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  • Completed in 1923 on Lot 1 of Tract 3668
  • Original commissioner: Arthur Hughes Braly
  • Original architect: Feil & Verge (Joseph L. Feil and Gene Verge)
  • On November 1, 1922, the Department of Buildings issued Arthur H. Braly a permit for a two-story, 17-room residence with integral garage at 223 North Rossmore Avenue
  • Arthur Hughes Braly—pronounced "Brawley"—was the son of John Hyde Braly. Practically all of the romance of California can be found in the life of John Hyde Braly, from his hardscrabble journey across the plains by Conestoga wagon, to the Gold Rush, to agriculture, to urban business prowess and great wealth. Born in Franklin County, Missouri, in 1835, John Braly came by his acute sense of Manifest Destiny through the example of tough forebears who'd already left North Carolina and crossed the Mississippi by the 1820s. The Bralys' push to the Pacific came in April 1847, when John, his parents, and six siblings set off for California. After a colorful, circuitous route over the plains, with stops in Laramie, Boise, and Oregon, the family reached California in the fabled year of '49. Their first stop was Fremont, from which the men began a business to provision the new towns of the mining operations in burgeoning Gold Rush country—"eating, drinking, smoking and swearing places," as Braly put it in his autobiography. Money quickly made allowed the Bralys to move on to a 160-acre farm in the Santa Clara Valley by the next year. Braly then went east for an education at Tennessee's Cumberland University; on his return to California he began a career as an educator. Taking charge of several schools over the next decade—with a break to return to the Nevada gold fields to become something of an unsuccessful loan shark that nearly ruined him—Braly also married. His bride was Martha Jane ("Mattie") Hughes, whose family had followed a track to California nearly identical to the Bralys', via North Carolina and Missouri. It would be many years before the Bralys would settle in Los Angeles, however. There were stops in San Jose and in Fresno, where Braly farmed raisins and, apparently having learned his lesson from his recent Nevada debacle, embarked on a banking career. In this new endeavor, Braly managed to prosper enormously. He set up banks in Fresno, Selma, and Tulare. He and Mattie had seven children by 1879, though only three would survive beyond 1888, including Arthur, born in San Jose on May 21, 1867. His sister Josephine died in 1887, after which, for the health of delicate sibling Millie, the family moved yet again, now to San Diego. Another bank was set up there; after Millie's death despite the move to a better climate, and after more financial hardships due to the bust of the Southern California boom, there was another stop in San Jose. Finally, by early 1891, Braly rallied from near total defeat and shouted "Eureka!" He'd found the amalgam of all California promise in Los Angeles, where the Bralys would, almost overnight, rise from setback to the ranks of seemingly long-established burghers. Their early residences included two at numbers 9 and 38 in the locally "aristocratic" enclave of St. James Park
  • The Bralys' provincial social clout solidified with Arthur's marriage to Mina Jevne in her parents' Westlake parlor on December 18, 1895. The press reported that the couple received the "handsomest and most costly gifts ever bestowed in the City of Angeles." The bride's father, Norwegian-born Hans Jevne, had settled in Chicago before coming to Los Angeles in 1882 to open a grocery on North Spring Street, the business prospering into wholesale as well as retail operations. The Jevnes and the Bralys thus become part of what would become local society as delineated by the editor of the Southwest Blue Book, first published in 1903; the families' alliance bolstered the influence of each on the city's development. Both invested in real estate; in 1902 Hans Jevne partnered with John Hyde Braly, Arthur alongside, to build what the Times called that July Los Angeles's "first real skyscraper" at the southeast corner of Spring and Fourth streets. The Italian Renaissance design of the new century's local starchitect, John Parkinson, became headquarters for the Southern California Savings Bank, of which John Braly was president and Arthur vice-president. At 12 stories, it was the tallest, most modern