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  • Built in 1951 on Lot 1 in Tract 3819
  • Original commissioner: Harry Boyajian
  • On September 26, 1951, the Department of Building and Safety issued Harry Boyajian a permit for a five-room house at 304 Muirfield Road; on October 15, Boyajian was issued a permit for revisions to its foundation. A certificate of occupancy for 304 was issued on May, 15, 1952. The original permit indicates that Harry Boyajian was both designer and contractor on the project
  • Turkish-born Harry Boyajian was the owner of dry cleaning shops; on the original permit for 304 Muirfield Road, he gave as his address 1308 Fifth Avenue, which was an apartment above one of his outlets, the Forum Cleaners, addressed 3728 West Pico Boulevard. Boyajian and his wife Beatrice and their daughter Rose were living there in 1940. They are noted as "owner,"  "manager," and "cashier," respectively, in voting records. In early 1948, the Boyajians had completed 2106 Bagley Avenue, a six-room house in Beverlywood, for which they had hired the esteemed architect A. Godfrey Bailey to design. It seems possible that that house, perhaps as might have been 304 Muirfield, was a real estate investment project rather than being intended as a long-term residence for the Boyajians. Their stays were short at both addresses
  • Philip Pinkwater, a Chicago businessman whose World Famous Sales Company sold sporting goods and rainwear, was the owner of 304 Muirfield Road by late 1953. On December 18 of that year, he was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety to add a 12-by-15-foot room to the house; the room count had somehow gone from five to seven and would now be eight. One of Pinkwater's sons is the writer Daniel Pinkwater, born Manus, whose voice has been heard on NPR's "Weekend Edition" and "All Things Considered" for years. Described in some references as a "ragman," Philip Pinkwater has been referenced by his son as a "ham-eating, iconoclastic Jew," and a "gangster." Daniel, it seems, may have once lived at 304 Muirfield Road himself, having spent some pre-high-school years at Hancock Park's Black-Foxe Military Institute. Philip Pinkwater's ownership of 304 appears to have been brief; by 1956, Abraham B. Kurtzman was living at 304
  • Abe Kurtzman was a longtime Los Angeles clothing manufacturer in business with three siblings as Kurtzman Bros. & Co. He appears to have remained a bachelor until marrying in 1961 at the age of 62; he was still living at 304 when he died at 65 on June 7, 1963
  • 304 Muirfield Road was on the market by April 1964
  • Kathryn E. Clarke was the owner of 304 Muirfield Road by late summer 1964. On September 11 of that year she was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety to add a 15-by-30-foot pool to the property. She had been living with her widowed mother not far away at 956 Longwood Avenue, where she'd built a pool in 1958. Mrs. Clarke died in 1961; Mr. Clarke had been an Irish-born steamship captain 
  • Moving next to a house nearby at 232 South Citrus Avenue, Kathryn Clarke had 304 Muirfield Road on the market in May 1969
  • While Harry Boyajian and Philip Pinkwater might have lent something refreshingly diverse to Hancock Park, 304 Muirfield Road would be entering its first phase of serious notoriety after the departure of Kathryn Clarke. Attorney Ronald Robert Silverton was practicing with his father, criminal attorney David Silverton, as Silverton & Silverton, which had its offices in what had been built as clothier Mullen & Bluett's Wilshire branch in 1930. In 1954 Ron Silverton married Fanya Carter, who as Fawn Silverton achieved some dubious success in the movies. On August 2, 1963, the Van Nuys News reported that she had just signed a 10-year contract with the obscure American Productions Inc. and that she would greet guests in a spun-gold dress at an event at home in Encino celebrating both the signing and her 30th birthday. Two years later, billed as "Fawn Silver," she starred as The Black Ghoul in Orgy of the Dead (screenplay by Ed Wood); a year later she appeared reclining and somewhat covered by a white fur coat in the cheesy short-lived Playboy-esque Millionaire magazine as "Fawn Silverton—Millionaire's Heiress of the Month." On January 3, 1966, Los Angeles Times columnist Charles Champlin ran a deadpan feature about Miss Silverton and her ascent, titled "Success Without Visiting Schwab's," that described her as having an I.Q. of 135, now somehow just 26 years old, and as the daughter of "local financier-philanthropist Vic Carter." "She has launched herself with the drive that builds empires—acting lessons with Stella Adler, Jeff Corey and Ben Bard, offices, a full-time personal manager and publicist, photo sessions with Tom Kelley of Marilyn Monroe calendar fame," the same Tom Kelley who shot her for Millionaire. It seems that Ron and Fawn had three children by this time
