3210 West Adams Boulevard

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  • Completed in 1917 on part of Block 60 of the South Arlington Tract for Dr. and Mrs. Ernest Albert Bryant
  • Architect: Arthur B. Benton
  • On March 10, 1909, the Los Angeles Times reported the sale of a "costly residence site" on the south side of West Adams Street to Mrs. Ernest A. Bryant by William S. Bartlett, who lived next door at 3200. "The property has a frontage of 150 feet...and is 500 feet deep..... It is one of handsomest homesites in the city, and surrounded by several of the most pretentious dwellings. It is in the heart of a rapidly developing ultra-fashionable neighborhood. To the east of this lot is the Bartlett residence, and adjoining the latter is the famous Childs home. Further west, on the same side of the street, are a number of costly homes, such as the Lindsay residence, and the Brunswig place"
  • Mrs. Bryant, née Susanna Patterson Bixby, was born on April 11, 1880, to John W. Bixby of the fabled Southern California Bixbys, who once owned much of Long Beach. There at the family's Rancho Los Alamitos she married 37-year-old Dr. Bryant on July 12, 1904; he was at the time the superintendent of the County Hospital. The bride had been living with her widowed mother in San Francisco, though while preparing for the wedding was the guest of her relative Mrs. Harry L. Bixby, who had just bought 24 St. James Park. After returning from their honeymoon, the newlyweds settled into 904 West 28th Street in Los Angeles, which had been bought recently, possibly with purchase price coming from Susanna, who was coming into the marriage with considerable separate funds. A daughter named after her mother was born to the Bryants on May 23, 1905, with a son, Ernest Albert Bryant Jr., arriving on March 6, 1907




  • After buying their parcel on West Adams Street, as the thoroughfare was then designated, more than seven years passed before the Bryants would begin building on it. Between their purchase of the lot and the hiring of Benton to build, the future path of migration of Los Angeles's affluent was taking shape, and it more or less precluded even the in-town estate area on Adams west of Arlington Avenue. From the time its first streets were laid out in 1907 until Hollywood took up residence by 1920—and as automobiles became more dependable and available in enclosed form—Beverly Hills remained sleepy; the bean fields between that settlement and downtown, however, were being developed rapidly with one high-end tract after another and were already drawing the affluent away from the older neighborhoods of Adams Street. The Bryants' 3210 West Adams would be the last of its neighborhood's estate-sized undertakings, as well as the shortest-lived of them. It's possible that had they waited until after the World War to build a new house, they might have reconsidered building on Adams and decided that the funds for the project would be much better spent in terms of investment in a Wilshire-corridor development such as Windsor Square or Fremont Place, both of which opened as early as 1911 (within the bounds of the Colegrove annexation of October 27, 1909, which had also included 3210's site), upland Beverly Hills, or even beyond, where a new estate area called Bel-Air would open before long
  • Trade journals announcing the Bryant house in October 1916 included The Architect and Engineer and the Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer; in its issue of October 14 the latter described Benton's design in detail: "Archt. A. B. Benton...has prepared plans for a 2-story, 20-room frame and plaster residence to be built at 3210 W. Adams St. for Dr. E. A. Bryant.... The house is designed in modified Mission style, and is irregular in shape with extreme dimensions of 135x95 ft.; concrete foundation, exterior finish, hardwood floors, brick porch piers and chimneys, quarry tile terrace floors, seven bath rooms with tile floors and wainscot, tile floor in kitchen, structural steel, steam heat with oil burning furnace, elevator, vacuum cleaning, ornamental iron balconies, vault with steel door, two automatic water heaters, nine tile mantels, plate glass, electric wiring. There will be a 2-story garage with living rooms on second floor. Bids will be opened next Monday"
  • The Department of Buildings issued a construction permit to Dr. Bryant for a 23-room, $55,000 house at 3120 West Adams on October 31, 1916; a permit for a $5,200 garage, also designed by Benton, was pulled on January 16, 1917
  • On September 6, 1917, the Los Angeles Herald reported that the Bryants were "to move into their handsome new home on West Adams Heights [an error, as that neighborhood actually lay to the northeast] the last week in September, and their friends are anticipating a charming "house warming" in the new mission structure." On December 5, the Herald reported that the Bryants were "giving a series of dinners at their new home." While the family did not seem to mind being written about frequently in the press, images of them did not often leave 3210 West Adams; as for the house itself, as of this writing no images of it have surfaced in any form
