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  • Built in 1929 on Lot 114 of Tract 8320
  • Architect: Paul Revere Williams
  • Original commissioner: William Phineas Banning
  • Contractor: Howden & Howden, the firm of the brothers William M. and Rollo R. Howden, real estate developers
  • Permits for a 10-room house and a 1½-story, two-car-garage at 425 North McCadden Place were issued to William Banning by the Department of Building and Safety on May 28, 1929
  • William Phineas Banning was a grandson of Southern California pioneer Phineas Banning (1830-1885), an early developer of land and water transportation and most notably of port facilities at San Pedro and adjacent Wilmington (founded by him and named after his Delaware birthplace), these towns coming to constitute the Port of Los Angeles before being annexed by the city in 1909; such was Phineas's success that his sons William, Joseph, and Hancock would own Catalina from 1892 until 1915. William Phineas Banning's uncle Hancock and wife Anne lived at 240 West Adams Street; he and his wife Evangeline, his brother Joseph Brent Banning Jr. and wife Alice, and the brothers' widowed mother Katharine Stewart Banning Banning (her father William was Phineas Banning's brother) were also living in the West Adams District during the 1920s (in dwellings at the southwest corner of Hoover and West 31st streets, on a parcel today occupied by U.S.C. housing) when these three households decided that West Adams's residential appeal was finished. The Bannings set their sights on reconstituting the family compound in Hancock Park, which, along with the earlier Windsor Square and Fremont Place developments, among other more modern subdivisions, was absorbing the city's Old Guard seeking fresher digs, Los Angeles's annexation march now having reached the Pacific. The extended family decided upon the team of architect Paul Williams and builder William Howden—both men barely 35 years old and already known for their exacting talents—to build three distinct houses of similar size (though from the street, ones deceptively large) on North McCadden Place between Oakwood and Rosewood avenues. William Banning's house at 425 was constructed on the west side of the street facing his mother's at 426 and his brother's at 432
  • William and Evangeline Banning were divorced on February 16, 1934. He appears to have moved across the street to live with his mother at 426 until remarrying in 1939. The house at 425 North McCadden may have been kept by William, the Bannings often retaining property as investments. Whoever the owner may have been after the Bannings' marital rupture, 425 was by 1936 rented to Mary Hervey Duell, a longtime divorcée who had been living in the house her divorced daughter Natalie Duell Douglas had built at 501 South Hudson Avenue in 1930; by 1944, 425 South McCadden had been purchased by film producer and director Rowland V. Lee by 1944, who owned it until 1948



Illustration: Private Collection