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141 Hudson Place




  • Built in 1926 on Lot 373 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle as a speculative project
  • Architect: Clarence J. Smale
  • On September 17, 1926, the Department of Building and Safety issued Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle permit for a two-story, 11-room residence and a one-story, 30-by-30-foot garage at 141 Hudson Place. In the early 1920s Alexander D. Chisholm had formed a contracting, building, and real estate development company, Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle, in partnership with William H. Fortine and Evan L. Meikle; Chisholm formed his own firm, the A. D. Chisholm Company, after the partnership was dissolved in 1929
  • Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle built 141 Hudson Place along with two other spec houses nearby: 135 Hudson Place next door (permits issued for it as 131 Hudson Place in September 1926) and 164 South Hudson Avenue around the corner (permits issued in August 1926), which would be sold by the following spring, as would be 141. The Chisholm firm also began building 132 Hudson Place for grocer William G. Young in late 1926 
  • The Los Angeles Times reported on April 24, 1927, that Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle has just sold 141 Hudson Place to Leon F. Caswell, president of the Peerless Laundry Service Corporation. The house was described as having 13 rooms rather than 11, five baths, and to be of "Italian" architecture
  • Born  in Carson City in the middle of the Michigan glove on December 18, 1876, Leon Fisher Caswell met Julia Steiner Seymour after moving west following his separation from his first wife within a few years of their marriage in 1899. Julia Seymour, the mother of two, was granted a divorce from her first husband, whom she'd married at 16, in January 1903, with Leon securing his own divorce in October 1905. The couple was married in November of the following year. Their daughter Gladys was born on September 25, 1910; by 1911, the Caswells were renting a house in Pasadena, her daughter Selena living with them—her son Lawrence stayed with his father, a San Bernardino County citrus farmer—Leon having engaged in the laundry business. Within a few years the Caswells moved into Los Angeles, where Leon would establish the Peerless Laundry Company at Main Street and Slauson Avenue. The family lived at several addresses between the plant and Exposition Park until buying a house at 2892 Sunset Place, just south of Wilshire Boulevard near Hoover Street, where they stayed until moving into 141 Hudson Place in 1927
  • Gladys Caswell married William Miller Chace Jr., plant manager of Peerless Laundry, in the garden of 141 Hudson Place on May 29, 1931. Julia Caswell died at home at the age of 55 five months later, on October 25. Leon Caswell wasted no time after being widowed, marrying a cosmetologist 20 years his junior within a year of Julia's death. Having hit the big time, the apparently already twice-married Reva Smith Clay Roseboom Caswell moved into 141 Hudson Place with her latest acquisition—and the Chaces. By the summer of 1933, the Caswells had sold 141 and bought a recently built house on South Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. The Chaces moved to an apartment in Westwood and divorced by the early 1940s. Leon and Reva Caswell were married until his death at 70 in 1946; she married her fourth husband in 1948
  • Leon and Reva Caswell sold 141 Hudson Place to insurance executive John Henry Russell by the summer of 1933. John Henry Russell worked alongside his father John Newton Russell, the son succeeding the senior Russell as manager of the home office agency of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1931. John Henry spent some of his childhood in Denver before returning to Los Angeles, where he had been born on September 9, 1894. His father became secretary of Pacific Mutual after the company moved its headquarters south from San Francisco three weeks after the 1906 earthquake destroyed its building there. In November of that year, John Newton Russell was issued permits by the Department of Buildings for a large house at 2263 South Hobart Boulevard in West Adams Heights; attorney George I. Cochran, who became Pacific Mutual's president, had built 2249 South Harvard Boulevard around the corner in 1903, next door to Frederick Hastings Rindge's 2263 built the same year. Later known as Sugar Hill, the neighborhood, which would include gated, now vanished Berkeley Square, was part of the westward expansion of a West Adams centered around Adams and Figueroa that included Chester Place and St. James Park. John Henry Russell attended the 24th Street School and Manual Arts High School and was graduated from Stanford in 1917. He married Amy Requa, daughter of mining engineer and Herbert Hoover associate Mark L. Requa, in 1919 and would move into 338 South Hobart Boulevard to the north of his parents. The Russells would have two sons and a daughter by the time they moved from Hobart Boulevard to Hudson Place
