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  • Built in 1927 on Lot 264 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: actor Lewis S. Stone
  • Architect: Walter F. Olerich
  • On May 9, 1927, the Department of Building and Safety issued Lewis S. Stone permits for a two-story, 10-room residence and a one-story, 20-by-37-foot garage/laundry at 161 North June Street
  • Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on November 15, 1879, Lewis Shepard Stone had arrived in Los Angeles as a stage actor by 1907, an early address of his being the newly built St. Lawrence Apartments in St. James Park. With a bearing that would become his trademark, Stone segued naturally into film, becoming a player for Metro Pictures, continuing on with the company's evolution into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the transition into talkies. Stone married actress Margaret Langham in 1909; they would have three daughters, the second of whom died in 1915 and the third who was born four months before her mother's fall from a New York hotel window in June 1917. In 1920 Stone married his one-time leading lady from their days at the Belasco on Main Street, Florence Oakley, who had divorced her dipsomaniac first husband the year before. The newlyweds bought the columned 1912 house (still) at 212 South Wilton Place in one of the denser neighborhoods east of Hancock Park that would lose cachet to the roomier Park and other westerly subdivisions. It was from Wilton Place that the Stones would move to 161 North June Street once it was completed in late 1927
  • Lewis Stone and Florence Oakley lived only briefly at 161 North June Street; the couple separated in June 1928. Charging his wife with extreme cruelty including fits of anger that interfered with his work, Lewis filed for divorce in September 1929. While he might have had to reckon with what may have been a hefty settlement on Florence and the Wall Street crash coming a month after the filing, Stone would soon be building a substantial new house in North Hollywood; 161 North June Street was on the market by early 1930. Ads for 161 referred to it as palatial and described it as having five bedrooms, a library, an amusement room, and a solarium. By April, Stone and his daughters had moved to a rented house in Pasadena, where they would live briefly; 161 North June sold in May


Lewis Stone as Judge Hardy and Mickey Rooney as Andy in The Courtship of Andy Hardy, 1942


  • Lewis Stone would find lasting fame during the late 1930s and 1940s in M.G.M.'s Andy Hardy series of films playing Judge Hardy alongside Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Ann Rutherford. His domestic life had settled down before then, as had, for a while, his place of residence. He married a third time a year after divorcing Florence. Nearly 51, he and 29-year-old Hazel Elizabeth Woof, a woman apparently of independent means living in Playa del Rey, eloped to Yuma and were married on October 19, 1930. After a stop in an apartment at the El Mirador in West Hollywood, the Stones moved into the new house he'd had David F. Picken design and was having built that year at 5700 Rhodes Avenue in North Hollywood. After his daughter Barbara married William Arnold Ion, her high school sweetheart, in June 1936, the couple moved into a house her father had had built in 1935 next door to his own. The Ions remained there even after her father, apparently still fond of Hancock Park and vicinity, left with Hazel to rent 326 South Hudson Avenue. In the spring of 1953, the Stones bought, likely at a bargain price given that it had been lingering on the market for a few years, a house of serious pretensions in Windsor Square, the decade-older subdivision of rectilinear streets just east of Hancock Park. Completed in 1913 by Dr. Edwin Janss, the commodious 455 Lorraine Boulevard seems an unlikely choice of residence for an older childless couple. Lewis Stone's tenure at 455 was brief: He died there on September 12, 1953, after suffering a heart attack while running through his yard in pursuit of three teenagers. The boys had previously annoyed Stone by sneaking swims in his pool and had returned to throw outdoor furniture into it as a prank, no doubt to elicit the drama of his ire. The actor had been preparing to take on the role of Oliver Larrabee in 1954's Sabrina, starring Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, and Humphrey Bogart; he was replaced by Walter Hampden
  • Succeeding Lewis Stone at 161 North June Street was Elbridge Amos Stuart of Seattle, founder of the Carnation Milk Company. He and his wife purchased 161 as a winter home; they would also acquire the flanking vacant adjacent Lots 263 and 265 of Tract 8320
  • On September 15, 1930, the Department of Building and Safety issued E. A. Stuart a permit for the addition of a sun room on the first floor with a bath and dressing room above it on the second floor. On March 24, 1932, E. A. Stuart was issued a permit to add living quarters over the 1927 garage and expand the garage itself
  • Born in North Carolina on September 10, 1856, Elbridge A. Stuart was working in the grocery business in El Paso by the age of 23 after a time working on the building of the Santa Fe Railway into New Mexico. He traveled to Rutland, Vermont, to marry Mary Jane Horner on November 13, 1884—it is unclear as to how they might have met—and the newlyweds settled in El Paso. Their son Elbridge Hadley Stuart was born there in November 1887, daughter Katherine in August 1893 just before the family moved to Los Angeles. In 1890, as he rose in his trade, Stuart had bought out his last El Paso partner in his wholesale and retail grocery business, selling E. A. Stuart & Company in 1894 after having recently partnered with Robert L. Craig in Los Angeles. In March 1894 they incorporated a new wholesale concern providing groceries, cigars, tobacco, coffee, and spices for which they immediately built new facilities on South Los Angeles Street. Elbridge's brother Robert, two years older, was taken on as a salesman
  • In 1899, once again seeking opportunity, Elbridge Stuart moved his family to Seattle. Purchasing the plant and machinery of a milk condensery in Kent, south of Seattle, at a sheriff's sale, he and partners formed the Pacific Coast Condensed Milk Company, which in September 1899 produced its first cases of evaporated milk, dubbed Carnation Brand Sterilized Cream. (The name is said to have been inspired when Stuart passed a downtown Seattle tobacconist's display of Carnation cigars.) Stuart gained sole control of the Pacific Coast Condensed Milk Company in 1901; the firm grew and in 1916 changed its name to the Carnation Milk Products Company. Elbridge Hadley Stuart followed his father into the business after being graduated from Andover and Yale. He was vice-president of Carnation by 1920 and, succeeding his father, became president in 1932


