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  • Built in 1920 on Lot 6 in Tract 3446
  • Original commissioner: department-store heir Arthur Letts Jr.
  • Architect: Arthur Rolland Kelly
  • The Department of Buildings issued a permit to Arthur Letts Jr. for an 11-room house on April 3, 1920; on June 1, a permit was issued to Letts for a 20-by-30-foot garage on the property, also designed by Arthur Kelly. These initial permits indicate the address as 354 South Rossmore Avenue
  • Arthur Letts Jr.'s father was the English-born founder of The Broadway department stores—as well as the original moneybags behind Bullock's—who in 1896 had arrived in Los Angeles via Canada, Seattle, and Spokane, where he'd last worked desultorily in dry goods. Arthur Letts Sr. started in the business in Toronto and was been friendly there with Los Angeles attorney George I. Cochran, who had been best man at his 1886 wedding and who persuaded him to move to California. Cochran also convinced local banker George Bonebrake to lend Letts the money for the Los Angeles venture that finally got his meteoric mercantile rise off to a start. In less than a decade Letts Sr. had made enough money off the domestic needs of the burgeoning city to build a serious English-style estate for himself in Los Feliz in 1905. Designed by the architects of Cochran's Harvard Boulevard house, Train & Williams, it was called Holmby House after Letts's native Holdenby in Northamptonshire, the name there having been pronounced traditionally as "Holmby"


Arthur Letts Jr. became president of The Broadway after the death of his father on May 18, 1923. The
store's board of directors made the announcement on June 7. Letts was quoted in the Times the
next day: "The foundation stones of truth, courtesy, liberality and value have been firmly
cemented into the structure of this business. It shall be my earnest endeavor to
build higher upon them." Letts oversaw a major expansion of the main
downtown store in 1924, two years later selling the business
to a group of the store's executives headed by his
brother-in-law Malcolm McNaghten.


  • On February 24, 1914, Arthur Letts Jr. married Bessie Emeline Baker, daughter of insurance man Danford M. Baker, who himself had been championed by George I. Cochran. Residing with his parents at Holmby House, Arthur and Bessie awaited the completion in late 1914 of their own residence on family-owned property nearby at 1834 North Kenmore Avenue (demolished in 1986). The Lettses' Janss-family in-laws—Arthur Jr.'s sister Gladys had married developer Harold Janss in 1911—would be the Lettses' guide in their real estate moves from, successively, Los Feliz to the raw Hancock Park subdivision to the raw Holmby Hills tract within eight years of their moves to Rossmore Avenue
  • Bessie Letts's parents had built 2118 South Harvard Boulevard in West Adams Heights in 1907 after arriving from Chicago. Dan and Clara Baker would be moving into a house just across Fourth Street from Arthur and Bessie's and built simultaneously, one at 400 South Rossmore that was also designed by Arthur Kelly; 356 and 400 South Rossmore remain standing as two of the very earliest houses in Hancock Park. The Bakers were also being influenced in their real estate decisions by the persuasive Jansses, who, after embarking on an abortive family compound in Windsor Square (see the story of 434 South Windsor Boulevard here), began to see even Los Feliz and Windsor Square—and certainly fading postwar West Adams—as passé. To them, the residential future of Los Angeles's serious money lay in the city's annexations to the west of Beverly Hills. Holmby House was demolished after just 22 years, members of the extended Letts/Janss family all relocating to Holmby Hills
  • Arthur Letts III arrived on December 12, 1925, but died soon after birth. Deciding to adopt, the Lettses found twins, David and Diane, born in Los Angeles as John and Alice Burke on April 20, 1924. They were formally adopted on July 28, 1926, and appeared with their new father in the Los Angeles Record on July 28, 1926. The Times noted the event on August 8


As seen in the Los Angeles Record on July 28, 1926: Arthur Letts Jr. and the twins that he and his 
wife adopted that day. The accompanying article noted that a playground was being prepared
for the children in the backyard of 356 South Rossmore; their new parents divorced four
years later. They would be growing up at 806 North Whittier Drive in Beverly Hills.
David Letts served in the Pacific during World War II, married in 1947, and
moved to Omaha, there working as a supervisor for United Air Lines.
Raised in Christian Science, Diane Letts was sent to board
at the Principia School in St. Louis and went on to
become a physical education teacher at the
Berkeley Hall School, Beverly Hills.


