3200 West Adams Boulevard

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  • Built in 1904 on part of Block 60 of the South Arlington Tract by banker William Springer Bartlett
  • Architect: Charles F. Whittlesey, who would be building 3300 West Adams nearby for Dr. Granville Hayes in 1906. Lycurgus Lindsay's unusual house at 3424 is also attributed to Whittlesey, with some Sullivanesque similarities to 3200 evident. (Whittlesey had at one time been a protégé of Louis Sullivan; unlike 3200, both the Hayes and Lindsay houses survive) 
  • In the late 1890s, what were then the far reaches of Adams Street (as the thoroughfare was then called), even territory beyond Arlington Avenue not yet annexed to the city, began attracting the rich who sought to create in-town estates that would take advantage of a steep slope affording dramatic southerly views. Emeline Childs, seeking to move from her family's first spread now being overtaken by urbanization, acquired a vast tract at the southwest corner of Adams and Arlington; retaining the nearest two-and-a-half acres for herself, she built 3100 West Adams in 1902 and subdivided the rest into 500-foot-deep lots
  • On March 6, 1904, the Los Angeles Times reported that Mrs. Childs had just sold the 155-by-500-parcel next to hers to William Bartlett and that he had in hand plans for it prepared by Charles Whittlesey "for a very handsome cement and plaster residence in the mission style of architecture." A report in the Times on July 10 described the house as being in progress and that it was "at the end of the car line." (At the time, the West Adams tracks of the Los Angeles Traction Company terminated at Arlington Avenue, just inside the city limits; in 1909, in anticipation of the annexation of the area beyond the limits, which included the county territory on which the Bartlett house stood and which lay within the Colegrove Addition that would become part of the city that year on October 27, the streetcar line's extension west to Eleventh Avenue was being planned. Bartlett and others in the neighborhood, objecting to clanging bells and grinding wheels, fought the plan but lost)
  • On August 7, 1904, with the house said to be nearing completion—it would initially be numbered 2400 West Adams before annexation-related address revisions circa 1912—illustrations accompanied another Times story describing details of the Bartlett house as follows: "The plans...provide for a fourteen-room two-story frame structure, with basement and attic...with exterior finish of rough-cast plaster and expanded metal lath. In architectural style it is typical of the Spanish mission.... The entrance is through the pergola on the east side of the house. A feature of the dwelling is the interior court, or patio.... [On entering the house] one enters a large reception hall.... From a point near [its] central portion...a broad staircase leads to the rooms of the floors above. On the first floor there is also a library, music-room, den, dining-room, breakfast-room, kitchen with pantries, and a servants' sitting-room. On the second floor there are five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a wide balcony, a roof garden...[from which the] charmingly varied view that is to be found in this portion of the city can be surveyed at leisure by the occupants of this thoroughly modernized mission home.... The house is to be completed by October 1...." It would in fact be a few months before it was ready for occupancy


The Los Angeles Times seems to have been especially fond of the Bartletts; not only was the progress
of every one of their social and business moves documented, but so was that of their new house.
Large photographs accompanied a feature on 3200 in the paper on August 7, 1904. Above
are views of the entrance pergola at the northeast corner of the building, which
Whittlesey detailed with projecting vigas and Sullivanesque detail
at the top of the corner walls. The effect would result
in a house at once ancient and modern.


  • Either at the same time he bought his own lot from Mrs. Childs or shortly thereafter, W. S. Bartlett acquired the westwardly adjacent 150-by-500-foot building site from her, which appears to have been more for the investment than with the idea in mind of creating an even bigger property for himself. The Times reported on December 10, 1905, that he had resold the second parcel to millionaire David P. Doak, president of the Pan-American Railway Company, for $12,500. This deal appears to have fallen through, however, to what would be Bartlett's considerable advantage. On March 10, 1909, the Times reported that the property had been sold to Mrs. Ernest A. Bryant for $22,500. The Bartletts would be able to enjoy more space to their west for years longer, with Dr. and Mrs. Bryant's 3210 West Adams not appearing next door until 1916
  • Native Indianan William and Brooklyn-born Franklina Gray Bartlett and their two younger children, Franklina Matilda, now 18, and Jack Gordon, 10, moved from 322 West 27th Street—now under the 110 Freeway—into their new house at the end of the year following a month's trip to the Hawaiian Islands. The Bartletts would call their house, somewhat pretentiously for a suburban rather than country property, "Fenton Knoll," Fenton being the name of an ancestral plantation in Farquier County, Virginia, belonging to a collateral branch of Mrs. Bartlett's family. Mentions of the the Bartletts in news of Los Angeles business and society continued to be frequent, with Mr. Bartlett becoming ever more powerful in the banking industry and Mrs. Bartlett, a charter member and later president of the Ebell of Los Angeles, an indefatigable clubwoman, hostess, and supporter of the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy (while born in enemy territory, she treasured her Southern roots). Their elder son, Sidney Lanier Bartlett—his mother claimed to be related to the Southern poet and author—had married Miss Pansy Edna Willliams on March 21, 1903; his father built a house for them nearby at 2505 Cimarron Street. Matilda Bartlett—her name at this juncture Frenchified as "Mathilde"—was put on the market as a debutante at a Fenton Knoll reception on December 12, 1906


A slightly southeasterly view of 3200 West Adams Street taken from the westerly entrance after
 landscaping had matured; at top is the corresponding scene from the easterly driveway.


