734 West Adams Boulevard

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  • Completed in 1908 by lumber and utilities executive William G. Kerckhoff on part of Lot 1 in Block 22 of Hancock's Survey
  • Architect: Hunt & Eager (Sumner P. Hunt and Wesley Eager)
  • Kerckhoff's 734 was not the first 734 West Adams on its lot. In 1886, railroad contractor Alexander A. McDonell bought the 1.5 acres and the existing house on it that would be acquired by Kerckhoff in 1906; on July 1 of that year, the Los Angeles Times reported Kerckhoff's purchase of the 180-foot wide, 360-foot deep lot and that he had sold the house itself, a relocation permit for which had already been issued, to make way for his own project. The original 734 and its tall tank house were moved to a site just south and slightly west at 710 West 27th Street and would survive until 1958
  • Construction of the second 734 West Adams took two years and was started soon after the departure of the first. The initial permit for the house was issued to W. G. Kerckhoff by the Department of Buildings on July 30, 1906, one calling for a two-story, 18-room building of irregular footprint measuring 87 feet both in width and depth. Hunt & Eager were being commissioned all over town for examples of the latest fashion in domestic architecture, a style that came to be called "Stockbroker Tudor" and built by the dozens from Brookline to Burlingame, from Grosse Pointe to Pasadena, and from Atlanta to Seattle. Their similar house for J. Ross Clark, just two houses east of 734 at 710 West Adams, had been completed in 1904. A construction permit for the firm's also-similar 3200 Wilshire Boulevard for industrialist William G. Lacy was issued just three days before that of the new 734 West Adams; by the time the Kerckhoff house was completed in the latter half of 1908, Silas R. Burns Jr. had joined its busy architects, the new firm of Hunt, Eager & Burns proceeding to design similarly detailed residences for attorney Henry O'Melveny at 3250 Wilshire Boulevard and for automobile pioneer Reuben Shettler at 3100 Wilshire—this last house and Clark's 710 the only two of the five to have been lost to demolition, Kerckhoff's remaining on Adams and the O'Melveny and Lacy residences sitting comfortably today on Plymouth Boulevard in Windsor Square)
  • While even before completion the new house appears on the Sanborn fire insurance map issued in 1907, its 1½-story garage does not; a permit for it was issued by the Department of Buildings on September 17, 1907, the document still not reflecting Hunt and Eager's new partnership with Burns, who was just then joining the firm. On May 24, 1908, the Los Angeles Herald reported that landscape architect Wilbur D. Cook Jr. had been commissioned to design the grounds of "the residence of William G. Kerckhoff, in course of erection at 734 West Adams street, from plans drawn by and under the supervision of Architects Hunt, Eager & Burns." Cook had recently designed the layout of Beverly Hills, the development of which Kerckhoff, blessed with great foresight when it came to the future of Southern California, had a major stake, as related below


William G. Kerckhoff was captured in 1905 by Los Angeles Times illustrator—and noted
painter—Arthur Burnside Dodge in his good-natured As We See 'Em: A Volume of
Cartoons and Caricatures of Los Angeles Citizens. While the cartoon pictures
him as a lumberman, Kerckhoff had become many things during his
long business career: oilman, utilities magnate, real estate
developer, and railroad provisioner—one of his
companies supplied the Santa Fe with
ice—as well as a generous
philanthropist.


