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  • Built in 1924 as 403 Muirfield Road on Lot 38 in Tract 3819
  • Original commissioner: industrialist William Lacy
  • Architect: Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle (Alexander D. Chisholm, William H. Fortine, and Evan L. Meikle) is indicated on the original building permit for 403 Muirfield Road as architect and contractor; the firm, as did similar organizations, employed draftsmen to execute designs or subcontracted them out to independent architects. During the 1920s Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle built houses for private clients such as William Lacy as well as on spec. Examples of the firm's work (and of is corporate variants) on Muirfield Road alone also include 511, 543, 635, and 645
  • On March 4, 1924, the Department of Buildings issued William Lacy permits for a 12-room residence and a 20-by-40-foot, 1½-story garage at 403 Muirfield Road
  • William Lacy was perhaps unusual for his era in that he was respected not only for his business acumen—admired for his material success rather than resented for it—but appreciated too for his bonhomie and tireless efforts on behalf of Los Angeles, his unselfish desire to see the city grow and its citizens prosper accordingly. As a young man in Los Angeles from the time that its first transcontinental rail connection was bringing it out of its frontier era, the city's future seemed limitless, and he caught the booster bug. After Los Angeles High School and business college and establishing himself with his father and brother in the various Lacy enterprises—banking, iron, clay products, oil, gold—Lacy married Emma L. Gordon on February 2, 1892. After first living with the senior Lacys in Lincoln Heights, the couple moved across the river to larger houses as six children, four boys and two girls, began to come. Living initially at Spring and Seventh, they then built on West Ninth Street at a corner now under the Harbor Freeway. Continuing a westward drift, in April 1905 William acquired what seemed at the time to be the four best lots in the Wilshire Boulevard Heights Tract, securing the southwest corner of Wilshire and Vermont Avenue. And only the best architects would do for what became 3200 Wilshire Boulevard—by the end of the year, Lacy had commissioned Sumner P. Hunt and Wesley Eager to design a 14-room house that would sit high on a berm overlooking the intersection. The Superintendent of Buildings issued his construction permit for 3200 on July 27, 1906


As an indefatigable civic booster and onetime president of the Chamber of Commerce,
William Lacy never missed an opportunity to extoll the economic gold mine
that was Los Angeles. Here, he stands atop a cargo of oranges
being shipped from the harbor at San Pedro.


  • The Los Angeles Times of July 2, 1922, reported the sale of William Lacy's corner of Wilshire and Vermont to a group of investors known to be headed by John G. Bullock, a name that would figure prominently into boulevard history by the end of the decade. Even as early as 1922, downtown business interests recognized the city's westward drift. The most famous case of understanding the need to follow customers is that of department-store founder John Gillespie Bullock. With a group of investors in 1922, and with the owner of 3200 Wilshire ready to decamp for a new suburb to the west and no doubt looking at a serious profit, Bullock bought the southwest corner of Wilshire and Vermont, betting on the coming rezoning of the boulevard to commerce. Whether or not it was his original intention to simply demolish the Lacy house when the time came to build his new suburban store on the corner, or whether he had his eye on it as movable is not known. While he was already living at 627 South Ardmore in a house he liked—maybe it was his wife who was especially attached to it—perhaps Bullock had a chance to come to appreciate the particular charm of the house that came with the land he'd bought for his store's expansion. At any rate, a deal was struck between Bullock and Lacy. In July 1924, a large auction was held at 3200 Wilshire to dispose of whatever belongings the Lacys didn't want to take with them to their new house in Hancock Park. Meanwhile John Bullock had acquired a large parcel on Plymouth Boulevard; 3200 Wilshire would have a new home. On August 15, 1924, the Department of Buildings issued permits for the relocation of the house and its garage to Windsor Square. The new site indicated on the permits was Lot 19 of the Windsor Square Tract; it appears that the house may have indeed stood there temporarily on trucks as Bullock decided on the final configuration of what would become something of a family compound, or the reference to Lot 19 on the permit was to all of his holdings on the block, which included Lots 20 and 21. The former 3200 Wilshire wound up midblock on Lot 21 and part of Lot 20; the Sixth Street corner, interestingly, awaited the arrival of 627 South Ardmore. Although the Bullocks had only lived there for five years in the house Juanita Gless (actress Sharon Gless's great-grandmother) had built in 1913, it seems that Louise Bullock didn't want to leave her Arthur Heineman–designed home behind. So, throwing money at the situation, John Bullock moved two houses to Windsor Square, in the process saving significant examples of Los Angeles domestic architecture for future generations. The Department of Buildings issued a permit for the relocation of 627 South Ardmore on July 27, 1925; today, it is at 605 South Plymouth and the house once at 3200 Wilshire Boulevard sits at 627 South Plymouth. As for the southwest corner of Wilshire and Vermont, a plan for a suburban Bullock's branch was shelved only to be revived several year later, with a twist. Once the decision was made to go ahead with a new store, a study indicated that shoppers would be discouraged by the madly increasing traffic at the intersection. The Lacy corner remained bare save for a Bullock's billboard, and a new site for the store was decided upon on a large parcel assembled by Bullock two blocks east between Westmoreland Avenue and Wilshire Place. When the monumental Bullock's-Wilshire store opened in September 1929, it changed forever the face of the boulevard, and it made the name Bullock almost as synonymous with Los Angeles as the name Wilshire
  • The Lacys' sixth child would be born at 3200 Wilshire. In addition to supervising the maids, cook, driver, and nurse, Emma spent time at the Ebell Club attending lectures meant to broaden distaff minds in an era when even rich and genteel ladies often did not go to college. William attended to his myriad businesses, hung out with cronies at the California Club, golfed at Midwick, roughed it with the Uplifters, and hunted ducks. Always civic minded, he would go on to serve as president of the Community Chest and of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce
  • Between their Wilshire Boulevard and Hancock Park houses, William and Emma Lacy rented an apartment in a 1920 fourplex at 634 South St. Andrews Place (a building moved in 1947 to 965 Fedora Street, where it still stands). Only the Lacy's youngest child, Elizabeth, called Betty, was still living with them; she was just turning 16 when they moved into 403 Muirfield Road in late 1924. Roy, third of the Lacy's four sons, moved into 403 a few years after being graduated from Cal in 1922 and a long trip through South America and would remain there until he married in 1940. Betty Lacy eloped with Charles Madary, son of the secretary of the Richfield Oil who was also affiliated with the company, in August 1927. The Lacys announced the marriage at a buffet dinner at 403 Muirfield later that year
  • William Lacy died on June 11, 1932. The next day the Times reported that Lacy, "Suffering from a nervous breakdown, induced in part by despondency over business conditions and the plight of the unemployed, William Lacy, 67 years of age, wealthy manufacturer, and former president of the Chamber of Commerce, ended his life yesterday morning at his home at 403 Muirfield Road. Discovery of the body, made after a short search of the house when his son Roy noticed that his father was missing from his room shortly after midnight, was made by Miss Alice Gordon, Mr. Lacy's sister-in-law. The manufacturer's body was found in the laundry room of the home with a pillow case over his head and a flowing gas jet beneath the cloth." A service was held at 403 before a funeral at St. Paul's Cathedral on Figueroa Street. Even taking into consideration the natural tendency of the culture of the era to venerate its Masters of the Universe, few of us are likely to have our local newspaper of record editorialize our life at the end, as the Times did for William Lacy on June 13:



