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  • Built in 1928 on Lot 175 in Tract 6388
  • Architect: Roland Eli Coate
  • Contractor: Joseph Soll Abel 
  • Original commissioner: unclear per the original building permits issued by the Department of Building and Safety on June 4, 1928. That document cites an "A. F. Garrett" of 333 South Hoover Street, reachable at DUnkirk 1874, as the owner of the lot, this address and telephone number the same as those noted for the contractor Joseph Abel. A permit issued on July 12, 1928, for furnace installation also cites "A. F. Garrett" as the owner of the property. If not an employee pulling the permits for the contractor, "A. F. Garrett" could be the name of a party living outside of Los Angeles, and/or possibly of a discreet single woman or a wife financing the project with her own funds, as was not infrequently the case with sizable residential projects in the city. "A. F. Garrett" may have also been a contact for the man widely and perhaps properly credited as the first owner of 627 South Hudson, pioneer garment-industry executive Lemuel Goldwater; interestingly, the house is listed as the "Lemuel Goldwater House" in the papers of Roland E. Coate in the collection of the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California at Santa Barbara
  • The permit issued on June 4, 1928, by the Department of Building and Safety regarding 627 South Hudson Avenue calls for the construction of a 14-room residence with attached garage on Lot 175 in Tract 6388




Roland Coate's design for 627 South Hudson Avenue presents
modest street and northerly façades, modern in that one that might
have thought the house to have been built even 30 years later. Unlike the
placement of most other Hancock Park houses, Coate oriented 627's longer 
southerly elevation to face an expansive formal parterre garden designed
by Albert E. Hansen, as seen below. Recognized by the exacting ladies
of the Garden Club of America, Hansen's layout has apparently
been well preserved since he laid it out over 90 years ago.



