PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES





  • Built in 1926 on Lot 208 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: industrialist Morgan L. Sweeney
  • Architect: Adolph Frederick Leicht
  • On May 6, 1926, the Department of Building and Safety issued Morgan Sweeney permits for a two-story, 11-room residence and a two-story, 21-by-25-foot garage–servants' quarters
  • Before coming to California, Connecticut-born Adolph Leicht had practiced in Newark, his commissions including gloomy stone New Jersey churches and late-Victorian Long Island summer houses. Practicing in Los Angeles by the early '20s after a few years in Sacramento, Leicht designed a number of sometimes fanciful Mediterranean-style residences in and around Los Feliz. He also had complicated dealings with Aimee Semple McPherson in the designs of buildings relating to her Angelus Temple complex, dealings that resulted in architect suing preacher and she, true to form, manipulating judge and press by making a fashion show out of the trial and he thus dropping the suit 
  • San Francisco–born Morgan Lebrut Sweeney had come to Los Angeles in 1919 and was by 1926 manager of Union Tank & Pipe Company of Vernon, mechanical engineers, designers and purveyors of tanks, well casings, water pipe, and "everything riveted, welded, or soldered"; president of Union Tank was Edward J. Bowen, who'd built 336 South Hudson Avenue in 1924. Sweeney's daily presence in Vernon would likely have had him dealing with J. B. Leonis, founder and ruler of that industrial town, just south of downtown Los Angeles; interestingly, another South Hudson Avenue house that went up at the same time as did Sweeney's was the one Leonis built at 647. Morgan Sweeney and his second wife, Margaret, had a son, Morgan Jr., born on August 11, 1915. Morgan's first wife, Jessimine, had died in October 1902, 11 months after the birth of their daughter, who was named Jesmor—a combination of their first names. Jesmor Sweeney appears to have lived with her paternal grandmother in San Francisco after her father remarried, though she must have spent time with her father and stepmother on Hudson Avenue: By the summer of 1930, she had married J. B. Leonis Jr.


As advertised in the Los Angeles Times on April 8, 1923; after
the death of its president, Edward J. Bowen, in the crash
of a T.A.T. Trimotor at Oceanside in January 1930,
Morgan Sweeney became head of the firm.


  • Morgan and Margaret Sweeney owned 636 South Hudson Avenue through the 1930s, though, perhaps for reasons of economy if not an inability to sell it during the Depression, they left the house in mid-decade to rent it out and rent elsewhere themselves, among their addresses over the next few years being 155 South Wilton Place and 804 South Longwood Avenue—which they appear to have bought, Morgan now having gone into real estate after leaving Union Tank, the firm apparently having become defunct after 1933
  • Renting 636 South Hudson Avenue briefly in the latter half of the 1930s was Emanuel "Manny" Cohen, who in February 1935 left his powerful position as vice-president in charge of production at Paramount Pictures to form his own company in a deal involving, among others, Bing Crosby and attorneys John O'Melveny (who lived in Hancock Park at 212 Muirfield Road) and Neil McCarthy (also living in Hancock Park, at 465 Muirfield). Morgan Sweeney Jr., who married on New Year's Eve 1937, and the senior Sweeneys appear to have occupied 636 briefly before the house was rented again in 1940
  • Dr. Herbert Otto Bames, his wife Agnes, and their younger of three daughters, Gertrude and Corinne, were leasing 636 South Hudson Avenue by the spring of 1940; Bames would buy the house from the Sweeneys within a few years. On August 27, 1946, the Department of Building and Safety issued Dr. Bames a permit to build a 6-by-14-foot extension to the house's playroom. The Bameses stayed at 636 until 1955
  • Having arrived in California from Boston in 1945 and moving from Pasadena, Russian-born attorney and mortgage broker Hayward (né Hyman) Tamkin bought 636 South Hudson from the Bameses and was in residence with his wife Etta and sons Curtis, Douglas, and Jeffrey by 1955. Etta Tamkin was a lawyer herself and a founder of the Music Center, an original member of its fundraising Blue Ribbon 400—spearheaded by Mrs. Norman Chandler of 455 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square. Mrs. Tamkin also served as a president of her chapter of Hadassah, among her other civic, charitable, and religious endeavors
  • Still living at 636 South Hudson Avenue, Hayward Tamkin died at the age of 82 on January 17, 1991. Though the Tamkins were spending most of their time in Palm Springs, Etta appears to have still been in possession of 636 after 53 years when she died at 97 on February 21, 2008
  • 636 South Hudson was sold after Etta Tamkin's death to an owner who added a 12-by-41-foot swimming pool to the property in 2011



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT