710 West Adams Street

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  • Built prior to 1887 on part of Lot 1 in Block 22 of Hancock's Survey
  • Samuel B. Lewis came to Los Angeles in 1884 to open Hayden & Lewis, a leather-goods and saddle manufacturer that was an offshoot of his business interests back in Chicago. He seemed to have thought it never too late for anything; before coming west to begin a new venture in what was in 1884 a small, pre–Boom of the '80s western town, he had married Mary Fredennick, 22 years his junior, on January 24, 1877, at the age of 42. Their daughter Lila was born the following December. The Lewises appear to have preferred hotel living prior to succeeding the late Dr. Stephen Munroe in the house he occupied at 710 West Adams, which sat at the center of a 242-by-360-foot parcel, in 1892; Munroe may have been renting the property from the widow of Joseph A. Dodge, possibly the original builder before he died in early 1887
  • Sixty-seven years old when he embarked on reorganizing his property in 1901 and then building a new house—thinking of his impending retirement and perhaps of his youthful wife's future—S. B. Lewis struck a deal with another Los Angeles businessman, something of a social peer though one much richer and commanding business of a much larger scope. The brother of Montana copper king William A. Clark, J. Ross Clark was prominent and indefatigably industrious in Southern California and throughout the west. While he had in mind for it a much bigger house, in late 1901 he bought a 142-by-360-foot parcel from Lewis, who had been living for a decade in the rose-covered cottage on it that Clark would soon replace. The sale, technically made to Clark's wife Miriam, was reported in the Los Angeles Herald on December 6, 1901. The second 710 West Adams was completed in 1904. Meanwhile, having retained the west 100 feet of his original Adams frontage to form a new 360-foot-deep lot, Lewis had plans in hand by March 1902 to build himself a sizable new $8,000 Colonial Revival design of the firm of Hudson & Munsell. The Herald reported on April 20, 1902, that a building permit had been issued to Lewis for the new 12-room house, which would be addressed 718 West Adams Street
  • Lewis's original cottage, by now a relic of the district's exurban past, was apparently demolished rather than moved to make way for the Clark house—as the original 734 West Adams, next door to the west, would later be for its own successor. Adams Street houses were getting bigger and bigger as its quarter-century heyday began to approach its peak


An illustration of Samuel B. Lewis's new Adams Street house appeared in The Chicago Sunday Tribune
on November 6, 1892; the article featured the homes of Chicagoans who had migrated west to
Los Angeles, also including attorney Holdridge O. Collins's nearby 819 West Adams
and retired hardware merchant William T. Johnson's 957 West Adams.



Illustrations: Private Collection; Chicago Tribune