Stimson House
Stimson House is a Richardsonian Romanesque mansion in the University Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Built in 1891, it was the home of lumber and banking millionaire Thomas Douglas Stimson. During Stimson's lifetime, the house survived a dynamite attack by a blackmailer in 1896. After Stimson's death, the house has been occupied by a brewer who reportedly stored wines and other spirits in the basement, a fraternity house that conducted noisy parties, as student housing for Mount St. Mary's College, and as a convent for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.
Architecture
When Stimson House was built in the 1890s, the Los Angeles Times described it as "the costliest and most beautiful private residence in Los Angeles," a building "admired by all who see it." More than a hundred years later, the Times said: "From the front, the 3-story house resembles a medieval castle, with brick chimneys standing guard like sentries along the roof and an ornate four-story crenelated tower on the northeast corner, a noble rook from a massive chess board." With its $150,000 cost, it was the most expensive house that had been built in Los Angeles at the time.From the day it was built, the 30-room house was a Los Angeles landmark. Neighbors and occupants have referred to it over the years as "the Castle" or the "Red Castle" due to its turret-top walls, four-story tower, and red-stone exterior.
Exterior features
The original occupant, Thomas Douglas Stimson, hired architect H. Carroll Brown, then only 27 years old, to design his new home. Stimson designed the home principally in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with rough-hewn stone, round headed arches, short columns, rows of arched or rectangular windows and an overall fortress quality. The Richardsonian style was popular in the Upper Midwest in the 1880s, though the style never became popular in Los Angeles. Stimson reportedly wanted his new home to resemble the brick-and-stone mansions of Chicago's Gold Coast, including the Palmer Mansion. A Los Angeles Times music critic reviewing a chamber music performance at the house in 1989 called its architecture "Midwestern Ivanhoe." With its Gothic tower and other features, the style of the house is not strictly Richardsonian. A Times writer in 1948 noted that the house presents a "puzzling" appearance: "Its architecture reflects the Mission influence, a bit of Byzantine, something Latin and a little Fort Ticonderoga."Brown obtained the distinctive red stones from a quarry in New Mexico and used San Fernando sandstone for the windows, balconies and the tower's crown trim. The most prominent feature on the house is the four-story Gothic tower. The top of the tower and ridges are crenellated and finished with notched battlements. Other important features include a third floor balcony with a gabled arch and a stepped gable with a Palladian window. A porch with carved stone columns surrounds the first floor.
The neighborhood in which the Stimson House was built became known as "Millionaires Row" in the 1890s, though the size and stone construction of Stimson House set it apart from the wood houses along Millionaires Row.
Interior features
Some have noted the "irony" in a lumber baron's home being built of stone rather than wood. However, the interior has been described as "a shrine to lumber, a museum of wood, a smorgasbord of timber—ash, sycamore, birch, mahogany, walnut, gumwood and oak, all shipped from lumber yards in the Midwest." Each room on the first floor is furnished with a different type of wood, and the heavy doors have double thickness, to match the wood of the room on either side. An intricate parquet border is found at the edge of the oak floors throughout the house.Under the first floor there is a basement, "a maze of rooms and arched doorways." There was a room that at one time served as an underground lounge and bar. In another recess there was a wine cellar equipped with an iron door that served as a makeshift jail cell and the scene of many pranks during the house's later years as a fraternity house. There were also traces of organ pipes that once were installed there.
The interior features also included a Diebold safe hidden behind a door in Stimson's study. The nuns who occupied the house in later years reportedly stored their cleaning supplies in the safe. Stimson reportedly took photographs of his Chicago mansion and hired Carsley and East Manufacturing Co. to duplicate them and ship the finished products to Los Angeles.
History
Thomas Douglas Stimson
Thomas Douglas Stimson was one of the wealthiest men in Los Angeles. He was known as a self-made man who left his home in Canada at age 14, and worked as a trader in Michigan. He later moved to Chicago where he built a successful lumber business. In 1890, he moved to Los Angeles at age 63, seeking a more pleasant and healthful climate for his retirement. However, rather than retiring, Stimson became one of the most active members of the Los Angeles business community. He became one of the largest shareholders in the Citizens Banks and was vice president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.In 1893, Stimson used the same architect who had built Stimson House to build the Stimson Block, a six-story office building at the corner of Third and Spring streets downtown. The Stimson Block used many of the same architectural features employed in Stimson House, and when it opened in 1893, the Stimson Block was the tallest building in Los Angeles. The Stimson Block was demolished in 1963 to make room for a parking lot.
Stimson died at Stimson House in February 1898. His widow, Achsah, lived in the house until she died in 1904.
