636 West Adams Street

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  • Built in 1881 by Los Angeles attorney William P. Gardiner on part of Lot 1 in Block 22 of Hancock's Survey; replaced in 1898 by Gardiner's father-in-law, Michigan lumberman Ira O. Smith
  • Architects of the first 636 West Adams: Kysor & Morgan (Ezra F. Kysor and Octavius W. Morgan Sr.); the firm reported the project to the Times for a summary of the previous year's local building projects that appeared in the paper on January 15, 1882. The second 636 West Adams was designed by the firm of Eisen & Hunt (Theodore A. Eisen and Sumner P. Hunt)
  • Back in Michigan on June 1, 1881, William P. Gardiner married Miss Minnie Smith, "one of Muskegon's fairest belles," and brought her back to Los Angeles. On August 1, the Herald reported that the couple had bought an acre of land south of the center of town toward the fledgling University of Southern California. The Gardiners would immediately begin building a house, settling into it by the end of the year; it was one of the earliest residences built on Adams Street west of Figueroa. In March 1882, Minnie Gardiner was reported in the Times and the Herald as the nominal purchaser of a 20-by-360-foot strip westerly adjacent to their property. On May 23, she gave birth to a daughter, who would live less than a year; in June, her mother, Kate A. Smith, coming west from Muskegon seeking a winter residence for she and her husband, was reported as having bought an acre next door to the Gardiners to the west, which appears to include Minnie's March purchase. Before long the extended family's holdings would reach a frontage of 387 feet along Adams Street and a total of 3.2 acres after the acquisition of an additional westerly parcel of 1.36 acres on which William Gardiner would build the first 666 West Adams by the end of the decade. In 1883, he had bought property in San Gabriel, on which, two years later, he built a country house
  • Another daughter—Minnie Jr.—was born to the Gardiners in November 1883, followed by a son 13 months later and another son in February 1889. By 1890, Mrs. Smith was occupying 636 West Adams, joined when he was not otherwise occupied in the lumber business back in Michigan by her husband, Ira O. Smith, an associate of Thomas D. Stimson, who would be building his famous red sandstone house around the corner on Figueroa Street within a few years. The Gardiners were now at 666 across the lawn from the Smiths; the neighborhood was in the midst of its transition from exurban to suburban; there would also be considerable change in the Gardiner/Smith households
  • Minnie Smith Gardiner died at home in San Gabriel on September 4, 1891, the cause cited by the Herald the next day as inflammatory rheumatism. Exactly 13 months later, on October 4, 1892, Kate Smith died in Helena, Montana, while vacationing with her granddaughter. Her funeral was held at 636 West Adams on October 10 and she was buried at Rosedale alongside Minnie
  • Ira O. Smith, still largely based in the Midwest, waited the customary year-and-change after the death of Mrs. Smith before marrying again. On November 11, 1893, he married Mrs. Sarah McDaniel, also recently widowed, in Aurora, Illinois. On December 24, the Times described her as a "leading artist of Denver," where she had been living recently, and noted that the newlyweds had arrived at 636 West Adams the day before to spend the winter
  • Meanwhile, William Gardiner decided to move full-time to San Gabriel, where the children were looked after by a housekeeper while he commuted to his office in downtown Los Angeles. He had served as a Superior Court judge from March 1887 to November 1888, afterward becoming a banker and, as did every Southern Californian with an extra dime in his pocket, he invested in property. The house at 666 West Adams was rented out. An early tenant was investor William E. Dean and his wife Elmira, who were both deaf; they had been married by the Reverend Dr. Thomas Gallaudet, a pioneer in the education of the hearing-impaired, whose name, via his son, would become that of the famous university in Washington. Physician and surgeon Berkeley Sherwood Dunn leased 666 in the mid '90s
  • While the neighborhoods near the Adams/Figueroa intersection contained some of Los Angeles's biggest and most expensive houses, fire protection there was marginal when a series of destructive blazes occurred during the 1890s. The Smith and Gardiner houses were not spared. Early on the morning of February 24, 1897, 666 West Adams, occupied at the time by Dr. Dunn, caught fire and burned to the ground. Then, early on the morning of September 17, 636 West Adams burned. Ira and Sarah Smith escaped the flames, the latter taking care to grab her jewelry box; after kerosene was discovered and the garden hose found cut into pieces, police suspected arson. Smith fingered the coachman he had recently fired
  • Gardiner's 666 West Adams was a total loss; three months after the fire, the Herald reported on May 23, 1897, that he'd just sold the 165-by-360-foot lot and two surviving barns to Dr. Leslie E. Keeley, an Illinois physician who'd made a fortune promoting his controversial "Gold Cure" for alcoholism and other addictions. Within a few years Keeley's brand new 666 West Adams became the home of retired pottery manufacturer Homer Laughlin


Footprints of the two houses built at 636 West Adams Streets less than a decade apart reveal that
the second, built in 1898, utilized the foundation of the first, burned the prior year. The new
building, seen here at right in a 1900 depiction, would be considerably enlarged with
rearward additions during the coming decade to accommodate its use as
a girls' school. During the 1920s, it was an apartment house.


