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  • Built in 1923 on Lot 10 in Tract 5640
  • Commissioner of the original house: retired real estate operator Edward Carr
  • Architect of the original house: Harry Lincoln
  • On October 29, 1923, the Department of Buildings issued Edward Carr permits for a 14-room house and a two-story, 20-by-28-foot garage at 424 Rimpau Boulevard. Curiously, the address first entered on the documents was "412 So Rampart Blvd," with its corresponding "Lot 79" in "Tract 91" given as particulars; these notations were overwritten before submission to the Department of Buildings with the correct "424 So Rimpau Blvd" and "Lot 10" and "Tract 5640." (Permits for the 60-room apartment building still standing at 412 South Rampart Boulevard were issued two months previously)
  • Edward Carr had been a harness maker in Owosso, Michigan, before becoming a real estate loan broker there. His first wife died in Owosso in 1904; he married Winifred Bartholomew in 1911. The Carrs arrived in Los Angeles in 1916, taking up residence at the Engstrum Apartments downtown. On December 10, 1919, Carr was issued permits for the house and garage still standing at 757 South Windsor Boulevard, which the Carrs sold after a few years, moving to a rented 1920 duplex at the southwest corner of South Norton Avenue and Third Street while planning and awaiting the construction of 424 Rimpau Boulevard
  • The Carrs had moved west with her mother, Mary Louise Bartholomew; all three would be moving to 424 Rimpau Boulevard once it was completed. The three would live quietly at 424 for the next 20 years. Mrs. Bartholomew died at home at the age of 100 on October 21, 1944, her funeral being held at 424. Edward Carr was 89 when he died on January 29, 1946. Winifred Carr soon put 424 on the market; once sold, she moved eight blocks west to 212 South Orange Drive, which was half of a duplex built by Edward Carr in 1926, apparently as rental property. She remarried in August 1948, her new husband, Robert A. Copple, moving in with her on Orange Drive
  • Mason Letteau was the son of cemetery and crematorium owner George Henry Letteau and had grown up at 132 Fremont Place. After Stanford he went on to Harvard Business School, class of 1940; while east, he met the beautiful New York and Palm Beach socialite Betty Louise Scheer. Their engagement was announced prominently in The New York Times on December 19, 1939. Perhaps it was the oil-and-water mix of less uptight California society with considerably more dazzling and sophisticated East Coast society—Southwest Blue Book versus Social Register—that resulted in the marriage not taking place; perhaps it was his schooling, perhaps it was talk of war. At any rate, with Mason having decided that Palm Beach was over his head or Miss Scheer having decided that she'd made a mistake, he went very much home. On July 8, 1941, Letteau married beautiful Fremont Place girl Georg'Ann Gross instead. "Jo," as she was known, had grown up with Mason, living in another Mediterranean house just around the corner at #73. He had received his commission as an ensign in the Naval Reserve at Annapolis the month before. While he was overseas, a son, Robert, was born on May 17, 1942. Perhaps owing to haste and wartime upheaval, the neighborhood marriage, sadly, did not last. Mason remarried on October 25, 1947, his new bride being the widowed Wildell Washburn Davis, known as Billie, whose husband Wilson Buford Davis had died in the crash of a Western Air Lines DC-3 on a snowy peak near Gorman less than a year before. Billie, as Letteau's bride was known, wore portentous mourning black for their quiet Santa Barbara wedding. The marriage was announced prominently in the Los Angeles Times on October 27 with the lede, "Coming as a surprise to their many Los Angeles friends...." On November 27, 1947, another item in the Times noted that "Newlyweds Billy [sic] and Mason Letteau...are getting settled in their new home, 424 S. Rimpau Blvd." Whether it was having gotten married again too soon after the death of her first husband or owning to what might have been Mason's roving eye or other aspects of his personality—whether it was amicable or not—his second marriage was over even sooner than his first


The family business: Mason Letteau followed his father into the interment trade when he was elected
executive vice-president of the Inglewood Park Cemetery after George Letteau died in 1949. He
was named president in February 1957, the fourth of the cemetery and second Letteau;
he later become general manager and CEO. Mason's son, Robert, grew up to
be an attorney and a councilman for the City of Inglewood; later he
was appointed a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.


