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  • Built in 1928 on Lot 381 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: mortgage banker Arthur F. Morlan
  • Designer: Rae Morlan Isaacs, daughter of Arthur F. Morlan
  • On January 9, 1928, the Department of Building and Safety issued A. F. Morlan a permit for a two-story, 14-room house at 150 Hudson Place
  • Born two days before Fort Sumpter southwest of Youngstown, Ohio, Arthur Forker Morlan arrived in Los Angeles from Buffalo in 1887, at first going to work for a grocer. On July 20 of that year he married Margaret Nichols back in Buffalo, to which she appears to have returned to give birth to the Morlans' daughter Rae Belle on February 11, 1892. Arthur Morlan entered the real estate title and abstract business a few years after settling in California. After decades in the trade, Morlan joined Los Angeles's Title Guarantee & Trust Company as secretary-treasurer, moving through the ranks as vice-president and president to board chairmanship months before his death in 1940. Morlan was just the sort of burgher George Allan Hancock envisioned as a suitable homebuilder in his Hancock Park development, one with well-connected hands on the levers of civic power and development who could network at the California Club if he was elected to its membership, which Morlan was. Even by 1928 he would have been considered a Los Angeles pioneer; his residential track confirms this. After early years in Main Street boarding houses downtown, he built in West Adams before moving on to Country Club Park and finally settling in Hancock Park 
  • Though talented and presumably competent, her houses still very much standing, Rae Morlan Isaacs was a self-styled architectural designer rather than a board-certified architect. Her parents built 227 South Windsor Boulevard in New Windsor Square in 1921, apparently with their daughter's input. On October 3, 1924, Rae M. Visel had been issued a permit to build 661 South June Street in Hancock Park, into which she and her second husband, Harry Hopper Isaacs, would move after its completion; the building permit for 661 South June indicates no one as architect but cites R. M. Visel as its contractor. Harry Isaacs was a petroleum engineer; the couple married in February 1925 as 661 South June was being completed, he having divorced his first wife, with whom he had two children, and she her first husband, attorney Stanley Visel, with whom she had a son, Morlan. As a designer Rae Isaacs was nothing if not fond of Spanish and Mediterranean architecture, having designed two of her parents' houses and two of her own along these lines. Leaving 661 South June behind, she and Harry moved into her newly completed design at 616 South Hudson Avenue in the spring of 1927. On permits for that house, the printed word "Architect" on lines requesting a name has been written over with the word "Designer," indicating that Isaacs was not a board-certified architect
  • Life events took place rapidly and rather grimly in the extended Morlan family. Harry Isaacs, who'd turned 50 a month before, died at 616 South Hudson Avenue on September 7, 1936. His younger brother Fred's wife Loretta—he also worked in the petroleum industry—died of pneumonia on April 19, 1937. Widow and widower married forthwith and he took up residence at 616 South Hudson. Arthur Morlan died at Good Samaritan on April 14, 1940; his widow expired on Christmas Eve 1941. Then Rae Isaacs died on March 7, 1942, a few weeks after her 50th birthday. Fred remarried less than a month later and then died in September
  • The next owner of 150 Hudson Place was oil executive M. Edward Frazier, who with his wife, née Louise Unfried, and their 10-year-old daughter Pattie, was in residence by 1944. The Fraziers had been renting 316 South Arden Boulevard in Windsor Square. The family was another example of the Hancock Park haute bourgeoisie that would have pleased Allan Hancock, with the head of the household in an executive position, his wife keeping a proper abode and doing volunteer work, all very Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, their daughter attending Marlborough. The family received the attention of social diarists such as the Times's Christy Fox, who reported on the 1949 Chistmas party Pat Frazier—she had apparently outgrown "Pattie"—gave with her across-the-street friend Marcia Farwell for their chum Toni Wise, daughter of the William Wises, former Angelenos visiting from Paris. The party began at 8 on December 23 with dancing at the Fraziers', moving at 11 for a supper across the street at the Farwells' 135 Hudson Place
  • Prominently featured at the top left of the "Women" page of the Times on September 11, 1953, Margaret McKnight wrote that "On a perfect summer afternoon yesterday, members of three generations of old Southern California families took their places in the oak pews of All Saints Episcopal Church, Beverly Hills, to be part of the wedding ceremony of Patricia Louise Frazier and William Tidd Walker Jr." After much typically minute description of flowers and frocks, McKnight continued: "As the radiant couple left the church, guests drove to the Merton Edward Fraziers' Italian-styled Hudson Place home. There they were received in the living room and then they walked under arches decorated with wedding bells to the garden overlooking the Wilshire Country Club." Apparently there were no errant golf balls knocking canapés out of the hands of guests that day—or resulting in other damage, such as the broken windows the Fraziers' next-door neighbor at 138 claimed had devalued his house—to mar the reception. As would a number of families living with daughters in big Hancock Park residences, Merton and Louise Frazier waited until Pat was married and off on her own before putting their house on the market. Wasting little time after the rice was swept up, their broker placed an illustrated display ad for 150 Hudson Place in the Times of March 7, 1954, though they would decide not to sell after all, at least not until another six or seven years had gone by. The Fraziers would even add an 18-by-36-foot swimming pool in 1956 per a permit issued by the Department of Building and Safety on June 18 of that year


As seen in the Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1954


  • By 1960 Merton and Louise Frazier appear to have begun spending most of their time in Palm Springs, where he became involved in town politics
  • Robert Howard Ahmanson and his wife Kathleen, one of three daughters of civil engineer Floyd Lester Holser, whose company erected the steel framework of Los Angeles's 1928 city hall among other large projects, succeeded the Fraziers at 150 Hudson Place. Robert Ahmanson went to work for his uncle, the financier Howard Ahmanson, after being graduated from U.C.L.A. in 1949. After marrying Kathleen Holser in 1954, he moved from his uncle's house at 211 Muirfield Road to Arcadia, returning to Hancock Park by 1962. Floyd Holser was listed at 150 Hudson Place in the 1963 city directory before he died that year; the Ahmansons would remain for decades
  • Acquiring the lot next door to the south that had been the site of a house built in 1950 and demolished in 1997, Robert Ahmanson erected 160 Hudson Place in 1998 to form an adjunct to 150
  • Per his obituary in the Times on September 4, 2007, Robert Ahmanson appears to have died at 150 three days before at the age of 80. His widow died at 80 on December 29th of the following year. Ahmanson interests appear to still own 150 Hudson Place as of 2020
         

Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT