CASTLE KEEP : The Grand Stimson House Has Changed Hands Numerous Times, With a Beer Baron and USC Frat Boys Counted Among Its Past Residents. Now, Extensive Renovations and New Tenants--the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet-- Have Given It New Life

With an abiding faith as firm as a mighty redwood, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet have once again settled into the house that wood built.

The mansion at 2421 S. Figueroa St., built 100 years ago for lumber tycoon Thomas Douglas Stimson when he moved to Los Angeles from Chicago, has changed hands numerous times during its history.

Once before, from 1949 to 1969, the house served as a convent for about 30 Carondelet Sisters, an order devoted to teaching, nursing and social work. Between Stimson and the five Carondelet Sisters who moved in this fall, the 30-room mansion also has been home to a civil engineer, a beer baron, a USC fraternity and students from neighboring Mount St. Mary’s College who affectionately called it “The Castle.”

Now with $1 million in renovations and repairs well under way, the house, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is Historic-Cultural Monument No. 212 in Los Angeles, stands ready to accommodate its new occupants, who are already doing good works throughout the city.

And thanks to the Sisters’ reverence for their new their home and their commitment to the community, local preservationists rejoice that instead of becoming an anachronistic relic, the stately house will once again be a vital part of the neighborhood.

“This is a grand old mansion and we’re still a little in awe of it,” said Sister Mary Allen, who oversees the renovation of the house as provincial treasurer for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, who have integrated into the surrounding area by doing community work and plan to open the mansion for small musical productions, selected community events and rent it out to film crews seeking historical backdrops. (Carondelet is the name of the St. Louis suburb where the first Sisters of St. Joseph built a log cabin in 1836. By 1889, the Carondelet Sisters were active in Los Angeles.)

From the front, the 3 1/2-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.

A third-floor balcony sits beneath a gabled arch and another stepped gable contains a Palladian window. A porch with carved stone columns encircles the first floor.

Excluding the tower, the house totals 12,800 square feet.

“I’ve admired the house from the minute I first walked in,” said Sister Jill, one of the supervisors for the archdiocese’s elementary schools. “The wood, the details on the door hinges, the different shapes of the glass in the windows, the stained glass windows above the stairway that have their own light. I find it fascinating.”

The grandeur of the house has attracted Hollywood over the years. It has been a setting for, among other things, chamber music performances, television commercials, the movies “House II” and “After Midnight,” two miniseries, “Testimony of Two Men” and “Captains and Kings,” and an episode of “The Bionic Woman” in which Lindsay Wagner’s double jumped off a second-floor porch. That same episode, titled “Black Magic,” also featured the late Vincent Price, who liked the spookiness of the house’s acoustics so much he returned later to record some productions of his own.

Though he amassed a fortune in the lumber business, Stimson built his home out of Arizona red sandstone. He wanted the exterior to resemble the brick-and-stone mansions of Chicago’s Gold Coast, and handed the task to a young Los Angeles architect, Carroll H. Brown.

Brown’s architectural design for the Stimson House has been described variously as Richardsonian Romanesque, Victorian Gothic, Romantic Revival and, according to a Times reporter in 1948, a style that reflects “the Mission influence, a bit of Byzantine, something Latin and a little Fort Ticonderoga.”

A Times music critic reviewing a chamber music performance at the house in 1989 called its architecture “Midwestern Ivanhoe” and said the edifice “proved a good deal more interesting than the music.”

If Stimson’s choice of stone for his home’s exterior seems ironic, the interior reflects his true passion. The inside is 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.

Richly paneled walls rise up to high coffered, or delicately plastered, ceilings. Each of the rooms on the first floor is finished in a different wood and thick doors made of two kinds of wood, one on each side, match the wood in the room.

Other details include inlaid woodwork in the oak floors, stained glass windows along the main stairway, marble fireplaces, engraved door hinges, unique corner china cabinets and a hidden safe in the original family room. “That’s where the sisters used to keep their cleaning supplies,” Sister Mary Allen revealed.

Material prepared for the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission’s review of the Stimson house in 1977 called it “architecturally unique in Los Angeles,” “the best example of this period of American architecture in Los Angeles” and “one of the most significant structures in the Los Angeles area.”

Architect Rudolph De Chellis of O’Leary Terasawa Partners, who supervised the renovations, said it was “an honor to work on that building.”

“You have to respect the craftsmanship and detailing,” he said. “You can’t find that today. You couldn’t duplicate it.”

