2076 West Adams Boulevard
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In a 1998 paean to businessman Daniel Murphy, the Los Angeles Times called him "the city's richest and most powerful man," adding unironically that it is to him that we owe the creation of Needles, Colton and El Segundo. "Even today," the Times continued in 1998, "although few recognize his name, the foundation he established remains the largest single benefactor of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese...." And of course for a figure so important as to rate one of those mockregal papal titles—in his case "Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher," whatever that could be—there would be no scrimping when it came to his own comfort and embellishments to his elaborate estate—or, rather, it seems, no scrimping when it came to giving into wifely wheedling. Murphy was well-known as a self-effacing man, one who might have been happy to remain living in the small frame house at 2858 Orchard Avenue, modest for the West Adams district, that he and Mrs. Murphy bought not long after their marriage in San Jose on February 25, 1900. Antoinette Sinnott Murphy had snagged a big one, however, and, as a determined social climber, understood that conspicuous consumption was the key to being considered top-drawer in provincial Los Angeles, as did her contemporary, the inspirational Estelle Doheny of Chester Place, who not long before had begun her ascent as a telephone operator. The first building permit for what was actually the second 2076 West Adams Street was issued by the Department of Buildings on October 1, 1908; designed by the in-demand team of architects Frank D. Hudson and William A. O. Munsell, Murphy's modern and distinctive palace was ready by mid 1910. Perhaps one of the prettiest houses ever built in Los Angeles, it has sadly gone to its reward, as has the house moved to 2193 West Adams Street to make way for it.
Dan Murphy had been renovating the house his late friend and business associate Clinton Sterry built at 2607 Wilshire Boulevard in 1897; while by 1908 Wilshire Boulevard had developed into a linear neighborhood of grand residences, its cachet and that of its aborning adjacent neighborhoods was at least a decade from beginning to usurp the desirabilty of the Adams corridor. With views to the north from the original blocks of Wilshire early on featuring oil derricks of the Los Angeles City Oil Field, there is little doubt that Nettie Murphy decided after smelling the petroleum fumes to push Dan to work out a plan to develop the property he'd bought at 2076 West Adams from real estate investor Jane Ridgway in 1903; this south-sloping 589-foot-deep Adams Street lot afforded spectacular southerly views toward the Pacific. Mrs. Ridgway had built a typical suburban frame house on the parcel as her own home in 1896, perhaps as much for its value as an investment, in the newly annexed Western Addition beyond Hoover Street. Equal as dealmakers, Mrs. Ridgway and Murphy had settled on having the original 2076 moved to a lot 1,000 feet west and across Adams on the site of the future William Andrews Clark Library, turned 180 degrees, with the house then resuming its function as the Ridgway residence.
An illustration of the ambivalence bedeviling the rich when it came to deciding on desirable early-20th-century Los Angeles neighborhoods was Daniel Murphy's hedge of bets in acquiring properties both in the West Adams district and on Wilshire Boulevard. In September 1904, a year after buying 2076 West Adams, Murphy purchased 2607 Wilshire from the estate of Clinton Sterry, for whom he had recently served as a pallbearer. Born in Pennsylvania in 1855, Murphy began his rise by working as a conductor on the St. Joseph & Denver City Railroad, which ran through his hometown of Hanover in northeastern Kansas. Setting off for California in 1878 to become a brakeman with the Southern Pacific, his Gilded Age drive would turn all he touched to gold. After going on to develop the railroad stop of Needles into a town in the 1880s and developing a sideline in mineral prospecting, he financed the reorganization of the California Portland Cement Company in 1894 and then founded the Brea Cañon Oil Company, all of which provided the means to speculate in land, including property in Los Angeles. A largely forgotten Los Angeles legend, Murphy, to whose wife's growing sense of power the Venetian suggestions of 2607 Wilshire may have originally appealed, made the effort to enlarge the Sterry house from 14 to 17 rooms. Ultimately he decided that, as fashionable (if smelly) as Gaylord Wilshire's subdivision might be, the Ridgway property in the much more established Adams District, once it was augmented by further lot purchases, would allow for a grander in-town estate than what was by comparison a suburban lot on Wilshire. In any case, while remaining on Orchard Avenue all during this period of indecision, along came a third Big Swinging Dick, a friend of Murphy's who was apparently unperturbed by oil odors. Isaac Milbank—his wife was a Borden's Milk heiress—took 2607 Wilshire off the Murphys' hands in May 1905. The Ridgway deal done and the Wilshire house unloaded, visions of another sort of Italian palace danced in Nettie Murphy's head.
