I wanted to see what could be learned about the "railroad station"
e_r posted recently. It had an odd location, isolated from streets by other buildings. It turns out there is a small bit of noirish history associated with this place.
The first step was to find out the address of the building. Here is a Sanborn from the 50s:
lapl.org
So the address seems to have been 1453 N. Vine street.
With that information, I looked at the LADBS records. These were difficult to parse, but it seems that the first appearance of something at this address was in 1914, when a "one-story, 18' x 24' tea room in gardens surrounded and enclosed, somewhat, by enclosure fence & pergola" was added to an already-existing dwelling owned by a William F. Markham (see below).
The Sanborn from 1919 shows the dwelling was pretty close to Vine Street:
lapl.org
Comparing its location to the later Sanborn, it clearly has moved a bit to the southwest. I found a 1927 permit for this relocation:
ladbs
The city directories and the newspapers have a few mentions of the address:
1914-1917 William Markham residence
1927 Feb 12 LAT want ads:
newspapers.com
1932 Ann Pengre was conducting a dancing school
1933 the "Commonwealth House," evidently some sort of community center
1937 George Moore's Mutual Theatrical Institute
newspapers.com
1940 Jack Holden's "automobile top manufacturing" shop
1956 "Hollywood 16mm Industries Inc." (One can only imagine what sort of films were being made there.)
Most of the structures around here were demolished in 1965.
Now for the noirish part: William Markham was known as the "air rifle king." From the
Glendale News Press:
"William F. Markham made his fortune with the 1886 invention of the air rifle and manufactured thousands of them in his Plymouth, Mich., plant. In 1911, he disposed of his holdings and came to California, building a house at Hollywood and Vine, then far out in the country and just a short walk from the home of artist Paul de Longpre."
Markham died a very wealthy man in 1930. Fast forward six years and the notoriously corrupt Buron Fitts was running for another term as LA district attorney. He drew a crusading reform attorney as his opponent: Harlan Palmer, publisher of the Hollywood Citizen-News. Just before the 1936 election, Fitts arranged an "October surprise" for Palmer:
LAT 10-2-1936 via newspapers.com
Palmer lost by less than 2% of the votes. Litigation regarding the estate went on for years.