616 East Adams Boulevard

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  • Built in 1903 as the second 616 East Adams on Lot 9 in Block 1 of Daman & Millard's Subdivision of the Shaw Tract by real estate developer Frank W. Miller as his own home
  • The first 616 East Adams Street (as the Boulevard was then designated) appears to have been built in 1891 by merchant tailor Frank Herbert Snowden, who in 1896 turned the house around and moved it to Lot 16 in Block 1 of Daman & Millard's Subdivision of the Shaw Tract—the lot directly behind its original site—to become 615 East 27th Street. The house still stand there, as illustrated below
  • Lot 9 remained empty for the next seven years until Frank Miller, recently arrived from Salt Lake City and having acquired the lot from Frank Snowden, built the current house on the lot in 1903. The Los Angeles Times of August 16, 1903, reported that a building permit for a new seven-room residence at 616 East Adams, budgeted at $2,500, had just been issued to Mr. Miller by the Superintendent of Buildings
  • Curiously, the current 616 East Adams is almost identical to 609 East Adams across the street, the shape of the front second-floor center-window detail being one slight variation. It seems that the houses, built by different builders, may have been picked out of the same pattern book
  • Frank Miller, his wife Louisa, her widowed mother Anna Evering, and the Millers' two daughters Emma and Minnie remained at 616 for the next decade. Twenty-eight-year-old Minnie married Ernest C. Mefford, assistant general manager of the California Drug and Chemical Company, on March 12, 1913
  • On February 18, 1913, the Department of Buildings issued Louisa Miller a permit for alterations to the house resulting in its conversion to a duplex; it was now 614-616 East Adams, with the Meffords moving into 614. (The house appears to have later reverted to a single-family dwelling.) Ernest Mefford and his widowed mother Mary had been renting nearby on East 25th Street before she built 1466 West 49th Street in 1911  
  • By the fall of 1913, the Millers and the younger Meffords had decided to leave South Los Angeles altogether. They commissioned the very popular Los Angeles architect Frank M. Tyler to build adjacent houses on Sierra Bonita Avenue in Hollywood—a town annexed to Los Angeles in 1910—which were completed in early 1914. Classic airplane bungalows, 1521 and 1525 Sierra Bonita Avenue still stand in excellent repair alongside another bungalow that Mary Mefford, having decided to build next door to her son and daughter-in-law, had Tyler design for her the following summer; 1531 Sierra Bonita completed the family trio and also still stands 
  • Purchasing 616 East Adams from Frank Miller was Matthew Reed McBurney,  physician, surgeon, and "osteophathist," whose family would stay until 1924. (Listed at 616 in the city directory in 1917, for one year only, was J. Albert Bowes, a former sheet-metal worker who was now the director of the Mechanical Educator Company, producers of the "Visigraph"—a calculating device consisting of a numbered rotating drum inside a perforated cylindrical steel cover to be used by schoolteachers for arithmetic instruction)
  • Oil driller Clemons G. Eifert and his wife became the owners of 616 East Adams in 1924. With her husband frequently away on business, Mae Eifert rented rooms to boarders. The Eiferts' 16-year-old daughter Mildred married 25-year-old oil-industry machinist David Brown in June 1928; little June Brown arrived the following May. In between, Mrs. Eifert's mother Margaret McCloskey died at 616 on December 29, 1928. The Browns lived with her parents in the house, as did Clem's brother Newell, also an itinerant oil driller, when he was in town. Mae moved her boarding operation to 1340 South Grand in 1932; both she and Mildred were divorced by the end of the decade and running a boarding operation at 1515 West 22nd Place
  • Occupying 616 East Adams by 1934 were Carlos Ysaginnes Sabatini, his wife Judith, and their four children, who had recently arrived in the United States from their native Costa Rica. Carlos, who sometimes anglicized his name to Charles, held a variety of jobs including chauffeur and salesman at the wholesale produce market; the Sabatinis also rented out rooms at 616
  • On April 23, 1943, the Department of Building and Safety issued Judith Sabatini a permit for a 12-by-32-foot addition to the rear of the house
  • By 1948, having purchased 2140 West 20th Street, the Sabintinis left 616 East Adams Boulevard (as Adams Street had been designated since the 1920s) 
  • Ownership of 616 East Adams after the departure of the Sabatinis is somewhat unclear; by 1952, the house was occupied by Ging C. and Marian G. Wong, although on April 1 of that year the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit to Mr. Shee Chang—possibly a misnomer for Ging C. Wong—for the addition of a 20-by-40-foot garage at the rear of the lot, which replaced an earlier smaller garage of unclear vintage on the center-east side of the property
  • The Wong family appears to still be in possession of 616 East Adams as late as 2020


The original 616 East Adams Street, as the Boulevard was designated when the house was built circa
1891, now faces East 27th Street, directly behind its 1903 replacement, the rear of which can be
seen rising at left. Another such move of a smaller original house off of prime East Adams and
its replacement with a larger dwelling occurred down the block at 608 East Adams in 1906.



Illustrations: Private Collection