  • By 1967 the Silvertons had shaken off the Valley and were living on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. There then seems to have been a divorce, with Mr. Silverton acquiring 304 Muirfield Road as, at least temporarily, a bachelor pad, a purpose for which it seems to have been well suited. Silverton began Playboy Mansionizing the house in 1969, when on October 16 he was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety to add a gym with sauna at the northeast corner of the property. On November 4, he received a permit to build a second pool. Then, on May 31, 1970, 29-year-old Brunhilde Goerlich became the new Mrs. Silverton
  • The Silvertons would embark on a series of agglomerations to the original structure of 304 that would do little to enhance its appeal except perhaps to the owners. Three days before his second wedding, the Department of Building and Safety issued Silverton a permit for the addition of a north-side 21-by-13-foot bedroom to 304. On August 14, 1970, he was issued a permit to add a bath and enclose a north-side 8-by-12-foot breezeway. On March 9, 1971, Silverton was issued a permit to add an 11-by-13-foot dining room. A permit for another north-side bedroom, this one 17-by-18, was issued on December 22, 1971. By then the funding for all this building activity at 304 had come into question
  • In February 1971, Ron Silverton was appointed to the Los Angeles County  Crime and Delinquency Control Commission by county supervisor Kenneth Hahn. On the following May 24, the Times reported the next day, Silverton was arrested at his Wilshire Boulevard office on felony charges dating back to December 1969 including "bribery, perjury, subornation of perjury and filing antedated documents, and two counts of offering false evidence." It seems that attorney Silverton had filed a Monterey Park wig-shop owner's personal injury suit after the statute of limitations had expired. On December 15, 1971, he was convicted on seven felony counts including perjury and the filing of false documents. Per the Times of January 27, 1972, Silverton was, after his conviction, "charged with six accounts [sic] of grand theft and one count of forgery in connection with the alleged bilking of clients on auto accident settlements." To add chutzpah to this very un–Hancock Park state of affairs, Silverton had announced himself as a candidate for district attorney. Other defendants included office staff at what was now called the Silverton Law Corporation and an apparently complicit chiropractor. On February 7, 1972, Silverton was sentenced a 1-to-14-year term in the clink; his stay in jail appears to have been considerably less than 14 years. It wouldn't be until late in 1972 that his law license was suspended
  • Fairly obviously a lawyer who devised his own laws, Ronald Silverton was back in the news for an even tawdrier avocation than mere insurance fraud. On June 14, 1974, he was indicted along with four others, having been accused of operating an "international black market baby ring in which prices reportedly ranged from $10,000 to $15,000.... Silverton called the charges 'absolutely untrue' and insisted that he had done 'nothing that is illegal or immoral.'" He had been running advertisements in Southern California papers asking "Problem pregnancy? May we help? Free prenatal care. Work suitable to pregnancy" and drawing up contracts with pregnant women to fulfill orders. Silverton was found guilty of felony conspiracy on July 25 and sentenced to a whopping 11 months in jail, still insisting that his baby-brokering was "moral, legal and proper." As for 304 Muirfield Road, all this notoriety occurred well before entertainer Norwood Young visited even further if much more comical immoderation on the house with his charming array of front-yard Davids that soon became legendary in Hancock Park and the across the city