  • On December 8, 1947, the Department of Building and Safety issued Mason Letteau a permit to renovate the kitchen at 424 Rimpau Boulevard, combining it with the breakfast room  
  • It seems that Billie Washburn Davis Letteau—or, rather Billie Washburn Davis, she having dropped Mason's surname like a hot potato after the split—might have been the one to put up the cash to pay Winifred Carr for 424 Rimpau Boulevard; she'd sued Western Air Lines for $250,000 after the death of the husband whose name she took back. The house was disposed of by midsummer 1949. On July 3, the Times, erroneously reversing the names of buyer and seller, reported that "The residential property at 424 S. Rimpau Blvd. was [recently] purchased by W. W. Davis from Daniel J. Petrovich for $36,000." It was Wildell Washburn Davis—the "Letteau" having decamped with Mason to a bunk at the California Club—who sold the house to Mr. Petrovich. (Mason Letteau went on to become more involved with his father's Inglewood Park Cemetery after George Letteau died that year. He would also become vice-president and treasurer of the Cremation Association of North America, which, according to its website and redolent of The Loved One and The American Way of Death, "...feels that the word 'cremains' should not be used when referring to 'human cremated remains.' 'Cremains' has no real connection with the deceased whereas a loved one's 'cremated remains' has a human connection." At any rate, Mason Letteau would marry a third time in 1959 before he died in 1968
  • Daniel J. Petrovich, a 34-year-old pipeline contractor, moved into 424 Rimpau Boulevard with his wife Rose Marie, daughters Diane and Elizabeth, and son Daniel Jr.; Paul arrived that November 1949. A gardener and his wife moved into the garage apartment. The family would remain in possession of 424 for the next 55 years


An advertisement appearing in the 1924 Los Angeles City Directory

  • Dan Petrovich worked for his father's sewer pipeline business; Martin Petrovich had arrived in New York from Yugoslavia on January 4, 1906, using the name Mose Petrovich and soon made his way to Los Angeles. It was here that he became Martin Petrovich, nicknamed Mike—name changes and "a.k.a."s becoming something of a family tradition—and opened a sewer- and cesspool-building firm, the name of which he anglicized as "M. Miller." Mike Petrovich would actually retain his original surname until he died in October 1961. It appears to have been after the patriarch's demise that Dan and Rose Marie Petrovich (she née Balich, born in Boyle Heights in 1917) decided to change the family name to Miller. The couple had had by that time two more children, Janey Petrovich in 1953 and Gregory Petrovich in 1957; when a fourth daughter was born in 1963—Rose Marie was then 45—she became Tracy Miller, who was 24 years younger than her eldest sibling
  • On August 20, 1957, the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit for 424 Rimpau Boulevard, curiously in the name of "M. Miller," to build an 11-by-15-foot porte-cochère attached to the north side of the house. On May 23, 1962, "Mr. and Mrs. D. J. Miller" were issued a permit for a 20-by-40-foot swimming pool at the southeast corner of the property. On December 5, 1973, a permit was issued, again curiously, to an "A. Miller" to convert the first floor of the 1923 garage into a "rumpus room" and to build an adjacent two-vehicle carport
  • Dan Miller died in Los Angeles on February 23, 1987. His funeral was held at St. Anthony's Croatian Church in the family's old North Bunker Hill Avenue neighborhood, as had been his father's mass. Rose Marie Miller, by now 86, was still in possession of 424 Rimpau Boulevard in 2004, when the house was sold. (The second centenarian to have occupied 424, Rose Marie died at the age of 100 on January 18, 2018; her funeral was also held at St. Anthony's)
  • The purchasers of 424 Rimpau Boulevard from Rose Marie Miller had recently remodeled another Hancock Park house, one built in 1929 at 465 North June Street; their rebuilding and major expansion of 424 widened the façade considerably and resulted in a somewhat overwrought and self-conscious redesign, one with an incredibly shiny interior, that sadly physically and aesthetically eradicated Harry Lincoln's 1923 house. It was sold for $7,665,000 on October 14, 2014. A comprehensive video of the current 424, one set amusingly to Mozart's String Serenade No. 13, is here



Illustrations: Private Collection; Inglewood Park Cemetery Association; LAPL