  • After an initial investigatory trip to California in 1875, Terre Haute–born William Kerckhoff settled in Los Angeles with his father George and stepmother Elise, both German-born, and four of his siblings, in 1878, the family having left Indiana for good. George and William Kerckhoff got into the lumber business immediately, joining the established local branch of the San Francisco–based firm of Jacob G. Jackson, located at Alameda and First. On April 25, 1879, the Herald reported that a new Los Angeles partnership had been formed with Jackson; Jackson, Kerckhoff & Cuzner's first newspaper advertisement appeared on the same day ("Doors, Windows, Blinds, Posts, Shingles, Laths, Shakes, Plaster of Paris, Cement and Hair"), James Cuzner having recently been Jackson's local agent. The Kerckhoff family lived at first on property on the east side of Main Street between Sixth and Seventh streets, noted on maps as the Kerckhoff Tract, then situated in a residential neighborhood of detached Victorians. After his marriage to Louise Eshman back in Terre Haute on November 13, 1883, the couple moved slightly north to their own house at the northeast corner of Main and Sixth, where they would remain for the next 20 years. Poised to take full advantage of the Boom of the '80s, the energetic and purposeful Kerckhoff family's fortune was assured. Investments in western timberlands, sawmills, and lumber-transporting steamships followed, then in banks, utilities, and, inevitably, land and oil  
  • The Hammel and Denker Ranch, formerly the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, was nine miles from downtown Los Angeles. In late 1904, an option was taken on it by the Amalgamated Oil Company, a new syndicate formed that October by William Kerckhoff, Charles Canfield, William C. Price, and other investors who intended to drill for oil. In what has become something of a famous story, it was an abundance of water that was found on the ranch rather than petroleum, leaving the visionary men of the syndicate to make a silk purse out of their investment by creating Beverly Hills. The Times reported on January 6, 1906, that the syndicate had just purchased the property; on September 2, the paper reported that Kerckhoff, Canfield, and Henry E. Huntington (he would be bringing in tracks from Los Angeles), through what was now called the Rodeo Land and Water Company, had laid out its streets "in beautiful curved lines," which became the development's signature feature. "No expense has been spared to make this a fine suburban residential district." The designer was Wilbur Cook, who would be working on the landscaping of Kerckhoff's new house on Adams Street. It is interesting to note that the Kerckhoffs chose not to become pioneer homebuilders in Rodeo Land and Water's development of Beverly Hills, but understandable at a time when the Adams District itself was considered suburban, especially by a family that had started out in Los Angeles at the corner of Sixth and Main streets. While Beverly Hills would be connected by rail, its famous magnet, the pink hotel, was six years away from opening; in 1906 the town was undeveloped physically and socially (and was still only sparsely so at the time of the town's incorporation on January 28, 1914) and too far to commute from comfortably in the automobiles of 1906, too distant from Mr. Kerckhoff's downtown office and Mrs. Kerckhoff's own comfort zone. At the same time he was developing Beverly Hills, Kerckhoff was developing the resort of Del Mar as a partner in the South Coast Land Company


A photographer for the Los Angeles Herald-Express captured the eastern end of the Kerckhoff house on
January 5, 1938. He was standing on the site of 718 West Adams, demolished by Mrs. Kerckhoff
in 1936, and that of what is today U.S.C.'s Annenberg Apartments, completed in 1980.
At right is glimpsed Mark Sibley Severance's 758 West Adams, built in 1888.


  • With their Main Street neighborhood rapidly being taken over by commerce, not without their own encouragement, the Kerckhoffs left 560 South Main in 1902 when Henry Huntington announced plans for the new Pacific Electric Building just across Sixth Street on a Kerckhoff Tract parcel that included the site of 614 South Main, where George Kerckhoff had lived until his death in 1896; not only would the huge new structure top out at nine stories, it was to be the noisy hub of P.E.'s vast Southern California rail network. As a business partner of Huntington, Kerckhoff was only too happy to begin planning the redevelopment of his longtime homesite. By August the old house had been moved from 560 South Main to a lot on Maple Street, even before new plans for the old property had been finalized. It wouldn't be until the spring of 1907 that William Kerckhoff, in the middle of his lengthy personal residential project on Adams Street, would announce the 10-story Kerckhoff Building on the site of 560. (The new building was designed by Morgan & Walls; the family had little allegiance to a single architect.) George Kerckhoff's widow Elise would be building a new house on Westlake Avenue; the William Kerckhoffs would move to three successive houses in the city's bon-ton University neighborhood while looking for a new seat. On May 17, 1903, the Herald reported that W. G. Kerckhoff had purchased the large Howard property at 1007 West Adams, at the northeast corner of Hoover Street, and intended to build a "handsome house" there "from specially designed plans." While it appears that he got as far as removing the original dwelling at 1007 West Adams, for reasons that are unclear but likely having to do with his realizing that traffic would only increase at Adams and Hoover, he transferred his intention to build on Adams—if not the blueprints themselves—to the largest plot fronting a quieter segment of the street just across from Chester Place at #734. After at least two temporary moves after leaving 560 South Main, William and Louise Kerckhoff lived at 2638 Portland Street as work on the new house progressed


