453 East Adams Boulevard

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  • Completed in 1908 on a parcel comprised of Lot 11 and the easterly 25-foot half of Lot 10 in Block A of Culver's Adams Street Subdivision of the Shorb Homestead by Anna Belle Clark
  • Architect: Thornton Fitzhugh
  • A permit for a new nine-room house at 453 East Adams Street was issued to Anna B. Clark 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 445 East Adams to Miss Clark's sister Ella Newell and her husband James M. Newell; its architect was also Thornton Fitzhugh. The Los Angeles Times of December 22, 1907, described 453 and 445, erroneously, 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"


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.


  • The Clark sisters were siblings of the 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 that is 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 the brothers 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
  • Anna Clark would remain at 453 East Adams for most of the rest of her life. Though she appears, while there, to have been living in the house mostly by herself, family was always at hand. A faithful French servant, Dena Bota, was with Anna for many years. Also in residence at various junctures were two family members of somewhat mysterious origins named Sarah Bonner (born in Missouri in 1886) and Clark Joaquin Bonner (born in Rochester, New York, in 1889). The mystery lies within documents such as the 1900 census, which enumerates this 14-year-old Sarah Boner and 12-year-old Clark Boner as 86-year-old Mary Clark's daughter and son; the 1910 census describes Sarah Bonner at 453 East Adams as Anna's niece. Clark Bonner is described as Anna's nephew at 453 in the 1920 enumeration. Doubly curious is that Anna and Ella Clark's sister Sarah (and William's and Ross Clark's as well) had been married to a John Quincy Boner, with whom she had only a daughter...and she had died the year after the younger Sarah was born but the year before Clark Boner was born. Adding an n to Boner to bring the spelling of the name closer to its pronunciation might be understandable, but the birth of Clark after the death of the elder Sarah Boner would seem a bit hard to reconcile. It is known, however, that William A. Clark never forgot the kindness of his brother-in-law John Quincy Boner when he was a penniless young man passing through Missouri on his way west, which may explain the enfolding of Sarah and Clark Boner, however they may have been related to John Boner, into the family. Clark Bonner became indispensable to the Clarks, coming to oversee the affairs of the Senator, who died in 1925. Bonner, who had gone into insurance and land development, would also take charge of Ross Clark's estate after he died in 1927. While socially prominent, he lived somewhat more modestly than his uncles at 510 South Arden Boulevard in Windsor Square


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.


  • Anna Clark appears to have required a professional nurse living with her by 1921; Katherine Wallwitz was in residence at 453 East Adams from then until she died in the house on February 1, 1929. Anna Clark turns up as a patient at Glendale Sanitarium in April 1930; later, having returned to 453, apparently with a companion in attendance, she died on January 15, 1934
  • Meanwhile, Ella Newell died at 445 East Adams on October 17, 1931, followed by her husband there on June 28, 1932
  • Although the properties would be rejoined eventually, the Clark family appears to have disposed of 453 and 445 East Adams separately after the deaths of Anna and the Newells. The purchaser of 445 was a pioneering Texas-born physician and surgeon named 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


Surgeons to different species, Etta Gray and Idella Manisera were two of the most independent and
dedicated women of 20th-century Los Angeles. Gray is seen during her years away from the city
running clinics in the Balkans. Mrs. Manisera holds a cockateel she has nursed back to health,
as seen in the Los Angeles Times on April 24, 1949. That year, she presented her new
invention, a precursor to modern parents' apps to monitor teenage driving habits.


  • The ownership of 453 East Adams during the four years after Anna Clark's death are unclear; occupying the house from 1936 to 1939 was another remarkable woman, one who opened a clinic of her own in the house. Idella Manisera had wanted to be a medical doctor, but, stymied in that pursuit, became instead a leading authority on the care and diseases of small birds. She performed surgery on and saved the lives of countless canaries, parrots, and even peacocks. Her work made papers across the country; some years after leaving 453, Mrs. Manisera invented an automotive device, apparently meant to be issued by judges to repeat violators of the speed limit, to record infractions for the court record
  • In 1939, produce dealer George Kadoya acquired 453 East Adams; the 1940 Federal census, enumerated on April 16, lists him as the owner. He lived in the house with his brothers, Edward and Henry; all of the Kadoyas were American citizens. Also listed in the 1940 census as living in the building were two other Japanese-American households—most of their members also California-born—indicated as renting from Kadoya. The families were forced to relocate after President Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942, which began the wartime internment of aliens, including American citizens of Japanese heritage  
  • Although George Kadoya does not seem to have returned to live at 453 East Adams after the order expired on March 20, 1946. It is unclear as to precisely when ownership of the house changed again; in addition to various residential tenants, part of 453 would be rented out for various club meetings or church services into the 1950s, with the event space being called for a time the Casa Rafael
  • In 1952, Etta Gray decided to convert part of 445 East Adams into an ambulatory-care facility; it appears that at this point she bought 453, thus reuniting the Clark sisters' two houses under common ownership. Anna Clark's house continued as residential property and meeting space; it appears that some clinic employees moved in. 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
  • According to the Los Angeles Sentinel of September 6, 2001, Effie Mae Miles had worked for Etta Gray in her clinic for many years as an escort home for patients after their procedures. On January 18, 2003, the Times described a somewhat more colorful picture in a feature on Mrs. Miles's family, describing she and her husband James as "living large" at 453 East Adams as caretakers of the building for Dr. Gray. The Mileses had come west with her sister Classie to join an aunt who, according to their niece Vonnie Gipson, had led the family to Los Angeles from Texas in the 1920s. Aunt Sarah and Classie are described as living at 453 with the Mileses. (Among family lore is that, for reasons unspecified, Hollywood leading man George Brent had given Classie a yellow Studebaker convertible.) Soon after Etta Gray's death in 1970, the Mileses bought 453 East Adams for $17,500 
  • James Miles died in 1990. After Effie followed him in 1993, she left 453 East Adams to Vonnie Gipson and her husband Melvin, who were then living in Orange County. Effie's last words to her niece are said to have been, "You'll know what to do with it." Melvin Gipson was a major in the Marines; he described the house to the Times as "uninhabitable" when he and Vonnie inherited it, with no working bathrooms.... "[We] scrubbed, sanded, painted and wrote checks." To finance the project, the Gipsons rented space for quinceañeras, weddings, and television shoots
  • Once the restoration of 453 East Adams was completed, the Mileses opened Lady Effie's Tea Parlor in its front rooms on October 24, 1999. (Lady Effie's appears to have closed by 2016)
  • 453 East Adams Boulevard became Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #764 on October 1, 2003


Vonnie and Melvin Gipson spent years restoring 453 East Adams and then honored her aunt by
opening Lady Effie's Tea Parlor in 1999. It quickly became a key stop in South Los Angeles. 



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT/Newell Family Collection;
Library of Congress; Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources