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  • Completed in 1930 on Lot 3 in Tract 7040 (Tract 7040 was a re-subdivision of Tract 6388; 7040's Lot 3 was originally Lot 180 of Tract 6388)
  • Original commissioner: Natalie Duell Douglas
  • Architect: Alfred Kenneth Kellogg
  • Contractor: A. D. Chisholm Company; in the early 1920s Alexander D. Chisholm had formed a contracting, building, and real estate development company, Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle (William H. Fortine and Evan L. Meikle); A. K. Kellogg had been working for the firm as a designer when he was given the commission for 501 South Hudson Avenue. The architect carried on in the employ of Chisholm, who formed his own company after the Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle partnership was dissolved in 1929
  • On November 20, 1929, the Department of Building and Safety issued Mrs. N. D. Douglas permits for a two-story, 20-room house and a two-story, 24-by-37-foot garage and staff quarters at 501 South Hudson Avenue


As seen in the Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1929: The caption writer refers to Mrs. Douglas
 erroneously as "Mrs. M. D. Douglas" and to "411 South Hudson," 411 being the original
  Hancock Park developer's designation of the southerly half of her property.


  • In January 1907, Chicago-born debutante Natalie Duell Douglas eloped with Iowa-born George Camp Douglas, a grandson of Cedar Rapids grain mill owner Walter Donald Douglas, whose firm merged with others to form the Quaker Oats Company in 1901. Their son Walter Donald Douglas II was born in June 1909. The Douglases' marriage was not happy and would eventually end in divorce; before he ran off to join the British Army in 1915, he had been the defendant in at least one alienation of affection suit and had creditors chasing him, despite the fact that he would in time come into a great deal of money according to the will of his father who had gone down with the Titanic. (Camp distinguished himself as a British officer and had remarried by the time he died in an accident in France in 1925.) By 1920 Natalie and her mother Mary Duell, who seems to have divorced Natalie's father, were renting a house in Coronado; within a few years they decided to settle in Los Angeles, taking a house at 714 South Ardmore Avenue. The rather dense subdivisions that had begun to flank Wilshire Boulevard east of Wilton Place in the 1900s and 1910s would remain respectable enough into the 1960s, but by the late '20s they had become déclassé to those who had the means to move west, where the city had added luxurious tracts as far out as the Pacific. Her big double lot purchased and the residence designed, Natalie went ahead with her project at 501 South Hudson in the heart of Hancock Park despite the slide on Wall Street that had begun in September leading up to its spectacular crash a month before permits for the house were pulled in November 1929
  • At St. Paul's Cathedral on August 23, 1933, as reported in the Times the next day, Walter Donald Douglas II, Dartmouth '31, married Charlotte Marie Ferguson, whose parents, the Clarence Fergusons, had built 200 Muirfield Road in Hancock Park in 1922. Natalie Duell Douglas died just three months later, on November 13, a week after her 47th birthday. The cause of her death is unclear and unmentioned in the press; just two weeks before, she had been pouring tea at the Three Arts Club on Magnolia Avenue with the likes of social dreadnoughts Mmes Hancock Banning and Charles O. Nourse and the Misses Guendolen Laughlin and Carmelita Rosecrans (the family of whose brother William Rosecrans would soon be succeeding Charlotte Douglas's at 200 Muirfield Road). When Charlotte and Walter's daughter was born on May 31, 1934, she was named Natalie. Apparently renting, they were living in Hancock Park at 143 South McCadden Place but Walter would soon be inheriting and moving back to 501 South Hudson with his family, which in the spring of 1936 would come to include a second daughter, Ann, and by 1940, a third, Susan
  • Mary Hervey Duell had left 501 South Hudson and was renting the house that William Banning, nephew of the aforementioned Mrs. Hancock Banning, had had Paul Williams design for him at 425 North McCadden Place in Hancock Park in 1929. By the times she died on June 6, 1948, Mrs. Duell was living at 315 South Plymouth Boulevard in Windsor Square 
  • On July 15, 1948, just five weeks after the death of Mary Duell, Charlotte Douglas died at the age of 38 at Good Samaritan Hospital, the cause of her death as unmentioned as that of her mother-in-law in 1933. Just a few months before, a filler item appearing in the Times reported curiously and belatedly that the Douglases and their daughters had spent a winter vacation at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs. All along 39-nine-year-old Walter, fairly blatantly, it seems, had other irons in the fire in the forms of a new house and a 27-year-old fellow native Angeleno, Mary Elaine Knott Andrews, the divorced mother of a young son. Per the Des Moines Tribune of October 30, 1948, Walter and Mary Elaine took out a marriage license in Mason City, Iowa—perhaps he was showing her his roots—and were married before returning west, where he was now the vice-president of the Hoffman Radio Corporation. Two weeks before, Walter Douglas, having hired architect Herbert Riesenberg, had taken out the permit for a new Hancock Park house at 127 North Hudson Avenue, 3½ blocks north of his former residence at 501 South Hudson. By the spring of 1950, Walter, Mary Elaine, Natalie, Ann, Susan, and Walter Donald Douglas III—born on November 23, Thanksgiving Eve, 1949—were settled into 127 North Hudson. On December 8, 1950, Hervey Elaine Douglas was born. Mary Elaine's son David C. Andrews, who'd been born on June 1, 1943, was in 1950 living with his maternal grandmother in a small house in Boyle Heights; he appears to have later been adopted by Walter Douglas. The house that Walter II's mother had built 20 years before at 501 South Hudson Avenue had been sold to Philip G. Kinzer
  • Iowa-born Philip Galer Kinzer, the Carnation Company's vice-president in charge of sales and advertising, moved to Los Angeles from Milwaukee in 1947 and would be on hand to open the firm's new Wilshire Boulevard headquarters in August 1949, an iconic building now lost. His stay at 501 South Hudson Avenue was brief; his wife, Claranelle Kinzer, another native Iowan, died on March 6, 1953, while the couple was visiting Hong Kong. With classified ads making note of its elevator, 501 South Hudson was on the market by that November. On November 30, 1950, P. G. Kinzer had been issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety for a bathroom renovation
  • Native Angeleno Horace Hebbard Bresee, a longtime mathematics teacher and basketball coach at Los Angeles High School, was the next owner of 501 South Hudson Avenue. Bresee was graduated from L.A. High in 1922 (and from pre-Westwood U.C.L.A, 1926); his grandfather, the Iowa-born Phineas F. Bresee, had come west to Pasadena in 1883 and become a Methodist minister before founding the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene (later, and still, known as the Bresee Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena). Phineas's son Paul, Horace's father, became a physician while three other sons founded Bresee Brothers, the well-known local mortuary firm in 1897. It is unclear as to how a high-school math teacher could afford the lavish 501 South Hudson—perhaps Horace's Kansas-born wife Esther (L.A. High class of 1924) came with a dowry when the couple married in 1928. Their first of two sons, Franklin, born on August 20, 1929, would become well-known as the radio actor and radio historian Frank Bresee; his "Golden Days of Radio" series and interviews with Hollywood stars began in 1949 and was on the air for decades and can still be heard today in podcasts. Alan Bresee was born to Horace and Esther on August 10, 1935
  • On July 13, 1956, Horace and Esther gave a 94th birthday party for the oldest alumnus of Los Angeles High School, native Angeleno Miss Mary Foy, class of 1879, at 501 South Hudson. (The year after Miss Foy was graduated, she was appointed, at age 18, as the first woman to head the Los Angeles Public Library; she was also a founder of the Native Daughters of the Golden West and a leader in the suffrage movement. Her childhood home, twice moved from the corner of Seventh and Figueroa, still stands on Carroll Avenue in Angelino Heights) 
  • The Bresee family would retain possession of 501 South Hudson Avenue for nearly six decades. Horace died on January 27, 1984, age 79; Esther was 98 when she died on March 1, 2004. Over the decades, their sons had lived at 501, Frank with his wife Bobbie in later years; Horace's father, Dr. Bresee, was also in residence before he died in 1959, weeks shy of turning 88. That year, Frank began operating a radio studio at 501, posting official notice of his intention of establishing the operation in the Hollywood Citizen-News in February 1959
  • 501 South Hudson Avenue was used as the Hudson sisters' house in the 1991 remake for television of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Exteriors of the original 1962 film starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, were filmed at 172 South McCadden Place nearby
  • Frank Bresee had 501 South Hudson Avenue on the market in the summer of 2010 at an asking price of $4,300,000. Although reported sold for $4,200,000 in August 2010, perhaps to his own trust, Bresee was issued permits in the fall of 2010 to remodel the kitchen, to add a party-ready 5-foot deep, 53-foot-long swimming pool and a six-foot block wall at the rear lot line, and for new windows. (Perhaps he had received lowball offers and negative feedback; houses lived in comfortably long-term by one family are often in need of more help than the family realizes.) In October 2015, another transfer of the property was reported at a sale price of $11,850,000. Frank Bresee died at Cedars-Sinai on June 5, 2018
  • 501 South Hudson Avenue was on the market in the fall of 2022 for $17,500,000


Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT