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365 South Hudson Avenue




  • Completed in in 1928 on a parcel comprised of Lot 184 and the southerly 40 feet of Lot 185 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: Webster B. Holmes, vice president of the Southern California Gas Company, bank director, and oil investor
  • Architect: Jonathan Ring, whose next Hancock Park project was at 100 Hudson Place
  • On November 17, 1927, the Department of Building and Safety issued W. B. Holmes a permit to build a 19-room residence at 365 South Hudson Avenue. On June 14, 1928, Holmes was issued a permit for a 1½-story, 28-by-33-foot garage and chauffeur's room
  • At St. John's Episcopal Church at Adams and Figueroa streets on November 25, 1919, Ohio native Webster Balkwill Holmes, Cornell '07, married Marion Kerckhoff, one of the twin adopted daughters of lumber and utilities executive William G. Kerckhoff, who had built 734 West Adams Boulevard in 1908. The newly married Holmses lived there with her parents before moving to South Pasadena; they would have three daughters, Josephine Marion (born in 1920), Barbara Kerckhoff (1923), and Gertrude Marjorie (1924). The family moved back to Los Angeles by 1925, stopping at 2260 West 25th Street in West Adams and then at 430 South Mariposa Avenue in the Chapman Park tract north of Wilshire Boulevard. It was from Mariposa Avenue that the Holmeses moved to Hancock Park, the cachet of which drew away the affluent from West Adams as well as from interim neighborhoods east of Wilton Place, such as Chapman Park, established only a decade before
  • In a scenario that would have warmed the heart of Veda Pierce, Webster and Marion Holmes and their three daughters appeared to live as models of Southwest Blue Book propriety and understated glamour. The family was seen frequently in the society pages of the Los Angeles Times, there seeming to be no ill winds blowing through 365 South Hudson up on its knoll. Only a small fire in 1932—and that in the servants' quarters—seems to have disturbed the household over the years. There were wedding receptions at 365 for all three daughters, who were all top-drawer Las Madrinas debutantes. Josephine was the first to marry when, at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills on June 20, 1942, she became the bride of tall and slender Robert Brundage McLain, a Stanford Deke who would be going into the insurance brokerage business. Marjorie married Richard Claude Simpson—Stanford and Harvard Business—at St. Alban's Episcopal in Westwood on April 12, 1947; on St. Patrick's Day 1950, also at St. Alban's, Barbara married Dr. James Frank Mills, a dentist. (The Simpsons would divorce in 1963, with Marjorie marrying civil engineer James Hewes Crispin III, another Stanford/Harvard Business man, in 1966)
  • Webster Holmes moved at some point after 1953 to Fifield Manor, a nursing home converted that year from the former Arcady Apartments by the Reverend James Fifield. (The 13-story Arcady, which is today the Wilshire Royale Apartments, was completed in 1927 at 2619 Wilshire Boulevard on the site of the famous mobile Verbeck house, moved to 637 South Lucerne Boulevard in Windsor Square in 1923.) Holmes died at Fifield Manor on April 18, 1959; his widow was still in possession of 365 South Hudson Avenue at the time but was preparing to move to a small house at 200 South Plymouth Boulevard in nearby New Windsor Square
  • Purchasing 365 South Hudson Avenue in 1959 was Jack L. Hemphill, national sales manager of the Grolier Society. Grolier published of the Book of Knowledge encyclopedias and had offices at 3540 Wilshire Boulevard. It seems that Hemphill's business strategy involved the cultivation of an image of success, which 365 would certainly have provided; he was described in one source as a Grolier manager who directed his staff to drive Lincolns rather than the plain-jane Fords and Chevrolets most traveling salesmen made do with. In May 1962, Hemphill was elected president of Grolier. On September 18, 1959, the Department of Building and Safety issued Hemphill a permit to add an 18-by-38-foot swimming pool to the property, for which a certificate of occupancy was issued on December 21. It seems that his image-building may have proven onerous financially. In 1964, after leaving 365 after just four years, Hemphill set up his own company, Hemphill Enterprises, as a distributor of Grolier publications. The firm was liquidated by the end of the decade
  • In July 1963, classified ads appeared in the Times offering 365 South Hudson Avenue for sale, though no price or exact address was disclosed. Ads also appeared that month offering "Decorator Furniture" for sale at the house. A sale of the property was imminent, and a well-known name would be occupying 365 by the end of the summer
  • Perhaps no better capsule biography of the new owner of 365 South Hudson can be found than that prefacing in his papers now in the collection of Loyola Marymount University:
Fritz Bernard Burns (1899-1979), born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was a powerful real estate developer in Southern California. As vice-president of Dickenson & Gillepsie real estate firm in Los Angeles in the 1920s, he oversaw the development of Palisades Del Rey (now Play Del Rey). With partner F. W. Marlow, he was involved in the development of Westchester, Windsor Hills, Panorama City, parts of North Hollywood and other areas in Los Angeles. Such projects made him a prominent developer in Los Angeles and a leader in the development of mass-produced housing, resulting in community development and the notion of middle class ownership of homes as a way of life. He was, consequently, a leading civic figure in the city. Burns was also a major philanthropic benefactor to Roman Catholic institutions, including Loyola Marymount University and Aquinas College. Burns was President of the Home Builders Association of Los Angeles in 1942 and of the National Association of Home Builders in 1945.

  • In 1946, having hired architects Walter Wurdeman and Welton Becket, Fritz Burns had built a significant model residence at Wilshire and Highland Avenue across the boulevard from the southwest corner of Hancock Park. His early Midcentury Modern "Post-War House" was furnished by Bullock's—and later by Barker Bros.—and was featured in House Beautiful, Life, and Popular Science, among other publications. Rather amazingly, if who knows for how much longer, the Post-War House still stands at 4950 Wilshire Boulevard in 2022. The architectural contrast of it and Burns's choice of the baronial pre-war 365 South Hudson Avenue as his own residence is worth noting




  • Fritz Burns had married Lucille Edna Robison in June 1924, with their son Fritz Patrick Burns arriving 11 months later. The Burnses were divorced by 1940, when Fritz married Gladys Guadalupe Carson Scheller, a descendant of the pioneer Dominguez family and a widow with three children. After their Las Vegas ceremony and a honeymoon in the east, the couple settled into her house at 227 South Windsor Boulevard in New Windsor Square. The Burnses were living at 133 South June Street in Hancock Park by the end of 1943 and would remain there until moving to 365 South Hudson Avenue. Curiously given that the Hemphills had apparently had a pool built at 365 in 1959, Burns was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety on October 24, 1963, for a 20-by-40-foot pool on the property, a certificate of occupancy for which was issued the following September
  • It is unclear as to how long the Burnses remained at 365 South Hudson Avenue, though they were still living there in middle of the 1970s. Fritz Burns, age 79, died in Los Angeles on February 19, 1979. His obituary in the summer 1979 issue of the Loyola Lawyer reported that Burns "succumbed at his Hancock Park home following a lengthy illness," which may refer to 365. Patrick Burns died a year later at the age of 54; his mother died in August 1981
  • 365 South Hudson Avenue was on the market in the fall of 1986 asking $2,500,000
  • Born in West Virginia in 1921 to a coal miner and shopkeeper of Lebanese origin, self-made insurance billionaire George Joseph founded Mercury Insurance after many years with Occidental Life. After serving as a B-17 navigator during the war, he married his wife Gloria in 1946 and entered Harvard on the G.I. Bill, graduating in three years. Back in Los Angeles, the couple lived early on at the still-standing La Mae apartments down on West 45th Street just east of Western Avenue, George going to work as an analyst and tireless salesman for Occidental. The founding of Mercury Insurance in 1962 called for a new house in a neighborhood Joseph had long coveted, and 646 South Hudson Avenue became available that year. After 39 years and five children together, the Josephs divorced, she, a vice-president of Mercury, receiving half of the marital assests, including 646 South Hudson, where she was still in residence in 2018. George Joseph had opened Mercury's first offices in a Miracle Mile building; in 1984, the year his divorce proceedings were underway, he cemented a foothold near Hancock Park when he built a new headquarters for Mercury at the southeast corner of Wilshire and the west entrance of Fremont Place, next to the one-time site of 4472 Wilshire Boulevard. After many years of a house here and there but lying mostly fallow save for uses such as Christmas tree sales lots, parcels lining Wilshire in the Park Mile had begun to be populated by condominiums and office buildings by the 1980s. George Joseph remarried soon after his divorce; he and his second wife Vicky Wai Yee, 30 years his junior, found another English-style house to move into in the form of 365 South Hudson Avenue, just two blocks north of the first Mrs. Joseph at 646, and remain in residence as of 2018 



Illustrations: Private Collection