PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES






  • Built in 1955 on Lot 6 in Tract 18106; replaced in 2018
  • Original commissioner: furniture manufacturer Forest Haines Gillespie
  • Architect: none indicated on original building permit; the engineer was George Sexton
  • On May 20, 1955, the Department of Building and Safety issued Forest Gillespie a permit for a 75-by-49-foot residence with an attached garage at 206 Rimpau Boulevard
  • In 1919, Forest Gillespie had teamed up with his father, Thomas Gillespie, and a brother, Milton, to manufacture furniture with an eye to the thousands of bungalows being built across Los Angeles that only hinted at the dramatic rise of the city's population, which would well more than double during the 1920s. Despite a few personal glitches, the family's success as local industrialists became evident in their acquisition of ever grander addresses over the next decades. Milton's abandonment of a teenage marriage in 1918 and his Fresno child-bride's tabloid-blared demands for money on the basis of an alleged pregnancy were eventually forgotten, as was Forest's being charged with fraud and grand larceny in 1925 for having, according to the Times, entered into a conspiracy with a school-board purchasing agent "to buy furniture...at prices greatly in excess of those prevailing on the open market," with the two men sharing the extra profit. The jury was deadlocked, apparently freeing Gillespie to, by 1930, plan a big new plant and then sell it to a furniture conglomerate soon after. Forest, whose first wife, the surgeon Dr. Mary Akey Gillespie, had died in 1932, built 78 Fremont Place for his new wife and children and his parents in 1936. During the 1930s, the extended Gillespie family had occupied 98 Fremont Place
  • On February 13, 2018, the Department of Building and Safety issued a demolition permit for the original 206 Rimpau Boulevard to an entity known as Tiger Bass Properites, based in Cerritos; on the same day, Tiger Bass Properties was issued a permit for a new 91-by-74-foot residence and attached garage on the property



Illustrations: Private Collection