      • Emma Lacy remained at 403 Muirfield Road through World War II; in 1946 she sold it to Harry P. Gantz
      • Harry P. Gantz, whose occupation aside from being a polo player and wartime aviator is unclear, had built a Spanish-style house on his Fullerton citrus ranch in the 1920s, "El Dorado," that was sold in 1931 to C. Stanley Chapman, son of Fullerton’s first mayor. (Chapman's family recently donated the property to Cal State Fullerton for use by the college president.) Gantz's second wife was silent film actress, screenwriter, producer, and director Lois Weber; they were married in Beverly Hills in 1926 at "Enchanted Hill," the architecturally famous the home of screenwriter Frances Marion and cowboy star Fred Thomson. The Gantzes divorced in 1935; he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1941 and left the service in April 1943 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He was still using that rank when he bought 403 Muirfield Road. By then Gantz had married well-known interior decorator Katherine Goldthwaite Burnap, who had been the first wife of Sidney Rogers Burnap, the Hollywood surgeon who performed among other operations the removal of Jean Harlow's appendix in 1933. (See also our profiles of 3087 Wilshire Boulevard and of 524 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square.) For reasons that are unclear, it appears to have been the Gantzes who altered the house's address to 401 Muirfield Road; in any case they occupied the residence for only a short time, selling it after complicated negotiations in 1948. The Los Angeles Sentinel reported that the Gantzes moved out of the house on August 7 of that year
      • Harry Gantz died in Australia on August 10, 1949, while on a world tour with his wife; his large obituary in the Times on August 12 made reference to his close friendship with the famous General H. H. "Hap" Arnold as well as to Gantz's transfer of 401 Muirfield Road "in a double escrow to Nat (King) Cole, Negro entertainer [which] caused a storm of protest among other residents of the Hancock Park district."


      Nat King Cole, his wife Maria, and daughters Carol and Natalie around the pool built at 401 in 1954


      • Harry Gantz's $65,000 sale of 401 Muirfield Road—the price was later sometimes reported to have been $85,000—would be bringing both fame and ignominy to Hancock Park. When it was revealed that the buyer of the house was the very famous singer Nat King Cole, Hancock Park's champions of Caucasian hegemony had a collective heart attack. Andrew J. Copp Jr., who had completed 414 Muirfield Road across the street in 1924 just as 403/401 was being started and who still lived there, gathered a group of the like-minded to form the Hancock Park Property Owners Association (today known as the Hancock Park Homeowners Association). According to reports in the Los Angeles Sentinel on August 12, 1948, the group appeared to include Rhoda Agatha Rindge Adamson, the daughter of the historically very rich and powerful couple Frederick Hastings Rindge and Rhoda May Knight Rindge, the latter famous in her own right as a Malibu firebrand. Rhoda Junior had married Merritt H. Adamson, the foreman of her family's ranch, and with him had founded the large local dairy that incorporated her first name spelled backward in its own name, Adohr Milk Farms; the couple lived at 355 Muirfield Road, which they'd built in 1922. Being among the earliest builders in the Hancock Park subdivision, Copp and Adamson would have well remembered that their lot deeds included racial covenants that excluded any nonwhites from living in the neighborhood unless they were employed as servants. The Hancock Park Property Owners Association was founded to "seek a solution to the problem" of the interloping Coles. Interestingly, the fight came just months after the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision on May 3 in the case of Shelley vs. Kraemer that "the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a state from enforcing restrictive covenants that would prohibit a person from owning or occupying property based on race or color." Los Angeles civil-rights attorney Loren Miller had argued the case in Washington alongside future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall
      • Nat King Cole had recently married Boston-born jazz singer Maria Hawkins; Nat's daughter from his first marriage grew up to become the equally famous singer Natalie Cole, who retained fond memories of growing up in Hancock Park. Nat and Maria adopted Carol, the daughter of Maria’s sister Carol Hawkins, and they would adopt their son Nat Kelly Cole in 1959. Maria gave birth to the Coles' twin daughters, Casey and Timolin, on September 26, 1961. Individually and together, Nat and Maria Cole would remain heroically undaunted after moving into 401 Muirfield Road in August 1948 even as threats began. Over the next several years signs with racist tropes (sometimes misspelled) were placed on the lawn of 401, a shot was fired through a window, and the Coles' boxer dog was poisoned. Even before they moved in, the racist likes of Copp and Adamson tried to prevent Gantz's secretive sale to the Coles, with Gantz and the real estate brokers involved being harrassed to the point of needing police protection. Copp went to see Cole and offered a $25,000 premium over the purchase price if he would relinquish the house, funds reportedly offered, per the Los Angeles Sentinel of August 5, 1948, by attorney Harold C. Morton, a member of the Property Owners Association who lived at 514 Muirfield Road. (The arrogant Morton would bring Hancock Park even more disrepute when his ne'er-do-well son was found guilty of killing his wife in front of his children in 1961.) It was considered by many that Cole's neighbors influenced the sudden and highly publicized seizure of 401 in a 1951 I.R.S. claim that Cole owed a reported $146,000 in back taxes, the tax agency threatening to sell the house in less than three weeks unless the lein was satisfied. To their everlasting credit, Nat King Cole's family would not budge and would retain the property into the 1970s


