1701 West Adams Street

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  • Built in 1897 on Lots 47 and 48 of the Granada Tract by Judge Edwin H. Lamme
  • Having recently divorced his first wife, Lamme, who was 50, married his two-decades-younger stenographer, Catherine Helling, on June 29, 1896
  • Reports of an unusual new house to be built by the Lammes began appearing in the press in the spring of 1897; on October 24, in an item titled  "A Novelty in Pianos," the Los Angeles Times reported that "Just now the Judge is building himself a home on West Adams street, a spacious and attractive residence, in an ultra fashionable part of the city, but he is building it of logs, and all the interior finish, as well as the furniture, is to be in Indiana hickory, and 'rustic' in style. That everything might be in keeping, he some months ago ordered through the Southern California Music Company of this city an upright Shaw piano, as fine as could be made, but all the outside finish to be of this same rustic hickory. The Studebaker Bros. of South Bend, Ind., were commissioned to furnish the materials.... The entire exterior, even the music stool, is of hickory with the bark on it—withes, saplings, etc. worked into ornamental panelings and various pleasing designs...." On December 19, the Herald reported that Mr. and Mrs. Lamme would be moving into their "log cabin" shortly after the holidays




The Lammes' unusual new house, which they had dubbed "Rusticana,"
was featured in a Chamber of Commerce booklet issued in 1898. The name
certainly applied to the house, but, even if West Adams Street this far west was
yet to be paved, streetcars turning west on it from Rosedale/Normandie Avenue
(at right) were noisy reminders that civilization was close at hand. A side view
below reveals the house's depth along Normandie and that the tag "cabin"
was something of a misnomer—this house could accommodate an inn.



  • A line of the Los Angeles Traction Company, a streetcar system organized in 1895 and later merged with the Los Angeles Railway, came down Rosedale Avenue (renamed Normandie in 1898) from 24th Street and turned west at Adams. The grinding of steel wheels on 90 degrees of curving track cannot have been a pleasant aspect of living at the northwest corner of the intersection, and obviously a reminder that for all of Lamme's rustic pretense, he had chosen to situate his log house at a busy intersection in the middle of a dynamic if still young city
  • Deciding on a move to Shanghai, where he would practice law for the next six years, the Lammes left 1701 West Adams after little more than three years. On June 3, 1901, the Los Angeles Herald reported that Edwin Lamme had just sold 1701 West Adams to attorney Lewis Reeser Garrett


Many renderings were made of 1701 West Adams Street during its quarter century at the northwest
corner of Adams and Normandie Avenue. Its unusual architecture and modern horizontal lines
were at charming odds with the tall profiles of the usual late Victorian and early Colonial
 Revival houses spreading west from Hoover Street. A great many of these images
ended up on postcards sent by tourists all over the world. It is not known if
the man in the image above might be Edwin Lamme or Lewis Garrett.


  • Lewis Garrett appears to have envisioned 1701 as a honeymoon cottage, much as had Edwin Lamme; on July 3, 1901, he married Bertha M. Phelps in her parents' Ingraham Street parlor. The Herald reported on July 7 that the Garretts would be "at home after August 1 at 1701 West Adams street." Garrett and his father-in-law, Ira W. Phelps, would collaborate on various oil, real estate, and mining deals over the years, not always making friends of other business associates; a highly publicized lawsuit over a deal for water rights in Inglewood in 1908 didn't end with Garrett looking particularly scrupulous, though it may all have been considered fair by the city's hard-driving Gilded Age upbuilders. It is unclear as to whether the Inglewood kerfuffle was the reason Garrett left 1701 West Adams to live permanently at a country house in Eagle Rock, where Mrs. Garrett raised their two daughters as well as Buff Orpingtons and White Leghorns. It appears that Garrett retained 1701 for several years, renting it out complete with its eccentric hickory furnishings before the house assumed a second life as a hotel and restaurant called the Log Cabin Inn




