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  • Built in 1928 on Lot 11 in Tract 7040. (Tract 7040 was a re-subdivision of Tract 6388; 7040's Lot 11 was originally Lot 157 of Tract 6388)
  • Original commissioner: attorney and banker Erle Mervin Leaf
  • Architect: Wallace Neff
  • On October 6, 1928, the Department of Building and Safety issued Erle M. Leaf permits for a two-story, 13-room residence and a one-story 22.5-by-29-foot garage at 450 South June Street
  • Not to be confused with Hollywood photographer Earl Herbert Leaf, Erle Mervin Leaf, son of a railroad man, was born in Idaho Falls on Christmas Day, 1886. The family moved on to Pocatello and then to San Jose, where the senior Leaf went into real estate. Erle settled in Los Angeles in 1912 after receiving undergraduate and law degrees from Stanford; on October 8, 1913, he married Italja M Bower, daughter of attorney Euzema Bower, at her parents' house at 1121 South Hope Street, which the Bowers had built in 1899. (That house would be demolished in 1928.) Italja had been born in Bainbridge, Georgia, before her family moved west during the Boom of the Eighties. The Bower women seem to have had no problem fudging their ages; while the 1900 Federal census and her own headstone accurately report her birth as 1881, she was, by the 1910 census, six years younger. (Her sisters Ramona and Helen were also reported in the 1910 as being younger than more dependable records indicate.) One wonders if 26-year-old Erle Leaf knew that Italja was 31 and not 25 when they met; in a statement supporting Italja's application for a passport in 1922, her mother had the temerity to swear that her daughter had been born on June 10, 1887, and not six years earlier. Italja Leaf was nine years younger than her actual age in the 1930 census enumeration, though by 1940 she got five years closer to the truth
  • Erle and Italja Leaf had three children; Gordon Erle was born on May 23, 1915, the family then living in an apartment on Ocean View Avenue. Harriet Italja was born on January 14, 1917; Erlda Vinette not until December 16, 1925, when Italja was, in honest terms, 44 years old. After the birth of Harriet, the Leafs would rent a recently built house at 831 Fifth Avenue—later buying it—in suburban Wilshire Park. Despite, per the Times, of having a lien placed on him by the I.R.S. in October 1927 for $18,032.98 in unpaid 1922 taxes—$319,000 today—Erle Leaf managed to settle the debt and proceed to start building 450 South June Street a year later
  • The Leafs would live at 450 South June Street for 23 years. Erle and Italja announced Harriet's marriage to Czech-born Zoltan Havas, a writer with The New York Times, in New York, on March 14, 1942, before he was drafted and shipped off to Europe; Harriet had matriculated at Marlborough, Stanford, and U.C.L.A. In something of a gender reversal of the age-altering practices in Italja Bower's family, Mr. Havas appears to have been claiming at the time to be three years older than he actually was, perhaps to be closer in age to Harriet. What effect this claim might have had on the marriage is unclear, but for whatever reason the wartime union lasted not much longer than the conflict. Having worked as city editor for The Occupation Chronicle, a weekly newspaper serving the U.S. military post in Frankfurt, Harriet would return to live at 450 South June Street by 1948. The Leafs announced the engagement of Erlda in the Times on July 4 of that year to Roy Wheeler Young, a chemicals salesman and developer. The marriage took place in the Shatto Chapel of the First Congregational Church on November 13, with a reception afterward at 450 South June; Harriet was her sister's matron of honor. Having resumed her maiden name, Harriet moved to Paris in July 1950, where she worked as a writer and correspondent for the Chicago Daily Tribune. In April 1952 she married Romanian-born attorney Francois O. Beregi; they couple would live in Paris but were reportedly planning a move to Los Angeles. With 450 South June now an empty nest, Erle and Italja Leaf decided to downsize in 1952 and move to Park La Brea
  • Classified ads in the Times and in the Pasadena Independent in October 1952 began with "Our property is sold; we promised immediate possession." A long list of furniture and bric-a-brac the Leafs would not need in an apartment followed
  • Occupying 450 South June Street from 1952 to 1957 was winemaker James Lino Vai, president of the Padre Vineyard Company. Born in Turin on July 12, 1882, Giacomo Vai arrived in New York two days before Christmas 1905 and made his way to Southern California within a few years. When applying for naturalization in December 1911, he gave his home address as that of winemaker Giovanni Demateis at 2016 Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights; Demateis had a winery at 845 North Alameda Street in the city's Little Italy just north of the Plaza, which Giacomo Vai—now known as James—took over with a partner, Louis P. Roy, while Demateis moved on to form the Italian-American Vineyard Company. With the arrival in Los Angeles of James's brother Giovanni—who retained his Italian given name—Roy left in short order to go into his own wine and liquor business. The Vais' corporate entities would include the North Cucamonga Winery and the California Medicinal Wine Company, which would do a good job of getting alcohol legally down the public's gullet during Prohibition
  • It was a heady, competitive era in the California alcoholic beverage trade leading up to—and after—the institution of Prohibition, agents of which would no doubt be making good use of a device the Vais had recently patented. Per the Herald of June 9, 1917: "Five years of study and experimentation by two well known Los Angeles men have resulted in the perfection of a machine which has been adopted by the United States government for the measuring of distilled spirits and the gauging of the alcoholic contents of spirits." It might be thought that the brothers' invention would help the government undermine their own business once the Volstead Act took effect on January 17, 1920. Instead the Vais went on to increase their fortune by producing wine tonics during the 1920s. According to one historian, "While other vintners were getting out of the business or falling victim to racketeers forcing them to produce cheap bootleg liquors," James and Giovanni began producing their California Padres Wine Elixir Tonic. It measured in their own devices as containing 21 percent alcohol; infusing the mixture with beef extracts increased the amount of iron, qualifying it for medicinal use. The same historian credits the Vais with being the first California vintners to sell bulk-process champagne and reports that they added a line of lucrative and unbanned sacramental wines and, in the end, apparently, being competitive capitalists at heart, were not above producing and distributing bootleg hooch themselves. Having survived the official alcohol ban, the Vai businesses continued to do well. After the death of Giovanni in 1957, the DiGiorgio family bought the Vais' Padre Vineyard Company
  • In June 1912 James Vai had married Belgian-born Victorine Deforeit Legre, who was more than 20 years his senior and who had been married to a saloonkeeper whose establishment was a few doors north of the winery on Alameda Street. The Vais divorced by 1920, with James remarrying in October 1921. His new wife, née Madalyn Adams, born in New York, was 14 years younger. There appear to have been no children from either of his marriages. Vai's success in spirits legal or illegal during the '20s was enough to propel he and Madalyn upward socially to the upper-middle-class-if-fading district along Westmoreland Avenue south of Wilshire Boulevard from their previous residential preference of Lincoln Heights. Dyeworks magnate Morris Kornblum had built 3143 Wilshire Boulevard in 1908 and, that same year, had financed a house for his newly married son (and employee) Abraham at 966 South Westmoreland Avenue, just north of Westmoreland Place, a gated development struggling to attract the seriously rich but which still had the reputation to attract affluent-enough homebuilders to its periphery. By the early 1920s Abraham Kornblum, like his father a man with a keen sense of real estate, understood that the seriously successful were fast migrating west along the Wilshire Corridor as far as the Pacific; among new destinations, and the most convenient of the newest, was Hancock Park. In June 1925 Kornblum bought a new house being built at 683 South June Street in the block south of the lot on which 450 would be erected three years later. (The new house perhaps being too close to the increasing traffic along Wilshire Boulevard, Kornblum decided to move again three years later. Having 683 auctioned off in 1928, he bought 109 South Las Palmas Avenue nearby, recently completed by homebuilder David Perel. While 109 was in a quieter block, the restless Kornblum would sell it within a few years and move to Beverly Hills.) James and Madalyn Vai would be content to acquire 966 South Westmoreland and to live in it for nearly 25 years through the neighborhood's serious decline into a district of rooming houses and sanitariums before making their own move to June Street in 1952. (Perhaps having retained 966 South Westmoreland as an investment, James Vai appeared on voter rolls there in 1956; the house was replaced with an apartment building in 1961.) In 1957, 450 South June was acquired by the British government for use as a residence for its local consuls general. The Vais moved to 721 South Genesee Street; James Vai remained in the wine trade until his death there at 78 on January 8, 1961
  • The British government continues to maintain 450 South June Street as the residence of its consuls general 66 years later. In that time additions and alteration have been made to the rear of the house, which is used extensively for entertaining


Illustration: Private Collection