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  • Built in 1924 on Lot 194 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: Edward Jospeh Bowen Sr., president of Union Tank & Pipe Company and secretary of Pacific Wire Rope Company
  • Architect: Elmer Grey
  • On August 22, 1924, the Department of Buildings issued Edward J. Bowen permits for a two-story, 17-room, 67-by-93-foot residence and a two-story, 36-by-50-foot garage and servants' quarters at 336 South Hudson Avenue
  • Edward Bowen, 30, and Ella Gaffney, 25, were married in her hometown of San Francisco on September 6, 1911. Their son Edward Jr. was born 13 months later; John Gaffney Bowen, who would be called Jack, was born in April 1916. Mr. and Mrs. Bowen were killed in the crash of a T.A.T.–Maddux Air Lines Ford Trimotor near Oceanside on January 19, 1930; five days before, Bowen had been elected a director of Citzens National Trust & Savings Bank. The Bowens' sons remained at 336 South Hudson Avenue with their guardian, Edward Bowen's sister Lydia, until Edward Jr. married Joan Brandel in July 1937. The family would be selling 336; by the spring of 1940, Edward and Joan and his brother were renting 234 Muirfield Road. Edward Bowen III and Patrick would be born during the war years. Interestingly, Edward Bowen Jr. decided on a radical career change; moving east to attend New York Medical College, he would receive his M.D. in 1948. Jack moved to San Francisco and Edward and Joan bought 516 South Hudson Avenue, which, like 234 Muirfield, was an English-style house in the mold of his childhood 336 South Hudson


A rendering seen in the Los Angeles Times on August 31, 1924, depicts the southerly façade of
336 South Hudson Avenue; construction on the house had commenced that month. The
gardens would be the work of renowned landscape architect Florence Yoch.


  • By the end of 1940, 336 South Hudson Avenue had been purchased by Loyd Wright, a prominent Los Angeles attorney not to be confused with Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright and an architect himself, well-known at the time for his own advanced designs in Southern California. Loyd Earl Wright, born in San Jacinto on Christmas Eve 1892, was moving to Hancock Park from Beverly Hills with his wife Julia (née Julia Martha Kingsbury, a graduate of Claremont), sons Loyd E. Wright Jr. and Dudley, and daughters Pauline and Clarissa Jane; draft records indicate that Loyd Jr. had recently been a patient at the Valmora Sanatorium in New Mexico, apparently having been suffering from tuberculosis. Prior to buying 617 North Alta Drive in Beverly Hills in 1932, the Wrights had lived in a house at 1836 North Kingsley Drive in Los Feliz that Loyd and Julia had purchased soon after their marriage in Hemet on September 7, 1918, with Loyd scheduled to go off to war. (It is unclear if, in the phrase of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he ever "got over.") After his service, wherever it took him, Loyd returned to practicing law with his father and he and Julia moved into the Kingsley Drive house with her widowed mother. Loyd Wright Jr. was born one day shy of nine months after the wedding. It seems that Loyd Wright found that living in Beverly Hills during the '30s made for too onerous a commute to his downtown office in the Board of Trade Building, hence the move halfway back east to Hancock Park. The Wrights would remain at 336 South Hudson Avenue until the mid 1960s
  • Members of A-list Hollywood were among Loyd Wright's clients, including over the years D. W. Griffith, Mae West, Charlie Chaplin, Hal Wallis, and Mary Pickford in her 1936 divorce from Douglas Fairbanks. High-profile entertainment-industry work in no way reduced Wright's standing in the legal community, as one might be inclined to think; his gravitas was such that he was elected to the presidency of a trifecta of bar associations, including those of Los Angeles, the State Bar of California, as well as the American Bar Association from 1954 to 1955
  • A Marlborough, Finch, and Stanford graduate—she was a Kappa at the latter—Pauline Wright, known as "Polly," was married to Navy Lieutenant Commander Long Ellis at Wilshire Methodist Church on August 30, 1946, with Dr. James Fifield Jr., a sort of upper-class version of Aimee Semple McPherson, officiating. A reception followed at 336 South Hudson. Lieutenant Commander Ellis was a alumnus of Williams and was preparing to enter Harvard Business School after the honeymoon. At Wilshire Methodist on August 14, 1943, Loyd Wright Jr., who had matriculated at U.S.C. and had apparently recovered from his illness, married Jane Marie Cooper, who had been living with her grandmother, Mrs. George E. Huntsberger, at 450 South Lucerne Boulevard in Windsor Square. Dudley Kingsbury Wright, a Dartmouth senior, was married to Ann Katherine Follinger of Scarsdale, New York, at the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church in Baltimore on September 24, 1947. Clarissa Wright, who was known as Claire and, like her sister a former Las Madrinas debutante, seemed destined to remain leading her proper life as a dutiful Junior Leaguer until she was married at 33 to James Earle Sargeant at All Saints' Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills on January 12, 1957. Per club rules, the couple was required to relinquish their respective memberships in The Spinsters and The Bachelors, the Los Angeles Establishment clubs for the top-drawer post-college unmarried set. James Earle Sargeant Jr. was born on July 26, 1961. Loyd Wright Jr. died in 1964 at the age of 45
  • Several names are associated with 336 South Hudson Avenue between 1965 and 1973. A permit for a kitchen renovation issued by the Department of Building and Safety on January 14, 1966, cites a George Low as owner; an S. W. Jackson is listed at 336 in city directories of 1967-1969; a Bertha Willis is listed at 336 in the 1973 city directory. Max Factor III is another name connected to 336 in the early 1970s
  • 336 South Hudson was on the market in the summer and fall of 1973
  • Philip M. Hawley, then president of Broadway-Hale Inc., the department store chain, became the owner of 336 South Hudson by early 1974. Broadway-Hale became Carter Hawley Hale Stores that year; in 1977 Hawley, who had begun his career at The Broadway as a sportswear buyer in 1958, became C.E.O. of the firm, which had acquired, or would be acquiring during the 1970s, Neiman-Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, San Francisco's Emporium, Contempo Casuals, Waldenbooks, and Wanamaker's of Philadelphia, among other retailers
  • On May 1, 1975, the Department of Building and Safety issued Philip Hawley permits to fill in the property's original swimming pool, apparently built in 1924, and to replace it with one measuring 20 by 45 feet
  • Philip Metschan Hawley, born in Portland in 1925, had married Mary Catherine Follen on May 31, 1947; they would have eight children, many of whom would live near their parents in and around Hancock Park. Mrs. Hawley died in 2019. Earlier in the decade the Hawleys had taken an apartment at Country Club Manor on North Rossmore Avenue, with 336 South Hudson going on the market beginning in February 2010 at a seriously ambitious asking price of $8,450,000. By April there had been a $1,200,000 reduction, and then further cuts on down to a reported sale at $6,075,000 in May 2011



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT