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437 South Las Palmas Avenue




  • Completed in 1925 on Lot 94 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: real estate operator Fred L. Abel as his own home
  • Architect: Ray J. Kieffer
  • On November 18, 1924, the Department of Buildings issued F. L. Abel permits to build a two-story, 10-room residence and a one-story, 20-by-30-foot garage at 437 South Las Palmas Avenue
  • Born in Grinnell, Iowa, on November 2, 1874, Fred Lewis Abel married fellow Grinnellian Violet Naysmith Blow, five weeks his senior, in Kansas City on March 29, 1900. Their daughter Maxine Anna was born in Grinnell on October 8, 1906. Abel had been established in the real estate business in Grinnell, presumably having done well enough to move west and build a large house in what was one of Los Angeles's newest and most sought-after developments. The Abels appear to have relocated to the city not long before permits for 437 South Las Palmas Avenue were issued
  • Fred Abel's 79-year-old widowed mother Anna, who had come west with her son and his family, died at 437 South Las Palmas Avenue on April 29, 1927
  • While they would occupy 437 South Las Palmas into the 1940s, Abel, as a real estate man might, offered the house for sale during his ownership. The family relocated to a recently completed apartment house at 607 Cloverdale Avenue during 1928 and 1929, renting 437 to property developer Bernard P. Rand, who was at the time building his own Hancock Park home at 616 South June Street. Wall Street having crashed, Fred Abel had the house on the market in December 1929 asking $35,000. Ads in the spring of 1930 noted that "owner must sell" but the price was still $35,000 and would remain so into 1931, the house still unsold. In late 1938 Abel was advertising 437 as being priced "$5000 under low market value." The property was priced "below market" in the spring of 1941
  • It is unclear as to when Fred and Violet Abel finally left 437 South Las Palmas Avenue. Maxine had married North Dakota–born Dun & Bradstreet reporter Nathan Longfellow White in August 1935 and was living in Hermosa Beach by 1940. (White was later an insurance man and in the 1950 Federal census would be enumerated as an F.B.I. agent.) Violet was listed in the 1942 city directory as living in a newly built house in Brentwood; the couple would within a few years move to Stockton, where their daughter had relocated. Fred died there at 74 on December 15, 1948. Violet would survive until her death at 88 on May 3, 1963
  • Department-store executive Stewart K. Widdess succeeded the Abels at 437 South Las Palmas Avenue. What might have led Widdess to the property is unclear, but after his arrival in Los Angeles with his family in 1935 he happened to rent a house at 6511 Moore Drive in Carthay Circle that, curiously, Fred Abel had completed on spec in 1927 and then sold to a jeweler who appears to have been unrelated to Widdess; it could be that Abel had reacquired the property in a foreclosure and then rented it to the executive
  • Born in Lindsay, Ontario, on June 11, 1909, Stewart Knowlson Widdess began his career in retail advertising at Eaton's in Toronto. In April 1932, while working at Dey Bros. in Syracuse, New York, he became engaged to Gertrude A. Comstock of Peterborough, Ontario, who was then a student at Syracuse University; they were married on February 18, 1933. Widdess came west from a brief post at Herpolsheimer's in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to join the J. W. Robinson Company as advertising director. The Widdesses' son Paul was born in Los Angeles on November 30, 1935, with Stewart Jr. arriving on June 24, 1939. Stewart Widdess was elected vice-president of Robinson's in March 1943 and to the firm's presidency on January 31, 1945. He resigned from Robinson's in February 1950, and that November was named president of the Abbott Kimball Company of California, the west coast division of the New York–based advertising firm. It seems that Widdess may have missed department-store culture; in September 1952 he accepted a post as vice-president and publicity director of Dayton's in Minneapolis, which he took up on January 1. The Widdesses were honored with farewell parties given by Hancock Park neighbors, though they would return in June for Paul's graduation from the Black-Foxe Military Institute, once on Wilcox Avenue between the northerly greens of the Wilshire Country Club and the Tennis Club
  • Having retired on the west coast, Stewart Widdess died in Walnut Creek at the age of 80 on December 19, 1989. In his obituary in the Twin Cities Star Tribune two days later, Stewart Widdess Jr., then senior vice-president of marketing for what had become the Dayton-Hudson Department Store Company, credited his father with having inspired the name of the firm's Target stores in the early 1960s after he proposed an image of an arrow hitting a bullseye
  • Succeeding the Widdesses at 437 South Las Palmas Avenue was downtown clothier William Peake and his family. William Peake, né Pekofstein, was born in Russia on January 21, 1900, arriving in the U.S. in 1910. Once in Los Angeles, he married English-born Rose Bud Levenstein on September 18, 1928, and that year opened a menswear shop at Jefferson and Vermont with his brother Maurice. The brothers would go their separate business ways within a few years, Maurice establishing a shop on Vermont Avenue around the corner from the former store, one likely to have gotten the trade of U.S.C. students, and William opening downtown at 759 South Olive Street catering to businessmen
  • Once his downtown store was established, William and Rose Peake started their family; Adria Lorraine arrived on May 22, 1936, and Donald Geoffrey on June 7, 1940. The Peakes lived early on at the Riccardo Apartments on West Adams Boulevard, moving successively to an apartment in the Fairfax District and then to a duplex at 6123 West 6th Street from which they would move to Hancock Park. The family would remain at 437 South Las Palmas Avenue for decades. Having just turned 84, Rose Peake died on August 16, 1990. The house was on the market for rent soon after and by the summer of 1991 being offered for sale at $1,050,000
  • David Scott Wood, who appears to have been an architect, owned 437 South Las Palmas Avenue during the 1990s. He made a large rear second-floor addition to the house in 1998. The property was on the market in the spring of 2003 asking $1,779,000. An owner since that time has added an 18-by-36-foot swimming pool and replaced windows


A rendering of 437 South Las Palmas Avenue, 2023


Illustrations: USCDL; Private Collection