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401 South Las Palmas Avenue




  • Built in 1926 on Lot 98 in Tract 6388
  • Original commissioner: mortgage banker Lewis Curtiss Torrance Jr.
  • Architect: Paul Revere Williams
  • On July 16, 1926, the Department of Building and Safety issued L. C. Torrance permits for a two-story, eight-room residence and a one story, 22-by-32-foot garage at 405 South Las Palmas Avenue; the address was altered to 401 by the time of completion
  • In the Boom year of 1887, Lewis Curtiss Torrance Sr. had come to Southern California from western New York with his brother Jared Sidney Torrance, the brothers going into real estate development in Pasadena; Jared Torrance went on to found the city of Torrance. Lewis C. Torrance Jr. was born in Pasadena on October 16, 1894. After he was graduated from Stanford, he attended medical school, per his June 1917 draft registration, on which was noted his claim for exemption as he "desires to complete profession." Drafted anyway, he was employed as a telephone company manager after the Armistice—his father was president of the Santa Monica Bay Telephone Company—and living with his parents at their house at 426 South Kenmore Avenue (demolished in 1961). When Lewis Sr. opened the Torrance Finance Company in downtown Los Angeles in 1924, assuming its presidency, Lewis Jr. became vice-president of the firm. February 1926 was momentous and bittersweet: On the 10th, Lewis Jr.'s engagement to 22-year-old Salt Lake City–born Kathryn Keith was announced at a luncheon at her parents' house at 4032 Wilshire Boulevard. Seven days later, Lewis Sr., who had moved to Pasadena, died at Good Samaritan after suffering a stroke at his office. Lewis Jr. and Kathryn were married in a quiet ceremony at St. John's Episcopal on June 16. (The maid of honor was Elizabeth Jenkins, whose father, William O. Jenkins, often cited as the man who amassed the largest personal fortune in Mexico, was then building 641 South Irving Boulevard at Wilshire Boulevard in Windsor Square, a house that would go on to star in 1950's Sunset Blvd..) A small reception was held afterward at 4032 Wilshire; a month later, having hired Paul Williams, Lewis Torrance Jr. was issued the permits for 401 South Las Palmas Avenue. He assumed the presidency of the Torrance Finance Company
  • On July 17, 1926, the day after Lewis Torrance was issued permits for 401 South Las Palmas Avenue, his sister Katharine Torrance Peachy was issued permits by the Department of Building and Safety for a 10-room residence, also designed by Paul Williams, at 325 South Las Palmas Avenue. Mrs. Peachy's husband, Henry Kyd Douglas Peachy, was by this time vice-president of the Torrance Finance Company
  • Sheila Elizabeth Torrance was born to Lewis and Kathryn Torrance on September 29, 1927. She would attend Marlborough, become, in top-drawer Southwest Blue Book society, a Las Madrinas debutante, a member of the Spinsters (Los Angeles's exclusive social club was for the most prominent debutantes, membership revoked at marriage, in her case in 1952), and a Junior Leaguer. Lewis Curtiss Torrance III arrived on November 10, 1933. He attended Harvard Military Academy. Tim, as he was known, grew up to work at Neiman-Marcus in Beverly Hills and to become, per the Times at his death in 2015, an "an enthusiastic follower and supporter of cabaret performers such as Julie Wilson." He never married
  • The onset of the Depression appears to have hit the extended Torrance family rather hard. The Torrance Finance Company would close by 1933. The house Katharine Peachy was building at 325 South Las Palmas, which she may or may not have intended as a speculative project but which would have been an upgrade from the smaller house she was living in at 336 North McCadden Place (and where she would remain until 1965), was being offered for sale in March 1930, though it appears to have been rented out for the next several years. The Paul R. Williams Project quotes a source describing a lag in the completion of 325 North Las Palmas Avenue: "The depressed economy meant some of Williams' original design details were not realized in [Mrs. Peachy's] two-story 4,500 square-foot home until 1933."