The west wall of the Carnation Company's building at 5045 Wilshire Boulevard with its signature palms
serving as a design element became an iconic Los Angeles landmark. Completed in 1949, the
building was designed by Stiles O. Clements. Father and son Stuarts cut the ribbon at its
dedication on August 30 in a ceremony also meant to celebrate the firm's 50th
anniversary. After Carnation was acquired by Nestlé in 1985 and then
departed for a Glendale tower five years later, the wall was
lost when the building was expanded westward.


  • Elbridge A. Stuart stepped down as president of Carnation in 1932, remaining on as chairman of the board, a position he would hold until his death. He and Mrs. Stuart began to spend more time at 161 North June Street, where they would build on their three-lot in-town estate a pergola and a series of lath houses during the 1930s and a large greenhouse in 1941
  • On August 12, 1938, the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit to E. A. Stuart for the addition of an elevator to 161 North June Street. Stuart was issued a permit for an 18-by-73-foot greenhouse toward the front of Lot 263 on April 1, 1941, and for a 12-by-20-foot toolshed toward the rear of Lot 263 on March 13, 1942
  • The Elbridge A. Stuarts celebrated their 50th anniversary with a renewal of their vows and a reception at 161 North June Street on the evening of November 13, 1934. After a month's illness, the Stuarts' daughter, now Katherine Stibbs, died at her home in San Mateo on September 28, 1936; services were held three days later both in Burlingame and at 161 South June Street preceding her interment at Forest Lawn. Mary Jane Horner Stuart died at 161 on June 13, 1939, age 78. Elbridge Stuart was 86 when he died at 161 on January 14, 1944. Elbridge and Mary Jane, their son and his two wives, their daughter (but not her husband) are all now entombed in the Stuart mausoleum at Forest Lawn
  • Precise details of the disposition of the three-lot parcel centered on the residence at 161 North June Street are unknown. While Dr. Claude L. Davison is known to have acquired the house and garage on Lot 264 by early 1948, it is unclear as to whether he also acquired the adjacent Lots 263 and 265 and their garden-related structures and sold them off for development himself or whether perhaps Elbridge Hadley Stuart, then living in Bel-Air, sold them off from his father's estate, or if an interim owner engineered the deal. At any rate, new residences would be built on the lots flanking 161 North June in 1952. In February 1952 classified ads placed in the Times by contractor Arthur C. Wright, who was getting ready to build his own house on Lot 263, to be addressed 151 North June Street, offered the 18-by-73-foot greenhouse built by E. A. Stuart on Lot 263 in 1941 "As is, to be moved from lot between 141 & 161 N. June st." Lot 265, southerly adjacent to 161, saw the construction of 175 North June Street later in 1952
  • Dr. and Mrs. Claude Lorraine Davison had been living at 111 North Windsor Boulevard in New Windsor Square when they decided to move to 161 North June Street. Born in Colfax, Illinois, on September 24, 1900, Dr. Davison maintained his practice at the Wilshire Medical Building at Wilshire and Westlake Avenue while Mrs. Davison maintained an active volunteer and club life. In residence at 161 by early 1948, the Davisons moved in with their 12-year-old daughter Claudette Lorraine, who, 10 years later, having been graduated from Marlborough and U.S.C., married John Liebig Griffiths in a ceremony at All Saints' Episcopal in Beverly Hills on September 6, 1958. A reception followed at 161 North June Street. Dr. and Mrs. Davison would have 161 South June on the market by midsummer of 1966
  • Donald and Harriet Brill succeeded the Davisons at 161 North June Street; he was issued a permit for a kitchen renovation by the Department of Building and Safety on September 23, 1968. The Brills divorced in 1969
  • The family of Charles E. Donnelly was in residence at 161 North June Street by the spring of 1970 and was still in possession of the property nearly 50 years later. On the market in late 2018, it was advertised for sale asking $5,999,000; real estate information reports a reduction of $600,000 in February 2019 and a sale on that April 22 for $5,050,000