While it could perhaps not have been anything as pathological as megalomania, a mere 165-foot-wide lot, even if it was 589 feet deep, would not wind up suiting Nettie Murphy's taste for baronial extravagance. In the mid 1910s, the Murphys acquired the circa-1896 Corson-Burbridge-Werner house next door at 2080 West Adams and cleared it from its lot to add another 165 feet to his frontage; the property now totaled 4½ acres. The combined parcels were renamed on survey maps as the "Antoinette Tract" in honor of Mrs. Murphy. But Murphy didn't stop at a mere 4½ acres. In 1928, the 14-room brick house just to the east at 2070 West Adams, called "Wildaire" and completed in 1906 by Cameron E. Thom, mayor of Los Angeles from 1882 to 1884—also designed by Hudson & Munsell—was demolished. The Murphys would now have an in-town fiefdom of 6¾ acres, with 2076 at its center, to enjoy for the last decade of his life. By then, an elevator had been added to the house to ease the burden of climbing stairs, with both Dan and Nettie ailing. Even still, the family continued retreating in summers to "Wynanspray," their house on 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach.
While they were now ensconced in their own, shall we say, Vatican, with interiors by Frances Elkins and Nettie's elaborate gardens designed by no less than Wilbur Cook—a greenhouse and lath houses and pergolas and follies and fountains completing her dream, the scheme updated by Florence Yoch in 1929—the onset of the Depression would quickly make it clear that West Adams, even its estate area, was no Beverly Hills or Bel-Air. While the immediate neighborhood would retain its appeal to some diehards of the city's social Old Guard for another decade, the Adams District's aging housing stock and crumbling eastern reaches could no longer compete with those western suburbs or subdivisions that had begun to emerge out on Wilshire Boulevard beginning in 1911, when Fremont Place and Windsor Square opened, creating a real estate draining effect that redoubled when lots in Hancock Park were put sale in late 1919. But by the early '30s, even with his property devalued housing-wise, in an unfashionable location and expensive to maintain—even for a Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher—Murphy would be staying on Adams Boulevard.
Antoinette Murphy fell ill in mid 1937, expiring at home on June 16 of the following year. A funeral was held in her private chapel at 2076 West Adams. A week shy of his 81st birthday, Dan died at 2076 on September 14, 1939, following a heart attack. Bernardine was left with the wherewithal to maintain the house through the servant-scarce war years; she would also succeed her father as president of several of his businesses and become a director of his California Portland Cement Company, which had become Murphy's most important business asset. When romance finally appeared in Bernardine's life, it was naturally under Catholic auspices—and with an Irish component, of course, one even including the given name of her father—and it was discovered practically in her own back yard, or more precisely, just across the street at the Murphy-financed St. John of God Sanitarium, which had opened in 1943 in the former Neustadt/Fitzgerald house at 2443 South Western Avenue. Working there was Brother Daniel Joseph Donohue. According to the Times in 1998, "When one of Bernardine's servants became ill and wanted to die in his native Germany, Donahue [sic] volunteered to take him there. Later Donahue [sic] and Bernardine met again in Rome and a romance blossomed." Once he was released from his religious vows by Pope Pius XII, 35-year-old Donohue and 49-year-old Bernardine were married on January 16, 1954. No longer a Brother, Daniel Joseph Donohue had them instead. Soon after, the newlyweds decided that Adams Boulevard's residential days were definitely done and that it was best left to institutions. Setting their sights on Earle C. Anthony's property at 3431 Waverly Drive in Los Feliz, one famously designed by Bernard Maybeck, they acquired it and then, in the family tradition when it came to making one's home comfy, went to town making improvements, adding an elevator, pools, fountains, you name it—a gazebo, some statuary, and mature trees were even helicoptered from 2076 West Adams to the new house. (Interestingly, Daniel Donohue's name appears as the owner of the house on many building permits involved.) For her part, Bernardine furnished one room on Waverly Drive as a replica of the pope's prayer room in Rome. Then the couple's titles arrived from the Vatican. For their work in establishing the Dan Murphy Foundation in 1957 and for its largesse to Catholic causes, as of 1960 there would now be Countess Bernardine Murphy Donohue; for three of his many honors (Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Knight Commander of St. Gregory, and, echoing his late father-in-law, Knight Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of Holy Sepulcher), Countess Donohue's consort was now Sir Daniel Donohue. In tune with the snobbish tendencies of the Sinnott sisters and of Bernardine, he had acquired quite a taste for the good life after the asceticism of the sanitarium; the "Collection of Sir Daniel Donohue," as Bonhams & Butterfields called it—1,000 lots of European furniture, objets de vertu, silver, and decorative and fine arts—sold at auction in 2011 for over $4,000,000.