Tall trees lining the driveway and hiding the house were replaced with David knockoffs in 1998


  • In the meantime, the jig was up for Ronald Silverton on Muirfield Road; 304 began appearing for sale in ads in July 1974, with classifieds reading on variation of "1-sty,. 4 br., 2 mds., 4 ba. Pool/gym, sauna, therapy pool, A/C, new luxury" but citing no asking price
  • It is unclear as to when Ron Silverton may have been able to unload 304 Muirfield Road; he was most certainly selling at a particularly low ebb for Hancock Park, its market still reeling in the midst of '70s stagflation and still in the wake of the last decade's Watts rebellion and Manson mayhem that deterred many from seeking homes in central Los Angeles, especially houses that were dated Midcentury architectural mishmashes. We have found nothing so far to link 304 to any new owner between the years 1974 and 1987


The gates to Norwood Young's house would add Ceasars Palace flair to the Muirfield Road streetscape


  • By mid 1987, Buenos Aires–born Dr. Francisco Bruno Fuscaldo was the owner of 304 Muirfield Road. On June 15 of that year the Department of Building and Safety issued Dr. Fuscaldo a permit for even more appendages to the house; a north-side addition and an apparent rearward extension of the kitchen and a bedroom were authorized, which required a reconfiguration of the roofline. One can only imagine the patchwork network of plumbing and electrics in the building, let alone the sprawling aesthetics of a never very attractive house. Little wonder that Norwood Young saw it as the perfect mess to make all his own as the now-legendary tackiest house in Hancock Park; at least it wasn't the desecration of one of the neighborhood's more traditional bourgeois piles. In a piece in the Times on November 17, 1997, about his work on 304, Young, who referred to his mansion as "Youngwood Court," told an interviewer that "The house was a piece of ---- when I bought it and I brought it up." It was indeed probably a piece of shit, from the LADBS-permits sound of it. Neighbors interviewed by the Times huffed predictably
  • To increase the bedroom count to seven—exactly who visited the bachelor is unclear—Young took out a permit from the Department of Building and Safety on March 11, 1998, to add space at the southeast corner of the house
  • Described as an obscure R&B singer and mascara-wise as a Little Richard or Michael Jackson wannabe—his house more famous than the man himself—New Jersey–born Norwood Young probably came by his money from means other than show biz. He was unabashed in turning the property into a Canoga Park garden center on steroids, something you pass while out motoring in the Valley, wondering who bought all that statuary. In addition to dimestore rooftop busts, his array of 16—or was it 19?—somewhat inaccurate copies of the David over in the Accademia Gallery that he spaced along his curving driveway was to make the house the talk of the town. It seems that Young had been renting 304 from Dr. Fuscaldo since 1994 before buying it for $1,200,000 three years later. He lavished no less attention on a stupefying Liberace-style makeover of its warren of rooms, with the camp not quite obscuring the garishness. It was all most definitely Young's to enjoy unapologetically and he was certainly not without his supporters. The entertainer would continue to enliven the neighborhood by seasonally decorating his statues until, it seems, the whole overshadowing cauldron of burning individual taste and the lonely me-against-the-world nature of it was too much for even Norwood to deal with anymore. The show was over after he put 304 on the market in the spring of 2011 asking double what he paid for it 14 years before
  • Taking his kitsch with him, Young sold 304 Muirfield Road on April 26, 2012, for $1,450,000, down $950,000 from his original ask and less than what he'd paid for it in 1997, which, adjusted for inflation, was now $1,700,000. He'd also sunk an awful lot into his interior and exterior whimsies. Since then, the house has acquired a safe beige pallor, seen below, which may or may not have been an improvement on the modern-mortuary look seen at top, rendered not long after Young and his Davids moved out. The house is described on real estate websites as now having five bedrooms, somehow down from seven, but still outnumbering its original total room count


The now über-anodyne 304 Muirfield Road is just as well now fully hedged off from the street 



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; Atlas Obscura