141 Westmoreland Place

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  • Completed in 1905 on Lot 141 of the Westmoreland Place Tract by Texas-born real estate developer Wesley Clark
  • Architect: Hudson & Munsell (Frank D. Hudson and William A. O. Munsell)
  • The Los Angeles Express of May 27, 1905, offered a photograph and detailed description of the house, its exterior already largely completed: "Wesley Clark's home stands on the [northwest] corner of Westerly drive [today, Menlo Avenue] and Eleventh street....In its architectural arrangement it is distinctive and striking. The heavy timbered and gable effects and the light color of the general exterior of the building contrast agreeably with the reddish brown tinge of the roof and brown sandstone of the lower exterior. The massive chimneys, of the same general color, and [their] tower effects, add to the imposing character of the exterior. The dwelling covers a ground space of 67.4 by 96.5 feet. It stands nearer the west line of [the tract] and commands a view which reaches far into the Cahuenga valley. The building contains twenty rooms, exclusive of the halls and smaller rooms pertaining to a family mansion of this class. On the first floor is a reception hall, 17 by 15 feet; a library, 25 by 17 feet; a billiard room, 29 by 17 feet; a drawing room, 23 by 17½ feet; a dining room, 25 by 17½ feet; a kitchen, 18½ by 17 feet, and four servants' rooms. On the second floor are five large bedchambers, three bathrooms and a lavatory; a hallway, 16 by 22 feet; a sewing room, 16 by 16 feet, and two balconies. In the attic are storage rooms, and in the basement are wine cellars, vegetable cellars, cold storage rooms and fuel and furnace rooms. The finish and equipment of the building will be complete in every detail, and even now it is regarded as one of the show places of the city."
  • An item in the Express on October 24, 1905, apparently placed by Wesley Clark himself, announced that he and his wife were moving into the newly completed 141 Westmoreland Place "today." The item also reported that "This leaves vacant Mr. and Mrs. Clark's residence at 234 West Adams Street" and suggests that those interested should contact Mr. Clark at his office
  • The vast rooms of 141 Westmoreland Place did not go to waste; the Los Angeles dailies covered numerous social functions hosted by the Clarks in the house, culminating in the marriages of their daughter Lucile to Houghton Metcalf of Providence at home on the evening of November 4, 1913, and of daughter Sarah to Walter Brunswig on January 21, 1914, also at home. (Walter Brunswig was the son of pharmaceutical mogul Lucien Napoleon Brunswig of 3528 West Adams Street)
  • While living back in Dallas, Wesley Clark had had two daughters, Nellie and Inez, by his first wife, Ida, who died in May 1885. Moving to Los Angeles not long after, intending to ride the Boom of the Eighties, he went into real estate on his own, though apparently becoming associated to some degree with established real estate and insurance man Elden P. Bryan (another native Texan and recent arrival from Dallas, he in December 1885) and Bryan's then-partner Frank M. Kelsey. By 1893 Bryan & Kelsey had become Clark & Bryan. In March 1888, Wesley Clark married 25-year-old Mississippi native Sarah Russell. Lucile was born to them in December 1889, Sarah in February 1891, and William Russell Clark—finally a boy—in October 1892. The family of seven lived on South Flower Street until 1893, that year building 234 West Adams, from which they moved to 141 Westmoreland Place 12 years later. Nellie Clark married Reginald J. C. Wood in May 1903 as her father was planning his new subdivision
  • In what one might have suspected was a Clark & Bryan publicity stunt, the Herald of August 7, 1904, featured 11-year-old Russell Clark as a businessman on the move. "A few weeks ago Russell Clark addressed Wesley Clark thus: 'I have decided to go into the real estate business and I want to buy a lot.'" Russell had his eye on Clark & Bryan's Bungalow Row, a tract of modest-sized building sites just outside the north gates of Westmoreland Place. In what would turn out to be a harbinger relating to the future success of the Place, Wesley Clark replied, "Keep your money, Russell, there's nothing in it." "Well, why don't you get out of it, then, and not spend all you ever made in advertising Westmoreland?" asked Russell. "The whole thing, my boy, has grown upon me." "If the whole thing has grown upon you I think that Los Angeles is big enough to allow me to grow up to it, and I have decided to grow up a real estate man. I want to buy a lot and get out my signs right away." After the dissolution of the Clark & Bryan firm on November 7, 1906—the day after Bryan's daughter Bessie married real estate man Luther T. Bradford, Bryan going on to partner with his new son-in-law—Russell would indeed join his father in business as Wesley Clark & Company. Father and son would try to revive the fortunes of Westmoreland Place, to no avail. By early 1923, they were, interestingly, in the poultry business, having opened Darby Farms in San Bernardino. In later life, Russell became a shipyard worker up north in Richmond
  • Russell Clark's hormones were pumping. Eight years later, in November 1912, he created a scandal when he eloped with 21-year-old Clytie Cosper Elizalde, who'd already been divorced from Joseph Elizalde of Santa Barbara. Wesley and Sarah Clark disapproved; when asked by the Herald to comment, they noted that their son had only just turned 20, shy of the apparent legal age without parental consent of 21. There were rumors that the Clarks would seek to have the marriage annulled; when asked by the Herald whether or not he would take immediate steps toward annulling the marriage, Wesley Clark, perhaps having gotten a better idea of the couple's affinity, told the paper, "No, they're married—let them stay married. I haven't anything to say about it." Russell and Clytie separted five months later. On April 22, 1913, the Herald reported that "It is understood an annullment will be sought on the ground that Clark was under age and did not have his parents' consent."