  • As was the first 666 West Adams, the first 636 was a total loss after burning in September 1897; despite continuing concerns about fire protection in the neighborhood, Smith decided to build a new 636, the Herald of January 21, 1898, reporting his plans for a new 12-room house designed by Eisen & Hunt. (Theodore Eisen lived around the corner from Smith at 2626 South Figueroa, Sumner Hunt around another corner at 2645 Severance; they were among the local homeowners who began demanding more hydrants and a closer firehouse)
  • After living in rented houses since the fire, the Smiths were reported by the Times of July 10, 1898, as having just moved into the new 636. William Gardiner died at home in San Gabriel on April 15, 1900, at the age of 53; his funeral was held at 636 West Adams followed by burial at Rosedale. A year later, on May 8, 1901, Ira Smith died at 636, of rheumatism, per his Times obituary. He was 74. Somewhat inconveniently, he chose to die amid the hubbub of President McKinley's visit to Los Angeles, which included a dinner the next evening given in the president's honor by Homer McLaughlin next door in his house at 666 West Adams, which had replaced his son-in-law's earlier residence
  • Sarah Smith filed her husband's will for probate immediately and began selling some of his many properties and investing in other real estate ventures. While she was now overseer of the legal and financial welfare of her step-grandchildren, it is unclear as to whether they lived together, though there are indications of closeness in the society pages of the local press. The Gardiner children, 16, 15, and 11 at the time of their father's death, remained on their 175 acres in San Gabriel in the care of a servant in the months afterward. As property was divided, Sarah Smith moved out of 636 West Adams by mid 1903, the house becoming, at least nominally, under the ownership of Ira Gardiner, then 18 years old. It would be rented for the time being in what would be a very early departure of a house in the neighborhood from the norm of single-family occupancy
  • Ida Banta Lindley was a sister of eminent Los Angeles physician and surgeon Walter Lindley; since 1895 she had been secretary of and a teacher at the Marlborough School, which had occupied the former Marlborough Hotel at West 23rd and Scarff streets since the fall of 1890. In the fall of 1903, renting 636 West Adams from the Smith/Gardiner family, Miss Lindley opened a lower school there to prepare girls under 14 for the upper-school Marlborough and for the nearby Girls' Collegiate School, quartered in the Casa de Rosas at Adams and Hoover streets. Her venture was called the Marlborough Preparatory School; Dr. Lindley promoted his sister's establishment in his journal, the Southern California Practitioner




Local newspapers began running advertisements
for the Marlborough Preparatory School in the summer of
1903. Ida Lindley had been associated with the parent institution
for the past seven years. Her brother kindly promoted his sister's new
venture in his journal that combined long articles on medical advances with
filler including social notes. The leafy neighborhoods of single-family
residences along West Adams Street were frequently being chal-
lenged by commerce; Los Angeles's potential for growth
meant that even affluent districts were ever in flux.
 


  • Ida Lindley and her widowed mother, Mary, moved into upstairs rooms at 636 West Adams along with boarding students; classes took place on the first floor. Turn-of-the-century Los Angeles was not necessarily the orange-scented idyll promoted by the railroads; burglaries and assaults were common, even in fashionable West Adams. On the night of January 20, 1904, between semesters, a porchclimber broke into 636 and made off with Ida's gold watch and other items
  • The school was a great success. Although it is unclear as to what financing arrangements might have been made between the owners of 636 and Ida Lindley as lessee, the principal of Marlborough Prep contracted with Theodore Eisen, now practicing on his own though with his son Percy as a draftsman, to build a separate building at the south end of the property. Issued by the Superintendent of Buildings on August 26, 1905, the building permit called for a two-story, 41-by-46-foot frame structure to accommodate additional classrooms and living space. A year later, a builder was called in to add a large 24-by-36-foot addition to the main building
  • The second 636 West Adams suffered a major fire of its own, breaking out on the morning of October 27, 1908. A defective furnace was suspected. Per the Times the next day: "Twenty little girls narrowly escaped death yesterday morning, when the Marlborough Preparatory School...caught fire.... The big frame building was gutted, and will have to be rebuilt." The girls were taken by Mrs. Theodore Eisen for breakfast at her house around the corner at 2626 South Figueroa and later to the Marlborough School on 23rd Street. It is unclear how much neighborhood fire protection might have improved in the previous decade, but this second 636 West Adams was spared the total destruction of the first in 1897
    • On November 11, 1908, the Times reported that the purchase of 636 West Adams by Ida Lindley from Ira O. Gardiner had been completed and that Theodore Eisen had been hired to redesign the building. Now partnered with Percy as Eisen & Son, Eisen was called in to address the fire damage and to further enlarge the house. On December 31, 1908, the Department of Buildings issued a permit for the work; the addition would measure 26 by 26 feet. A builder added a small additional room in September 1910


    Dr. Lindley faithfully promoted his sister's property with advertisements in the
    Southern California Practitioner even after she turned her house over to
    colleagues from the Girls' Collegiate School. Stability for the young
    ladies of Los Angeles's private schools in terms of facilities
    seems to have been as uneven as the residential
    patterns of the constantly growing city.