While after the Countess's fatal heart attack at the age of 63 on March 5, 1968, the Los Feliz spread would be donated to the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for use as a convent, it is the disposition of 2076 West Adams Boulevard that is more pertinent to our story. Not surprisingly, religious interests had gained title to it as well. The Department of Building and Safety issued a demolition permit for the house on July 19, 1957, the owner indicated as the Catholic Church, which, of course, knew how to maximize the value of the gift, part of the property being leased to an oil company. In the mid 2010s nearly two dozen wells continued to pump hard by an apartment complex called St. Andrews Gardens that was built in the front yard of the vanished 2076 West Adams Boulevard in 1971.
In a 1998 paean to businessman Daniel Murphy, the Los Angeles Times called him "the city's richest and most powerful man," adding unironically that it is to him that we owe the creation of Needles, Colton and El Segundo. "Even today," the Times continued in 1998, "although few recognize his name, the foundation he established remains the largest single benefactor of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese...." And of course for a figure so important as to rate one of those mockregal papal titles—in his case "Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher," whatever that could be—there would be no scrimping when it came to his own comfort and embellishments to his elaborate estate—or, rather, it seems, no scrimping when it came to giving into wifely wheedling. Murphy was well-known as a self-effacing man, one who might have been happy to remain living in the small frame house at 2858 Orchard Avenue, modest for the West Adams district, that he and Mrs. Murphy bought not long after their marriage in San Jose on February 25, 1900. Antoinette Sinnott Murphy had snagged a big one, however, and, as a determined social climber, understood that conspicuous consumption was the key to being considered top-drawer in provincial Los Angeles, as did her contemporary, the inspirational Estelle Doheny of Chester Place, who not long before had begun her ascent as a telephone operator. The first building permit for what was actually the second 2076 West Adams Street was issued by the Department of Buildings on October 1, 1908; designed by the in-demand team of architects Frank D. Hudson and William A. O. Munsell, Murphy's modern and distinctive palace was ready by mid 1910. Perhaps one of the prettiest houses ever built in Los Angeles, it has sadly gone to its reward, as has the house moved to 2193 West Adams Street to make way for it.
Dan Murphy had been renovating the house his late friend and business associate Clinton Sterry built at 2607 Wilshire Boulevard in 1897; while by 1908 Wilshire Boulevard had developed into a linear neighborhood of grand residences, its cachet and that of its aborning adjacent neighborhoods was at least a decade from beginning to usurp the desirabilty of the Adams corridor. With views to the north from the original blocks of Wilshire early on featuring oil derricks of the Los Angeles City Oil Field, there is little doubt that Nettie Murphy decided after smelling the petroleum fumes to push Dan to work out a plan to develop the property he'd bought at 2076 West Adams from real estate investor Jane Ridgway in 1903; this south-sloping 589-foot-deep Adams Street lot afforded spectacular southerly views toward the Pacific. Mrs. Ridgway had built a typical suburban frame house on the parcel as her own home in 1896, perhaps as much for its value as an investment, in the newly annexed Western Addition beyond Hoover Street. Equal as dealmakers, Mrs. Ridgway and Murphy had settled on having the original 2076 moved to a lot 1,000 feet west and across Adams on the site of the future William Andrews Clark Library, turned 180 degrees, with the house then resuming its function as the Ridgway residence.
An illustration of the ambivalence bedeviling the rich when it came to deciding on desirable early-20th-century Los Angeles neighborhoods was Daniel Murphy's hedge of bets in acquiring properties both in the West Adams district and on Wilshire Boulevard. In September 1904, a year after buying 2076 West Adams, Murphy purchased 2607 Wilshire from the estate of Clinton Sterry, for whom he had recently served as a pallbearer. Born in Pennsylvania in 1855, Murphy began his rise by working as a conductor on the St. Joseph & Denver City Railroad, which ran through his hometown of Hanover in northeastern Kansas. Setting off for California in 1878 to become a brakeman with the Southern Pacific, his Gilded Age drive would turn all he touched to gold. After going on to develop the railroad stop of Needles into a town in the 1880s and developing a sideline in mineral prospecting, he financed the reorganization of the California Portland Cement Company in 1894 and then founded the Brea Cañon Oil Company, all of which provided the means to speculate in land, including property in Los Angeles. A largely forgotten Los Angeles legend, Murphy, to whose wife's growing sense of power the Venetian suggestions of 2607 Wilshire may have originally appealed, made the effort to enlarge the Sterry house from 14 to 17 rooms. Ultimately he decided that, as fashionable (if smelly) as Gaylord Wilshire's subdivision might be, the Ridgway property in the much more established Adams District, once it was augmented by further lot purchases, would allow for a grander in-town estate than what was by comparison a suburban lot on Wilshire. In any case, while remaining on Orchard Avenue all during this period of indecision, along came a third Big Swinging Dick, a friend of Murphy's who was apparently unperturbed by oil odors. Isaac Milbank—his wife was a Borden's Milk heiress—took 2607 Wilshire off the Murphys' hands in May 1905. The Ridgway deal done and the Wilshire house unloaded, visions of another sort of Italian palace danced in Nettie Murphy's head.