building in the city. While pleasing some civic boosters, it alarmed others, who pressed the City Council to pass an ordinance limiting any new building to a height of 150 feet, an edict that stood until 1957. While at the same time rebuffing the gesture of the dusty Imperial Valley town of Brawley of naming itself after him—a snub answered by the town's subtly giving him the finger by adding a couple of letters to spell the name phonetically—Braly accepted the naming of the new building in his honor. The Braly Building later went by other names, among them the Union Trust Building, the Continental Building, and the Hibernian Building. It is now residential and known in 2023 as The Continental
  • The Bralys' web of influence was even further strengthened in 1903 when Arthur's brother Harold married Henrietta Janss of that prolific real estate family. As did Arthur, Harold would go on to build in a westerly neighborhood that became a prime successor of St. James Park and other such increasingly déclassé districts of Los Angeles, including the middle-class Westmoreland Tract (adjacent to ill-fated gated Westmoreland Place) in which Arthur and Mina had architect Frederick L. Roehrig design a house at 991 Arapahoe Street in 1904, her brother Jack building next door to the north—Braly-Jevne-Janss alliances were tight. They would forge ties with one another both at home and at the office. Just a month before Arthur Braly married Mina Jevne in 1895, his sister Emma had married Howard Graham Bundrem, a native of Emporia, Kansas, who was then with the Santa Fe Railway; he soon turned into an Emma-financed polo-playing rake not at all helpful to the Bralys in their formation of business and social power blocs, the discovery of Bundrem's having embezzled $2,600 from the saddlery he was managing becoming the last straw. While the divorce on the grounds of infidelity that came in March 1907 was embarrassing, Emma was brought into line when she married Henrietta Braly's brother Dr. Herman Janss quietly in San Francisco in August 1908. The third California generation of Bralys was now firmly established far from pioneer struggle, but would be, as were many high-toned Angeleno families, ever mindful of the paradoxical cachet of having come west in dirty clothes even before the '49ers


Harold Hyde Braly, Emma Braly Bundrem Janss, and Arthur Hughes Braly at their parents' 50th
anniversary party at the Alexandria Hotel in November 1911. The Bralys helped create a local
aristocracy as Los Angeles was establishing itself as a major city with their serious input.


  • In 1904 John Hyde Braly sold 38 St. James Park and would build on Arapahoe across 10th Street from his son. The neighborhood was lovely when new but, as with all nouveax riches, there would be a nagging desire on the part of the extended family for higher residential profiles. This was a restless bunch; the Bralys and Jevnes decamped to Pasadena by 1910. It was from there that Arthur and Mina would decide to move to Hancock Park. In 1924, nine months after his brother began building 223 North Rossmore, Harold Braly was issued permits to build 165 Muirfield Road just around the corner. (The Janss famiy, who had long been subdividing property in parts of eastern Los Angeles city and county, in the San Fernando Valley, and in Orange County before developing Westwood, once planned a residential compound for themselves on six Windsor Square lots, with Fifth Street as the southern border, between Windsor and Lorraine boulevards. Only 434 South Windsor and 455 Lorraine were completed. Perhaps the family began to think better of working together as well as living together, a lovely dynastic idea that seldom pleases a majority for long; amusingly, an article on the Windsor Square plan in the Times of September 9, 1911, carried the subtitle "Janss Household Is Settled for Next Century." Edwin and Herman Janss would wind up near each other in Los Feliz by 1923 with their sister Henrietta following her Braly husband Harold and her brother-in-law Arthur to Hancock Park, to Muirfield Road and Rossmore Avenue respectively. The Janss family compound idea was not at all dead, however, one forming within a decade around the north end of the Los Angeles Country Club)