    • While Ida Lindley retained ownership of the house, she moved out in the summer of 1912 and leased the premises to Miss Maude Thomas, who opened her St. Catherine's School that fall. St. Catherine's was a consolidation of Marlborough Prep and the lower grades of the Girls' Collegiate School, which was moving from the Wigmore house at 949 West Adams. (The upper-school campus of Girl's Collegiate was at the southeast corner of Adams and Hoover in what was known as—and still is—the landmark Casa de Rosas.) Miss Lindley and her mother, who was now 83, moved to 2648 Budlong Avenue, where Mrs. Lindley died on November 3, 1913
    • A significant development in the evolution of the old West Adams District occurred in February 1916 when the Marlborough School made its move from West 23rd Street to its current campus on West 3rd Street between just-developing Windsor Square and not-yet-opened Hancock Park. (The move prompted a developer to market an adjacent new subdivision as "Marlborough Square.") The trustees of the school clearly understood that Los Angeles's future affluent residential development was to be out astride Wilshire Boulevard rather than along Adams, despite the fact that the building of significant houses on the latter street was continuing, if only on its stretches beyond Western Avenue


    In a one-academic-year-only revival of the name before she left Los Angeles and
    moved to Whittier, Ida Lindley reopened Marlborough Prep in the fall of 1916.
    St. Catherine's moved to 325 West Adams, where it later became the in-
    correctly punctuated "Miss Thomas' School" and lasted into the mid-
    1930s, by which time the decline of West Adams had re-
    duced its appeal to those able to afford private
    educations. The rich and their schools had
    left for Wilshire-corridor suburbs.


    • St. Catherine's would occupy 636 West Adams through the spring semester of 1916; in the fall, moving even farther east rather than in the signal direction the Marlborough School had taken, it opened in the old Hooker house at 325 West Adams. Having retained ownership of 636, the property remaining suited to the education of young girls, Ida Lindley decided to reopen her Marlborough Preparatory School that same fall of 1916. She closed the restarted school after one academic year to take a teaching post at Whittier College starting in the fall of 1917. A new use would have to be found for 636 West Adams and the improvements that rendered it unsuited to conversion back to single-family use
    • Ida Lindley sold 636 West Adams to the Pacific Hospital Corporation, which ran the Pacific Hospital on Grand Street. On November 25, 1919, the corporation was issued a permit by the Department of Building for the purpose of converting an old building for use as an apartment house, apparently for nurses, with 13 units. The project did not seem to go smoothly, with at least one lien being placed on the property during construction; a second building permit, citing a new architect, Herbert C. Howard, was issued on January 5, 1921, for the purpose of finishing the work started under the 1919 permit
    • The Ira O. Smith house, built in 1898 and by now a much altered and enlarged multi-unit structure, was acquired in 1922 by real estate developer James D. Millar, who moved his family into the building. Millar would add a two-Ford-wide garage to the property in the spring of 1923
    • By 1926, 626 West Adams had a name. It was now the La Fleur Apartments, managed by Emelia Baumgardner
    • In the late 1920s, as the affluent of the old residential district centered at the intersection of Adams and Figueroa began a serious exodus to the northwest, the Automobile Club of Southern California sought to expand its already huge headquarters completed on the corner in 1923. Further indicating the dominance of the automobile was the official redesignation of West Adams Street as a trans-city Boulevard in the Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924. The auto club's building, which had replaced residences including 630 West Adams and 2619 South Figueroa, would become even bigger by mid 1930, extending west to take out 636 West Adams
    • The Department of Building and Safety issued a demolition permit for 636 West Adams Boulevard on May 13, 1929. Concrete for the new wing of the Automobile Club was being poured by April of the next year
     

    The original main building of the Automobile Club of Southern California at 2601 South Figueroa
    opened in 1923; the peaks of 636 West Adams are seen on its far side at center not long
    after. Ira O. Smith's 1898 house had been greatly expanded southward on its lot
    to become first a school and then an apartment building. Seen above it is
    666 West Adams, followed by the second 710 West Adams and
    a small pale corner of 718 West Adams. The original
    734 West Adams is at the top edge, left.




    Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; LAPL; Google Books