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  • Built in 1925 on Lot 29 in Tract 5640
  • Original commissioner: retired St. Louis manufacturer Herman J. Benderscheid
  • Architect: Clarence J. Smale, then working for the construction firm of Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle
  • On February 13, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued H. J. Benderscheid permits for a 12-room house and a one story, 20-by-25-foot garage at 625 Rimpau Boulevard
  • Herman J. Benderscheid, born in Germany on July 24, 1847, arrived in the U.S. in April 1880. Settling in Los Angeles, where he became a stairbuilder and where he was naturalized in July 1888, he relocated to St. Louis in 1890 to pursue the same craft, which led to cabinetmaking. In 1893 he started the Benderscheid Manufacturing Company, specialists in showcases for drugstores on a national scale. He had married Bertha Hahne in 1870; their son Herman Jr., born on July 4, 1876, grew up to become secretary of his father's firm. The house the Benderscheids built in St. Louis still stands at the northwest corner of University Street and North Garrison Avenue; so does the retirement bungalow he built in Los Angeles in the fall of 1921 at 125 South Wilton Place after what were apparently frequent winter visits to Southern California
  • The Benderscheids lived at the Hotel Trenton on Olive Street while awaiting the completion of their Wilton Place house. On October 15, 1921, 34-year-old Mathilde Schnur arrived in New York from her native Germany, proceeding across the country to live with her Aunt Bertha and Uncle Herman Benderscheid in Los Angeles. At the time of her May 23, 1922, declaration of her intention to become a U.S. citizen, Miss Schnur gives her occupation as a "domestic." It seems that Bertha Benderscheid was ailing—apparently in the care of her niece, she would die at 125 South Wilton Place on April 12, 1923, age 78; compounding the presumed sadness for her widow, just four months later, on August 22, Herman Benderscheid Jr. died in Norfolk, Virginia, after a long degenerative illness. Mathilde, it seems, was the convenient antidote to Herman Sr.'s grief
  • In 1922, in an unclear arrangement, 125 South Wilton had been transferred to downtown haberdasher Frank J. Plumley and his wife Maude, who did some interior remodeling to the house that appears to have allowed Herman Benderscheid, and Mrs. Benderscheid as long as she had left to live—as well as Mathilde—to stay until 625 Rimpau Boulevard was completed in the latter half of 1925. It is unclear as to whether its lot had been purchased and the house planned as an ungrade for Herman and Bertha or whether he decided to build the new house for Mathilde. After the deaths of his wife and son, 76-year-old Herman Benderscheid wasted little time in remarrying; perhaps inevitably, his bride would be the 40-years-younger Mathilde. On the passenger manifest of the Resolute, arriving in New York from Germany on October 25, 1924, Mathilde is still Miss Schnur, an alien, with Herman, listed separately as a naturalized U.S. citizen, noted as a widower. It is unclear as to when a wedding between Mathilde and Uncle Herman might have taken place, but the two moved from Wilton Place to 625 Rimpau Boulevard once it was completed in mid 1925 and were presumably married by then. An image of the new house appeared in the Times that December. Mathilde would be naturalized as Mathilde Benderscheid in Los Angeles on November 18, 1927


As seen in the Los Angeles Times on December 20, 1925, 625 Rimpau Boulevard still stands, as
does Herman Benderscheid's previous residence at 125 South Wilton Place and the house
he owned in St. Louis and sold before his permanent move to California in 1921.




