PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES





  • Completed in 1950 on Lot 40 in Tract 5640
  • Original commissioner: attorney Kenneth Neal Chantry
  • Architect: Theodore Criley Jr. of Claremont
  • On November 3, 1949, the Department of Building and Safety issued Kenneth N. Chantry a permit for a seven-room house and attached garage at 415 Rimpau Boulevard. On December 7, Chantry was issued a permit to alter the garage placement to conform to setback regulations relative to West Fourth Street; on December 21, Chantry was issued a permit to change the design of the foundation from one of caissons and beams to standard construction. The permit notes that "This change [is] necessary due to discovery in excavations that there was no fill[ed] ground + basement"; it appears that it was thought intially that a permanent building had at one time occupied the lot, which, based on aerial images and maps and the developmental history of Hancock Park, does not ever seem to have been the case
  • On May 31, 1950, as the house itself was being completed, Kenneth Chantry was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety for an 18-by-36-foot swimming pool at 415 Rimpau Boulevard
  • Los Angeles native Kenneth Chantry, graduate of Polytechnic High School, Stanford, and U.S.C.'s School of Law, was practicing with Henry Herzbrun during the 1940s in an office in the Richfield Building downtown; a move to Beverly Hills came in late 1946, more convenient for the firm's entertainment-industry clients such as King Vidor, Mae West, Pat DiCicco, Susan Hayward, and Franchot Tone. On February 23, 1946, Governor Earl Warren appointed Chantry temporarily to the bench of the Los Angeles County Superior Court. Times coverage of the appointment the next day referred to his wife, née Margaret Loper of Fresno, as his Stanford sweetheart; the couple had been married at the Stanford Memorial Chapel on November 21, 1930, and since had two daughters. Chantry resigned from the bench a year later to accept an appointment as a member of the City of Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners. Elected president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association in March 1955, Governor Goodwin Knight named him to the Los Angeles Superior Court bench a second time eight months later
  • The Chantrys were still living at 415 Rimpau Boulevard when Margaret Chantry died on May 31, 1987, at the age of 85. Kenneth Chantry was still in possession of 415 when he died on April 23, 1998
  • The remarkable Dr. Robert Dale Shlens was the next owner of 415 Rimpau Boulevard. Born in Hammond, Indiana, on August 29, 1935, Shlens was stricken with polio at the age of ten and spent nine months in an iron lung. Force of will and multiple surgeries allowed him to become ambulatory and to pursue orthopedics as a career despite skeptics; eventually admitted to Orthopaedic Hospital's residency program, Shlens completed his training and became Board Certified in orthopedic surgery, going on to practice medicine in Los Angeles for 50 years. Still the owner of 415 Rimpau, Dr. Shlens died on December 5, 2014, with his family continuing in possession of the house
  • While Hancock Park saw its major building activity in the 1920s—the constant hammering and dusty lots must have been trying—many of its early houses became white elephants during the Depression alongside those of West Adams, from which many Hancock Parkers had come. Construction came nearly to a standstill during the '30s and through the war years, with many unimproved, overgrown lots scattered throughout the neighborhood. As the postwar economy boomed, these building sites attracted new homebuilders interested less in architectural tradition than modernity and convenience, the parcels large enough for expansive one-story Midcentury houses. In the Larchmont Buzz of July 29, 2021, writer Phyllis Hansen notes that 415 Rimpau Boulevard "was believed to be the first single-level residence in Hancock Park." In Hansen's piece the Chantrys' younger daughter remembers that "Not all the neighbors were pleased," unsurprising in a neighborhood of many arch conservatives—reportedly even the head of the local chapter of the John Birch Society and a cabal of racists who sought to prevent Nat King Cole from living among them—who no doubt saw modern architecture as the work of ethnically suspect commie pinkos. (Phyllis Hansen's complete article, which includes more images, is here)


Walking south from Fourth Street on the west side of Rimpau Boulevard, pedestrians encounter a
message in Lincoln pennies at the northerly driveway entrance to 415: WALK IN PEACE.



Illustrations: Private Collection