  • The Bryants continued to entertain frequently at 3210, including with al fresco barbecues in the garden with its views southward toward the ocean; after Susanna Jr. was graduated from Vassar in June 1925, at the age of 20 somewhat precociously, it seems (a classmate was Roberta Crutcher of 1257 West Adams), it was time for her to be put on market as a debutante, spinsterhood still then a fear even for a woman with a college degree (or perhaps even more of one). Mrs. Bryant presented Susanna to her fellow matrons at a tea at 3210 on November 18, 1925; other entertainments in Susanna's honor included a supper dance given by Colonel and Mrs. William E. Fowler at their house at 2425 Wilshire Boulevard (Emily Jarvis Earl Fowler had been widowed by Edwin T. Earl, who built 2425 in 1899). It would take a while for a marriage proposal to come, and not before it was reported in the Times on December 20, 1929, that Mrs. Bryant had recently petitioned the court to have her name changed legally to Susanna Bixby Bryant from Susanna Patterson Bryant to avoid confusion with her daughter. This was at a time when women still often retained their own middle name rather than using their maiden names in official records; the move would seem strange in that Susanna Jr. was about to change her name through marriage anyway, though perhaps her mother's petition was made less for social ease or undue pride in the Bixby name but rather to ensure legal clarity in trust arrangements as the Bryant children were on the verge of gaining spouses and Susanna Sr. was reorganizing various family properties
  • On December 26, 1929, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Bryants were that morning announcing Susanna Jr.'s engagement to Richard Young Dakin of Pasadena. Only members of the immediate families were in attendance, the Times wrote the following February 28, the day after the wedding took place in the drawing room of 3210. "After April 1, [the Dakins] will be at home to their many friends at 2050 Monterey Road, South Pasadena, where a home completely furnished is awaiting their occupancy." Mrs. Bryant may have had a hand in her daughter and new son-in-law's house—while her brokerage statements may have begun to decline since the Crash a few months earlier, she was known to have had a great deal in terms of personal assets before Wall Street laid an egg. An item in the Times on September 1, 1925—one picked up by papers across the country—included her among those Southern Californians who paid the most in Federal income tax the year before, in her case the 2019 equivalent of $1,168,000, a figure no doubt minuscule by today's standards, but fantastic for the time. (The list included other Bixbys and Los Angeles notables such as the aforementioned Emily Jarvis Earl Fowler, Allan Hancock of 3189 Wilshire Boulevard, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Jesse Lasky, Burton E. Green, Mira Hershey, William L. Stewart, Willis G. Hunt of 3 Berkeley Square, Daisy Canfield Moreno, as well as the Dohenys and Herbert G. Wylie of Chester Place, Scrippses, Lankershims, and Dan Murphy of 2076 West Adams)
  • Ernest Albert Bryant Jr. was also married in 1930; on July 19, he tied the knot with Miss Judith Tilt of Pasadena. (It seems that young Ernest may have also had a house waiting for he and his new spouse after the honeymoon; the day after the wedding, the Times allowed that "After August 1, the couple will take up their residence on the Bryant rancho near Long Beach." The reference seems likely not to have been to the Bixbys' Rancho Los Alamitos there, but rather to another of their vast tracts 25 miles to its east 
  • A history of one of the family's vast landholdings, Rancho Santa Ana, appeared in the Los Angeles Times on August 13, 1998. The story referred to Susanna Bryant as having "tired of white gloves and tea parties in Pasadena," perhaps confusing her place of residence during the 1920s with that of her daughter later. What has sometimes been referred to as the Bryant Ranch was 5,000 acres of Bernardo Yorba's Rancho Cañon de Santa Ana that John W. Bixby had acquired in 1875 and renamed Rancho Santa Ana. Susanna Bryant began to take an interest in the property around the time of her marriage, planting citrus orchards and managing the spread. She acquired sole ownership of Rancho Santa Ana in 1915; by 1927 she'd established there, on the brow of the Puente Hills overlooking the Santa Ana River, the 200-acre Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in memory of her father "for research, study and appreciation of native California flora." Once the project was underway (and, especially, after she had launched her children and could forgo the tedium of too much in the way of the bourgeois social precepts that the Times had hinted at), Susanna Bryant spent more time at her house on the property, built in 1911. While the outdoors was clearly in her Bixby blood, and while she may have become bored with society, Susanna Bryant was very much involved in the Garden Club of America, that bastion to this day of rich establishment ladies in chapters across the country whose tradition has been to make serious studies of plants and flowers 