  • The Benderscheids decided to put 625 Rimpau on the market in early 1929; an open house was held on February 10, a classified that day reading "This is the one you want or should want. Beautiful Moorish and Italian stucco.... Much different than the rest." No price was specified, but a year later the house was being advertised at $57,500; three months later the price had been dropped $5,000, but there were still no takers and the property was withdrawn from the market. Hancock Park houses had become white elephants during the Depression
  • Herman and Mathilde Benderscheid lived quietly at 625 Rimpau Boulevard until the summer of 1935, when they decided to take the signature vacation of affluent Californians of the era. Round-trip first-class passage was booked on the Lurline leaving San Pedro for Honolulu on July 12, 1935, for a two-week rest; the couple arrived home on August 8. On October 3, Herman Benderscheid died at the age of 88. Although there is a sizable headstone at Forest Lawn, Glendale, where there are small separate markers for "MOTHER 1844-1923" and "FATHER 1847-1935," the Benderscheids' son had been buried in the coincidentally named Forest Lawn Cemetery in Norfolk
  • Mathilde Benderscheid made plans to sell 625 Rimpau Boulevard not long after her husband's death; she would be moving to a duplex she bought at 114 South Harper Avenue
  • Purchasing 625 Rimpau Boulevard from Mathilde Benderscheid was Scottish-born master builder John MacLeod, who would be moving in with his wife née Elizabeth Murray—also born in Scotland—and their three young daughters. The MacLeods were moving from 245 North Plymouth Boulevard in New Windsor Square, which they sold to lumberman Charles W. Bohnhoff, lately of 401 South Windsor Boulevard. MacLeod's obituaries 40 years later described him as once being "one of the nation's best-known heavy construction builders" and credited his firm, the Macco Construction Company, with building portions of the San Francisco airport and approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as dams, pipelines, roads and freeways, and large-scale residential developments
  • On August 27, 1941, John MacLeod was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety for the addition of an upstairs bathroom and dressing room over an existing first-floor roof at 625 Rimpau. On March 28, 1946, MacLeod was issued a permit to expand the garage by 20 feet to accommodate four cars, with servants' rooms above
  • On June 4, 1949, the MacLeods' eldest daughter Catherine married insurance man William Shattuck at the newly built Bethel Lutheran Church on Olympic Boulevard; a reception was held afterward at 625 Rimpau
  • The MacLeods, their younger two daughters Janet and Elizabeth, and their Alaskan-born niece Kathy were enumerated in the 1950 Federal census at 625 Rimpau in April 1950; by the middle of the next year, the family had sold the house and moved to Newport Beach
  • Dr. Bernard Lavine, a general practitioner, and his wife Frieda were living at 625 Rimpau Boulevard by the fall of 1951; the couple had been living with Mrs. Lavine's parents, Sam and Pauline Shlaichow, at 344 South Mansfield Avenue. (Sam Shlaichow was was a master wood carver who'd worked in the factories of Grand Rapids before moving to Los Angeles just before America's entry into World War I.) Sam Shlaichow is listed in the 1956 city directory at 625 Rimpau as though he was the head of the household, though he and Pauline retained the Mansfield house, perhaps renting it out
  • On October 16, 1951, the Department of Building and Safety issued Bernard Lavine M.D. a permit for bath and kitchen remodelings at 625 Rimpau, the latter involving a lowering of the ceiling; on July 7, 1953, Lavine was issued a permit for a 20-by-42-foot swimming pool
  • Another curious city directory listing for 625 Rimpau was that of attorney Raymond Gloozman in issues of the early 1960s; it could be that the Lavines rented the house out for a time. (Raymond Gloozman's legal claim to fame appears to have been his representation of dental assistant Katayana Harrison in her 1979 palimony suit against comedian Flip Wilson)
  • Bernard Lavine died on January 31, 1962; his obituary in the Times the next day noted that he was a past president of the Southern California Council of B'nai B'rith Lodges and that he had been living with Frieda at 625 Rimpau
  • Ownership of 625 Rimpau Boulevard after the Lavines is unclear; it was on the market in 1972 and still in 1974, when classifieds ran offering it at $160,000; in a bit of classic real estate agent puffery, one ad appearing not long after the spring 1974 release of the Robert Redford film version of Fitzgerald's 1925 novel claimed that "Gatsby would have loved this mansion." Gatsby probably would have thought it a hut and the house was still available the next summer, Hancock Park in the '70s being about as popular as it was during the Depression '30s
  • Prominent criminal defense attorney Charles Earl Lloyd occupied 625 Rimpau Boulevard during the 1970s. Early in his legal career, Lloyd, born in Mississippi in 1934, was one of the first African-American deputy city attorneys in Los Angeles; he became a law partner of Tom Bradley before the latter went into politics and famously became mayor 
  • Noted neuroscientist Leslie P. Weiner and his attorney wife Judith Hoffman succeeded Charles Lloyd at 625 Rimpau and still own it as of 2019. Their son Matthew Hoffman Weiner is the prolific television producer, director, and writer known for Mad Men and The Sopranos who has had definite personal opinions about growing up in Hancock Park



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT