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436 South Las Palmas Avenue




  • Completed in 1926 on Lot 119 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: real estate investor George Taylor, on spec
  • Architect: none specified on building permits; uncredited independent designers appear to have been employed as George Taylor moved from project to project, working westward through Wilshire subdivisions  
  • On December 15, 1925, George Taylor was issued permits for a two-story, 10-room residence and a one-story, 18-by-28-foot garage at 436 South Las Palmas Avenue
  • George Taylor was a prolific builder in the Wilshire corridor. He had recently completed five speculative houses on South Arden Boulevard in Windsor Square; at the time of starting 436 South Las Palmas Avenue he had projects underway in Hancock Park at 344 South Las Palmas and 427 South McCadden Place. Future projects in the subdivision would include 415 South Las Palmas and 172 South Hudson Avenue
  • Golf promoter and sporting-goods retailer George T. Cline was born a twin in Indiana on January 15, 1885. His grandparents were John A. and Agnes Cline—he was a naturalist and taxidermist—who had come to Southern California in 1869 via Indiana after living in Australia, where their oldest son, John C. Cline, had been born. Per the Times of October 15, 2020, J. C. Cline was elected as constable of Los Angeles Township in 1884, his job being to ride the range from the Valley to east of the city. In 1892 he was elected County Sheriff, his duties including "tracking down rustlers and other outlaws and transporting them to jail, keeping the transport payments for himself—which was accepted practice in those days." Replaced after two years, Cline was then appointed by President William McKinley as Collector of Customs for the Los Angeles district, in which capacity he served for eight years, turning afterward to real estate. He filed articles of incorporation for the Cline Realty Company on October 21, 1907, naming his mother Agnes Cline and his Indiana-born brothers William, George, and Casper as directors
  • Illustrating the early westward trajectory of residential Los Angeles, John A. Cline lived on Macy Street, now the site of Union Station (he died there in May 1897). John C. Cline built a house at 958 South Bonnie Brae Street, corner of what is now Olympic Boulevard, in 1894. In 1909 William Cline Sr. and his wife Georgia built 678 Wilshire Place in an enclave between the boulevard and Seventh Street a block west of Hoover. Agnes Cline had bought the distinctive three-year-old A. C. Freeman house (still) at 1409 South Gramercy Place in 1906; a press item that year referred to it as being in the "West End" of the city. Casper Cline would live at 1409 with his mother until he died there in September 1914 of cirrhosis at the age of 45. Agnes Cline died at 1409 five months later; the family would retain the house, appearing to rent it initially, followed by the brief tenancy of George and later that of his brother. (Interestingly, George Cline was issued a building permit in September 1906 for the addition of a "museum" at the rear of 1409 South Gramercy, presumably to house John A. Cline's collection of taxidermy and natural history)
  • George T. Cline and William Cline Jr. would move into their parents' new house at 678 Wilshire Place. In 1911 William Jr. moved into a house around the corner from his parents, one he had relocated from two blocks east to 2905 Leeward Avenue. Before long, however, William decided to leave the family real estate concern and move east, per the Times becoming associated with "an eastern manufacturing company." He married an Angeleno, Lucy Cope, in New York in June 1911 and took off for Europe. His eastern associations didn't last, the couple returning west to Leeward Avenue before long. The Clines' daughter Patricia was born in January 1915 (she would die at the age of 12). After a divorce by the early 1920s, William Jr. remarried. George married divorcée Myrtle Brown Pratt at the Riverside Inn on February 19, 1926, and moved into 678 Wilshire Place with her 12-year-old daughter Betty Lee before finding George Taylor's recently completed 436 South Las Palmas Avenue 
  • While his brothers John and William pursued real estate, George T. Cline joined his friend Bernal H. Dyas in forming the Dyas-Cline Sporting Goods Company, which opened its doors downtown on Third Street between Main and Spring on September 11, 1905. George Cline had been a star of Stanford's baseball team and was an avid golfer. The firm prospered, though Bernal Dyas sold his interest in Dyas-Cline in the fall of 1913 to open his own sporting-goods concern, which became well-known in Los Angeles. The city's continued expansion was making room for a competitive retail sporting-goods scene; Dyas-Cline continued as Cline-Cline, with George's brother William having joined the firm. Their father's Cline Realty Company continued into the 1920s, with George becoming involved in it while William moved into the insurance business. In 1928 Cline Realty built a commercial structure, one that would house its offices, on the Miracle Mile at the northeast corner of Wilshire and Cloverdale. It would later be known as the George T. Cline Building
  • George and Myrtle Cline moved into 436 South Las Palmas Avenue soon after their marriage, he legally adopting Betty Lee, who would attend nearby Marlborough. The Clines' daughter Boneita Lorraine was born on April 4, 1927. Also joining the household was Mrs. Cline's widowed mother Elizabeth Brown. The Depression likely to have been a factor, it was announced in the press in April 1931 that, in order to focus on real estate, George Cline would be selling Cline-Cline Sporting Goods to owners who would rebrand the Third Street store as the Olympic Cut Rate Sporting Goods Company, the name chosen to tie in with the upcoming 1932 Games in Los Angeles. Cline remained an avid golf promoter as vice-president of the Southern California Golf Association. On Christmas Day 1932, Betty Lee Cline and Charles Seaver announced their engagement; a Stanford man and a Deke, he was known statewide as an amateur golf champion. It was a long engagement, the wedding not taking place until April 6, 1935, at St. John's Episcopal on Adams Boulevard. The groom's father, Everett Seaver, had been an amateur golf champion himself and was heavily involved the the sport's promotion. There was indeed a strong athletic interest in the Cline and Seaver families: In Fresno on November 17, 1944, Betty Lee gave birth to her fourth child, George Thomas Seaver, later better known as baseball Hall of Famer Tom Seaver
  • 436 South Las Palmas Avenue was put on the market in the spring of 1935 priced at $27,500. Ads in August referred to it as an "insurance company sale," perhaps indicating that it had fallen into the hands of a title insurer. The Clines would be moving to a house at 522 South Alexandria Avenue in a Wilshire district neighborhood that had attracted buyers fleeing older easterly Los Angeles areas 20 years before. Chapman Park and its contiguous tracts north of Wilshire between Vermont and Wilton were considerably denser and had fewer restrictions in terms of multi-unit housing than did Hancock Park or Windsor Square, among other more attractive neighborhoods, but the Depression had decimated property values of even the most exclusive upper-middle-class enclaves, with homeowners often losing their shirts and having to retrench
  • Harold F. Jones, vice-president of the wholesale Superior Optical Company, next occupied 436 South Las Palmas Avenue, appearing to rent rather than own. His tenancy was in any case brief, interrupted by the gruesome death of his wife Alice Manning Jones. On June 20, 1937, the mummified body of Mrs. Jones, 42, had been found underneath an apartment house at 6617 Orange Street (in what is today called Beverly Grove), where she had apparently retreated a few days after she left her Hollywood nursing home in December 1936, having been living there after a nervous breakdown. Suffering from a "persecution complex," as the press put it, she was given to leaving her husband and their three daughters to hide under houses or in closets. Murder was at first considered but an autopsy revealed no foul play. Mr. Jones got on with his life forthwith. By early 1940 he was living in another rented Hancock Park house at 265 South McCadden Place with Marion, 19, Marjorie, 18, and Mildred, 15—and a new 22-year-old wife, Elizabeth. He was then 46
  • 436 South Las Palmas Avenue appeared back on the market in late 1938 and remained there into the summer of 1939
  • Hollywood haberdasher Dore Nelke Schwab and his family were in residence at 436 South Las Palmas Avenue by the spring of 1940, appearing to rent the house before buying it. Born in Quincy, Illinois, on March 20, 1890, Schwab had come west via Provo, Utah, to become a movie producer after World WAr I. Having sold their chain of seven stores in Kansas, Utah, Idaho, and Montana and one in New York City, Dore Schwab's father Sam also came to Hollywood, opening a men's store on Hollywood Boulevard. After some success in film for a year or two in the early '20s, Dore decided to join Sam in haberdashery. Schwab had married Lillian Aisenstein in New York in July 1919; Dore Jr. arrived in March 1922 and Peggy Jane in November 1925. The Schwabs rented a house on Hawthorne Avenue in Hollywood and then two on Highland Avenue, moving to 436 South Las Palmas from 238 South Highland. By this time Sam Schwab had retired from the Schwab Clothing Company, with Dore assuming the presidency. Sam and Lillian Schwab's widowed sister Esther Weil and Esther's son Robert were part of the extended family that moved into 436 with Dore and Lillian. Sam died at home on January 7, 1946, at the age of 88
  • Industrialist Gustav R. Rich and his wife Miriam were living with their daughter and son at 436 South Las Palmas by early 1948, appearing to rent rather than own. The property was on the market by June 1949 asking $37,500
  • Frederick F. and Eleanore Wehrle were the next owners of 436 South Las Palmas Avenue, in residence by the spring of 1950 with her son Edwin Locksley Stanton III, born 2½ weeks before his father was killed in the Normandy invasion, and the Wehrles' 18-month-old daughter Deborah Louise. The Wehrles had been married on June 7, 1947, in a small ceremony at St. James' Church on Wilshire Boulevard, with a reception following at her childhood home at 325 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square. A second daughter, Gretchen Christine, arrived on June 30, 1951. The sisters would grow up to matriculate at Marlborough. The Wehrles appear to have still been in possession of 436 South Las Palmas Avenue at the time of Eleanore's death on August 13, 1980, a few weeks shy of turning 61. Fred Wehrle remarried in November of the next year and would be moving to Bel-Air
  • On July 9, 1963, the Department of Building and Safety issued the Wehrles a permit to add a two-story, 24-by-14½-foot addition to the southeast corner of the house to provide for a family room downstairs and a bedroom and bath upstairs. On October 15, 1963, the Wehles were issued a permit to add a storage room to the rear of the garage
  • 436 South Las Palmas Avenue was on the market by February 1983 asking $595,000; it appears to have been sold by that summer
  • The owners of 436 South Las Palmas Avenue as of 2023 have now owned the property for 40 years


A rendering of 436 South Las Palmas Avenue, 2015


Illustrations: USCDL; Private Collection