Stimson's son Charles D. Stimson followed his father into the timber industry and was the patriarch of the Seattle-area Stimson family whose other members have included Dorothy Stimson Bullitt and the conservative pundit Charles "Cully" D. Stimson. The Seattle scion also built a notable home, the Stimson-Green mansion on First Hill, and another descendant built a notable house in Capitol Hill's Harvard-Belmont Landmark District on the site of Horace C. Henry's former mansion.
"Dynamite Fiends"
In February 1896, the Stimson House was the target of a bizarre bombing attack. The headline in the Los Angeles Times read, "DYNAMITE FIENDS: An Attempt to Blow Up the Stimson Mansion; The Redstone Walls Resisted the Terrific Explosion." A "stick of giant powder" was placed against the foundation of the house, directly under Stimson's bedroom. A large hole was torn in the side of the house by the explosion, but the thick foundation wall was not damaged. Reports indicated that a frame house would have been shattered into fragments by the explosion, but the solid stone structure withstood the blast. Two neighbors witnessed the culprit lighting the fire on the dynamite, grabbed their guns, ran across the lawn, and were thrown off their feet by the explosion. On regaining their balance, the neighbors saw a man running away from the scene and fired several shots in his direction, but the man escaped.Initially, there was suspicion that "the plot to blow up the house" was either a robbery attempt or the "dastardly" act of "some Anarchist or enemy of capitalists who took this cowardly method of expressing his hatred for men of wealth, and singled out a man who is reputed to be one of the wealthiest in Los Angeles, and who lives sumptuously as becomes his station."
Later that month, private detective Harry Coyne was arrested for the attack. Stimson testified at the preliminary hearing that he had hired Coyne to accompany his son to Mexico the prior month. Shortly after returning from Mexico, Coyne told Stimson that he was in danger from the machinations of a notorious Mexican criminal. Coyne offered his services to help foil the attack. Over a period of time, Coyne advised Stimson that the criminal had been attempting to break into the house, and sought to verify his claim with the discovery of tools and marks on a window. Coyne also claimed that the criminal had poisoned Stimson's dog, after which the Stimson family dog became sick. After the explosion, Coyne told Stimson that the trouble was still not over, that he was in constant danger of being shot or stabbed and that the crooks had eleven sticks of dynamite remaining that would be used for another attack on the house. Coyne suggested that the only way to stop the culprits was to kill them, and he offered his services to take care of the matter. Stimson confronted Coyne and told him he suspected the affair to be a blackmailing scheme by Coyne himself. Coyne's minute information as to the supposed crooks' plans and actions betrayed his role in the crime, and he was eventually convicted and sentenced to five years at Folsom Prison.
Edward Maier
After Stimson's wife died in 1904, the house was purchased by a civil engineer named Alfred Solano. In 1918, Edward R. Maier, sportsman and owner of Maier Brewing Co., bought the house, and it served as the Maier family home until 1940. Maier was said to have stored his wines and liqueurs in the labyrinthine basement.Fraternity hijinks
In 1940, the Maier family sold the house to USC's Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity for $20,000—about 13% of the original cost of construction. In their first year of occupancy, the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity put Stimson House at the center of a near riot among USC students. Members of a UCLA fraternity prematurely set the traditional USC bonfire ablaze early in the morning before the scheduled event. Two of the UCLA students were captured by members of the USC fraternity and returned to Stimson House. In response to the acts of the UCLA students, 800 Trojans set fires in the streets with makeshift piles of sticks, boxes, crates, wooden benches and anything else that would burn. When firemen arrived, a "solid wall of undergraduates" blocked their access to the nearest fireplug. Firemen doused the students with their fire hoses, and police unsheathed their billy clubs to avert a riot. Two hours later, the two captured UCLA students were displayed to reporters "imprisoned in the 'catacombs of Stimson House. The two young men had been stripped of their clothing, their bodies smeared with black paint, and on the chest of each was written the letters "S.C." Their heads had also been shaved, leaving only a topknot with a circle of black paint creating the appearance of an Iroquois Indian. Both had been spanked until sitting was uncomfortable, and the two were "guarded in their cell by more than 100 husky Trojans." One of the captured UCLA students was the son of Los Angeles Police Chief Hohmann who said, "Bob got himself into this, and he'll have to take his medicine."In 1996, the Pi Kappa Alphas held a reunion at Stimson house, which they had referred to as the "Red Castle." They found the iron-gated wine cellar just as it was when errant pledges were locked inside and sprayed with a hose. Memories flowed as the fraternity brothers gathered at the house, one recalling his proposal to his wife on the stairs of the house, and another recalling pelting a pledge with eggs from the same staircase, only to discover that the pledge was allergic to eggs—paramedics had to be called when his eyes swelled closed. One of the returning fraternity members recalled that, as a pledge, he crawled through an air shaft to escape from the catacombs and, covered with soot, appeared at the door of a neighbor asking if he might use the phone—the neighbor being Mrs. Doheny, who later bought Stimson House to rid herself of the Pi Kappa Alphas.