      Nat King Cole arrives arrives home in March 1951 to the tipped-off press and I.R.S. agents who were
      there to seize the singer's hard-won house at 401 Muirfield Road. The government was claiming
      back taxes; given the notorious bigotry whipped up in recent years by his powerful attorney
      neighbors Andrew Copp and Harold Morton, there were less sanctimonious Angelenos
      who saw the public ambush as another ploy instigated by the Hancock Park
      Property Owners Association to humiliate Cole into leaving. He didn't,
      and would be bringing home many new Cadillacs over the
      years. Though none were known to have been pink,
      they may have inspired his daughter Natalie
      to cover Springsteen's "Pink Cadillac,"
      her huge 1988 hit single.


      • The Coles made a number of sigificant alterations to their prized property. The first permit was issued to them by the Department of Building and Safety on August 25, 1948, just as they moving into the house; the document authorized interior alterations to the garage. A permit was issued on April 13, 1954, for a 20-by-40-foot swimming pool. Two permits were issued to Cole on July 1, 1958, one for an eight-foot widening of the porte-cochère and one for a 10-by-40-foot addition to the garage. A permit for bathroom remodeling was issued on May 3, 1961, and one 14 days later for a second-story 9-by-15-foot bedroom addition on the second floor, presumably built in anticipation of the arrival of the twins in September
      • Nat and Maria Cole and their five children were still living at 401 Muirfield Road when Mr. Cole was diagnosed with lung cancer in late 1964. He died at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica on February 15, 1965, a month shy of his 46th birthday. A funeral was held three days later at St. James' Episcopal Church on Wilshire Boulevard. Maria Cole married screenwriter Gary DeVore in 1969 and moved to Tyringham, Massachusetts, though she retained 401 until 1973. The house was on the market in November 1972 for $325,000; the same price was being asked in Times ads in May 1973
      • Occupying 401 Muirfield Road in subsequent years was the family of Willie J. Stennis, owner of the popular Golden Bird fried chicken restaurant chain. In addition to the business, which he operated with the help of his wife and four sons, Stennis was a banker and had been appointed as a trustee of the California State University and Colleges by Governor Jerry Brown, serving from 1975 to 1990. He also served a term as a board member of the Metropolitan Water District. Stennis died on May 12, 1993, at the age of 69. During his time at 401, he was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety on October 10, 1990, for a kitchen remodeling and one on September 3, 1992, for the enlargement of the master bedroom
      • Advertisements for 401 Muirfield Road appearing in 1999 offered the house for $2,195,000. The owner purchasing it late that year began a major transformation and expansion of the property that involved the purchase of the house next door to the south, 427 Muirfield Road. Dr. George L. Palmer, a retired dentist turned real estate investor, built 427 as his own home in 1923; his son, George Vincent Palmer, was its architect as well as that of 400 Muirfield. (Father and son also together built, apparently on spec, 514 Muirfield, which became the residence of Harold C. Morton, who was among those who fought to run Nat King Cole out of Hancock Park in 1948.) The 1999 purchaser of 401 demolished 427 in 2002, replacing its footprint with a tennis court. The Coles' 1954 swimming pool was replaced as was the garage with a guest house. The porte-cochère, expanded by the Coles in 1958, was enclosed to become a new garage. The residence built by William Lacy in 1924 was also renovated and expanded, the reconfigured property becoming something of an in-town estate as Hancock Park strived to keep up with the Westside


      FURTHER READING: Curbed Los Angeles