  • Decamping with his family to his mother's house in Pasadena, Lewis Torrance was renting out 401 South Las Palmas Avenue by late 1933; the house was on the market by October 1935. By 1940 the Torrances were living at the Hotel Windermere in Santa Monica
  • Nat Levine, president of Mascot Pictures, distributors of films rejected by the major studios—he was soon to be the president of Republic Pictures, which absorbed Mascot—was renting 401 South Las Palmas at Christmastime 1933 when bandits invaded his crowded Christmas Even open house. After pistol-whipping Levine for refusing to reliquish his diamond ring, the perps made off with cash and jewelry demanded of guests
  • Dr. Clarence Robinson Welfer, a physician, became the owner of 401 South Las Palmas Avenue in 1938. Born in Pittsburg (as the name of the Pennsylvania city was spelled until 1911) on January 6, 1895, Welker came west to attend U.S.C., thus developing a taste for Southern California. After returning east to medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, he married native Pittsburgher Ida Richter on July 19, 1920. Within two years, the Welfers were settled in Los Angeles in a recently built cottage at 1032 Westchester Place along with his parents and his sister Grace Lloyd and her husband Charles, all of whom also came west
  • The Welfers stayed at 401 South Las Palmas for less than a decade. They had the property on the market by February 1945; it appears to have sold by the end of the year to a Vaughn Robinson, the Welfers moving to half a duplex nearby on Orange Avenue. Robinson appears to have done some remodeling on the house before putting it back on the market. While it may seem hard to imagine a Paul Williams house in prime Hancock Park lingering on the market for years, ads for it were still running in the Times as late as December 1948
  • John McClintick Reily, an executive with the Carnation Milk Company recently arrived from New York with his wife and three children, was the next owner of 401 South Las Palmas Avenue, in residence by mid 1949. Born in Fulton, Missouri, on July 12, 1907, John Reily moved with his family as a boy to Highland in San Bernardino County, where his physician father was superintendent of Patton State Hospital. John Reily was in the advertising business in New York City when he married Winifred Rule, daughter of Mrs. Jack Jevne of Beverly Hills, on May 18, 1935. (The Jevnes were seriously Southwest Blue Book sorts.) John Milner Reily was born a year later, Joan in May 1942, and Priscilla in November 1946, all arriving in Manhattan before the move west
  • 401 South Las Palmas Avenue appeared briefly on the market in September 1964, though the Reilys do not seem to have left the property until 1966. Snow-skiing enthusiast John Reily had founded Alpine Meadows of Tahoe in 1960 and would now be moving north
  • Czech-born Ladislaw Wintner arrived in the U.S. in September 1954, soon making his way to Los Angeles with his wife and five children. Living just west of Hancock Park, most recently at 139 South Mansfield Avenue, the Wintners moved to 401 South Las Palmas Avenue by 1967. The property was back on the market by December 1968 and lingered until at least the following May, though members of the Wintner family appear to have remained in residence into the 1980s including Ladislaw Wintner's son Steven (born Salamon in Antwerp in June 1948). Steven went on to buy 608 South Highland Avenue in Hancock Park
  • Owners of 401 South Las Palmas Avenue after the Wintner family have carried out earthquake retrofitings, remodelings including a large rear wing, and the addition of a swimming pool
  • Hancock Park has been subject to burglaries and confrontational robberies since its earliest days, including the robbery of Christmas Eve 1933 described above. On July 14, 2024, daring daylight burglars made off with jewelry and two Chanel pocketbooks from 401 South Las Palmas Avenue. Wearing ski masks, the perps were photographed fleeing out of the front door to their getaway car at the curb


