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355 South June Street




  • Built in 1925 on Lot 140 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: builder Harry H. Belden for resale
  • Architect: Ray J. Kieffer
  • On January 2, 1925, the Department of Building and Safety issued Harry H. Belden a permit for a two-story, 10-room residence and a one-story, 20-by-30-foot garage at 355 South June Street
  • Harry H. Belden was a prolific builder of houses in Hancock Park, Windsor Square, and elsewhere. His Hancock Park houses include 110 North Rossmore, 324 Muirfield, 317 and 624 Rimpau, and 152 North Hudson as well as 12 of the 14 houses on June Street between Third and Fourth streets. Advertisements for Belden-built houses appearing in the Times during November 1925 refer to several residences on the block being under construction; Belden's residences in the 300 block of June Street designed by Ray J. Kieffer are 300, 305, 314, 315, 324, 325, 345, and 356 as well as our subject here, 355. (Belden's projects at 335, 336, and 346 South June were designed by brothers Kurt and Hans Meyer-Radon)
  • Born in Kentucky on November 8, 1870, William Parrish Jeffries was living in Los Angeles by the age of 18. Working early on as a surveyor for the city, he quite naturally became interested in the possibilities of real estate development, which would become one of his several métiers. The printing business became another. Perhaps as a hedge against the vicissitudes of dealing in Los Angeles property during the local effects resulting from the Panic of 1893, Jeffries teamed up with his friend Frederick B. Kitts to form Kitts & Jeffries, printers and engravers. That firm evolved into the W. P. Jeffries Company and associated enterprises such as the Jeffries Lithograph Company and the Jeffries Banknote Company. The businesses were continued by his sons after William's death in 1935. The informal political group Jeffries had formed with friends as a young man became the Jonathan Club in 1895; his name is engraved as president on the cornerstone of the club's downtown headquarters that was completed in 1925
  • William Jeffries married native Angeleno Lora Loomis Hubbell at Immanuel Presbyterian Church, then at the southeast corner of Pearl and Tenth streets (now Broadway and Olympic Boulevard), on November 10, 1904. The bride's father was a former judge and a land developer in Brooklyn Heights east of the river; putting the deed in his daughter's name, as was customary, he built the Jeffrieses' first house at 976 Arapahoe Street (demolished in 1962). It was from this house, built in the fashionable Westmoreland Tract, that the Jeffrieses would moved to Hancock Park, among the newer westerly subdivisions rapidily usurping the denser and aging Westmoreland and West Adams districts. Jeffries was in possession of 355 South June Street by January 1928 and would be carrying out several alterations to the property before moving in; a social item in the Times on May 27, 1928, noted that the family had recently moved into their new house from 976 Arapahoe. William Jeffries was at the time president of W. P. Jeffries & Compmany, the Jeffries Lithograph Company, the Angeles Mesa Land company, and treasurer of the Los Angeles Investment Company
  • On February 6, 1928, the Department of Building and Safety issued W. P. Jeffries permits for additions and alterations to 355 South June Street including a new one-story, 18-by-20-foot servants' quarters, a new door in the garage, and for an upstairs sleeping porch on an existing deck covered by an extension of the roof. On September 6, 1928, a permit was issued for repairs following a small fire at 355 
  • William and Lora Jeffries had four children in rapid succession: Allerton Hubbell was born in August 1905, nine months and 18 days after their wedding; Sarah Elizabeth, to be know as "Sally," arrived in September 1906, Dorothy Jane in December 1907, and Lawrence Loomis in February 1909. Stephen Parrish turned up in May 1916. While it occurred in New York City, her presence there and its causes are unclear, it may have been the death of Dorothy at the age of 17 that precipitated the Jeffrieses' move to Hancock Park. The drama of Jeffries offspring continued. Sally married banker Vincent Lyman Martin in New York in July 1928. They were divorced in 1935. With the suggestion of physical abuse, the Times reported dramatically that her official complaint against Mr. Martin included charges that he was "morose, taciturn and disagreeable" and that he did not love her. "She said that since she had been raised in a home of refinement this conduct had 'inflicted great and grievous mental suffering and anguish and great and grievous bodily harm and injury.'" In 1948 Sally would marry Frederick Graham Runyon, editor of the Pasadena Independent
  • Allerton Jeffries married Bertha E. Northcote at the Church of the Angels in Garvanza in November 1928; the couple divorced in 1931, he turning around to marry the recently married and divorced Louise Little Johnson. The beautiful Louise Little—known as Lola—had had to drop plans for a big Beverly Hills wedding in May 1931 to Orson Tracy Johnson, scion of the family of Orson Thomas Johnson, who was among the largest individual owners of property in early Los Angeles, his real estate ventures including the construction of the Westminister Hotel on Main Street in 1887. Lola and Tracy instead eloped to Reno under police protection after threats of kidnapping and murder against her were received by her parents, their authenticity unclear. That marriage was very short-lived; Lola and Allerton Jeffries apparently soon found each other and, according to Los Angeles County records, were married in May 1932 after quick Mexican divorces. Their wedding, however, seems to have been premature, legal details of her divorce having not been properly nailed down; another ceremony was required, which was officiated by a superior court judge in Arizona in June 1933—and, just to be certain, another one on Los Angeles in May 1934. They built a house in North Hollywood in 1937, with two sons and a daughter arriving by 1940. In 1947 the family moved to 314 Rimpau Boulevard in Hancock Park