  • References to the Log Cabin Inn began to appear in the local press in mid-1913; a Benjamin W. Singer was the proprietor. During the next several years, the establishment appears to have been a popular venue for genteel ladies' luncheons and receptions. The Log Cabin Inn was nevertheless offered for sale in a classified advertisement in the Los Angeles Herald on December 15, 1915, touting its fame as "The Most Refined Residential Catering Business in Los Angeles." The building had indeed become something of a landmark, one that endures in numerous views on postcards that have long outlasted the structure. (Sadly, interior views have proven elusive)




  • Some time around her sensational divorce from Eulogio Carrillo, an heir to the much-contested millions of Californio landowner Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker—the actor Leo Carrillo was another member of the family—Laura Carrillo assumed the proprietorship if not the actual ownership of the Log Cabin Inn. During her tenanacy the house would be described variously as though it were her private residence, one "considered one of the most elaborately appointed residences in Southern California," and in other instances referred to as something of a roadhouse. On April 18, 1919, the Herald reported that burglars had ransacked 1701 while members of the household slept, making off with $4,000 worth of loot
  • On November 20, 1917, Los Angeles voters passed what became known as the Gandier ordinance, which provided for the permanent closure of all saloons in the city after March 31, 1918, and severely curtailed the availability of spirits in other venues. Mrs. Carrillo would run afoul of the law in January 1920; on the 17th of that month, 12 days before the Eighteenth Amendment took effect, the Herald reported that the Log Cabin Inn had been raided, with officers confiscating "a quantity of wine, bitters, 'stout' and home brewed beer. Mrs. L. Carillo [sic], aged 33, the proprietor, was booked on a charge of violating the Gandier ordinance." The Log Cabin Inn was closed immediately. Its contents were auctioned off the next month and the building was put up for sale


A large advertisement ran in the Los Angeles Times on February 24, 1920, inviting bidders
to an auction that day. Included were "Over 85 pieces of OLD HICKORY furniture,"
apparently many of them original to Edwin Lamme's house, though there
is no mention of the hickory-clad Shaw piano.  


  • The Lamme-Garrett house would continue as a restaurant, if not perhaps a speakeasy, when new owners acquired the property by the end of 1920. Roscoe Frank Goings, who would be described in his 1931 obituary as "one of the old-time saloon keepers of [Los Angeles]," lived around the corner at 1688 West 25th Street. His bar and attendant beer-bottling operation at 601 East 7th Street was well known, or at least had been before the Gandier ordinance and then Prohibition took effect. ("Soft drinks" were available there afterward.) On January 15, 1921, the Department of Buildings issued his wife a permit to remodel 1701 West Adams into what was described on the document as a "tea room." The Old Colony Tea Room appears to have revived for a brief time the house's prewar reputation as a genteel café. There was, the Goingses soon came to understand, little profit in tea or even (possibly) bourbon served in demitasses, and certainly the return could not measure up to the potential of valuable real estate at an increasingly busy Los Angeles intersection
  • Frank Goings's decision to redevelop the northwest corner of Adams and Normandie meant the end of an eccentric city landmark not much more than two decades old. Items regarding a restaurant operating as the Log Cabin appeared in the Times and Evening Express as late as March 1922. No demolition permit has yet been found for the log house at 1701 West Adams, but it had been cleared from its lot sometime before the Department of Buildings issued Goings a permit for a new store complex on the site on April 11, 1923. This structure, though much altered, appears to still stand on the site of "Rusticana." In a curious footnote, the Los Angeles School Journal of November 11, 1923, ran an item regarding physician-turned-educator Lowell C. Frost, a teacher recently retired from Franklin High School in Eagle Rock, with the statement that "Dr. Frost has purchased the well-known log cabin tea room on West Adams Street, which he manages." Perhaps a deal to buy the house from Goings, possibly to relocate it, had fallen through...or the journal had sat on the information too long before publishing it


 Illustrations: Private Collection; Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce; LAH