  • While Pasadena was the settled suburban ideal circa 1909 when Arthur and Mina Braly chose it over the nascent western suburbs of Los Angeles being built in beanfields—Beverly Hills then a dusty distance without even its pink hotel, Windsor Square and Fremont Place still on an empty plain—most of their extended family was deciding to develop real estate and to build new houses in the city as it expanded toward the Pacific. Still living at 558 South Catalina Avenue in Pasadena while awaiting completion of 223 North Rossmore, Mina Braly, Arthur apparently staying home, took a seven-week Hawaiian vacation in May 1923. Returning on the City of Los Angeles, Mrs. Braly took ill, dying at home on May 23 eleven days after docking. Her widow went ahead with the move to the new house in Hancock Park with John Hyde Braly II, then 20 and apparently delaying college to become something of a golf champion, soon to play for the Wilshire Country Club team, and Mina, who was 14 and would be attending Marlborough, which would be within walking distance of the new house
  • On November 10, 1926, 18-year-old Mina Braly Jr. married William Norbert Neff, a brother of architect Wallace Neff, at 223 North Rossmore Avenue. The Times reported the next day that the house "was transformed into a garden of chrysanthemums in pink and white tones combined with woodwardia ferns forming the background of the drawing-room." The bride's brother John served as best man. The 1930 Federal census enumerated William Neff as a potter; he later worked at his mother's family's long-established citrus ranch in La Mirada. Mrs. McNally was the daughter of Andrew McNally, the Chicago publisher whose firm Rand-McNally had become synonymous with maps
  • Arthur would remain at 223 North Rossmore Avenue until 1951, but not alone the whole time. On January 27, 1936, he married Santa Monica widow Louise Higman Magenheimer in a quiet San Luis Obispo ceremony officiated by the local justice of the peace. His son John was his attendant. Arthur and Louise moved from 223 North Rossmore Avenue to Parklabrea—as the name was initially styled—to occupy an apartment in the complex's highrise at 400 South Burnside Avenue. Arthur died there on November 20, 1956, age 89
  • Purchasing 223 North Rossmore Avenue by early 1951 was Portland-born Thomas Fotheringham Osborn, whose B. Hayman Company was a wholesaler of agricultural implements. Osborn and his wife, née Mabel Nadine Kloeb, had been married in her parents' Los Angeles parlor in June 1912; his namesake father was a civil engineer well known all over the west as an expert in reinforced concrete. Before purchasing 223, the Osborns had been living in a rented Hancock Park house at 158 South McCadden Place with their son Thomas, daughter Eleanor and her husband Clarence McMicken, and the McMickens' daughter Betty Lou. Thomas Sr. and Mabel, at least, would be living at 223 until 1959. That year, the Osborns bought the house next door to the south at 217 North Rossmore Avenue
  • On July 20, 1951, the Department of Building and Safety issued Thomas F. Osborne a permit to add a 7-by-20-foot porch to the rear of the house and a 23-by-27-foot garage appending the front. The latter would have dramatically changed the original façade of the house, a rendering of which has not yet been found
  • C.P.A., lawyer, and industrialist William Edward Hannam moved into 223 North Rossmore Avenue in 1959; Hannam had divorced his first wife in 1954 and in 1957 married Tina Simpson Murray. Hannam was a founder of Goodson & Hannam, tax attorneys; in 1957 he and Marvin Goodson organized Custom Component Switches, Inc., and with a plant in Burbank manufactured pressure switches for aircraft and missiles, with N.A.S.A. reportedly a key buyer. The company had acquired patents from an inventor who had been seeking tax advice; it seems that the lawyers used the business to their own advantage, which resulted in the inventor suing them in 1970. Socially, Hannam would serve as a vice president and president of the Wilshire Country Club, the greens of which surround 223
  • William and Tina Hannam remained at 223 North Rossmore Avenue until putting it on the market in the summer of 1988 with an asking price of $1,590,000
  • The scion of a family that began growing watermelons in the Imperial Valley a century ago has occupied 223 North Rossmore Avenue in recent decades. During the 2000s, the 1951 garage accretion was demolished and replaced with a new one; an attached two-story cabana and a pool were added


Illustrations: Private Collection; Memory Pictures, An Autobiography