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  • Built in 1923 on Lot 9 in Tract 5640
  • Original commissioner: Lillian I. Lindner, wife of businessman Charles A. Lindner
  • Architect: indicated as "owner" on the original building permit issued by the Department of Buildings on August 25, 1923; the owner is also indicated as the contractor. "C.A. Lindner" is noted as both architect and contractor on the original permit for the previous residence he built for his family at 714 South Windsor Boulevard in 1920
  • Back in Grand Rapids Charles A. Lindner had been the manufacturer of wood interior construction finishes for residences and commercial structures, its products being installed in buildings all over the country. By late 1919 he and Lillian and their three children were in Los Angeles renting a house on Reno Street just north of Lafayette Park while awaiting the completion of 714 South Windsor Boulevard, where the family remained until moving into 414 Rimpau Boulevard. Charles Lindner would be investing in oil, becoming president of California Oil Development Inc., and would serve as president-treasurer of Western Celotex Company
  • Charles and Lillian Lindner appear to have been seriously ambivalent about owning 414 Rimpau Boulevard. The house would be placed on the market several times until they finally sold it in 1941; classified advertisements appeared in the Times as early as March 1926, with $67,000 cited as the asking price. In April 1927, though no price was specified, ads noted that an agent would be "on property daily from 2 to 5" to show it. The house was still on the market in March of 1929; it was offered almost continuously during 1934 and 1935, and again in 1939
  • The Lindners returned to 414 Rimpau Boulevard in May 1939 after an extended trip to Australia, having in their absence rented 414 Rimpau to Leo Hartfield, owner with his brothers Max and Bernard of Hartfield's and Mayson's, downtown retail women's-wear shops. (At the time, Max Hartfield lived at 543 Muirfield Road in Hancock Park and Bernard Hartfield at 98 Fremont Place; before long all three brothers left the neighborhood to move west, Leo and Bernard to Beverly Hills and Max to Westwood)
  • Alice Cruz Freeman Miles Kinney was the owner of 414 Rimpau Boulevard by late 1941. Mrs. Kinney, a granddaughter of landowner Daniel Freeman, central figure in the development of Inglewood, had only just married Roland Thomas Kinney at her Santa Ynez Valley cattle ranch in August. Kinney, Stanford and Harvard Law, was president and a longtime member of The Bachelors, the downtown establishment's exclusive club for benedicts-in-waiting, membership in which was cancelled upon marrying. In 1927 Kinney and his brother, Wendell, had taken over the ironworks acquired by their father, Arthur W. Kinney, in 1918 and soon built a new foundry; in early 1941 they would establish the Kinney Aluminum Foundry Company to manufacture parts for the aircraft industry. The brothers operated other industrial concerns including Kinney Brothers, wholesale distributors of household appliances. Cruz, as she was known, had married Dr. Will Lauris Miles in September 1927; their daughter, Cruz Christie Miles, was born the next year. The Mileses were living in Beverly Hills by the spring of 1940, though it appears that Dr. Miles, a surgeon, contracted tuberculosis. Whether it was for that reason or some other or many, the Mileses divorced, freeing her to marry Roland Kinney. (Will Lauris Miles died at La Viña Sanatorium in Altadena in 1947.) She and Roland still living at 414 Rimpau Boulevard, 49-year-old Cruz Kinney died at St. Vincent's Hospital on September 10, 1954
  • On December 2, 1941, the Department of Building and Safety issued Cruz Kinney a permit for an interior remodeling of 414 Rimpau Boulevard. On August 10, 1950, she was issued a permit for a roof over the rear terrace; a permit issued to Mrs. Kinney on May 27, 1952, authorized an 18-by-16-foot enlargement of the library at the rear of the house. All of this work was designed by the firm of Lundeberg & Strawn ((William A. Lundeberg and J. Cecil Strawn). William A. Lundeberg was primarily a developer, although he had worked during the 1930s as a draftsman in the offices of architect Paul Revere Williams from 1925 to 1939, as had J. Cecil Strawn. Lundeberg & Strawn, whose office was on Larchmont Boulevard, carried out renovations across the city and sometimes built new residences on previously unoccupied sites—as in the case of 526 Rimpau Boulevard—and sometimes on sites on which larger houses had stood. (Lundeberg's other nearby projects include 602 and 606 South Lucerne Boulevard, 420 South Plymouth Boulevard, 355 South Irving Boulevard, 4665 West Fourth Street, and 4518 West Sixth Street)
  • On May 4, 1956, Roland T. Kinney married Mrs. Dorothy Nelson Solley, a divorcée known as Dorrit. The Kinneys were still living at 414 Rimpau Boulevard when she died on September 30, 1971, at the age of 67. Seventy-one-year-old Roland wasted no time in marrying for a third time and didn't have to travel very far while dating: He not only acquired Katherine Reynolds Fassoth Cavanaugh—she had been widowed twice—but the house next door at 400 Rimpau, where she'd lived since 1956. Managing to wait the Emily Post year after Dorothy Kinney died, the couple married quietly on October 12, 1972, as announced in the 1973 Southwest Blue Book 
  • Banker Morris Aubrey Densmore succeeded Roland Kinney at 414 Rimpau Boulevard and appears to have remained until his death on March 26, 1999. His wife, née Arline Thurlow, sold 414 in 2001. On June 29, 1978, Morris Densmore was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety for an 18-by-38-foot swimming pool on the property
  • Actor Sean Hayes, riding high on the success of Will & Grace, bought 414 Rimpau Boulevard in 2001. The façade of the house then appeared much as it was built 78 years before, as seen in the 1995 film Mallrats. Over the next  next 20 years its appearance from the street, and much of the rest of the house, would be transformed from a typical original upper-middle-class English-style Hancock Park house into a gated "mini estate," though this kind of transformation was not unusual as the neighborhood strove—and strives—mightily to keep up with Beverly Hills and the Westside. In 2002, a major renovation of the house, including a large two-story addition, was carried out, with other interior and exterior alterations made during Hayes's tenure. In November 2014, the actor married his partner, the music producer Scott Icenogle, in a ceremony reportedly having taken place at 414 Rimpau 




The original Hancock Park streetscape had its share of walled properties
but was by and large free of gated residences. Such security measures began
to appear in the neighborhood's low ebb in the aftermath of the Manson murders
and civil unrest; in recent times walls and gates have become status symbols as much
as protective devices. The house at 414 Rimpau Boulevard is seen above in the
1995 film Mallrats and below in a recent rendering. The tree at left remains,
though, curiously, one of the original streetlamps has been removed.




Illustrations: Private Collection; Universal Pictures