1360 West Adams Boulevard

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  • Built in 1898 on Lot 17 and the northerly half (25 feet) of Lot 18 of the Rowley Tract by Cincinnati-born railroad executive Godfrey Holterhoff Jr.
  • Architect: Eisen & Hunt (Theodore A. Eisen and Sumner P. Hunt)
  • On April 21, 1898, the Los Angeles Herald reported that Godfrey Holterhoff had been issued a permit for an 11-room house at the southwest corner of Adams and Menlo
  • Louise Schaeffer Lewis Holterhoff's sister Harriett and her husband, cracker and candy manufacturer William T. Bishop, had also purchased a parcel of three Adams-facing lots in the Rowley Tract; theirs was just across Menlo Avenue from 1360. The Bishops' 1342 West Adams, which Eisen & Hunt also designed and which still stands, was completed by the summer of 1898
  • The Superintendent of Buildings issued Mrs. Holterhoff a permit on January 9, 1906, for an addition to the house; Hunt & Eager (Abraham W. Eager and Sumner P. Hunt), successor firm to Eisen & Hunt, was the architect
  • On November 21, 1911, the Department of Buildings issued Mr. Holterhoff a permit to build a 20-by-30-foot garage on the west side of the property; the firm of Jewell & Griffith (Thomas Jewell and Robert Griffith), architectural engineers, was the designer 
  • The Holterhoffs were married in Los Angeles on September 5, 1889. Ohio-born Louise, a divorcée, brought her daughter Leila Lewis, born on October 29, 1885, into the marriage; like her mother, she was a native of Dayton. Adopted by Holterhoff, Leila became a remarkable Angeleno as a concert singer, horsewoman, psychoanalyst, translator, advocate for the blind, and a philanthropist. Headlined SIGHTLESS GENIUS TO WED HERE, the Los Angeles Times of November 29, 1926, ran a biographical feature on Leila announcing her engagement: "She has been totally blind [due to a medical accident] since she was a tiny baby but she has not allowed it to sadden her life one iota.... Leila has become a qualified M.D., with dozens of university degrees to her credit, and is an accomplished musician with a sweet soprano voice." She was a 1903 graduate of Marlborough; after a stint at Columbia, she moved to Europe, where she studied with Freud and learned seven languages. She married in 1923 and divorced two years later; her second husband would be Evan Royal Mosher, with whom she collaborated on translating works of Freud. In its feature the Times reported that the then Mrs. Heyn "specializes in insanity and had some remarkable successes with blinded, shell-shocked men during the war." After their marriage in Los Angeles on December 15, 1926, the Moshers returned to their research in Vienna. They adopted two English-born children before coming back to California to live a decade later