  • While it is hard to imagine more idyllic domestic arrangements in the Los Angeles of the aughts, sadness was not unknown chez Bartlett. On the evening of August 21, 1911, 17-year-old Jack Gordon Bartlett drowned after he fell out of his launch while crossing to Balboa Island with his friend Gartrell Harbeson, who lived up the street at 3917 West Adams. This tragedy cannot have helped the constitution of his father, who had heart disease; William Bartlett died at 3200 West Adams on October 10, 1914, age 71. At the time of his death, Bartlett was chairman of the board of the German-American Trust and Savings Bank and had recently been elected president of the Y.M.C.A. An indication of his character was revealed in a paragraph in his will, executed on July 31, 1912 and reported in the Times on October 17, 1914: "Acting from a judgment deliberately formed, based upon observation, and believing it better and wiser to give liberally during my life to religious and charitable objects, I make no bequest of that character. Knowing the hearty sympathy of my beloved wife in all that is good, I feel sure, if she survives me, that she will use the property entrusted to her as a faithful steward of God, and I trust that my children have been so educated as to feel it a privilege and a joy to give liberally in proportion to their means for the advancement of the kingdom of our heavenly Father and to many humane and benevolent purposes"
  • Mrs. Bartlett and Matilda remained at 3200 West Adams, and before long began planning the latter's wedding to James Henry French of Los Angeles; French was a second cousin of Matilda, and the two had been childhood playmates until the age of seven, when James's family moved away. At the time of the marriage, he was, interestingly, a banker with the German-American Trust and Savings Bank; after the First World War, he would go into the automobile business with his brother-in-law Lanier, opening Bartlett & French in Glendale, dealers of Chandlers, Hupmobiles, and Marmons. As usual with the often-mentioned Bartletts, copious coverage in the local press preceded and followed the nuptials. A swooning item in the Times on August 17, 1915, doubled down on the treacle, reporting that the wedding would be taking place on September 7 "in the spacious Fenton Knoll garden, 'neath a canopy of green trees and the Southern California blue heavens. The garden is one of the prettiest in the city, with a velvety sward and splendid variety of flowers, furnishing a natural background of bewitching beauty." The wedding, officiated by the groom's father, would even be filmed for posterity. On returning from their honeymoon, the Frenches moved into 3200 with Mrs. Bartlett. James had it made.


The 1915 wedding of the only daughter of the house to James Henry French at Fenton Knoll, "'neath a
canopy of green trees and the Southern California blue heaven," was filmed—with some odd
choreography—and presented with silent-movie title cards. This early home movie
can still be seen today, here. Bride and groom were second cousins.


  • With the rich having had many new tracts to consider to the west of the city ever since the first streets of Beverly Hills were laid out in 1907, the neighborhoods along what was now West Adams Boulevard had shown signs of becoming déclassé even before the Depression set in. Although the big houses of the South Arlington Tract were now white elephants, some of their original families stayed put. Even after Mrs. Bartlett died at 3200 on December 27, 1934, having just turned 81, the Frenches remained in the house with their two children until they moved to West Los Angeles in early 1942. (Franklina III was born in 1921; James Henry French Jr. would die in an automobile accident on the old Ridge Route through the Tejon Pass on November 6, 1944, a week after his 20th birthday) 
  • On May 29, 1942, a classified advertisement appeared in the Times offering a "very special" (and now unoccupied) house on one-and three-quarters acre at 3200 West Adams Boulevard for $21,000. More ads running into July upped the ante, with the situation now called "urgent" and the lot now exaggerated to be two full acres. The Frenches were relieved of the burden of the house soon after that appeal when the St. James Armenian Church, an outgrowth of the Holy Cross Armenian Church on East 20th Street near Maple, bought 3200, removed some interior partitions, and dedicated its new sanctuary on December 27, 1942, in a ceremony said to date from the third century A.D. The Times reported the next day that the conversion of a residence was a temporary measure and that "plans have been formulated for construction of a new building on the site after the war." It would in fact be long after the war before the new St. James Armenian Church would appear
  • The Department of Building and Safety issued a demolition permit for the Bartlett house at 3200 West Adams on August 15, 1955. A new church, which initial reports indicated would be a replica of Armenian churches of the Middle Ages, was consecrated on December 15, 1957. (In locating its St. James expansion, Holy Cross had chosen 3200 for its westerly location; by the early 1960s, its parishioners had moved even farther to the southwest, prompting a relocation from Adams Boulevard just seven years after building the new church to Slauson Avenue and La Tijera Boulevard. The sanctuary at 3200 West Adams was rented briefly by the Mt. Sinai Baptist Church in 1964 and then sold by St. James that July to the Apostolic Faith Home Assembly. In recent years the building has been occupied by charter schools, the owners of which have destroyed its original interiors; more here)


After using it as its sanctuary for 13 years, St. James Armenian Church demolished the Bartletts'
house at 3200 West Adams Boulevard in 1955 and replaced it with a purpose-built structure
two years later. While St. James moved on seven years later, its 1957 building remains.




Illustrations: Private Collection; A Look Back at Vintage Los Angeles