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  • Built in 1923 on Lot 15 in Tract 3819
  • Original commissioner: machinery and lamp manufacturer Frederick H. Cummer  
  • Architect: Ray J. Kieffer
  • On August 4, 1923, the Department of Buildings issued F. H. Cummer permits for a 10-room house and a 20-by-28-foot one-story garage at 524 Muirfield Road
  • Frederick Henry Cummer was a son of Franklin David Cummer, a Cleveland machinery manufacturer. After his death in 1898, Albert, Franklin's second of three sons, became president of F. D. Cummer & Son Company, Fred vice-president and treasurer. Fred retained his position with the firm even after moving west to spend winters in California in the early 1920s. In Los Angeles he began manufacturing lighting with Frank Toplitzky, a brother of Joe Toplitzky, a major local real estate developer. Their firm, the Angelus Lamp Company, lasted several years during the mid-'20s. Cummer appears to have gone into real estate investing himself; among the properties he acquired was an unimproved lot on the Miracle Mile at the northeast corner of Wilshire and Cochran, which he sold in 1929. (This became part of the site of an A & P "Food Palace" that opened in 1935; in later years this building housed a Staples and as of 2021 is due to be replaced by a 42-story apartment tower.) Cummer moved his family from one apparently rented house at 837 Westchester Place to another at 538 South Wilton Place before occupying 524 Muirfield Road. In 1926, he sold 524; between then and 1929, it unclear as to where the family may have hung their hats in Los Angeles. In 1929 Cummer bought 336 South Irving Boulevard, staying there for a few years


As rendered in the Los Angeles Times on January 16, 1927: The current visage of 524 Muirfield Road
is somewhat difficult to reconcile with this image of the house before being tarted up. The permit
for a southerly 1999 addition seen to the right in our rendering of the house (second above)
included permission to install a new roof to accommodate the enlargement, which may
explain the apparent loss of the original façade's gable. It is unclear, however,
when the entrance door and window above were elaborately appended;
the original south-curving front walk was similarly elaborately
modified in the mid 2000s as the architectural subtleties
of ever more Hancock Park houses are erased.


  • Classified ads ran in the Los Angeles Times in October 1926 offering 524 Muirfield Road for sale, noting that it had 12 rooms rather than the 10 cited on the original building permit, with no price specified but "For Sale at Cost." On January 16, 1927, the Times reported that the Benjamin Barry Company had recently handled the sale of 524 to a W. C. Schultz, who appears to have been recently married Ensign William C. Schultz, U.S.N. The Barry firm then handled Schultz's flip of the house to actress Ruth Roland, who was known locally as much for her real estate speculation as for her screen stardom—and it appears that Roland flipped the house yet again
  • Utitlities engineer Ezra Frederick Scattergood bought 524 Muirfield Road in 1928; his family would occupy 524 for the next two decades. New Jersey–born Scattergood received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers and his Master’s in mechanical engineering from Cornell before a stint as a professor at what is today Georgia Tech. Moving to Los Angeles in 1902, he worked as an electrical engineer before being hired as a consultant to develop hydroelectric power for the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct alongside the fabled William Mulholland. An advocate of municipal ownership of the city's power supply, he was the natural choice to become chief electrical engineer when Los Angeles established the Bureau of Power and Light in 1911. Over the next several decades Scattergood steered the Bureau as it acquired most of the private power companies supplying the local grid, the most significant acquisition coming in 1922 with the purchase of the distribution system of Southern California Edison. During the '20s he pushed for the construction of the Boulder Dam project and for the construction of the 265-mile transmission line to Los Angeles from what is known today as Hoover Dam. A year after the dam was completed in 1936, the Bureau of Power and Light was consolidated with the Bureau of Water Works and Supply to became the Department of Water and Power


Ezra F. Scattergood inspects the cable that will be strung from Hoover Dam to Los Angeles. While
William Mulholland is celebrated as the father of modern Southern California infrastructure
in the form of dams and aqueducts, it was the unsung Scattergood who converted
their energy potential into electricity. While Mulholland has a famous
roadway named in his honor, Scattergood's name graces
an El Segundo substation; their collaboration
is noted by their adjacent crypts
at Forest Lawn.


  • Ezra Scattergood married Michigander Lulie Chilton in 1901; their daughter Elisabeth was born in Los Angeles in 1908. The Scattergoods hired architect Frederick L. Roehrig to design a house that still stands at 4515 Berkshire Avenue in what is today the city's El Sereno neighborhood; Roehrig, known more for his large residences, would go on to design facilities for the Bureau of Power and Light and the Department of Water and Power under the auspices of Scattergood. In 1938 Scattergood was appointed to the National Power Policy Committee on Preparedness by President Roosevelt and continued as chief electrical engineer at the Department of Water and Power until his retirement in 1940. He was a consulting engineer to the Department until his death at St. Vincent's Hospital on November 15, 1947, age 76. Such was Scattergood's connection to the history of water and power in Southern California that his remains are interred at Forest Lawn in a crypt next to none other than William Mulholland 
  • Lulie and Elisabeth Scattergood remained at 524 Muirfield Road until moving to a smaller house at 426 North Citrus Avenue in 1951. (Mrs. Scattergood died two weeks shy of her 101st birthday in 1968; in 1973 Elisabeth married for the first time at the age of 64 and died in 1995)
  • Augustus F. Mack Jr. and his family moved into 524 Muirfield Road by 1951, having been living at 2401 Wild Oak Drive in Los Feliz Oaks. Mack was born in Brooklyn on May 24, 1907, a son of one of the brothers who founded Mack Trucks. His father moved his family to San Diego in 1912 to go into real estate; Junior went on to Stanford and Stanford Law and in 1928 at the age of 21 was the youngest person ever admitted to the California Bar. He married Edith Staples in 1935; the couple had two daughters, Nancy and Susan, and Augustus Mack III. Augustus Mack Jr. suffered a heart attack and died at home at 524 Muirfield Road, age 60, on September 11, 1967. Mrs. Mack appears to have left the house not long after
  • On June 4, 1971, a permit issued by the Department of Building Safety for a 16-by-36-foot swimming pool at 524 Muirifield Road cites an "M. Tappan" as owner of the house; a certificate of occupany for the pool was issued to M. Tappan by the city on the following March 8. Curiously, five years later a new owner, Charles F. Watkins, demolished this pool and built another one measuring 20 by 40 feet closer to the house, permits for this demolition, backfilling, and new construction being issued on May 10, 1977. Watkins was issued a permit on June 13, 1977, for interior alterations. He remained at 524 until at least 1984
  • Moses and Sandy Hyun were owners of 524 Muirfield Road in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Hyuns were issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety on April 25, 1996, to slightly expand the family room of the house; on October 21, 1999, they received a permit for a major remodeling that added 902 square feet with a two-story addition on the south and the rear (east) sides of the house and that may have also resulted in the elimination of the large southerly gable of the original façade
  • The owners of 524 Muirfield Road since at least the mid-2000s have remodeled the interior and made major revisions to the rear of the property. By the spring of 2007, the 1977 swimming pool was filled in and replaced with a new one, the third to be built on the property since 1971; a tennis court apparently built in the '70s was also removed. The original garage was demolished and replaced with one for three cars and accessory living space



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT, LAPL