 |
A postcard view of the rear of the Murphy house illustrates
the advantage taken by house builders of the southerly slope of
Adams Street beyond Manhattan Place; the lot of 2076, with a frontage
of 165 feet, extended 589 terraced feet down to West 27th Street. The view
north up the slope, below, appeared in a pictorial of "Southland Homes You See
in the Movies" in the Los Angeles Times on April 5, 1936. The grounds were
designed by noted landscape architect Wilbur D. Cook Jr., among whose
other projects circa 1910 included the curving street plan of Beverly Hills and, nearer to Adams Street, Los Angeles's Exposition Park. |
While it could perhaps not have been anything as pathological as megalomania, a mere 165-foot-wide lot, even if it was 589 feet deep, would not wind up suiting Nettie Murphy's taste for baronial extravagance. In the mid 1910s, the Murphys acquired the circa-1896 Corson-Burbridge-Werner house next door at 2080 West Adams and cleared it from its lot to add another 165 feet to his frontage; the property now totaled 4½ acres. The combined parcels were renamed on survey maps as the "Antoinette Tract" in honor of Mrs. Murphy. But Murphy didn't stop at a mere 4½ acres. In 1928, the 14-room brick house just to the east at 2070 West Adams, called "Wildaire" and completed in 1906 by Cameron E. Thom, mayor of Los Angeles from 1882 to 1884—also designed by Hudson & Munsell—was demolished. The Murphys would now have an in-town fiefdom of 6¾ acres, with 2076 at its center, to enjoy for the last decade of his life. By then, an elevator had been added to the house to ease the burden of climbing stairs, with both Dan and Nettie ailing. Even still, the family continued retreating in summers to "Wynanspray," their house on 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach.
While they were now ensconced in their own, shall we say, Vatican, with interiors by Frances Elkins and Nettie's elaborate gardens designed by no less than Wilbur Cook—a greenhouse and lath houses and pergolas and follies and fountains completing her dream, the scheme updated by Florence Yoch in 1929—the onset of the Depression would quickly make it clear that West Adams, even its estate area, was no Beverly Hills or Bel-Air. While the immediate neighborhood would retain its appeal to some diehards of the city's social Old Guard for another decade, the Adams District's aging housing stock and crumbling eastern reaches could no longer compete with those western suburbs or subdivisions that had begun to emerge out on Wilshire Boulevard beginning in 1911, when Fremont Place and Windsor Square opened, creating a real estate draining effect that redoubled when lots in Hancock Park were put sale in late 1919. But by the early '30s, even with his property devalued housing-wise, in an unfashionable location and expensive to maintain—even for a Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher—Murphy would be staying on Adams Boulevard.
