St. James Park Historic District

About this property

St. James Park is a neighborhood in the West Adams section of Los Angeles, California. It is a residential neighborhood surrounding St. James Park consisting of homes built in a mix of Classical Revival, Craftsman and Queen Anne styles. The neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991 and contains eleven Historic-Cultural Monuments. In 1887, the Los Angeles Herald announced that the forthcoming St. James Park would have a stone entrance to "rival the Arc de Triomphe" and would be eventually be surrounded by "the most costly residences yet erected on this coast". Named by George King and his wife, the couple donated the parkland to the city in commemoration of their many trips to London. As the neighborhood around the park developed, prominent residents included Leslie Keeley, Homer Laughlin, Eli P. Clark, Margaret Hughes, Thomas Dockweiler and Norman Sterry. In 1896, the Ladies Auxiliary had a benefit for the Stimson-Lafayette Industrial School. The event had a carnival theme, with "myriads of electric lights", palmists, fortune tellers and people in costume. The Los Angeles Lighting Company furnished the electricity as its contribution to the event. There were multiple themed booths, including an American Booth, a Spanish Booth, and two Central American booths. At 11 PM, "the tamale booth, which was one of the most beautiful in the grounds", caught fire from a Japanese lantern. Hours later, the phonograph booth caught fire in the same way and was destroyed. In September 1906, a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote: "The growing popularity of apartment houses is causing them to encroach on grounds heretofore exclusively reserved for high-class residences". He was reporting on "one of the handsomest apartment-houses in the city", which was designed by Thornton Fitzhue and was to be built on the southern side of St. James Park, "with a north frontage on the botanical gardens". All would have servants' quarters. Landowner John R. Powers completed another apartment building in St. James Place in 1909, with an entrance also on Scarff Street. Designed by George W. Wryman, it was divided into four apartments of seven rooms each; the venture represented an investment of $35,000. In 1909 the sidewalks of St. James Park were known as a place where nurses attending perambulators would air and care for babies of the mothers who lived nearby. In the 1910s, '20s, '30s and '40s, the Times and the Los Angeles Evening Express continued to cover the "high society" families living in St. James Park. In 1937, the Times said: "St James Place, Chester Place, Scarff Street - those place-names mean little to present day Angelinos. Yet they spell an aristocratic Los Angeles of the past, and to a good extent, the present. They are of the wealthy Los Angeles of a past generation, and a visitor to the neighborhood will find evidence of its elegance, if somewhat frayed and faded in spots."

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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