2234 West Adams Boulevard

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  • Built in 1909 by Emma Krutz Fuller, wife of businessman Thomas S. Fuller, on Lots 4 and 5 in Block 2 of the Boulevard Tract
  • Architects: Hunt, Eager & Burns (Sumner P. Hunt, Wesley Eager, and Silas Reese Burns Jr.)
  • Thomas and Emma Fuller arrived in Los Angeles via Ohio, Kentucky, and Kansas circa 1889, joining members of her family; Mrs. Fuller's youngest brother William G. Krutz Jr. had become established in the real estate business in the city in recent years. Fuller would proceed to speculate in property himself, as well as in gold mining and in oil. Emma Fuller's sister Clarice and her husband Calvin A. Leighton would also be settling in California. In 1903 the Fullers and the Leightons built similar seven-room houses adjacent to one another on West 24th Street, both designed by what was then Hunt & Eager, the team of Sumner P. Hunt and Wesley Eager before Silas Burns Jr. joined the partnership. The Fullers' 2195 West 24th and the Leightons' 2187 remain standing in excellent repair, their architecture clearly in concert with that of the Fullers' next house two blocks away at 2234 West Adams


Thomas and Emma Fuller built 2195 West 24th Street, left, in 1903, alongside and at the same time
that her sister and her husband, Clarice and Calvin Leighton, built 2187 next door. Both were
designed by the firm of Hunt & Eager, which the Fullers recalled six years later to
build 2234 West Adams, seen at top. All three houses still stand.


  • In 1904, C. A. Leighton built the well-known Hotel Leighton on West Sixth Street overlooking Westlake Park; it stood until 1985. Also that year Leighton and his brother-in-law became investors in a new venture, the Ricoro Gold Mining Company, and formed Fuller, Leighton & Company, salt dealers and commission merchants. Before long the firm became Fuller, Leighton & Stratton after Orra W. Stratton, married to a daughter of a brother of Emma Fuller and Clarice Leighton, joined the firm. The Leightons and the Fullers invested further in real estate by purchasing lots in the Boulevard Tract; on March 14, 1905, the Herald reported that Frank Benkert and his wife Elizabeth, who had been assembling a number of lots in the subdivision over the past decade, sold eight of them in Block 1 to Emma Fuller, interest in some of which she immediately transferred wholly or in part to her brothers William G. and Thomas S. Krutz. Lot 7 of the parcel contained a house, 2180 West Adams, built by Benkert circa 1894. It is unclear as to when and from whom the Fullers acquired Lots 4 and 5 of Block 2 of the Boulevard Tract on which 2234 West Adams would be built
  • The Department of Buildings issued "Mrs. T. Fuller" a permit for a new 11-room house at 2234 West Adams on September 22, 1909. She was issued a permit on July 11, 1911, to enlarge an unspecified room
  • Emma Fuller died at 2234 West Adams on October 9, 1916, after what was described as a lingering illness. She was cited in her obituary in the Herald the next day as "one of the best known women of Los Angeles," although little of her life appears to have been covered in the local press other than brief mentions in obscure real estate transactions and social notes
  • On July 8, 1919, the Times reported that Thomas Fuller had just sold 2234 West Adams to wholesale produce dealer and independent oil operator William E. McCaslin; Fuller would be moving to 2180 West Adams, the smaller house the family had acquired in their 1905 property purchases. In 1924, McCaslin built a new house for his family in the new View Park district at 5117 Angelus Mesa Drive (the street was later renamed as part of Crenshaw Boulevard; in 1947, a new owner moved the house to 6250 South Van Ness Avenue, where it stands today). McCaslin appears to have retained ownership of 2234 West Adams as a rental property at least into the mid 1940s
  • After McCaslin moved to View Park, he rented 2234 West Adams to his wife Edythe's sister Elizabeth and her husband Horace McClure and Horace's mother, who were in the process of building their own new house in the same tract as the McCaslins. It was then that 2234 entered one of its most interesting phases


The gentility of the West Adams district began being challenged
after World War I as newer suburbs siphoned off the affluent;
the Depression would accelerate demographic change in
its neighborhoods. But even before Black Tuesday,
many of its big houses had been carved into
apartments or U.S.C. fraternity houses,
or in the case of 2234 West Adams,
commercialized. The photograph
above appeared in the Times
on July 31, 1928. The
story then seems
to have ended.