  • Just four days after the Times of October 15, 1933, ran a large feature on the progress of the botanic garden, Ernest Bryant Sr. suffered a heart attack and died at 3210 West Adams at the age of 64. His funeral was held in the house on October 22. Obituaries chronicled his busy career, which began when, after receiving his M.D. in 1890 from the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Los Angeles the next year to become an attending surgeon of the police department. After his next post as superintendent of the County Hospital, he served as chief surgeon for Huntington interests such as the Los Angeles Railway and the Pacific Electric and for the Southern California Gas Company and the Southern California Edison company. An item in the Times on October 21, 1933, described Bryant's later work: "In January, 1926, shortly after his retirement from active practice, he founded the Good Hope Hospital Association, dedicated to the hospitalization of needy persons." The man was no slouch as a clubman either—cited in his tributes were memberships in the California, University, and Athletic clubs downtown as well as in the Midwick Country Club and in San Francisco's Bohemian and Pacific Union
  • After her husband died, and with the decline of even the westerly reaches of what was now designated Adams Boulevard accelerating even faster with the Depression near its nadir, Mrs. Bryant decided to take what was no doubt a considerable loss on her less-than-two-decades-old house and made plans to join the continuing exodus of the affluent from the district. She wasn't going to become a full rustic and move to her Rancho Santa Ana; in fact, she would be maintaining an in-town residence, briefly in South Pasadena before moving to San Marino. On January 12, 1936, the Times reported that Mrs. Bryant had been occupying Mrs. Hancock Banning's South Pasadena house for several months and would that week be moving her furniture from 3210 to another temporary residence on Oak Grove Avenue in San Marino while she awaited the completion of a new house nearby. (Mrs. Banning, another old-guard West Adamsite, had returned for a time to her house at 240 West Adams Boulevard, which she was having trouble selling.) A small item in the Times on June 21 described a house being built by Mrs. Bryant in San Marino, one designed by Gordon B. Kaufmann, though this may have been misinformation. Social items in the press have Mrs. Bryant at 1280 Shenandoah Road, San Marino, by early the next year. The house at that address remains standing, though it is attributed to Roland E. Coate, who, as it happens, often worked with Kaufmann; it appears that if Mrs. Bryant was having Kaufmann build her a house, she may have decided to abandon the project, or sell it before moving in, instead buying 1280 Shenandoah from Jerome H. Bishop, who had recently had it on the market
  • On September 25, 1936, what was now the Department of Building and Safety issued a demolition permit for 3210 to the Whiting-Mead Company, which had the contract to clear the not-quite-20-year-old house from the lot. As economic conditions improved after the recession of 1937-38, and just in time to help with the influx of war workers to the city, plans for a three-building apartment complex were carried out by developer Abraham Markowitz, to whom a permit was issued on December 1, 1939, for its construction. A tennis court was part of property; it was situated between the new Colonial Revival–style apartments still on the site and the Bryant's original garage building at the south side of the lot, which may have survived for nearly another half century, appearing to not have come down until an additional 30-unit building covered the southerly half of the original parcel by the spring of 1994  
  • Susanna Bixby Bryant died on a visit to Santa Barbara on October 2, 1946. Her death was termed sudden; she was 66. Her legacy of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden is recounted in a history of the project published six months after her death; by the time another five years had passed, the garden had been relocated 20 miles north to Claremont though it would retain its original name. Under an agreement made in May 1950, the garden was to continue in a permanent aflliation with Claremont College, remaining an independent teaching institution with its own board of trustees, funding, and staff. Land given by Ellen Browning Scripps to the college at the time of its founding in 1925 was to be the new home of Mrs. Bryant's legacy; it thrives there today as "the largest botanic garden dedicated to California native plants, promoting botany, conservation and horticulture to inspire, inform and educate the public and scientific community about California's native flora," according to its website
  • In a sad postscript, Susanna and Richard Dakin, along with their son Roger and his wife and four of their five children, and two crew, were killed when the Lockheed Lodestar carrying the family south from the Bay Area on a holiday trip went down 30 miles north of La Paz in Baja California on December 20, 1966


On the site of the Bryant house since 1940 are three Colonial Revival apartment houses; just behind
them is a larger apartment building completed in 1994 covering the entire rear of the original lot. 




 Illustrations: Private Collection; Men of the Pacific Coast