • With the Spiritual Fellowship Church retaining Lot 10 itself, the 1889 Shorb-Grigsby-Shishmanian-Ferrahian house was sold to the longtime Los Angeles wrecking firm Whiting-Mead, which was issued a demolition permit for it by the Department of Building and Safety on September 23, 1949
  • Services of the Spiritual Fellowship Church were held at Nel-Green Manor while a new sanctuary was being erected at 665 East Adams. It opened in 1951, with a metal cross outlined in neon added the next year and still in place. Horace Green died in 1954. After remarrying, Reverend Nelson became Mother Waters; she was still pastor of the Spiritual Fellowship Church when she died on January 11, 1970



Illustration: Private Collection; LOC