A rendering of 734 West Adams Boulevard from the sidewalk 110 years after the house first appeared


  • It is interesting to note that even while Beverly Hills was being developed in the mid-aughts, the length of West Adams Street was at the height of its appeal, fully leafed out all the way out to the numbered avenues beyond Arlington Avenue; almost any address along it was an indication of social and economic arrival. William's brother Herman Kerckhoff had built 1325 West Adams in 1899 and new residences were going up by the dozens in the expensive neighborhoods flanking the thoroughfare, then the spine of one of the city's earlier districts referred to as "West Los Angeles"
  • On June 2, 1908, the Santa Fe Railway moved into the upper eight floors of the 10-story Kerckhoff Building even while construction continued on the lower levels; in today's residential downtown Los Angeles, it is the Santa Fe Lofts. The building wouldn't be fully open until sometime during the latter half of 1908, close to the time that William and Louise Kerckhoff and the twin daughters they adopted in 1897 at less than a year old, Gertrude and Marion, would be moving into 734 West Adams Street
Details of the east side of the house: Before access arrangments were
changed by U.S.C., a paved driveway from the street ran through the porte-
cochère of 734 West Adams and back to the garage at the property's south end
close to West 27th Street, where there was another entrance. Versions of the X-style
detail between the first and second floors are seen on other Los Angeles houses
that Hunt & Eager, and its successor, Hunt Eager & Burns, designed around
the same time, including 3100, 3200, and 3250 Wilshire Boulevard.



  • What was now the firm of Hunt & Burns—Wesley Eager left the partnership in 1910 to practice with his brother Frank O. Eager—was called back to 734 West Adams in 1913 to make alterations for the Kerckhoffs including the addition of a screened sleeping porch
  • Gertrude Kerckhoff married Gerald Young on December 23, 1918; Marion Kerckhoff married Webster B. Holmes on November 25, 1919. Both ceremonies were held at St. John's just east on Adams Street, with small receptions at home. (A curious item made the evening papers the night before Marion's wedding; it seems she had recently had a stalker, who was slapping William Kerckhoff with a $100,000 suit for having had him arrested in June and charged with insanity)
  • William and Louise Kerckhoff remained at 734 West Adams even as the Street was evolving into a major crosstown Boulevard as part of Los Angeles's Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924. Other big houses nearby were being converted into apartments or U.S.C. fraternities or sororities as the city's population grew exponentially during the 1920s and the attractions of newer suburbs began to siphon off the affluent. Windsor Square and Fremont Place had opened in 1911; Hancock Park opened for sales by 1920, followed within a few years by Bel-Air; and, along with the inaugurals of other westerly suburbs such as Holmby Hills and Brentwood, Beverly Hills had fully matured. Even having had to deal in the past with changes to their neighborhood when 718 and 758 West Adams were threatened with redevelopment, the Kerckhoffs were still not tempted to relocate away from the district. Content in her longtime home, Mrs. Kerckhoff had landscape architect Paul G. Thiene designed a garden pavilion for her in 1927
  • William G. Kerckhoff died in Los Angeles of heart disease on February 22, 1929. His contributions to the upbuilding of Los Angeles received much press coverage; lists of his memberships in all the top clubs—the California, the Jonathan, the Los Angeles Country Club, the Bolsa Chica Gun Club, and San Francisco's Pacific Union and Bohemian—indicated his social status. Louise Kerckhoff seems to have been less interested in society, happier to stay at home, which, even with the onset of the Depression and her daughters' building their own houses in Hancock Park, she seems to have had no intention of leaving. The West Adams district, already on a slide, would begin to decline even more rapidly after 1929. Now the only people at all interested in its aging housing stock were those who wanted to exploit the property; when 718 West Adams next door to the east was again threatened with redevelopment, the Kerckhoffs—or Mrs. Kerckhoff soon after his death—bought it. On March 17, 1931, she took out a permit from the Department of Building and Safety to add a roofless veranda and to make general repairs to 718, perhaps hoping to rent it to a single tenant she could vet herself. Even if a suitable prospect could afford to rent a big house during the '30s, it was not likely to have been in an increasingly run-down neighborhood; a flat eastward extension of her gardens would prove to be the answer. Under the address of "720" West Adams, the Department of Building and Safety issued Mrs. Kerckhoff a demolition permit for 718 on January 9, 1936
  • After her husband died, Louise Kerckhoff devoted herself to her home and to distributing a large portion of her wealth to charitable causes, as her husband had begun to do. Three months after the death of Mr. Kerckhoff, it was announced that to honor his wishes she would be funding the new student union building at U.C.L.A., then developing its new Westwood campus; this is now called Kerckhoff Hall. In September 1929, it was announced that, also on the instructions of Mr. Kerckhoff, she was making a grant of $1,080,000 ($16,140,000 today) to a fund a clinic in Bad Nauheim, Germany, for the research of cardiac disease, from which her husband had suffered and where he had been treated during the '20s. Other generous donations were made to Scripps College and to Caltech to further fund the William G. Kerckhoff Laboratories of the Biological Sciences, for which Mr. Kerckhoff had given the seed money before his death
  • Louise Kerckhoff continued the family's philanthropy for the rest of her life. After she died at 734 West Adams Boulevard ("Boulevard" having replaced "Street" officially) on July 18, 1946, her will specified charitable giving as well as a $400,000 grant to the Kerckhoff Laboratories. Not forgetting the university in her own backyard, she left 734 West Adams to U.S.C. for the use of its medical school, with the stipulation that her sister, Josephine Eshman, have the use of the house until her death. As it turned out, Miss Eshman decided not to live alone in the big house and moved to Hancock Park near her nieces


