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301 North Las Palmas Avenue




  • Completed in early 1938 on Lot 189 in Tract 8230
  • Original commissioner: Frances Winstel, widow of real estate operator August Winstel
  • Architect: Homer D. Rice
  • On November 24, 1937, the Department of Building and Safety issued Mrs. August Winstel permits for a two story, "7+"-room residence and a one-story, 25-by-30-foot garage at 301 North Las Palmas Avenue
  • German-born August Winstel arrived in New York via Hamburg on August 1, 1882, and made his way to Los Angeles the next year. Going to work as a clerk in a haberdashery, he opened his own clothing store within several years. Deciding as did many men new to Southern California to go into real estate, Winstel formed a partnership with Henry Martz, who had been dealing in Los Angeles property since arriving from Detroit in 1880. Among the team's projects was an 1898 building at Broadway and Fourth Street to house an annex to the Hotel Van Nuys on Main Street run by Milo Potter. Known unprepossessingly at first as the Hotel Van Nuys Annex, it became the Hotel Van Nuys Broadway, with Martz's wife Elizabeth owning the northern half of the building and Winstel's wife Frances the southern half. Martz owned considerable downtown real estate at his death in November 1905, just a year after building his imposing residence at 655 Park View Street at the foot of Wilshire Boulevard; a fire destroyed the Van Nuys Broadway that Christmas Eve, with Mrs. Martz's part of the complex being remodeled with much upgraded fire-suppression methods and Mrs. Winstel's half being demolished and in 1908 replaced with the extant Winstel Building
  • August Winstel's partnership with Henry Martz brought him more than just business opportunities. On May 4, 1896, 14 days before he became a naturalized U.S. citizen, he married Henry Martz's sister Frances, who had had been born on February 23, 1873, in Detroit, the Martz siblings' father having arrived there from Germany in 1836 as an early settler. As August and his brother-in-law built speculative cottages and other buildings downtown during 1896, Wintsel built one for himself and Frances that year at 1220 South Grand Avenue. Their daughter Regina Maria was born on August 31, 1901; Bertha Susana arrived on March 24, 1908, after the family had moved to a grand new house. As commerce began to move south from the business district toward the Wintsels' Grand Avenue neighborhood, many of its residents chose to move much farther west into the developing farther reaches of the Adams Street and Wilshire Boulevard corridors as public rail and private automobile transportation improved. In 1906 the Winstels instead chose a much-closer-in lot on which to build an imposing new house at the northwest corner of Alvarado and West 12th streets in what is today mapped as the Pico-Union district; 1147 South Alvarado Street still stands in 2023 after 117 years.


1147 South Alvarado Street, 1906 and in 2023; the Winstel family built it in 1906 and remained
 there until moving to Hancock Park 32 years later. It is today occupied by the
straightforwardly named Alcoholism Center for Women.


  • August Winstel maintained close friendships among Los Angeles's fellow German-born and German-American capitalists such as Wurzburg-born John Hauerwaas, Bad Krueznach–born brewer Christian Krempel, and Detroit-born Henry Martz; another deer- and duck-hunting pal was Swiss-born Nestlé's heir Auguste Marquis. Christian Krempel's brother John P. Krempel was a leading Los Angeles architect; it was he who the Winstels had design his Alvarado Street residence as well as the Winstel Building. August Winstel died on November 25, 1935, at the age of 72, still living at 1147 South Alvarado. The neighborhood, having become one of rooming houses and rest homes, was by then decidedly déclassé. Frances Winstel, left well provided for, made plans to leave Alvarado Street for Hancock Park, the real estate values of which were was recovering from the Depression. There were still empty lots in the subdivision and Mrs. Winstel chose one at the northwest corner of Las Palmas Avenue and Beverly Boulevard where she commissioned Homer D. Rice, who specialized in apartment buildings and smaller houses, to design a modern residence for her and her still unmarried daughters
  • Bertha Susana Winstel—known by her middle name—appears to have married J. W. "Bill" O'Sullivan, a building material salesman, by late 1942, and gave birth to Michael Denis O'Sullivan on June 22, 1943. The O'Sullivans moved into to one of the early townhouses of what became Park La Brea and, according to news items, later lived in Beverly Hills
  • Regina Winstel never married; still living with her mother at 301 North Las Palmas, she died at California Hospital on Halloween 1948, age 47. By 1950, Susana, though indicated in the Federal census of that year as still being married, was living with her mother back at 301. She would remarry in 1955, her husband John R. Gordon adopting her son, who became Michael Denis Gordon  
  • Still living at 301 North Las Palmas, Frances Martz Winstel died on April 21, 1953, at the age of 80
  • Occupying 301 North Las Palmas during the mid 1950s was advertising executive Roy Hilton Campbell and his family. On August 18, 1955, Campbell was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety to add an 18-by-36-foot pool to the property
  • Grocery-store owner Max Fine moved into 301 North Las Palmas Avenue by 1958; Fine and his brother Al operated markets called Fine's Food Centers in Boyle Heights, in the Florence-Firestone district, and in the Valley. Max Fine died while at work on August 24, 1959, leaving his widow Esther, three sons, and a daughter. Eldest son Jack David married Maxine Factor, namesake granddaughter of the cosmetics mogul, at the Beverly Hilton in March 1961. Esther and Ruth would be staying at 301 until 1962