  • A Southern California leader in his own right though also known as a great-uncle of Senator (and 1964 Presidential candidate) Barry Goldwater, Lemuel Goldwater was born in San Francisco on August 23, 1867, the family name having been changed in London from Goldwasser on its trek westward. Starting his career with a family general store in Tombstone, Arizona, he had acquired enough of his own capital by 1893 to move to Southern California and buy a stake in the newly chartered Citizens' Bank of Anaheim, where he stayed as a cashier—a title then meaning more than teller—until the spring of 1898 when he moved up to Los Angeles to enter the garment trade with Morris Cohn, a well-established local clothing manufacturer who was seeking a partner with financial experience; a further draw to Los Angeles may have been the recent establishment of a haberdashery by distant Goldwater cousins Harry and Marcus on Spring Street in 1896. Cohn had established Morris Cohn & Company in 1890, which became Cohn, Goldwater & Company. Among other menswear the firm produced workers' overalls and became famous for its “Boss” brand of work clothing. Expansion followed with the acquisition of competitors' mills. Having (as was a common practice) deracinated himself by changing his surname to Cole for a brief career in silent film, Morris Cohn's son Fred went to work for Cohn-Goldwater; eyeing the success of the Catalina brand and having observed from Hollywood the less-is-more-skin trend in women's fashions, Fred Cole introduce his first bathing suit line—they would no longer be figure-concealing "bathing costumes"—which in time was branded Cole of California
  • On October 3, 1899, Goldwater married Hortense Levy, daughter of pioneer Angeleno Michel Levy, who had established himself in the liquor trade since his arrival in the city after the Civil War. The Goldwaters had two sons, Jerrold born in March 1901 and Richard in December 1904, prompting them to hire top-flight architects Hudson & Munsell (Frank D. Hudson, William A. O. Munsell) to design a new house at 1139 South Lake Street, which still stands. The family moved into Hortense's mother's house at 1109 South Hoover Street nearby after Mrs. Levy's death in 1918 and stayed there until moving to Hancock Park. By that time their once-fashionable neighborhood—now part of the Pico-Union district—had become déclassé, with long-established families moving practically en masse to new Wilshire-corridor subdivisions
  • Goldwater was a leading member of Congregation B’nai B’rith, which in 1929 moved into an impressive new synagogue at Wilshire and Hobart boulevards that became known as the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. His philanthropy included the founding of the Jewish Federation of Welfare Charities; in addition, he had took on the presidency of Kaspare Cohn Hospital, originally a tuberculoisis clinic in Angelino Heights, in 1926 (Morris Cohn's family relationship to Kaspare is unclear if it existed). Goldwater established an ambitious “Million Dollar Campaign” to update and expand the hospital's facilities and would preside over its move to Hollywood where it became known as Cedars of Lebanon, a precursor institution of the renown Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of today. Goldwater remained president of Cedars of Lebanon until his death on July 19, 1944, a month shy of his 77th birthday. Among his tributes was an obituary in Women's Wear Daily two days later: "The California garment industry lost one of its deans in the passing of Lemuel Goldwater. He died quietly in his sleep at the family residence, 627 South Hudson Avenue.... Mr. Goldwater had been in failing health since shortly after the death of his long-time partner, Morris Cohn, in September, 1941."
  • After the death of her husband, Hortense Goldwater was joined at 627 South Hudson by her sister Therese, who had never married. Miss Levy died on August 5, 1957; Hortense continued her philanthropy and volunteer work and hosted meetings of the old-guard Friday Morning Club at 627 until she died at home on October 5, 1959
  • The next owner of 627 South Hudson Avenue moved in not long after the death of Hortense Goldwater. In a somewhat unusual move east from Bel-Air, Antoinette Ruth Sabel Tuller was in possession by the spring of 1960. She had the house sandblasted, as many owners of Hancock Park houses needed to do in the 1950s to remove grime left after a decade or two of serious smog
  • Milwaukee-born Antoinette Sabel (née Sabelwitz) worked as the head of the music department at Pasadena High School before marrying attorney Walter Tuller in 1930 and was otherwise no mere public school faculty member. With the backing of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, she had gone on to develop orchestras, brass bands, and singing groups composed of city workers, though she forbade jazz, which she considered sordid. (One does not imagine having had an especially lively time at the Tullers' parties, if they had any.) It is unclear as to when Walter Tuller and Nettie Sabel might have first met. He was a partner in O'Melveny, Tuller & Myers, the firm becoming well-known as O'Melveny & Myers after his death (and now officially and simply called "O'Melveny.") Tuller was married with five children when he divorced his wife of 20 years in August 1928; for whatever reasons, it was decided then that the three elder children (Lulu May, 18, Carol, 17, and Walter Jr., 6) would be placed in the custody of their mother, living in Long Beach, while the two youngest (Mary Louise, 6, and Robert, 4) would live with Mr. Tuller in a house he bought at 300 South June Street in Hancock Park. In 1931 the ex–Mrs. Tuller was forced by the apparently unrepentant, egotistical, and altogether unpleasant-sounding Major Tuller—he was the type of man who clung to a wartime rank well after the Armistice—to plead in court for her alimony and for support of the invalid Lula May, who'd been cut off by Tuller when she turned 21; more wrangling over money would occur at the time of his death later in the decade. In the meantime, as announced in the Pasadena Post on June 13, 1930, Tuller married Miss Sabel at the Los Angeles home of friends the day before. A large, rather indiscreet photograph of the couple appeared in the Times on July 10, 1933, as they were embarking on a delayed round-the-world honeymoon
  • The ambitious new Mrs. Tuller seems to have been anxious to establish herself socially now that she had an important spouse and more than the salary of a schoolteacher or municipal employee to live on. Her husband had been born in flyspeck Iuku, Kansas, in 1886 as Walter Kimple Tuller (Kimple being his mother's maiden name); it seems that Antoinette preferred the grander-sounding middle name of Kilbourne for him (and for heself), and it was duly adopted. When Mrs. Walter Kilbourne Tuller decided she needed a beach getaway, she had her husband buy a lot in the Malibu Beach Colony, as reported in the Times in May 1939. After marrying Tuller, Nettie had moved into his Hancock Park house at 300 South June Street; in 1938 the couple bought the grand 455 Lorraine Boulevard—built in Windsor Square by Dr. Peter Janss in 1912 and owned later by Norman and Buff Chandler, who called it "Los Tiempos"—where Tuller died on September 27, 1939. Soon moving back to Hancock Park from Windsor Square, his restless widow bought 555 Rimpau Boulevard. She kept 555 through the war years and then bought the considerably smaller 132 North Las Palmas Avenue, hiring Paul Revere Williams, the house's original architect, to carry out some remodeling; she flipped 132 within a few years and, ever upward, would be moving on to Bel-Air, from which she boomeranged back to 627 South Hudson Avenue. While it seems that Nettie Tuller did quite well with her investments in property, the first Mrs. Tuller and Lula May must have been having conniptions watching the Tuller money being spent with abandon; more on Walter Tuller's caddish behavior toward his ex-wife and older children can be found in our story of 555 Rimpau Boulevard
  • Nettie Tuller appears to still have owned 627 South Hudson Avenue when she expired on April 6, 1974, 17 days before her 80th birthday
  • Susan Rubin Fenton appears to have acquired 627 South Hudson Avenue in 1975, remaining until 2003; she was married to former Valley banker Ned J. Fenton 
  • 627 South Hudson Avenue last sold for $3,850,000 on Aug 28, 2012





Illustrations: Private Collection; Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UCSB; LAT;