  • On July 20, 1933, the Department of Building and Safety issued J. H. Russell a permit to make interior alterations to the house, including two bay windows, for which Russell had hired prominent architect Gordon B. Kaufmann to design. Russell was issued a permit for termite remediation on May 1, 1939 
  • John and Amy Russell were mentioned frequently in social columns, sometimes confused in the press with the high-profile Marine Corps general John Henry Russell, perhaps better known as the father of New York socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor. On June 5, 1943, John and Amy Russell's 22-year-old elder son John Lawrence married Hancock Park neighbor Renata Titus, whose father had built 325 Rimpau Boulevard, scene of the reception, in 1924. As John Russell he became, standing 6-foot-3 with square-jawed, beetle-browed matinée-idol looks, a successful film and television actor who starred as Marshal Dan Troop in the ABC-TV western Lawman from 1958 to 1962. In another wartime wedding, his sister Marcia, born in 1924, married George C. Good in June 1944. The Russells' youngest child Newton Requa, born in 1927, followed his father and grandfather into the insurance business and later became a conservative but conscientious Republican crony of Ronald Reagan who would serve 32 years in the California legislature, 10 as an assemblyman and 22 as a senator
  • John and Amy Russell's tenure at 141 Hudson Place came to an abrupt end when he left the household on April 10, 1945, per her divorce filing in which she charged him with desertion. Mrs. Russell was granted custody of Newton and would receive $550 a month in alimony when the decree was granted on August 13, 1946. It seems that John Henry, who in his retirement from the insurance business had become with perhaps a tinge of irony the local head of the Boy Scouts of America, had a side squeeze in the form of 19-years-younger Beatrice Ellen Chapman, whom he married in October 1947; James Benton Russell was born on January 28, 1949. John and Beatrice moved to an apartment in Los Feliz. Within months of separating from John, Amy bought 211 South Arden Boulevard in Windsor Heights for herself. The house at 141 Hudson Place was sold to lumber merchant Homer Harding Burnaby
  • Kansas City–born Homer Burnaby was the son of Frank Harding Burnaby, who'd come west to California in 1922; purchasing a Beverly Hills lumber yard on which that city's library now stands, Frank Burnaby renamed it the Sun Lumber Company. Growing along with the Southland, the firm moved its headquarters to Van Nuys in 1947 and would grow to have many as 11 separate operations across the region
  • Homer Burnaby moved out of Beverly Hills along with his business, though not to the Valley; perhaps Hancock Park was more centrally located for traveling between the firm's various locations in pre-freeway Los Angeles
  • On March 25, 1947, the Department of Building and Safety issued Homer Burnaby a permit for the addition of a sewing room on top of an existing flat deck on the north side of the house and a bay window in the living room on the south side
  • By the time he bought 141 Hudson Place, Homer Burnaby was vice-president and general manager of Sun Lumber. He'd married La Cañada demoiselle Dorothy "Do" Alexander at the Church of the Angels in Pasadena on October 25, 1932; the couple had two daughters by the time they moved to Hancock Park, with a son having been born in 1945 and another son born after the family moved into 141. The Burnabys' tenure at 141 Hudson Avenue would last for 25 years, events at home highlighted by the receptions after Sara Burnaby married Nicholas Trueblood in December 1956 and her sister Dina married his brother Mark in June 1961. The house was on the market in early 1972 priced at $179,500. The equivalent of $1,225,000 in 2020, the Burnabys' asking price reflected the low ebb of central Los Angeles residential real estate in the wake of the 1965 riots and the Manson murders
  • Anthony and Ann Morrissey Liebig were the owners of 141 Hudson Place by 1973. Mr. Liebig died at home on August 13, 1991; the family remains in possession of 141 in 2020


Illustration: Private Collection