The indefatigable entrepreneur Floyd Clymer was a man apart from the usual
Hancock Park businessman, one who cared more for internal combustion
than most, which is saying something in Los Angeles. Clymer's road
to Hancock Park wound from Indiana to Colorado to Washington
state and included a term in Leavenworth. He is seen here
on the cover of one of his numerous publications. At
top is his 1964 Mercury test car parked in front
of 301 North Las Palmas Avenue, which
he had only recently moved into.


  • Moving to 301 North Las Palmas Avenue from his longtime nearby home at 1125 Keniston Avenue in 1963 was a motorcycle dealer, distributor, and enthusiast and a publisher of numerous books on motorcycle and automobile history and maintenance, as well as magazines and his own book-length reviews of new cars; his road tests appeared frequently in Popular Mechanics magazine. A properly deserving hero of sorts to a nationwide audience, the backstory of Indianapolis-born Joseph Floyd Clymer is one that makes his arrival in Los Angeles at the height of the Depression seem inevitable. In June 1910, at the age of 14, he and his 12-year-old brother Elmer drove a  Flanders Model 20—a competitor of the Model T—1,400 miles from Denver to Spokane, their physician father having moved to Washington state. Reputed to have become the youngest-ever automobile and motorcycle dealer, somehow when he was 14 and living in Greeley, Colorado, he married just weeks shy of his 18th birthday, a son arriving three months later. A daughter arrived February 1919, followed by a divorce in 1925 and an immediate second marriage


Smiling on his way to the maximum-security Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth in 1930


  • The 1930 Federal census listed Floyd Clymer as an inmate at Leavenworth, apparently having been found guilty of carrying out a business scam involving the misuse of the mails, perhaps for receiving materials paid for but never sent. With his prodigious ego he was known to curry favor with the prison warden and seek special favors, presuming himself to be above the common inmate. He distinguished himself more productively as editor of Leavenworth's Jailhouse News, which led to his combining his interest in cars with publishing. He kept up an affectionate correspondence with his wife Meryle, who stood by him during his incarceration and kept the business going, even if his children were adopted by his first wife Viola's second husband. Clymer's many good years resumed once he was sprung from jail on June 15, 1931, after 15 months and made his way back to Denver and then farther west to Los Angeles
  • The Clymers first lived in Los Angeles in the heart of Silver Lake at 1602 Silverwood Terrace, then in an apartment at 101 South Kenmore Avenue. Floyd had opened his new business, Clymer Motors, by early 1933, selling outboard motors, bicycles, and, his favorite Indian motorcycles (he later bought that famous name for his own line of bikes). Clymer was later described equivocatingly by Joe Scalzo in Grand National: America's Golden Age of Motorcycle Racing this way: "Shamelessly ballyhooing his own name was old Floyd's thing, and self-aggrandizement his life's work. He was a publicity hound, sometimes a preposterous one, but always a likable one." This latter trait charmed buyers; however he may have come across, Clymer's passion and hard work paid off. By 1938 he and Meryle had bought a duplex at 1123-1125 Keniston Avenue just south of Hancock Park and moved into one side
  • Floyd and Meryle Clymer had no children of their own; his continuing success, however, led to the purchase of the larger, single-family 301 North Las Palmas Avenue in Hancock Park proper. They were still living there when Floyd died at home on January 22, 1970, at the age of 74. His editorial obituary in the Times two days later referred to his son and daughter as well as to Meryle, who survived him. She put the house on the market not long after Floyd's death and moved to a Park La Brea apartment
  • On July 27, 1967, the Department of Building and Safety had issued Floyd Clymer a permit for 301 North Las Palmas to enlarge two of its dormers
  • Texaco executive D. Allan Sedgwick, a native Angeleno and graduate of Los Angeles High School and U.S.C., and his wife, née Earle Frazier, owned 301 North Las Palmas by 1973
  • The family of married attorneys William Lawrence Nelson and Kay Neill Nelson has owned 301 North Las Palmas in recent decades
  • 301 North Las Palmas hides today behind tall vegetation at its busy corner; the image seen at top is from 1964 and appears in Floyd Clymer's book published that year celebrating the 25th anniversary of the now discontinued Mercury brand of the Ford Motor Company


Now hiding behind high hedges, 301 North Las Palmas at Beverly Boulevard was completed in 1938
 


Illustrations: Private Collection/Floyd Clymer Publications; LAT; Everything Librarian