In Murphy mythology only recently rendered less murky in Joseph Francis Ryan's excellent 2020 biography Ice & Oil: The Life and Legacy of Dan Murphy, California's Unlikely Titan, Dan and Nettie, originally seeking a male heir on a trip to Italy, came home instead with a child named Bernardine, said to have tugged at Antoinette's sleeve while she and Dan were shopping at an orphanage; the meeting, rather, was actually in New York, where the adult Bernardine swore on a 1922 passport application to have been born on June 2, 1904. Wherever the tug occurred—it was romanticized somewhat cynically by Antoinette as a sign from God—the little girl was adopted and taken to Los Angeles to live as a princess at 2076 West Adams Street. Much later it came to light that little Bernardine had in fact been born the illegitimate daughter of Antoinette Murphy's sister Sue Sinnott. It seems that Sue lost her virtue, if it was still intact, in a dalliance with the recently married Italian Prince Enrico Ruspoli, who was apparently on a visit to California; childhood images of the result do reveal the swarthiness as well as the long nose, dark eyes, and heavy dark eyebrows of the adult Bernardine. The child was stashed in a Catholic orphanage in New York and not retreived until after the death of Nettie and Sue's mother in 1907. Brought to Los Angeles under the Murphys' ruse of having been found in Italy, Bernardine was teased if not whispered about by fellow students on her first day at Marlborough, resulting in her removal and henceforth being schooled at home and thus being given little chance to learn social skills. New money and what it could buy would shield her for her entire life, beginning with a large check written to Pope Pius X, who would bless and absolve seven-year-old Bernardine in a private audience in 1912 during a visit to Rome (during which, incidentally, Dan Murphy came to admire Mussolini). Her birth mother would live with the Murphys on Orchard Avenue and then at 2076 for the rest of her life and be called "Aunt" Sue, which must have contributed to what might have been to some degree a toxic and confusing atmosphere chez Murphy, if one mitigated by cash. The adult Bernardine would take her princely parentage seriously despite what she may or not ever have been told about her beginnings, emulating on Adams Boulevard the life of a princess, crowns, titles, golden splendor, and all. A generously-supported Catholic church had served well in covering all possible impediments to Nettie Murphy's social mountaineering though Bernardine Murphy was, as had been her parents, notably philanthropic beyond the papering over of scandal; the family's largesse was impressive beyond the million dollars a year Bernardine wired to the Vatican every year.
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A crown even: The Countess Bernardine Murphy Donohue
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Antoinette Murphy fell ill in mid 1937, expiring at home on June 16 of the following year. A funeral was held in her private chapel at 2076 West Adams. A week shy of his 81st birthday, Dan died at 2076 on September 14, 1939, following a heart attack. Bernardine was left with the wherewithal to maintain the house through the servant-scarce war years; she would also succeed her father as president of several of his businesses and become a director of his California Portland Cement Company, which had become Murphy's most important business asset. When romance finally appeared in Bernardine's life, it was naturally under Catholic auspices—and with an Irish component, of course, one even including the given name of her father—and it was discovered practically in her own back yard, or more precisely, just across the street at the Murphy-financed St. John of God Sanitarium, which had opened in 1943 in the former Neustadt/Fitzgerald house at 2443 South Western Avenue. Working there was Brother Daniel Joseph Donohue. According to the Times in 1998, "When one of Bernardine's servants became ill and wanted to die in his native Germany, Donahue [sic] volunteered to take him there. Later Donahue [sic] and Bernardine met again in Rome and a romance blossomed." Once he was released from his religious vows by Pope Pius XII, 35-year-old Donohue and 49-year-old Bernardine were married on January 16, 1954. No longer a Brother, Daniel Joseph Donohue had them instead. Soon after, the newlyweds decided that Adams Boulevard's residential days were definitely done and that it was best left to institutions. Setting their sights on Earle C. Anthony's property at 3431 Waverly Drive in Los Feliz, one famously designed by Bernard Maybeck, they acquired it and then, in the family tradition when it came to making one's home comfy, went to town making improvements, adding an elevator, pools, fountains, you name it—a gazebo, some statuary, and mature trees were even helicoptered from 2076 West Adams to the new house. (Interestingly, Daniel Donohue's name appears as the owner of the house on many building permits involved.) For her part, Bernardine furnished one room on Waverly Drive as a replica of the pope's prayer room in Rome. Then the couple's titles arrived from the Vatican. For their work in establishing the Dan Murphy Foundation in 1957 and for its largesse to Catholic causes, as of 1960 there would now be Countess Bernardine Murphy Donohue; for three of his many honors (Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Knight Commander of St. Gregory, and, echoing his late father-in-law, Knight Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of Holy Sepulcher), Countess Donohue's consort was now Sir Daniel Donohue. In tune with the snobbish tendencies of the Sinnott sisters and of Bernardine, he had acquired quite a taste for the good life after the asceticism of the sanitarium; the "Collection of Sir Daniel Donohue," as Bonhams & Butterfields called it—1,000 lots of European furniture, objets de vertu, silver, and decorative and fine arts—sold at auction in 2011 for over $4,000,000.
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| The front door of 2076 West Adams peeks out from its mid-life lushness as seen from the north side of the street. The house's low wall was extended west when the Murphys acquired the Werner property next door at 2080. The wires are over the tracks of the "A" line of the Los Angeles Railway that threaded its way from downtown, running west on Adams from Normandie Avenue to a turnaround point just past La Brea until service on the route ended on June 30, 1946. |
Illustrations: Private Collection; LAPL; LAT; Bernard Johnson
