60 Westmoreland Place

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  • Built in 1911 as a speculative venture of the real estate partnership of Elden P. Bryan and Luther T. Bradford on the southerly ¾ of Lot 60 and the northerly ½ of Lot 62 of Clark & Bryan's Westmoreland Place Tract 
  • Architect and builder: Milwaukee Building Company
  • On August 6, 1911, the Los Angeles Times reported that "an attractive fourteen-room house of the Spanish type is nearing completion for L. T. Bradford...." It was described as having a cement exterior and a tile roof; it appears to have combined Craftsman details with horizontal Prairie lines and a large picture window giving it a distinctly modern air when compared to 59 Westmoreland Place across the street
  • While details of the transfer are unclear, Los Angeles real estate operator William Ross Campbell appears to have acquired a long-empty 60 Westmoreland Place from Bryan & Bradford in 1917. Campbell was issued a permit by the Department of Buildings on September 17, 1917, for the addition of a 24-by-32-foot garage




The principals in the development of
Westmoreland Place had miscalculated the
appeal to the rich of living close to downtown;
with their ability to afford automobiles before the
mass appeal of the Model T, burghers of Los Angeles
preferred to live farther out in, for example, the equally
exclusive Berkeley Square, which opened in 1905 in direct
competition with the Place. After a split with Wesley Clark, his
original partner, Elden P. Bryan teamed up with Luther T.
Bradford. Hoping to spur more sales after the tract had
been languishing, they built #60 as a spec house in
1911; a rendering appeared in the Times that
August 6, as seen below. After completion,
the house was featured in ads during
during February 1912, above.



  • Living with Ross Campbell and his wife was Olga Campbell's daughter by a previous marriage, Genevieve Murray. Mr. Murray had died in 1910; the Campbells were married in Pasadena on May 15, 1913. According to reports of their acrimonious divorce a decade later, the "desertion"of Mrs. Campbell by Mr. Campbell began soon after the wedding—desertion in those days referring not just to absence from the household but a retreat from the connubial aspect of marriage. Slogging on for 10 years, Ross Campbell's cross-complaint following Olga's filing for divorce on September 6, 1924—and again on December 28, 1925, demanding more money—included the charge that Olga had committed indiscretions with an unknown man at 60 Westmoreland Place in August 1924. Ross left for Europe, leaving Olga the house but not enough money to maintain it. A decree and a proper settlement having been reached, Olga was living by 1930 with Genevieve (who had married Howard Sears in 1922 and been divorced) at the apparently more affordable but still luxurious El Royale on Rossmore Avenue. Ross Campbell was back in Los Angeles living alone in an apartment on Hoover Street
  • The house at 60 Westmoreland Place was in the hands of olive-oil packer Sherman E. Knapp by 1928, just as the neighborhood was entering its ungated years in which apartment buildings would begin to crowd out the nine original single-family residences, with those on the way to being given over to more than single families in one form or another. Once the physical gates were demolished and the two roadways of the Place were absorbed into South Westmoreland Avenue (the easterly drive) and Menlo Avenue (the westerly), addresses of the tract's houses were also altered. It might seem logical that merely giving the two-digit Place addresses two-digit prefixes, conforming them to general city practice—60 becoming 1260 in the case of what was now the Knapp residence—but there was confusion at first, with city directories and other sources actually printing the address as 1260 when the final designation settled on by 1930 was 1238 South Westmoreland Avenue
  • Sherman Knapp was a long-time Los Angeles produce wholesaler; in 1904 his brother Howard M. Knapp, also in the produce business, had caused Sherman embarrassment among their colleagues when he skipped town to escape debts. Sherman had been widowed in 1925; his wife Katherene had had her ups and downs, including having been arrested in New York in 1910 on a charge of being "a dangerous person pretending to foretell the future"; she claimed she was a minister of spiritualism and a teacher of metaphysics, and most certainly did not employ a crystal ball in her work. She had, however, advertised herself in Los Angeles papers from 1893 until just before her marriage to Knapp on Christmas Day 1900 as a "psychic life reader." She was quoted in a wire dispatch appearing in the Times at the time of her arrest: "For many years I have taught the beautiful, constructive philosophy of practical idealism, unfolding lives into fuller consciousness of boundless love, wisdom, health, happiness and life more abundant." After Charles P. Grogan, known throughout the west as the "Olive Oil King," died in 1921, Sherman Knapp joined his business, by 1925 assuming the presidency of the company. Knapp and his son Gordon would both live at 60 Westmoreland Place, though their stay would be brief and their ownership not much longer. Before they left they appear to have made preparations for the conversion of the house into apartments, as would now be permitted with the lifting of the tract's original covenant restricting it to single-family dwellings. On November 16, 1928, a permit was issued in the name of the Charles P. Grogan Company to convert a "laboratory"—apparently the prior re-purposing of the garage—back into an automobile storage building (Had some sort of olive-oil experiments been conducted there?)
  • By mid 1929, Gordon Knapp had married and moved out of 1238 South Westmoreland Avenue; his father was also living elsewhere, having taken a room in Lincoln Heights by April 1930. By then, 1238 was being rented by Belle K. Dings, a widow who was herself the landlady there of at least nine lodgers. The house appears to have still been owned by Sherman Knapp, who may have run into financial trouble as the Depression took hold. At any rate, the Bank of America was in possession of 1238 sometime before early 1933, when its agents were issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety on January 10 of that year for the addition of a second garage to the property. The use of the house is cited on the document as "hotel." Mrs. Dings continued to operate her lodgings until 1937. (Segueing to a tangent of noir fantasy, one imagines that the Edith Phillips who was among Mrs. Dings's lodgers later ran a bar on Figueroa Street near Temple and went on to murder her rich twin sister Margaret—Mrs. Frank de Lorca of Beverly Hills—and assume her identity, as Bette Davis played them both in the 1964 movie Dead Ringer)


A detail of the front porch of 1238 South Westmoreland Avenue as it appeared between 1937 and
1943 when it was occupied by the Helen Louise Girls' Home; an imaginative porch style
with exposed rafter ends (and their shadows) enliven a generally boxy design.


  • In 1937, before settling down to its longest-term use, 1238 South Westmoreland Avenue came under the ownership of the George Pepperdine Foundation, funded by proceeds of Mr. Pepperdine's vast Western Auto chain of car-parts and hardware stores. Pepperdine's philanthropy was investing in various multi-unit residential buildings in Los Angeles, including the deluxe Ravenswood on Rossmore Avenue, in order to use profits to fund its charitable endeavors including what is now Pepperdine University and in this case its new use of what had essentially been operating as a boarding house at 1238 South Westmoreland Avenue. "Boarding house" is indeed how the building was described on a permit issued to Pepperdine by the Department of Building and Safety on April 20, 1937, for various interior alterations. Belle K. Dings's operation would now become the Helen Louise Girls' Home, named in honor of George Pepperdine's second wife, whose pet project it was. In true parochial Pepperdine tradition, the home was intended "to aid non-delinquent Protestant [our emphasis] girl victims of homes broken by the death, divorce, or separation of their parents." The home would close after the outbreak of World War II and never reopen. During the '40s, the George Pepperdine Foundation began to divest itself of real estate, betting that oil wells, gold mines, and chemicals would be more lucrative. This misstep led to the personal bankruptcy of its founder. (More on George and Helen Louise Pepperdine is available in our story of their house at 3320 West Adams Boulevard)


The living room of the Helen Louise Girls' Home reveals its original Craftsman-style ceiling fixtures and
tile hearth; the picture window faces west toward the street. The facility's specific if exclusionary
aims were outlined in a promotional pamphlet: "While many institutions are open to Catholic
and Jewish girls, this Home is unique in that it is the only haven of its type for Protestant
non-delinquent girls." The Pepperdines enjoyed money but were never cosmopolitan.


  • Florence Evelyn Rider Ziegler Sparr bought 1238 South Westmoreland Avenue from the Pepperdine Foundation as it was reducing its real estate holdings. Apparently before 1943 having little commercial experience in the field of old-age homes, Mrs. Sparr may have been alerted to the possibilities of 1238 by her second husband William S. Sparr, a Southern California real estate operator. Once in possession of the house, she was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety on July 9, 1943, to divide the living room into three spaces. On July 16, a permit was issued for more interior work and an exterior ramp. The building is referred to as a "rooming house" on these documents; the purpose cited on a permit pulled on March 24, 1944, was to "remodel rooming house to sanitarium." The larger old houses of the Westmoreland tracts—the Place and its surrounding neighborhoods also established by Clark & Bryan—had become very popular for such institutional use
  • William S. Sparr had been the godfather of his wife's daughter Helen; the Sparrs were married in 1938. Florence Sparr's business was described over its several decades of operation variously as a rest home, a sanitarium, and a hospital, although its official title appears to have been the "Florence Sparr Homes." Mr. Sparr died in 1948, by which time Florence had purchased and moved into 1255 Elden Avenue, around the corner from 1238 at the northwest corner of Pico Boulevard. Additional property purchases included adjacent Pico frontage that would extend north to the parcel containing 1238 South Westmoreland. Construction on the first of several one-story buildings as additions to Mrs. Sparr's original sanitarium at 1238 began in the spring of 1948 just before her husband's death. By the mid '50s, the sanitarium's buildings would extend east along Pico to Elden Avenue over the site of 1255, which was apparently demolished. Its garage, however, was moved closer to 1238 South Westmoreland after a permit was issued on March 1, 1955. The Florence Sparr Homes would become part of Pacific Homes, a collection of convalescent hospitals that would later be accused of selling fixed lifetime contracts to the elderly with no way of financing them; it was characterized as a Ponzi scheme. Pacific Homes went bankrupt, although the Sparr Convalescent Hospital would continue in business for many years. In her retirement, Florence Sparr traveled; sadly, she and her daughter Helen Ziegler Vernon were among the 582 victims of the runway collision of two Boeing 747s in the Canary Islands on March 27, 1977
  • The house that began as 60 Westmoreland Place in 1911 and became 1238 South Westmoreland Avenue by 1930 lasted until 1975. A demolition permit for it was issued by the Department of Building and Safety on December 5 of that year. Although some palms planted in 1911 are still standing tall at the curb, the site remains empty and serves as a parking lot for trucks




Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; Pepperdine Libraries

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