An image of the house appeared in the Los Angeles Times on September 9, 1951, accompanying
an article describing its conversion to academic use. Much of the original detail remained
including quarter-sawn oak paneling, and an elevator, dumbwaiter, and intercom.


  • The Kerckhoffs' 734 West Adams Boulevard was reconfigured for the use of the U.S.C. School of Medicine. It would become a second Kerckhoff Hall, the first being U.C.L.A.'s student union. A feature in the Times on September 9, 1951, headlined SCIENTISTS WORK IN LAP OF LUXURY, described the transformation of house into its new mission: "Where carriages clattered down the curving drive, the only sound is the rattle of typewriters; in the basement, where servants chattered over the family washing, a technician uses a $15,000 electron microscope to probe the secrets of cancer." The medical school's preclinical department used the house itself; studies on nutrition were carried out in the garage in back near 27th Street. In 1949, the botany department had had built for it a 20-by-82-foot greenhouse on the former site of 718 West Adams and what is now the site of U.S.C.'s Annenberg Apartments. The house is now occupied by U.S.C.'s Annenberg Press
  • Gertrude Young and Marion Holmes received their shares of the Kerckhoff millions. The family was apparently still not sold on Beverly Hills, with the twins each completing big houses less than three block apart in Hancock Park in 1928, both residences in the English vein of their parents' 734 West Adams and both apparently financed by their father. Gertrude lived a life more in tune with socialites often portrayed later in television's Perry Mason, her 101 North Hudson Avenue, designed by Roland Coate, in fact appearing in an episode of the series in 1961. Gertrude divorced Gerald Young in Reno in 1935 and married fortune hunter Eric Lindquist two years later; her second and much contested divorce came in 1942. (She sold 101 North Hudson several years later and died in 1989 at nearly 93; she was buried at sea.) Marion Kerckhoff Holmes had Jonathan Ring design 365 South Hudson; she appears to have led a steadier life there than her sister had up the street, still married to Webster Holmes and living at 365 South Hudson at the time of his death in April 1959
  • The Kerckhoff house became Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument 606 on November 1, 1994
  • More reading is here.
  

It seems that Gertrude and Marion Kerckhoff maintained an affection for the English-style house they
had grown up in, even if by the time it came to having their own residences they wouldn't
have been caught dead living in increasingly déclassé West Adams. Designed by
different architects but both completed on the same street in 1928,
Gertrude's 101 North Hudson, left, and Marion's 365
South Hudson are considered two of the
grander Hancock Park houses.



 Illustrations: Private Collection; LAPL; USCDL; HathiTrust; LAT; Kansas Sebastian