  • While violations of Prohibition were no doubt rampant in all Los Angeles neighborhoods, the scale of the busts at 2234 West Adams in 1927 and 1928 were significant and would do nothing to mitigate the quickening slide of the gentility of the West Adams District as the affluent began to leave for newer suburbs even before the onset of the Depression. It seems that William McCaslin asked few questions of his tenants—one might even wonder if we was in on the deal—not even after policed raided the house on the night of September 23, 1927. Per the Times the next day: "A luxurious fourteen-room mansion in the heart of the exclusive West Adams residential district gave up to the police vice squad last night the most extensive and elaborate moonshine production plant they have seen in many months. The mansion, located at 2234 West Adams street, had been converted from stem to stern into a distillery.... A 350-gallon still was found in the basement, together with several thousand gallons of liquor...[and] some ninety fifty-gallon barrels of mash stored in each of the rooms on the second floor.... The house was raided after Police Officer O. J. King had had his nose tickled a few times by the odor of the mash when passing the house in making his rounds." Curiously, the owner of the house was not mentioned. Stranger still was that the raid didn't stop the operation or appear to result in agents destroying the equipment. On July 31, 1928, the Times more or less repeated itself: "Swooping down on a residence in the exclusive West Adams–street district, a raiding force of combined Federal and city prohibition officers yesterday uncovered one of the most complete distilleries ever raided in Los Angeles.... Forty-three 300-gallon tanks of mash, two 500-gallon stills, approximately twenty five-gallon tins filled with alcohol, almost a ton of sugar, and hundreds of boxes of yeast were discovered in the residence at 2234 West Adams." No mention of the raid 10 months before and still no mention of the owner. The equipment, however, was removed before long. Then the house became the base of ham radio station W6FBJ
  • By January 1930 William McCaslin was renting 2234 West Adams to more respectable tenants, if not coming from the neighborhood's traditional core of downtown establishment and professional-class sorts. With the affluent old guard continuing to defect to the north—to Los Feliz or Pasadena—and northwesterly to Wilshire-corridor suburbs—Windsor Square, Fremont Place, Hancock Park, Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades—even the houses along newer stretches of West Adams were becoming white elephants. Thomas and Eileen Regan were creative types. The 1930 Federal census enumerated on April 8 indicates that Mr. Regan was a movie actor, Mrs. Regan a teacher; he was, however, segueing into radio. A classified advertisement ran in the Times on January 6, 1930, for a  recording studio at 2234 West Adams: "Record your voice, music, sketches, radio songs or talks. Records also made of children's voices or musical talents." Before long the operation was called the Community Broadcast Studio, the call letters W6FBJ attached to it. According to her 1951 obituary, Eileen Regan had become a fiction writer under the pen name of Bill Bayle, although little of her work under either name appears to survive. Despite their commercial enterprise, the Regans were apparently excellent tenants; they would remain at 2234 before moving to Lafayette Square in 1942
  • New apartment houses had been going up in the neighborhood of Adams and Arlington since the easing of the Depression, with a wartime housing shortage spawning even more conversions of West Adams houses into multiple-unit buildings. While most likely having been renting 2234 to more than a single tenant since the departure of the Regans, the McCaslin interests decided to make it official in 1944. On August 8, 1944, the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit to an "F. McCaslin," whose exact relationship to William McCaslin is unclear, to remodel the house into a six-family dwelling. Architects Gable & Wyant (George E. Gable and C. Stanley Wyant) were in charge of the project. The architects also designed a new garage for the property


Daisy Boone Coven came to Los Angeles in 1943.
Moving on from show business, she became a
businesswoman and pioneer homeowner in
the West Adams district after the 1948
U. S. Supreme Court decision in
Shelley v. Kraemer striking
down racially restrictive
housing covenants.


  • It is unclear as to when 2234 West Adams was sold by McCaslin interests to a new owner. It appears that by 1953 the house had been acquired by former Chicago entertainer Daisy Boone Coven. As Daisy Boone, she had been half of the popular Chicago-based song-and-dance team called the Bon Ton Sisters. A feature in the Chicago Defender on May 30, 1953, described her as having moved to Los Angeles in 1943 and being the owner there of "a six-flat building plus the Walton Avenue house where she lives." Mrs. Coven was living in Apartment 4 at 2234 West Adams by 1956
  • Mrs. Coven was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety on May 14, 1971, to repair fire damage
  • Mrs. Coven was still living at 2234 West Adams when she died on November 23, 1989
  • On April 28, 1999, owner Larry L. Bajados was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety to reduce the number of apartments at 2234 West Adams from six to four, one downstairs and three upstairs. Bajados still owned the house as of November 2011



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; Chicago Defender