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  • Built in 1925 on Lot 351 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: general contractor Darrell Condley as his own home
  • Architect: Llewellyn A. Parker
  • On March 17, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued Darrell Condley permits for a two-story, 12-room residence and a one-story, 20-by-28-foot garage at 161 North Hudson Avenue
  • Darrell Condley and Eugenie Raymond, both Louisiana natives of interesting apparent mixed-race backgrounds, had been married in 1897, moving to Southern California within a few years and after the birth of their two daughters, Bernadette and Mercedes. Their son Darrell Milton Condley was born in Los Angeles on June 13, 1902. Darrell Sr. is identified in city directories of the early 1900s as a "butter dealer"; by 1906 he had gone into real estate, the next year forming Condley & Condley with Louis Condley Jr., a Louisiana-born cousin. That venture was short lived, the cousins going their separate ways by 1910. Darrell went into the construction business with a new partner for a few years, later in the decade very successfully operating on his own as a general contractor
  • The Condleys were living in Huntington Park by 1910 and in Vermont Square by 1920; the next year they moved north to a house built in 1915 at 169 South Hobart Boulevard, where they would remain until moving to Hancock Park
  • Darrell Condley did not have long to enjoy his new house at 161 North Hudson Avenue; he died on November 9, 1927. While driving downtown with Mrs. Condley that day he suffered a stroke; taken home immediately, the end came soon after. Condley's large obituary in the Times two days later, with a photograph, described him as a contractor, a banker—he had become a director of the Bank of Italy, precursor of Bank of America—and a club and fraternal man. He was a Shriner, an Elk, and a member of the Jonathan Club and the San Gabriel Country Club. Among the work attributed to him were the 1915 Hollywood High School gymnasium, El Segundo's 1918 city hall, and Los Angeles's first Buddhist temple of 1925 (the Hongwanji Temple building still stands at the northwest corner of Central Avenue and First Street)
  • Eugenie Condley would remain 161 North Hudson Avenue for eight years after her husband's death. Bernadette had married bakery salesman Edgar Fedderson in 1923 but by 1930 was divorced and living with her two children at 161, as was Darrell Jr. Even if she needed the room for her family, Mrs. Condely might have been finding, as were other Hancock Park homeowners, that she had come to inhabit an expensive-to-maintain white elephant. The house was on the market in 1930; by February 15, 1931, classifieds were running in the Times offering 161 at a significantly reduced price: "Spacious Italian home. Steam heat. Formerly $65,000. Now $45,000." There were no takers even at a 31 percent price reduction. The market appears to have forced the Condleys to retain 161 North Hudson for five more years. Large display ads in the Times in August 1935 announced a "DeLuxe Auction" of "10 rooms of exquisite furniture, furnishings, objets d'art and Oriental rugs" on the 13th and 14th of that month. While the Depression was easing, Hancock Park houses, in most cases less than a decade old, were still going for a song: 161 was being advertised in the fall of 1935 priced at $22,500 ($491,000 in 2023 currency). That humiliating figure seemed to do the trick. The Condleys would be moving to a small house in Van Nuys 
  • Wholesale drug executive Linn Dale Johnson, who had recently moved west from Kansas City, bought 161 North Hudson Avenue in late 1935. On January 15, 1936, Johnson was issued permits by the Department of Building and Safety to extend the north side of the garage 16 feet and to make interior alterations to the house. Johnson, his wife Ruth, and their daughter Joanne stayed at 161 only briefly, moving to a house at the Studio City end of Laurel Canyon. Classifieds in the Times in December 1936 offered 161 North Hudson Avenue for rent, furnished, at $500 a month; it would instead be sold by the following spring
  • On May 9, 1937, the Times featured 161, running the image seen above, with this caption: "This beautiful twelve-room residence situated at 161 North Hudson Avenue in the Wilshire Country Club section has been puchased for $40,000 by G. E. Kinsey from Linn D. Johnson." Glaucus E. Kinsey, his first name sounding alimentary, was mercifully known to his friends as George; he was moving to 161 from Beverly Hills with his wife Mattie, née Martha Matilda Armstrong, and college-age daughters Martha Dell and Margaret Louise. Margaret married osteopath William David Long at the First Congregational Church's Shatto Chapel on August 15, 1941; Martha married First Lieutenant Samuel Leas Carpenter III at home at 161 North Hudson in October 1943