Wesley Clark and E. P. Bryan advertised heavily in Los Angeles newspapers
and were successful at courting real estate reporters for additional coverage during early
early promotions of the tract and again in the early 1910s in a second (and no more successful)
push to sell lots. At top is an image appearing in the Express on May 27, 1905; above, one of
the house used alongside a picture of Bryan's 41 in a large advertisement placed in the
Herald on March 7, 1911, and, below, in that periodical on March 16, 1912.



  • Wesley Clark intended to move out of 141 Westmoreland well before Lucile's wedding in November 1913; advertisements offering the house for sale (along with a new spec house at 156), placed by Wesley Clark & Company, appeared as early as January 1912. Ads offering the house for long-term rental or for sale began to appear again in October 1913. Even as early as this Westmoreland Place had become a failure, its many empty lots going begging. Los Angeles was now determindly motorized, and affluent builders of big houses were leapfrogging the close-in tract for those farther afield such as Berkeley Square, Windsor Square, Fremont Place, and even distant Beverly Hills. Renters of 141, a white elephant after less than a decade, were fairly scarce, and short-termers. The Clarks would now live primarily at their Hotel Darby, which Wesley opened in 1910 on the site of the family's former residence at 234 West Adams, though the family would retain ownership of 141 into the 1930s
  • Renting 141 Westmoreland Place during 1915 and 1916 was James Kennedy, a general contractor, followed for a similarly short period by Melville Ross Gooderham of Toronto, apparently occupying the house as a winter home
  • In a moment of glamour for what was by now a largely windswept Westmoreland Place—only nine houses had ever been built on its 56 lots—Hollywood came to roost briefly for a few years in 1919, with 141 playing a pivotal role in filmdom's discovery of Beverly Hills as its residential suburb of choice
  • Silent superstar Mary Pickford, born Gladys Smith in Toronto in 1892, was given her stage name by producer David Belasco for a 1907 Broadway play; "Pickford" was to become the Smiths' brand name, adopted by the rest of the family. By the summer of 1918, Mary had left her first husband, Irish-born actor Owen Moore, and was secretly courting Douglas Fairbanks while seeking a divorce. Mary's mother Charlotte Hennessey Smith (a.k.a. Charlotee Hennessey Pickford, Charlotte Pickford Smith, and Charlotte Pickford) appears to have become the organizer of a base for her daughter as well as for Mary's actress sister Lottie Pickford Rupp—also separated from her husband—and, briefly, once he was demobbed after the Armistice, for the sisters' brother Jack Pickford and his actress-wife Olive Thomas. The family first came together at 56 Fremont Place, in August 1918 renting it for a year. After the lease was up, Charlotte, Mary, Lottie, and Lottie's three-year-old-daughter Mary Charlotte Rupp came to alight for a time at 141 Westmoreland Place. (The chemical escapades of Jack Pickford and Olive Thomas would soon create one of the first of the notorious Hollywood scandals of the early 1920s, as related in the story of 646 South Gramercy Place)


 As featured in the Herald on August 7, 1904, the year before his family moved from Adams
 Street to Westmoreland  Place, Russell Clark was a boy in a hurry to grow up. "No novice
in business," the paper reported, "for three years he has been in the chicken business,
having turned the few square feet of the family rear yard into a profitable hennery."
Russell had decided to get out of poultry, taking his considerable profits to buy 
a lot in his father's Bungalow Row—just north of Westmoreland Place—which
he was intending to flip. Just eight years later, he ran off to get married.


  • The incessant westward growth of Los Angeles would render many a neighborhood unfashionable in less than a generation, but few were left in the dust as quickly as Westmoreland Place. With the postwar recession beginning, Wesley Clark was lucky to find the Pickford household and its Hollywood money as renters of his barn of a house at 141. Charlotte Pickford Smith had no intention of remaining so far downtown in a déclassé neighborhood; hankering always for upper-middle-class respectabilty, she yearned to return to Fremont Place. She bought #129 there in May 1920, but not before all manner of family comings and goings at the rented Clark house
  • Mary Pickford had married Owen Moore in 1911. Their relationship was a rocky one, he, it was rumored, being fond of a drink. The Moores were separated by the time the family moved to 56 Fremont Place in August 1918, Mary and Douglas Fairbanks's relationship (and cohabitation) another Hollywood rumor. In the 1920 federal census enumerated on January 9, Charlotte Pickford Smith is listed as head of the household at 141 Westmoreland Place. Mary Pickford Moore is also listed, as is Lottie Pickford Rupp, both indicated as married, but with spouses absent. Mrs. Rupp's three-year-old daughter Mary Charlotte Rupp was also part of the household but was now being called Mary Pickford Rupp
  • While officially living at 141 Westmoreland Place, Mary Pickford had been spending a great deal of time in Beverly Hills with actor Douglas Fairbanks, who'd bought the country home of Lee Allen Phillips in 1918. After finally being granted a divorce from Owen Moore on March 2, 1920, she married Fairbanks eight days later, with the Beverly Hills house forever afterward being referred to as Pickfair. (The establishment of Pickfair would, of course, be the famous catalyst that would begin to draw film folk away from the stuffy central Los Angeles strongholds of the local establishment, which became less enchanted with stars as the scandals of the early '20s unspooled) 
  • On July 24, 1920, Charlotte Pickford, having already decided that little Mary Charlotte Rupp should be called Mary Pickford Rupp as an interim measure, legally adopted the child as her own—giving her two daughters named Mary—and changed the child's name yet again to Mary Charlotte Pickford. The Evening Herald reported that day, rather creepily, that "Mrs. Smith took the child as her daughter to brighten her home at 141 Westmoreland place and to relieve the loneliness caused by the absence of "America's sweetheart." Sitting in court during the brief proceedings were little Mary's estranged parents, Lottie and "wealthy New Yorker" Albert G. Rupp. The former owners of 129 Fremont Place had moved out of that house the week before, but it is unclear as to whether Charlotte and Mary Charlotte Pickford ever moved in for any length of time. There had been press reports of Mama Charlotte building another elaborate house in Fremont Place, but this does not seem to have been built, she deciding instead to live at the recently opened Ambassador Hotel
  • Another big Hollywood name would soon pass through 141 Westmoreland Place. Actor, director, producer, and studio head Mack Sennett may have rented for only a year, or perhaps five; one of his biographers contends that his tenure lasted throughout the 1920s. This does not seem to be the case; neither does the biographer's contention that the house appears in Sennett's 1924 Harry Langdon comedy short "The Luck o' the Foolish" (the featured house in the film is more obviously a backdrop). Sennett seems to have had a fondness for big houses, though his ambitions went beyond even the substantial Clark house: Sennett would be one of the developers Hollywoodland, opened in 1923 (the surviving first nine letters of its promotional sign are the famous Los Angeles landmark). There, atop what was called at first Mount Hollywoodland, Sennett intended to build a huge million-dollar palace, commissioning architect John L. DeLario to come up with a plan. Sennett only got as far as flattening the top of Mount Hollywoodland before running out of money. (The son of well-known Cadillac dealer Don Lee later bought the site to build Los Angeles's first television studio and renamed the peak Mount Lee.) In the meantime, Sennett spent his time at 141 Westmoreland making full use of the house for entertaining. One notable event took place on October 27, 1921, when he held a dinner party for comedy star Mabel Normand, who was starring in Sennett's new film, Molly O. Afterward there was a screening of the movie and dancing
  • By the early 1920s the fate of Westmoreland Place began to be wrangled over. E. P. Bryan had a new partner and Wesley Clark was working with his son. There were proposals to turn the empty space of the tract into a city park; hotels and apartment houses were also suggested. Wesley and Sarah Clark maintained their house, though in some years during the decade they were listed in city directories at the Hotel Darby and also at a modest house at 2647 Raymond Avenue, perhaps during the continued rental by Mack Sennett or by others