  • Arthur Kelly evidently became quite well attuned to the domestic arrangements desired by the extended Letts family, designing not only 356 and 400 South Rossmore but, before long, two houses on adjoining properties for Arthur and Bessie and for Dan and Clara Baker in Holmby Hills, which Arthur Letts Sr. had developed on the 400 acres of the original Wolfskill Ranch he'd purchased in 1919. (An excellent overview of the spectacular rise and various falls of the Lettses is here)
    • While today Hancock Park strives mightily to associate itself with grander Westside subdivisions developed at the same time—Holmby Hills and Bel-Air in particular—rather than déclassé and territorially aggressive Koreatown adjacent to the east, the Lettses and the Jansses understood early on the distinction between mere upper-middle-class housing and more impressive arrangements. Arthur and Bessie Letts once again hired Arthur Kelly, this time to design what was up to that time the city's most impressive residence, which would either evolve or devolve, depending on your perspective, into the Playboy Mansion. Completed in 1927, 10236 Charing Cross Road in Holmby Hills was adjacent to the site of Dan and Clara Baker's new 15-room house that Kelly was designing for them at 500 South Mapleton Drive and for which a building permit was issued by the Department of Building and Safety on September 13, 1928
    • Classified advertisements offering 356 South Rossmore Avenue for sale began to appear in the press by the spring of 1927. With no price mentioned, a stark three-line ad on April 26 read SACRIFICE/356 S. ROSSMORE/OPEN TODAY. Apparently prospective buyers did not think the house was worth whatever was being asked; it was still being listed as late as November 4, 1928: PRICE REDUCED TO $47,500—$768,300 in 2021—which brought it closer to what Frederick Nash Cartan and his wife Rachel had in mind. Cartan, an investment banker, his wife Rachel, their six-year-old son F. Nash Jr., and Mrs. Nash's mother, Jennie Ward, took possession of 356 within weeks


    "An estate in the city": Always seemingly self-conscious of its
    image in comparison with westerly districts, Hancock Park
    has long strived to project an image of itself as being
    an area of estates rather than of upper-middle-
    class housing—the Lettses were anxious to
    move on to an actual estate in Holmby
    Hills. As advertised in the Times
    on November 4, 1928.


    • Arthur and Bessie Letts would divorce on October 22, 1930, both of them remarrying in short order. That New Year's Eve, claiming it was love at first sight, Arthur married a New York woman he'd met who was also awaiting a divorce at the Cal-Neva Lodge; after divorcing her, he moved on to a third wife in July 1933. On February 12, 1931, in true Depression-era Los Angeles style at the Wee Kirk o' the Heather chapel at Forest Lawn cemetery, Bessie married New York attorney Francis Hann and settled in Beverly Hills. Still living at 10236 Charing Cross Road, Arthur died in 1959; in his will he left $25,000 to be divided among two gardeners, a chauffeur, and a secretary, and a trust for his widow. Cutting out David and Diane entirely, he left the rest to Claremont College
    • The Nash Cartans began major renovations to 356 South Rossmore immediately. On December 15, 1928, the Department of Building and Safety issued F. N. Cartan a permit for a 16-by-25-foot addition designed by architect Carl Jules Weyl. Referred to on the document as "servants' quarters," this appears to be the long wing extant along Fourth Street. Apparently referring to the same project, a permit issued on March 6, 1929, described it as being of two stories incorporating "three sleeping rooms and a bath," though the first floor must have contained space for the Cartans themselves. Carl Jules Weyl was at the time associated with the Brown Derby Corporation, of which Cartan became vice president after leaving his position at the Bank of Italy. Weyl would be designing the building in which was located the Derby's Vine Street branch. (When architecture commissions dropped off as the economy soured, Weyl moved on to art direction for Cecil B. DeMille and Warner Bros.) 
    •  A permit issued to Mr. Cartan on October 15, 1929, called for the extension of the front of the garage by three feet
    • Nash and Rachel Cartan appear to have been adept at straddling the line between Blue Book Los Angeles and Hollywood. Nash became a partner in the old-line brokerage firm of Wilcox Drake & Company on August 1, 1931, while continuing in his role as vice-president of the Brown Derby Corporation. The Cartans, who were moving to Rossmore Avenue from 515 South Norton Avenue, also maintained a residence in The Colony at Malibu; a fire starting in that house on the evening of November 3, 1931, destroyed it as well as, among others, Barbara Stanwyck's next door. (Defective wiring and high winds were thought to causes of the conflagration)
    • The Cartans' marriage was not without its ups and downs, which was perhaps not surprising given their apparently rather intense socializing and fairly frequent mentions in both establishment and "industry" press coverage of society. On August 8, 1933, Variety reported a rift: "Charging cruelty, Mrs. Rachel Ward Cartan, wife of F. Nash Cartan, an official of the Brown Derby corp., in Hollywood, has filed suit for divorce." There was a reconciliation, with mentions of their entertainments and travels—sometimes together, sometimes separately—resuming in gossip columns into the 1950s
    • For reasons unknown, the reconciled Cartans took an apartment during 1936 at the Chateau Chaumont on Serrano Avenue, renting 356 South Rossmore to surgeon Mark A. Glaser and his wife Flora
    • Resuming their formidable and well-covered social schedule, the Cartans returned to 356 by early 1937. Their party at 356 South Rossmore on April 16, 1937, was attended by friends active in local society as well as such Hollywood lights as Aileen Pringle, Buddy Rodgers, Raoul Walsh, and Judith Anderson
    • By the 1940s the Cartans had begun spending time in Del Mar; before long, they settled into 917 North Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills. 356 South Rossmore was sold to osteopath William W. Jenney, who was moving up from Long Beach
    • William and Helen Jenney remained at 356 South Rossmore Avenue until they returned to live in Long Beach in 1954
    • It is unclear as to whether he purchased 356 South Rossmore or rented it during his time in Los Angeles, but well-known firebrand labor lawyer Herbert Resner occupied the house during the mid-'50s before returning to San Francisco. Resner was famous in legal circles for winning an important case brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943 that forced shipping lines to become responsible for the safety of their employees. Moving his maritime personal injury practice south by 1952, he set up a downtown office, soon moving to a new Tishman building at 3460 Wilshire Boulevard. He lived in the Hollywood Hills before moving to Hancock Park in 1954. Taking his practice back to San Francisco in 1957, he shared offices with the even more famous Melvin Belli for the next 30 years. In the 1970s Resner branched out into entertainment law, representing such groups as Santana


    Behind every fortune is...steer manure? As seen in the Los Angeles Times on September 29, 1935


    • Moving into 356 South Rossmore by 1957 was William Bayley Coberly Jr., a widower who worked with his notably conservative father in the oil business. In this case, it was the cotton and oil business—their large landholdings, once given over to cattle ranching, now made up the California Cotton Oil Company, with local headquarters on East 52nd Street in Vernon. In some accounts the Coberlys come off sounding something like Tennessee Williams's Pollitts, Big Daddy and his boys, but with a little West Coast polish. Their high-toned Republican connections included Bill's sister Margaret's marriage to Herbert Hoover's son Allan in 1937. Bill Junior was, like dad, a member of the Southland oligarchy's favorite club, the California, as well as the sportier Newport Harbor Yacht Club, among others. Mrs. Dorsey's death at the age of 35 on Thanksgiving Day 1948 was explained in the Times only as coming "after a brief illness." She left children aged 12, 9, and 7. The extended Coberly family was among the few of the Blue Book variety that hung on in West Adams well beyond their cohort's almost wholesale move to newer suburbs beginning with the rise of Hancock Park and other neighborhoods in the 1920s. The anomalous lingering cachet of West Adams's gated but freeway-doomed Berkeley Square was notable; Lena and Bill Coberly moved to 12 Berkeley Square a full 21 years after the establishment of Hancock Park, with his parents following to #5. Interestingly, the architect of 12 Berkeley Square—no images have been found of it so far—was Arthur Rolland Kelly and may have been of an English design similar to 356 South Rossmore; it could be that its designer and design made leaving the Square a bit easier. Bill Coberly finally bowed to the inevitable and sold #12 in the summer of 1956, throwing what the Times called a "housecooling" party, bidding friends to come with an ode to Berkeley Square, the first line of which seems to be of a street's death foretold: "Partly soon a thoroughfare/Our faded, shaded, lovely Square." Bill remained at 356 South Rossmore until 1962, when he moved to the Talmadge apartments on Wilshire Boulevard; he married divorcée Victoria Mudd in 1969 and returned to Hancock Park, moving into her English-style house at 227 Muirfield Road
    • Securities dealer Robert Revel Miller and his family occupied 356 South Rossmore Avenue from 1962 until the early 1970s. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Echo Park and at 320 South Highland Avenue in Hancock Park, his father, Laurel Revel Miller, had formed Revel Miller & Company in 1926; the firm was absorbed by Hornblower & Weeks in 1960, with Robert Revel Miller remaining as a partner
    • Real estate developer William L. Tooley and his wife, Reva Berger Tooley, a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times as well as a fearless police commissioner, arrived at 356 South Rossmore with their family by 1971 and remained into the '90s
    • On October 15, 1971, the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit to William Tooley for the repair of a chimney damaged in the Sylmar earthquake of the previous February. Twenty years later, the Tooleys embarked on a major renovation that included an expansion of the garage/recreation room and a 244-square-foot addition in the rear "el" of the house. Permits for this work were issued on June 6, 1991; it is unclear if the house addition was ever made
    • John R. and Cathleen Jones have occupied 356 South Rossmore since 1994. They added a pool in 2001



    Illustrations: Private Collection; LAPL; Los Angeles Record; LAT