  • In 1900, street-railway executive William S. Hook bought a large parcel of the Rowley Tract at the corner of Adams and Vermont surrounding 1360 West Adams; its 5½ lots included Lot 19 and the southerly half of Lot 18 directly behind the Holterhoff house. Hook began building his 1386 West Adams that year; in March 1904, he was issued a construction permit for a smaller house on Lots 18 and 19, later designated 2617 Menlo Avenue. Hook died that June; his widow retained 2617 and would occupy it herself from early 1912 after selling 1386 West Adams to banker William H. Holliday. By 1920 the Hook family was in the process of moving from Menlo Avenue, interestingly not to one of the newer suburbs such as Windsor Square or Hancock Park that were beginning to drain West Adams of the old guard, but to the last bastion of that cohort's West Adams life, which lay between Berkeley Square and Adams Street. William S. Hook Jr., who lived eight doors south of his mother on Menlo, was, in something of a bad call in terms of a real estate investment, had bought and was preparing to move the 1904 house at 2155 West Adams a block east to 2055, where he would drastically remodel it. Mary Hook left 2617 Menlo by early 1920, living first at her son's house at 2155 West Adams before its relocation and then at her son Barbee's residence at 1363 West Adams after his move to Azusa. The Hooks sold 2617 Menlo to the Holterhoffs
  • Insurance maps and real estate atlases after 1920 indicate that various remodelings resulted in a physical connection between the Holterhoff residence and 2617 Menlo, which designation was dropped when that house was absorbed into 1360 West Adams
  • Godfrey Holterhoff Jr. died at 1360 West Adams on May 15, 1923
  • On August 19, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued Mrs. Holterhoff a permit for a 28-foot-long, nearly 9-foot wide "promenade," with a hip roof, barrel ceiling, and 10 French windows, the structure apparently being a new configuration of the connection between 1360 West Adams and the former 2617 Menlo Avenue. The designer indicated on the permit was the local outpost of the David Zork Company of Chicago, interior and architectural decorators and well-known manufacturers of reproduction antiques
  • The neighborhood of 1360 West Adams had begun to change rapidly after the death of William Holliday next door in April 1920; with his house at the busy intersection of Adams and Vermont ripe for commercialization, it was sold immediately and would become the Garden of Allah Hotel years before silent-screen star Alla Nazimova opened her West Hollywood establishment (the Garden of Allah on Adams closed in 1926, with Miss Nazimova opening her "Garden of Alla" (as the name was initially rendered in tribute to herself) in January 1927. The conversion of the Hook-Holliday house was no doubt a factor in Mrs. Holterhoff's sister and brother-in-law across the street succumbing to fashion and progress; in August 1926 they began building an elaborate new house in Bel-Air—another of the new west-side suburbs that were eclipsing West Adams. Louise Holterhoff would herself not be moved to relocate even after the Hook-Holliday house was demolished in 1931 and replaced with a large market structure built out to the Adams and Vermont sidewalks. She would continue to alter and revise 1360 West Adams in projects as late as 1941. She remained through World War II, continuing to appear with mind-numbing frequency in the Times's society pages. By 1947, she had moved down to live with her daughter, Leila, in Coronado, where she died at the age of 98 on December 9, 1957
  • Louise Holterhoff appears to have sold 1360 West Adams to Leopold Kalish, a well-known operator of hotels and apartments in Southern California, and Edward L. Weeks, who would be living on the premises. A small unspecified building on the lot was sold to nurseryman Paul J. Howard; in 1940, Howard had moved his famous California Flowerland from Third and La Brea to a new location in West Los Angeles, to which the piece of 1360 was relocated. With the concept of Adams Boulevard as an avenue of single-family residences long since challenged by changing domestic preferences and the Depression, and with commerce thriving on the next corner, Kalish and Weeks converted the building to a boarding house. A certificate of occupancy for 1360 issued on May 5, 1949, noted that there were 17 guest rooms, one six-guest room, and one room for four lodgers. Various owners would make various alterations to the building during the next 45 years and give the establishment various names, including the Tokyo Motel; in 1983, the building was remodeled to have 36 guest rooms
  • On March 15, 1931, the Los Angeles Times reported that the southeast corner of Adams and Vermont was acquired as an investment by filmmaker Cecil B. De Mille. Within months of his demolition of the Hook-Holliday house in March 1931, an elaborate and urbane 140-by-180-foot store building was erected covering the former front and side yards of 1386. Various food purveyors such as the Great American Market and other shops moved in; for many years there would be a Thriftimart supermarket in the structure, which stood until the fall of 1985. By 1994, the Food 4 Less supermarket chain, based in La Habra, had acquired the Vermont-corner property as well as the house at the Menlo Avenue end of the block that Godfrey and Louise Holterhoff had built in 1898 
  • On January 10, 1995, the Department of Building and Safety issued Food 4 Less Supermarkets a demolition permit for 1360 West Adams; while there had been reports that the Holterhoff house would be restored as part of a new market complex, Food 4 Less, perhaps eyeing its merger with Ralphs that was completed that June, changed its plans. Unlike De Mille's store building, the street façades of which were placed at the sidewalk with parking in the rear, a Ralphs store behind an enormous parking lot remains today on the Adams blockfront between Menlo and Vermont avenues



 Illustrations: Private Collection; WAHA; Outlook for the Blind (Autumn, 1916)