215 East Adams Boulevard

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  • Built in 1904 on Lot 17 in the Daman & Millard Tract by contractor William Jesse Hamilton as his own home
  • On September 9, 1904, the Los Angeles Herald reported that W. J. Hamilton was building a two-story, eight-room house at 211 East Adams, the address becoming 215 once the house was completed
  • W. J. Hamilton, a divorcé, moved into 215 East Adams with his mother Lucina Hamilton, a divorcée, with their first listing in the city directory appearing in the 1905 issue. In the 1906 edition, Lucina is listed at 227 East Adams, with 215 being rented for a short period to John Q. Braun, president and treasurer of Braun & Ferguson, wholesale druggists. W. J. Hamilton does not appear in the 1906 directory; it seems that he was absent from the city in the process of acquiring a new wife. While he makes a return appearance in the 1907 directory, with his mother also back at 215, they are missing from that of 1908. W. J. appears to have married and moved to Sierra Madre, where he died on March 31, 1910. Lucina Hamilton moved around the Los Angeles every year or so, appearing at an apartment at 2208 South Union Avenue in the 1910 census, enumerated on April 20, three weeks after the death of her son. Curiously, Ida Hamilton, W. J.'s widow, appears alongside her on Union Avenue while also being enumerated in Sierra Madre on the same day
  • From 1908 until 1912, 215 East Adams was rented to George B. Stelle, who was in the escrow department of the Title Insurance & Trust Company, his wife Florence, their son Leslie—who opened an automobile repair shop just up and across the street at 108 East Adams—and George's brother Edward, who was also employed by Title Insurance. Contrary to the usual pattern, the family had moved east on Adams Street from 1691 West Adams
  • Ida Hamilton had inherited 215 East Adams. The house seems to have had a separate accommodation from at least 1907 (if not from the time it was built); in addition to a prior apparently unrelated individual, Mrs. Hamilton appears alongside the Stelles at 215 in the 1911 city directory. What may have been something of an informal arrangement for the accommodation of lodgers would become more organized when Ida did a rather drastic renovation after being issued a permit by the Department of Buildings on August 7, 1913. The document authorized the raising of the house 14 inches and a shift of it two feet west, which was performed to maintain the original width of the driveway through which there would be access to a new small two-story residence at the right rear of the lot, the construction of which is, curiously, not indicated on the permit. Neither has a separate permit for it been found; this structure, which became 215½ East Adams, appeared on the block's Baist real estate maps between the publication's 1910 and 1914 editions
  • Ida Hamilton appeared in the 1914 city directory at 215½ East Adams, with the main house being rented to others until the family of attorney A. Alonzo Sturges moved in by 1916 for a short stay. After 1915 Mrs. Hamilton no longer appears at either 215 or 215½ and seems untraceable, perhaps remarrying and moving away. Wherever she may have relocated, she may have retained the property as an investment until it was bought by Jacob Miller and Lena Miller in 1924. Jacob Miller is identified variously a cigar maker (in the 1920 Federal census) and a parking lot "helper" in 1930, tips to him apparently being quite generous
  • On March 27, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued Jacob Miller a permit to formally create a duplex out of the original house on the lot, with one unit per floor. This appears to have been when a second entrance through a reconfigured bay on the east side of the house was added. The Millers would be occupying 215½ East Adams, renting the front apartments
  • From 1926, the Millers would be renting the front-house apartments to pioneering Texas-born physician and surgeon Etta Gray, Stanford '06, whose specialty was women's issues; her Women's Clinic would occupy 215, and, later, 445 East Adams Boulevard in the mid 1930s. Dr. Gray's history is one of the more interesting of the denizens of the thoroughfare: After returning to Los Angeles in 1922 from four years in the Balkans as director of the American Women's Hospitals there, she became a founder of the Medical Women's Society and was a promoter of Margaret Sanger's birth control methods, alongside a few local rabid eugenicists; her Los Angeles Mothers' Clinic Association evolved into the local Planned Parenthood organization. Conflicting records regarding Dr. Gray indicate that she was either single or never married or widowed (sometimes a euphemism for "divorced"), despite an item in the Los Angeles Times on August 2, 1925, illustrated with her picture, announcing her engagement to real estate broker Addison Ely. No marriage appears to have actually taken place, although the couple remained friends and would travel to Japan together in 1931. Dr. Gray had adopted a daughter, Jane—née Nitolinka—in Yugoslavia; Gray also returned from the Balkans in 1922 with a nurse, Nevada-born Freda Frost, with whom she and Jane lived for many years in Hollywood. Dr. Gray was a member of the very proper Ebell and Friday Morning clubs and served on many civic boards. She was in charge of female athletes during the 1932 Olympic games in Los Angeles and testified during Errol Flynn's 1943 statutory rape trial that Peggy Satterlee had indeed been molested by the actor
  • While their entrances in relation to the two buildings on Lot 17 are not entirely clear, there were by 1930 three addresses associated with the property: 211, 213, 215, and 215½ East Adams, with the Millers as owners occupying 211 in the 1930 Federal census. By 1940, there would be no 211 address
  • Jacob and Lena Miller left East Adams Boulevard (as East Adams Street was rechristened in the 1920s) in 1937, moving that year to a newly built apartment house on Kings Road in today's Beverly Grove district. The Millers may have retained ownership of their prior residence for some years if they didn't sell it to a new landlord; in any case, 213, 215, and 215½ East Adams were all rented out rather than being owner-occupied according to the 1940 Federal census
  • Records over the next several decades available to us do not provide much information as to the ownership of 215 East Adams; the various permutations of the address would disappear and reappear in city directories and sometimes include at one point "215¾." While permits issued by the Department of Building and Safety may not all be digitized, none pertaining to the property have been found after that issued to Jacob Miller in 1925





 Illustrations: Private Collection