445 East Adams Boulevard

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  • Completed in 1908 on a parcel comprised of Lot 9 and the westerly 25-foot half of Lot 10 in Block A of Culver's Adams Street Subdivision of the Shorb Homestead by Ella Clark Newell
  • Architect: Thornton Fitzhugh
  • A permit for a new nine-room house at 445 East Adams Street was issued to Ella and James M. Newell by the Department of Buildings on December 5, 1907. On the same day, the Department issued a permit for a second nine-room house next door at 453 East Adams for Miss Clark's sister Anna Belle Clark; its architect was also Thornton Fitzhugh. The Los Angeles Times of December 22 ran the rendering seen above and described 445 and 453 as a single building on a 150-foot-square lot (the houses, in fact, technically stood alone and were on an irregular lot, its westerly 130 feet extending to a service alley 165 feet back from the front property line); "...the building appears as one solid pile, but in reality there are two sections to the dwelling of eight [sic] rooms each. The owners are sisters. The general plan is a sort of "U"-shaped structure, enclosing a court.... There are to be four bedrooms in each half, with the usual living-rooms, kitchen, dining-room and den and also there are screened sleeping porches on the second floor. The total cost will be $18,000.... The contracts were let last week"
  • West Virginia–born James M. Newell was the pastor of the Bethesda Presbyterian Church, which was at the southwest corner of Paloma Street and East 14th Place. He had been in California since 1868; his first post was among miners at Placerville. His first wife died in February 1900; he and Ella Clark were married in the front parlor of her mother's house at 933 South Olive Street on August 12, 1903, and would live at 939 East 12th, near the church, until moving to Adams Street in 1908. Paul Clark Newell was born on April 13, 1905, and was still with living at 445 when he married in November 1931


A fragment of a 1922 Sanborn fire-insurance map illustrates the combined lots of the Clark sisters'
houses; rear access to the property was via an alley off East 25th Street. While Ella and James
Newell's 445 East Adams disappeared in 1981, Anna's 453 still stands, now 112 years old.


  • The Clark sisters were siblings of notorious copper millionaire Senator William A. Clark of Montana—whose son William A. Clark Jr. would soon be living at 2205 West Adams Street and building the Clark Library on that property today—and of J. Ross Clark, who had completed 710 West Adams in 1904. (The siblings' modest mother, Mary Andrews Clark, who died in 1904 at the home she shared with Anna on Olive Street, was honored by Senator Clark with the Mary Andrews Clark Memorial Home for the Y.W.C.A. on Loma Drive on Crown Hill, dedicated in 1913.) It seems plausible that the extremely rich W. A. Clark may have financed his sisters' new houses. It is interesting that he and his brother were given to building extravagant houses and monuments; though the sisters' efforts on East Adams were considerably grander than much of the surrounding streetscape of cottages, they were modest compared to Ross Clark's 710 West Adams and located in a respectable but relatively unfashionable neighborhood; all of the Clarks' Los Angeles houses, however, were telephone booths compared to the absurd 121-room palazzo Senator Clark was building on Fifth Avenue in New York at the time. Commissioned in 1897, its design dated and much derided by the time it was completed in 1911, 1 East 77th Street (as the Clarks listed it in the first appearance of the house in the 1912 Social Register, perhaps in a vain attempt at discretion) was demolished 16 years after that. By all accounts a scoundrel, found to have bought his initial senate seat and a man Mark Twain is said to have considered the very embodiment of Gilded Age excess and corruption, W. A. Clark Sr. was nevertheless long devoted to art collecting—and to his mother, if not to her lack of pretension


After Mary Andrews Clark died at 933 South Olive Street in December 1904, her daughter Anna
 continued to live in the house until she moved to her new residence in 1908. Gathered on the
porch of 933 not long before 445 and 443 East Adams were ready for them are Ella (at
center) and her husband, the Reverend James M. Newell (just above his wife); Anna
Clark is above the leftmost child in spats, with Senator William A. Clark, looking
very much in charge, standing to her left. J. Ross Clark of 710 West Adams
is to the right of the front door. His son Walter, at top left, died in the
sinking of the Titanic four years after this photograph was made.
Walter's wife, Virginia, standing just below him, survived.
  • Ella Newell died at 445 East Adams on October 17, 1931, followed by her husband there on June 28, 1932. Reverend Newell was described by the San Pedro News-Pilot as "California's eldest Presbyterian minister" at the time of his death. Paul Newell sold 445 not long afterward to pioneering Texas-born physician and surgeon Etta Gray, Stanford '06, whose specialty was women's issues. Dr. Gray was evidently doing well in the midst of the Depression; just before she bought 445 East Adams, she invested in large parcels of land (of one and two acres) in Brentwood. Dr. Gray had been maintaining a satellite office in the Clarks' neighborhood at 215 East Adams; part of the new house would be adapted to house this clinic, with the balance rented as apartments. 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 during Errol Flynn's 1943 statutory rape trial testified that Peggy Satterlee had indeed been molested by the actor
  • After Anna Clark had died on January 15, 1934, her house at 453 East Adams was sold by the Clark family. It would later be re-joined to 445 under common ownership when it was acquired by Etta Gray as rental property in the early 1950s. On March 14, 1952, the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit to convert part of 445 into a "home for the ambulatory aged." The operation was given the name "Parkside Manor," which was advertised as "non-Sectarian...open to all, regardless of religion, creed or social background." Dr. Gray retained ownership of both 453 and 445 until her death in Pomona on October 24, 1970, after a stroke. She was a month shy of her 90th birthday
  • 445 East Adams appears to have been acquired separately from the estate of Etta Gray; dividing the Clark sisters' houses once and for all, a demolition permit for it was issued by the Department of Building and Safety on March 10, 1989, citing the estate of a Mayo Nettles as the owner. On November 16, 1982, a developer was issued a permit to build a two-story, twelve-unit apartment house on the site; this building remains on the lot today



Illustrations: LAT; LAT/Newell Family Collection; Library of Congress