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  • Built in 1928 on Lot 161 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: building contractor Harry Feigenbaum as his own home
  • Architect: Max Maltzman
  • On June 29, 1928, the Department of Building and Safety issued Mr. and Mrs. Harry Feigenbaum a permit for a two-story, 15-room residence with attached garage at 624 South June Street
  • Polish-born Harry (née Aaron) Feigenbaum had settled in Chicago with his Polish-born wife Rose and two sons, Maury and Albert, and a daughter, Eva, between 1905 and the birth of another daughter, Leona, on New Year's Eve 1909. Feigenbaum had set up as a contractor by then, a trade adopted in due course by Maury and Albert. The family moved west in 1921 and into a recently-completed bungalow at 1513 Winona Boulevard in East Hollywood, soon moving to another at 6225 Afton Place. The Feigenbaum men did well in the building trade during the boom of the 1920s; by 1927, Harry and Rose were living in a Mediterranean-style house at 201 South Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills, from which they would move to Hancock Park
  • By the spring of 1930, Harry and Rose Feigenbaum had settled into 624 South June Street with Leona, George, who'd been born in 1911, and twins Adele and Marie, born in 1915. Maury and Albert had set up their contracting business as Feigenbaum Bros., Harry soon joining them, effecting a name change of the firm to H. Feigenbaum & Sons. The Depression brought the Feigenbaums' building efforts to an end, which led to the apparent foreclosure on 624 South June
  • Advertisements in the Times began to appear in the fall of 1934: "Mortgage Company Orders Sold Magnificent Italian Home; this property can be purchased at about 1⁄3 of the original cost." The Feigenbaums had moved to a smaller but very nice house at 155 South Formosa Avenue, which appears to have been financed by their son-in-law Edward Rifkind, a pharmacist, who'd married Leona in 1931. Though the house appears to have been rented to at least one party, physician George Berson, the mortgage-company ads, often headed with a boldface SACRIFICE!, continued into the spring of 1937
  • On June 18, 1934, a permit was issued to the Pacific Mortgage Guaranty Company by the Department of Building and Safety for the removal of the original porte-cochère on the north side of the house 
  • James Lewis Stunston was nearly 70 when he bought 624 South June Street. He'd retired from farming in southwestern Kentucky and moved to Los Angeles by 1923, bringing with him his wife, née Beulah Curd Winn, sons James Jr. (by his first wife, who'd died in 1902) and Lewis-Winn, and his widowed sister-in-law, Ruby Winn Ryland. James Jr. went into real estate immediately, partnering with Glaucus (a.k.a. George) E. Kinsey, who would later figure into the Hancock Park stories of 214 North Rossmore Avenue, 644 Muirfield Road and 161 North Hudson Avenue. Among the earliest projects of Kinsey & Stunston firm were the Mediterranean houses for the Stunston family in the new tract south across Wilshire Boulevard from Hancock Park and west of the new high school; 1022 Keniston Avenue was completed in early 1924 and 1009 Keniston across the street later that year. The extended Stunston family stayed at 1022 until moving, curiously, east toward downtown to 963 South Hoover Street in what was by 1927 an old neighborhood from which affluent residents had been rapidly decamping for new suburbs to the west such as Hancock Park and Windsor Square. The house at 963 South Hoover, still standing as of January 2023, was built in 1907 by William Avery, father of noted Los Angeles lawyer and Superior Court judge Russ Avery; Judge Avery had followed the westward trend and would be living in Hancock Park by the spring of 1924. His house there was at 214 North Rossmore Avenue, which George Kinsey would acquire from the judge in 1939 and flip the next year


Classic haute bourgeoisie Hancock Park: Beulah Stunston presides over a club tea in April 1940; her
  son James Lewis Stunston Jr. and his new wife, née Dodo McLain, at Hollywood Park that June. 


  • The Stunstons were taken up in local establishment society quickly, soon gaining a listing in the Southwest Blue Book. Beulah made the most of her Kentucky Southerness, remaining involved with the United Daughters of the Confederacy through its local chapter and those of other such ancestor-worship organizations. James Jr. was turning 40 and Lewis-Winn (the southern penchant for hyphenated given names intact, though he was nicknamed "Skip") was 26 when the family moved into 624 South June Street. Both were involved in real estate, managing apartment buildings—the family appears to have invested in rental properties and had retained 963 South Hoover as one of these—and both were unmarried. While Junior's engagement to actress Doris Hill—a 1928 WAMPAS Baby Star—had been announced in December of 1929, likely as a publicity stunt, he would not be marrying anyone for decades. In March 1932 Junior was arrested and jailed on "liquor charges"—Prohibition was still in effect—after being caught driving with a male companion on the wrong side of the road. Both he and his brother seem to have enjoyed the life of men-about-town; there was apparently money enough through the Depression for the family to live well and wind up in Hancock Park
  • Around the time of the Stunstons' purchase of 624 South June Street, Lewis- Winn bought a yacht at a U.S marshal's sale. Per the San Pedro News-Pilot of June 30, 1938, the 55-foot schooner Aafje had been the scene "of piracy and murder on the high seas" the previous December, when a man who had chartered it shot its rich Santa Barbara owner to death once out to sea and hijacked the crew, which eventually succeeded in killing the perpetrator (allegedly with a marlin spike) and throwing his body to the sharks. Ignoring the blood that had once washed over the Aafje's deck, a typically breathless social item in the Times appeared on August 14: "Mrs. J. L. Stunston of South June street prefers to do her entertaining on the newly purchased yacht of her son, Lewis Winn. Frequent trips to the Isthmus require great pitchers of orange juice, grape juice and ginger ale, as well as gigantic stacks of tempting chicken sandwiches. Piece de resistance of the Stunston hospitality, however, are the mint juleps, the recipe for which Mr. Stunston brought from his home in Kentucky and is justly famous. (Professional Southerners have always been with us)
  • Lewis-Winn Stunston married Marie "Dodo" McLain of Los Angeles in a quiet ceremony in Riverside on May 1, 1940. Skip already had a house under construction at 1027 Moraga Drive in Bel-Air; the newlyweds lived at 624 South June while awaiting its completion. The photogenic couple would appear incessantly in social columns over the decades; their son, Lewis-Winn Jr., born in 1946, would lead a troubled life. Beulah Stunston continued her well-chronicled entertaining at 624 with luncheons and teas for fellow club ladies. It appears that her husband, who would turn 80 in 1948, spent most of his time upstairs away from the fray. James L. Stunston Sr. died at the age of 85 on February 24, 1954; his widow was still living at 624 South June when she died there on May 7, 1959. Junior was apparently also still in residence at the time; free of what might have been a weighty parental web, he would finally marry at the age of 63 in 1962. Skip and Dodo still owned their Bel-Air house at the time of their deaths in 1978 and 1975, respectively, with Lewis-Winn Jr. inheriting it
  • 624 South June Street was for sale by late summer 1960—"price reduced to close estate"; the property lingering on the market into the next year
  • Individuals associated with 624 South June Street during the 1960s and '70s were Eugene J. Conley Jr., Charles P. O'Connor, and Edward Silver
  • 624 South June Street was on the market in the spring of 1974 and again (if not still) in the fall of 1976, then asking $450,000
  • Later owners of 624 South June included Dwight M. Kendall, a developer of mobile-home parks, and screenwriter, producer, and director Walter Doniger, notable for directing for television episodes of Cheyenne, Maverick, and Bat Masterson as well as of Peyton Place
  • 624 South June was on the market in the spring of 2009 listed at $3,999,000. A new owner added a pool to the property in 2012 


Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT