143 Westmoreland Place
PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES
FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO WESTMORELAND PLACE, CLICK HERE
- Completed in 1912 on a parcel comprised of Lot 143 and the northerly ¾ of Lot 145 of Clark & Bryan's Westmoreland Place Tract by real estate investor Joseph Elmer Carr
- Architects: John C. Austin and Woodbury C. Pennell; the team had also recently completed plans for 156 Westmoreland Place, just down the street, which was also in its final stages of construction
- On March 19, 1911, the Los Angeles Herald reported that Wesley Clark had just sold a lot-and-a-half building parcel in Westmoreland Place to J. E. Carr; soon after, Carr purchased an additional quarter of Lot 145, resulting in his complete 175-foot wide, 196-foot deep parcel
- The Department of Buildings issued a construction permit to Carr's wife Anna on August 3, 1911, allowing for a 15-room house. The Los Angeles Times featured it on January 14, 1912, giving us the rendering seen above, the only image of the house that appears to exist; the paper's detailed description of the Carr residence is duplicated below. On February 2, Carr himself was issued a permit for a garage on the property also designed by Austin and Pennell. On February 10, the Herald reported that 143 Westmoreland Place was nearing completion
- Indiana-born Joseph Carr had arrived in Los Angeles by 1896 and gone into the grocery business; he did well enough, or brought enough capital with him, to begin purchasing downtown property, by the spring of 1899 having acquired parcels in the 600 block of Broadway that he would redevelop over the next two decades. In 1909 he sold his grocery business and went into real estate full time. To celebrate his acumen he hired architect Robert B. Young to build the J. E. Carr Building that year, which still stands at 646 South Broadway. In 1919, with R. B. Young having died, he had John C. Austin, architect of 143 Westmoreland Place, design another office building, also still standing, at 621 South Broadway
 |
| The J. E. Carr Building at 646 South Broadway, completed in 1910, had as its anchor tenant the California Furniture Company, which moved from across the street. W. & J. Sloane took over California Furniture and the space in 1928. Seven years later, the local Brooks Clothing Company moved in; the business continued as a branch of Harris & Frank after a merger in 1947. The store closed in 1980, the building empty in recent years. |
- A fire attributed to faulty wiring early on Monday morning, February 18, 1918, caused $18,000 worth of damage to 143 Westmoreland Place. The Carrs escaped unharmed. Building and Engineering News of March 13 reported that a contract for repairs was awarded to builder Burton Yarnell; John Austin was in charge of restoration work. "The work will include some new tile roofing, mahogany and white enamel interior finish, oak floors, plastering, decorating, etc."
- Joseph and Anna Carr had two children; Brenton Stanley Carr had married and moved out of the house by the time his sister Bernice was married at home on May 5, 1921. Her husband, Hugh Miller Kice, was a Mack truck salesman turned Chevrolet dealer who would also be working for his father-in-law in the real estate investment business, Carr Realty & Mortgage Company. In 1924, with Westmoreland Place a failure, Joseph Carr's son and daughter chose farther-flung Hancock Park in which to build their houses, employing John C. Austin, then in partnership with Frederic M. Ashley, to design 435 Rimpau Boulevard for Stanley and 533 Muirfield Road for Bernice. Both were apparently financed by the elder Carr
- While they certainly had an impressive venue for entertaining, the Carrs appear to have led a relatively quiet life during their 25 years in the house. Despite the legal wrangling over the fate of Westmoreland Place after its failure as a neighborhood of substantial single-family houses—years of litigation over breaking the ban on apartment houses, despite the clear preference of the affluent for living in newer districts to the west—the Carrs, as did most early Place homeowners, stayed put. Even with acres of empty, possibly indifferently kept, land around them and even after rooming houses and sanitariums were being opened in the tract's old dwellings and after the first apartment building appeared just up Menlo Avenue (the five-story Art Deco Crestwood opened just up the street from the Carrs in the spring of 1931 at 1036), they stayed. They stayed even as the Place's stone-and-iron gates were removed and its streets were absorbed into the Los Angeles grid, the easterly drive becoming part of Westmoreland Avenue and the westerly a segment of Menlo Avenue. The Carrs' address was changed from 143 Westmoreland Place to 1107 Menlo Avenue
- Anna Carr died in Los Angeles at the age of 68 on February 15, 1934. Three years later, in April 1937, Joseph married Lucy May Driggs Beswick Beswick in Yuma; the newlyweds spent a year or so living at 1107 before she, perhaps, put her foot down and insisted on moving to a more modern neighborhood. (Mrs. Beswick had been widowed by her first husband and had a short-lived second marriage to his second cousin)
- It appears that Joseph and Lucy Carr retained ownership of 1107 Menlo Avenue even after buying a recently built house at 273 South Glenroy Avenue in Westwood. Renting 1107 from 1938 until 1942 was the Rossmore Bridge Club, some of whose employees lived on the premises. In 1943, the house was taken over the Los Angeles chapter of the American Red Cross, which in 1935 had acquired the Wells house down the street at 1218 Menlo Avenue for use as its headquarters. The organization would continue to expand its presence in the neighborhood. On December 28, 1944, the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit for a "food processing building" behind 1107. The Carr parcel had by this time been divided laterally into residential and non-residential zones, with the new building occupying the westerly Vermont Avenue side of the property
- Lucy Carr died in Los Angeles on July 10, 1942, at the age of 68. Joseph died at 273 South Glenroy Avenue on March 14, 1943, a few weeks shy of his 79th birthday. While more than a paid notice, his obituary, given his stature in the local real estate community, was as modest in terms of the press but consistent with the quiet life he had lived during his years in Westmoreland Place. Noted in the Times's tribute was that Carr "was a member of the grand jury which indicted the McNamara brothers in The Times dynamiting case" of 1910.
- The Carr house was still serving as offices for the Red Cross when the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit on May 10, 1963, for chimney work and repairs to the roof. A specific demolition permit for 1107 Menlo Avenue has proven elusive, but it appears that one issued to the Red Cross on February 10, 1970, may have been the one that brought down the nearly 60-year-old house
- Currently occupying the site of the Carr house is the Olympic Community station of the Los Angeles Police Department, built in 2006