Sunday, July 14, 2024: Plunderers of 401 South Las Palmas Avenue make their daytime getway


Illustrations: Private Collection; Hancock Park Homeowners Association

 PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES



325 North Las Palmas Avenue




  • Built in 1929 on Lot 192 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: Katharine Torrance Peachy
  • Architect: Paul Revere Williams
  • On July 17, 1929, the Department of Building and Safety issued Katharine Torrance Peachy permits for a two-story, 10-room residence and a one-story, 22-by-26-foot garage at 325 North Las Palmas Avenue
  • Katharine Torrance Peachy was the daughter of Lewis Curtiss Torrance, a western New York State miller who moved to Pasadena in 1887 and pursued real estate development. Her uncle Jared Sidney Torrance, who'd come west at the same time, would be a principal investor in the development of the city of Torrance, founded in 1911. Katharine Peachy was the wife of mortgage banker Henry Kyd Douglas Peachy, who was vice-president of the Torrance Finance Company, of which Mrs. Peachy's brother Lewis Curtiss Torrance Jr. was president
  • Referred to in classified ads as being a version of Monterey Revival design, 325 North Las Palmas Avenue was being offered for sale by March 1930 at $55,000; ads in May and June called it a "prize-winning home," an as yet unclear reference
  • Moving from 975 Westchester Place in what is today known as Wilshire Park, investment broker James W. Dunham and his wife June were listed as occupying 325 North Las Palmas in Los Angeles city directories from 1931 to 1935
  • While available building permits after the originals issued in 1929 do not indicate it, the Paul R. Williams Project quotes a source describing a lag in the completion of 325 North Las Palmas Avenue: "The depressed economy meant some of Williams' original design details were not realized in her two-story 4,500 square-foot home until 1933." The reference here is to Katharine Peachy; it is unclear if she intended to move around the corner to 325 North Las Palmas from the house at 336 North McCadden Place that she had been occupying since not long after it was built in 1925, and which she would still be in possession of at her her death in 1965. Perhaps thwarted by the economy in any move of her own to 325 North Las Palmas or in selling it, Mrs. Peachy appears to have rented rather than sold the property to its actual first occupant; in any case, James Dunham and his wife June were in residence until not long before his death in 1935
  • Attorney Stanley Walter Guthrie and his wife Alice were in residence at 325 North Las Palmas Avenue from 1935 to 1939; Mrs. Guthrie was a daughter of Walter Branks Cline, president of the Los Angeles Lighting and Los Angeles Electric companies, and had grown up at 2530 South Figueroa Street. The Guthries were living separately by the spring of 1940, she in Palm Springs and he at the University Club; there would be a divorce. (Mr. Guthrie married again in February 1949 and died in December 1952)
  • Minnesota-born Albert Joseph Viault, vice-president of the California Milling Corporation, moved into 325 North Las Palmas Avenue in 1940. Viault's family had long been involved in milling, in Minnesota prior to the turn of the 20th century before starting operations in Arizona, where Albert married Rheata Burton in 1909. The Viaults moved to Los Angeles in 1923 when Albert and his older brother Frank arrived to build a plant for California Milling at Alameda and East 55th streets, Frank serving as president of the firm and Albert as secretary and superintendent. (Their older brother Max remained in Arizona to continue overseeing the family's operations in Phoenix and Mesa.) Albert and Rheata Viault and their daughter Barbara settled at 849 South Citrus Avenue, from which they would be moving not far away to Las Palmas Avenue, where a fourth Viault brother, Arthur, had built 339 North Las Palmas in 1930 two lots away from that of 325; by that time Max Viaut had moved to Los Angeles, renting 131 South McCadden Place before a move to Bel-Air away from his brothers' preferred neighborhood. Frank Viault would be building 114 South June Street in Hancock Park in 1939
  • Albert and Rheata Viault's only child, Barbara Jean, born in June 1927, was graduated from Marlborough and Stanford, at which she met Samuel Swann Crowley Jr.; they were married at St. Alban's Episcopal in Westwood on June 13, 1947, with a reception afterward at home at 325 North Las Palmas Avenue
  • Albert Viault died on May 5, 1952. His widow would be putting 325 North Las Palmas on the market and moving to a Park La Brea apartment
  • The Clyde Russell Burrs would be moving into 325 North Las Palmas Avenue in 1954. While firmly established in proper Southwest Blue Book Los Angeles, the Burrs were apparently no firm believers in one's name appearing in the press only at birth, marriage, and death; the couple is mentioned dizzyingly in the Times and elsewhere from the time of their marriage in 1929. Mrs. Burr, née Alice Hicks, had grown up as West Adams gentry at 832 West Adams Boulevard, which her father Frank Hicks had built in 1904. That house having become U.S.C.'s Kappa Alpha fraternity, Alice's mother, the daughter of pioneer Angeleno Ozro W. Childs, and older sister Elizabeth "Buffy" Hicks Gross and her husband Robert were living nearby at 7 Chester Place, where the Burrs were married on November 14, 1929. A former Monrovia judge, Clyde Burr was 42, his bride 26. The Burrs would remain loyal to the neighborhood of Alice's childhood even in its fading years and rent 11 Chester Place from Edward and Estelle Doheny, who had bought up most of the Place's residences to create a private fiefdom within its gates, leasing houses to those deemed worthy. With the exception of the small Doheny domain and, for the time being, of gated Berkeley Square, the West Adams district had been in steep decline since the '20s, with almost all of Old Guard Los Angeles having begun decamping for newer suburbs west along the Wilshire corridor around the time of the opening of Fremont Place and Windsor Square in 1911. It was to the latter's 1920s addition, New Windsor Square, that the Burrs moved by late 1942, buying 236 South Plymouth Boulevard, which had been built in 1921. They would stay there until purchasing 325 North Las Palmas. Alice's byline "Alice Hicks Burr" was appearing regularly in the Times during her stint as a society scribe in the early '40s. Penning the Chatterbox column in the "Gossip and Smart Talk" section of the paper and later her own column, her breathless prose kept the city apprised of news of her social cohort, which she seemed to consider to be at least as fascinating to the public as was news of Hollywood
  • Clyde R. Burr was still living at 325 North Las Palmas when he died at the age of 81 on December 5, 1968. Alice Burr appears to have remained at 325 until not long before her death on March 31, 1987, the day after her 84th birthday. She appears to have gone to live at Las Encinas in Pasadena during her last few years
  • James Buckley Duffy III and his wife Lynne were the owners of 325 North Las Palmas Avenue by 1986. Duffy was described in the Times of June 19, 1995, as a ninth-generation Californian, his mother having been Estella Carrillo del Valle Duffy, who until her death in 1988 was living at 133 South Highland Avenue; Hollywood star Leo Carrillo was a cousin. Per the Times, Jim Duffy's oil-executive father hoped that his son would "grow out of" his passion for automobiles, but he never did, going to work for Willet H. Brown, a pioneer of radio and television in Los Angeles who with his father in 1927 had opened Hillcrest Motor Company in Beverly Hills, longtime purveyors of Cadillacs to the stars. Duffy eventually became overseer of Brown's vast car collection even after Brown's death in 1988 and until its dispersal in 1995. Moving on to a house on Mansfield Avenue nearby, the Duffys appear to have remained at 325 North Las Palmas into the 2010s
  • Owners of 325 North Las Palmas since the Duffys have carried out interior remodelings and added a new pool


Illustration: Private Collection
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