  • On January 24, 1944, the Hollywood Citizen-News reported that burglars had ransacked 161 North Hudson Avenue while the Kinseys were away for the weekend. The thieves made off with clothing, cash, and jewelry worth $1,000
  • "G. E. Kinsey" was a name that appeared frequently in the Los Angeles press over several decades both in social columns and in news of Mr. Kinsey's many large real estate transactions, which often involved Wilshire District and Hollywood apartment buildings. In the fall of 1943 Kinsey bought the seven-story Chateau Elysee at 5930 Franklin Avenue, built in 1928 by the wife of Hollywood pioneer Thomas Ince. George and Mattie Kinsey would later maintain an apartment at the Chateau despite their sale of it in July 1951 to the wife of Dr. James W. Fifield, pastor of the First Congregational Church. Fifield, who at one time lived in Hancock Park at 111 North June Street around the corner from the Kinseys, was the kind of clergyman who lived in splendor with servants, had a country house with a name, and supported Senator Joe McCarthy, a sort of Aimee Semple McPherson but one who catered to the upper rather than the working classes. It was with the former cohort that the Fifields sought to populate the Chateau Elysee, which they converted to a fancy retirement complex they would rename, characteristically immodestly, Fifield Manor. Promotional materials promised that "guests are assured complete security in their declining years." (The building declined along with its "guests" to the point of nearly being demolished; in 1969 it was taken over by the Church of Scientology to become its Celebrity Centre International)
  • The 1950 Federal census, interestingly, enumerates George and Mattie Kinsey as living at 414 St. Pierre Road in Bel-Air; apparently designed by Paul R. Williams and commissioned by Johnny Weissmuller but lived in by the swimmer and film Tarzan only briefy, the house has had an odd history, with differing internet tales as to owners and renters. It seems that in the late 1940s 414 St. Pierre was occupied briefly by Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, and then by the Kinseys, who had turned over 161 North Hudson Avenue to their daughter Margaret and her husband Dr. Long; it appears that Margaret worked for her father as a "confidential secretary," her occupation given in the 1950 census. Though only in their 50s, the Kinseys kept an apartment living at Fifield Manor after their stay in Bel-Air though they maintained 161 North Hudson as their voting address
  • Margaret and William Long's son William Glaucus Long was born on his parents' first anniversary, August 15, 1942. Lani Dell Long arrived on October 12, 1946. Having moved into 161 North Hudson Avenue, the family would, per the Times, still be living there in 1963 when tragedy struck on the afternoon of February 2. Traveling westbound on Route 66 near Needles after visiting relatives in Arizona, Dr. Long and his son were killed instantly in a head-on collision with an eastbound car passing a truck. By the time of his death, Dr. Mitchell had advanced well beyond osteopathy, having become a cardiac specialist and the senior attending physician at County General. William G. Long was a junior at U.S.C. and on its rowing team
  • While the Times gave Dr. William D. Long's address as 161 North Hudson Avenue at the time of his death, it seems that the house may have already been close to, if not in the process of, changing hands by that time. Publication of the July 1963 issue of the Los Angeles city directory would have been close to being finalized; in it, attorney James Henry Mitchell Jr. was listed at 161. He and his wife Marilyn Wright Mitchell were moving from 532 South Windsor Boulevard in Windsor Square
  • The James Henry Mitchells moved into 161 in 1963 with their young children James III and Karen Lee. Having been married at All Saints' in Beverly Hills on February 20, 1954, with a reception afterward at the Los Angeles Country Club, the Mitchells would be divorced in February 1978
  • Michael and Janet Fourticq would own 161 North Hudson Avenue during the 1980s and '90s; among other alterations they would add a 34-foot irregularly shaped swimming pool to the property in 1984 and a 13-by-28-foot den to the rear of the house in 1988. By early 1998 the Fourticqs had bought a house three blocks south at 344 South Hudson Avenue; 161 North Hudson became the property of Museum Associates, the financing operation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  • Museum Associates retained 161 North Hudson Avenue until June 2006, when it was sold to a party who sold it 14 months later to the owners as of 2020 


Illustration: LAT