I was once again browsing through Calisphere pictures and fell into another rabbit hole.
Here are two photographs, part of the architect S. Charles Lee papers in the Special Collections department at UCLA. They are labelled "Cohen House, Los Angeles, street view" and "Cohen House, Los Angeles, entry view...Hancock Park." So we can assume Mr. Lee was the architect for Mr. Cohen's house, and the house was in Hancock Park.
calisphere.org
calisphere.org
Could it be found, did it survive?
The architect's name is familiar to the regulars here.
tovangar2 made a excellent post about him two years ago
here.
Per Wikipedia's article on Lee:
"Simeon Charles Levi was born in Chicago in 1899 to American-born parents of German-Jewish ancestry, Julius and Hattie (Stiller) Levi. He grew up going to vaudeville theatres, nickelodeons,and early movie houses...In 1922, Lee moved to Los Angeles. His first major movie palace was the Tower Theatre, a Spanish-Romanesque-Moorish design that launched a career that would make Lee the principal designer of motion picture theaters in Los Angeles during the 1930s and 1940s. He is credited with designing over 400 theaters throughout California and Mexico. His palatial and Baroque Los Angeles Theatre (1931) is regarded by many architectural historians as the finest theater building in Los Angeles.
Lee was an early proponent of Art Deco and Moderne style theaters, including Fresno's Tower Theatre. The Bruin Theater (1937) and Academy Theatre (1939) are among his most characteristic. The latter, located in Inglewood, California, is a prime example of Lee's successful response to the automobile. After World War II, Lee recognized that the grand theater building had become a thing of the past, and began to focus on new technologies in industrial architecture."
OK so back to the task of locating the Cohen house. Google was spectacularly unhelpful, even including "-Mickey" in the search field. (Mickey never lived in Hancock Park.) The only hit I found was in a book called "The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theater" by Maggie Valentine. She is speaking of Lee's work:
google books
But, no address is given.
So I decided to look through the (many) Cohens in the 1929 LA city directory and use the Googlemobile to examine addresses which might be suspicious for Hancock Park locations. About halfway through, I found the following:
ancestry.com
And here is what's at 619 S June in 2011:
GSV
and here it's under construction last September (they added a wine cellar and elevator):
GSV
I hate that they got rid of the asymmetrical flagging on the driveway, the theme had been carried all the way up to the entrance.
That this is the right building is seen on the 1927 building permit,
blurrily showing M. M. Cohen as the owner and S. Charles Lee as the architect.
LADBS
So who was M. M. Cohen? There is a Wikipedia entry for "Maury Cohen" which, in the way of Wikipedia, conflates the stories of two different people. Our Cohen, the June street resident, was Maurice Mair Cohen (1889-1949). Born in Moscow, he moved to Chicago before his first birthday. He started out in clothing and furniture businesses both in Chicago and here. He became a producer at Poverty Row in the 1930s, moved to Beverly Hills, and co-founded the Palladium in 1940 with Norman Chandler's money, it was said. He died of a heart ailment at Cedars of Lebanon in September, 1949. Lee and Cohen may have known each other in Chicago before each made it big. In any case I am happy the house is still there, even if it needed a wine cellar and elevator to survive.