222 West Adams Boulevard


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  • Built in 1889 on a parcel comprised of Lots 18 and 19 in the Victor Dol Tract as 222 West Adams Street, as the Boulevard was then known
  • Original commissioner: Frederick Haniman, whose Los Angeles Fishing Company was a wholesale and retail dealer in fish, game, and poultry
  • Sold in May 1891 to attorney William Martin Van Dyke, who had been appointed Clerk of the United States Circuit Court in Los Angeles in November 1886
  • William Van Dyke, born in Arcata in 1858 and described in a 1932 obituary as the son of one of the "earliest white settlers in California, Superior Court Judge Walter Van Dyke," had married Annie Cora Taylor in her native San Francisco on April 4, 1889. Their daughter Lillian was born in July 1891 just after the Van Dykes had moved into 222 West Adams Street. Sons Walter and Douglas arrived in March 1893 and June 1894, respectively. Eventually joining the household were Van Dyke's widowed mother Rowena and his bachelor brother Henry, also an attorney, and unmarried sister Caroline. Henry left 222 in 1912 after he married Katherine Moulton, daughter of a Minneapolis millionaire, at the age of 40
  • The Van Dyke family remained at 222 West Adams Street for over 30 years. William retired from his clerkship of the United States Circuit Court on December 31, 1917, after which he and Annie planned on traveling. The couple had been to Europe at least twice already and were issued passports to sail from San Francisco on September 2, 1922, embarking an extended trip to Japan, China, and Hong Kong. This appears to have been their last trip. Annie Van Dyke died at 222 West Adams on December 19, 1923
  • William Van Dyke added a bathroom to 222 West Adams Street per a permit issued by the Department of Buildings on April 12, 1922. The death of his wife appears to have caused him to reconsider staying at 222; he also might have been noticing that the West Adams district, particularly his easterly end, was fast losing his social cohort to the newer subdivisions that had opened along the Wilshire Boulevard corridor beginning in the mid 1900s and that would include Hancock Park by 1920. His mother and sister as well as his son Douglas moved to 461 North Serrano Avenue, where Rowena died on January 6, 1925. The address seemed to be home base for William and Lillian as they embarked on a series of extended trips abroad, though while contemplating their next residential move they also rented 615 South Van Ness Avenue for a time. It was on his return from his last long trip that Van Dyke decided to build a new house in Hancock Park, which had become the most favored Wilshire-corridor development for ex–West Adamsites. On April 23, 1929, the Department of Building and Safety issued William M. Van Dyke a permit for a two-story, 10-room residence with attached garage at 238 South Hudson Avenue
  • As West Adams declined through the 1920s, its big houses were seemingly one by one converted into small hotels, rooming houses, and, in the University Park neighborhood, fraternity houses. The Van Dyke house at 222 West Adams became lodging if a bit less genteel than that of the Hotel Darby two doors away, which had replaced the relocated Wesley Clark house at 234 West Adams Street in 1910
  • During the 1930s, 222 West Adams Boulevard—the street having been upgraded in stature, for better or worse, as a major east-west traffic artery—was owned and operated as a hotel by the Italian Vineyard Company, whose president Secondo Guasti Jr. lived in the house his father had built in 1910 at 3500 West Adams Boulevard
  • On November 20, 1945, the Department of Building and Safety issued a demolition permit for 222 West Adams Boulevard



Illustration: LOC