Lora and William Jeffries with their very contemporary-looking daughter Sally Jeffries Martin, 1929


  • With only Stephen left at home—Lawrence had gone up north to Cal—the Jeffrieses put 355 South June Street on the market after only three years even as the Depression approached its nadir. Ads for an open house on April 30, 1931, called 355 a "beautiful $75,000 house in the heart of Hancock Park" and declared that it "should be sold today." It wasn't. There were further price reductions but no takers. The Jeffrieses were still in possession of 355 when William died at Hollywood Hospital on June 12, 1935, age 64. His widow placed 355 back on the market in the spring of 1936, "priced to sell."
  • Banker James Errett Shelton, who might have shared distant Kentucky roots with banker James Joseph Shelton of 305 South June just up the street, was the next owner of 355 South June Street. Born of Kentucky and Tennessee parentage in Colusa in the Sacramento Valley on November 6, 1886, and growing up in Fresno and San Jose, he would rise to the top of Los Angeles's financial world via Stanford, where no less than that university's founding president David Starr Jordan would attest to his credentials in a 1911 passport application. With baccalaureate and law degrees in hand, he headed south to Los Angeles after being graduated in 1912, practicing with two partners for five years before moving to the Title Insurance & Trust Company as counsel and then in 1919 to Security Trust & Savings Bank. Elected as that institution's secretary alongside other officers including vice presidents Maurice S. Hellman and Willis D. Longyear, he would become vice-president and secretary in 1921. By the time of his retirement in 1962 from what became Security Pacific National Bank, he'd served as president, C.E.O., and chairman of the board
  • James Shelton's March 1914 marriage to Lea Kirkman ended in divorce 13 years later, the Daily News headlining its reportage with "Wealthy Sportsman Sued for Divorce." Lea was quoted as saying that he "can have his wish to 'get rid of her' even if it cost $500 a month." She cast the sober banker as unfaithful hedonist: "Mrs. Shelton charges two occasions when her husband, supposedly on yachting and stag parties, actually was at parties where women were present." The Sheltons' daughter Dorothy Mary had been born in September 1918. Her parents both remarried in 1928, James to 30-year-old Iowa-born Miss Anne Jacobson. James Errett Shelton Jr. arrived on July 16, 1929, the family having gotten its first toehold in Hancock Park by renting 641 North Cahuenga Boulevard. They'd moved just over the Park's eastern border to Windsor Heights by the time twins Robert Calhoun and Thomas Calhoun were born on September 9, 1931. It was from 151 North Arden Boulevard that by early 1938 they moved to 355 South June Street, a house much more appropriate for a vice-president of what was now called Security–First National Bank. James E. Shelton was still living there 36 years later when he died on January 9, 1974. The Sheltons' listing at 355 in the 1973 Southwest Blue Book noted their memberships in the Los Angeles Country Club as well the Bel-Air Bay, California, University, and Ebell clubs—establishment Los Angeles all the way before new, much bigger money transformed the city. Anne Shelton died in Newport Beach on June 17, 1986
  • The owners of 355 South June Street after the Sheltons carried out interior renovations and added an 18-by-35-foot pool to the property; the house was on the market in July 1992 listed at $1,595,000. The purchaser, still in residence 30 years later, demolished and replaced the 1925 garage in 1998


Illustrations: Private Collection; UCLADL