The Clark house appears at the upper center in this 1931 aerial view; Vermont Avenue, running
at top left, had been widened six years before, encroaching on the lot and the garage.


  • Adding to the waning of Westmoreland Place was the city's decree that Vermont Avenue, after pushes to widen the key north-south roadway since at least 1908, be widened further. As the tract's western border, Wesley Clark's property was affected; his 1½-story, 40-by-60-foot garage at 141 would need to have its footprint reduced. On March 28, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued Clark a permit to alter the building; despite the faded nature of the neighborhood, he didn't just call in a builder but instead hired top architect T. Beverley Keim to redesign. (Keim was also busy at the time working on the Jenkins-Getty-Desmond house at 641 South Irving Boulevard). Perhaps still renting the house out, though, the Clarks had moved to 1401 South St. Andrews Place, where Mr. Clark died on December 12, 1926. Sarah Clark moved back to 141 Westmoreland Place after her husband's death even with the impending removal of the tract's gates as the neighborhood was finally being redeveloped into the apartment-house district of today. Once the neighborhood became ungated, the Place was integrated into the city grid, its westerly drive becoming part of Menlo Avenue. Mrs. Clark's house was readdressed 1041 Menlo; she would remain there until 1930 with Inez, who, despite having caught her sister Lucile's bouquet back in 1913, was never to marry. Sarah Clark would be moving to the Hershey Arms on Wilshire Boulevard and later across the boulevard to the Arcady, where she died on March 28, 1945
  • The proverbial white elephant before its time, anyone interested in grand houses having long since moved west, the Depression would cause what was now 1041 Menlo Avenue further indignity. While demolition was staved off, it became a rooming house and meeting venue. Known as "Menlo Manor" from early 1931, the larger rooms were rented out for club gatherings and lectures, its dining room the scene of the occasional banquet. A permit issued by the Department of Building and Safety on March 19, 1934, for termite repairs noted that 1041 was a "boarding house"; the owner of record was now the Title Insurance & Trust Company (one hopes that Mrs. Clark's house wasn't foreclosed upon). The apparently unrelated Jennie P. Clark ran the house in its early years
  • While still a rooming house, a name change and new focus came to 1041 Menlo Avenue in 1941. Classified advertisements for "Fireside Lodge, for the elderly," began to appear that summer. Pioneer mining man Louis A. Boyer and his wife Olorenza had bought the house to create the new business as a retirement project. (Having just turned 80, Louis A. Boyer would die at Fireside Lodge on January 30, 1945. He had operated the O.K. Mine at Twentynine Palms in the 1890s and then become an interior decorator [i.e., painting contractor] in Riverside. In 1913, he went into the oil business and drilled one of the first wells on Signal Hill)
  • Numerous permits were issued regarding 1041 Menlo Avenue by the Department of Building and Safety over the next 50 years. At least a dozen permits were issued to Olorenza Boyer for various interior and exterior alterations during the 940s and '50s. The name Fireside Lodge continued into the 1960s, though the business had been sold by Mrs. Boyer. A large new medical facility was added to the southeast corner of the lot (i.e., at the northeast corner of Vermont Avenue and Eleventh Street) in 1964, which survives today
  • Demolition permits for the 1905 Clark house and garage were issued on August 7, 1991. A parking lot for the Koryo Family Medical Center, which occupies the 1964 building, marks the site of 141 Westmoreland Place today



Illustrations: LAH; LAE; UCSBDL
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