At a cost of $130,000, the house, completed in 1893, was the most expensive in Los Angeles up to that time. The price tag if it were built today?

“Three or $4 million easy,” De Chellis said.

Jim Childs, who lives a few blocks from the house and is active on historic preservation matters, is glad to see the nuns breathe new life into it.

“Visually, certainly it’s one of the most important examples of period architecture in Los Angeles,” said Childs, who is chairman of a citizens advisory committee that works with the Community Redevelopment Agency.

“Its location (near a major intersection--Figueroa Street and Adams Boulevard) gives it a high profile and most people can relate to its historical significance because of its size and caliber,” he said.

What people concerned about historic preservation worry about, Childs said, is that such magnificent structures can overshadow smaller ones that also deserve to be protected and renovated.

That’s why Childs urges people to learn about the history of their neighborhoods. “Without the historical context, (the Stimson House) is seen as an oddity and a freak rather than part of the neighborhood,” he said.

Indeed, around the turn of the century, the Stimson House was the anchor of the most prestigious neighborhood in Los Angeles, a description reserved for Bunker Hill and neighborhoods just south of downtown during the 1870s and 1880s, according to architectural historians.

The opening of a horse-car line along 23rd Street helped attract many upper-class families to the area and they built mansions around St. James Park and Chester Place, near the Adams Boulevard-Figueroa Street intersection.

But by the 1920s, the rich were moving to Hancock Park and Beverly Hills, and by the 1930s several large homes in the area had been replaced by commercial establishments and, in one case, the sprawling Automobile Club of Southern California offices just south of the Stimson House.

During that time, “a flurry of subdividing activity indicated that investment considerations were now overshadowing quality of life pursuits . . . Consequently, mansions were broken up into apartments and estates were subdivided for new apartment complexes,” according to a 1991 report on historical architecture prepared for the state Department of Transportation.

Stimson was one of the city’s leading citizens and developers until his death in 1898. His family sold the house in 1907 to Alfred Solano, a civil engineer. In 1918, Edward R. Maier, president of Maier Brewing Co., bought the property. He was said to have stored his wines and liqueurs in the basement, a labyrinth of rooms and arched doorways.

In 1940, the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity of USC bought the house for $20,000. The house survived the frat’s eight-year tenure, though at least one floor board was broken by a student jumping on a pogo stick, according to an unofficial history of the house put together by the Carondelet Sisters.

At one point, the fraternity men hid a banner snatched from the UCLA campus in the mansion’s elevator shaft and on another occasion they imprisoned a UCLA student in the basement for two days after he was caught engaging in some mischief at USC, according to the nuns’ scrapbook.

But Vincent McDonough, a fraternity member who lived in “the Red Castle” in 1947 and 1948 and a son of Gordon L. McDonough, former Los Angeles County supervisor and U. S. congressman, said the high jinks were kept to a minimum. “Despite rumors to the contrary, we were a very studious house,” Vincent McDonough said. “All of us were ex-WW II guys darned intent on graduating.” McDonough, now 70, graduated in 1948 with a degree in international relations and went on to a long career with General Electric Co.

“It was a gorgeous, magnificent place,” recalled McDonough, a native Angeleno now living in Las Vegas. “It had an austere grandeur all its own.”

The 30 or so fraternity members living in the house while he was there took good care of it, McDonough said, and often invited professors over for lunch. The students rode to campus and back in an old red fire engine the fraternity owned, often accompanied by their Airedale mascot, George Tirebiter.

Of course, the Pi Kappa Alphas did take an occasional break from their studies. “I remember a few Hawaiian luau parties in the basement,” McDonough said.

Other memories of his days at the house include regular bridge games and a visit from singer Frankie Lane, who was promoting one of his records, McDonough said.

During that time, McDonough also met Dorothy Patricia, the woman who would become his wife. They courted at Pi Kappa Alpha parties and were married at St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church, next to the house, where they first met at a Mass.

But at least one of the neighbors apparently thought the frat was a bit too boisterous. In 1948, Carrie Estelle Doheny, widow of the oil magnate Edward Doheny and a philanthropist in her own right, bought the house for $70,000. The frat moved to 28th Street.

“She was not happy with the noise from the fraternity,” Sister Mary Allen said. “So she bought it and gave it to us (the Carondelet Sisters).”

Not surprisingly, the nuns proved to be quiet neighbors. Coincidentally, one of the residents was Sister Alice Marie, the oldest sister of Dorothy Patricia McDonough, whose family lived in nearby St. James Park.

From about 1970 until 1989, the nuns let Mount St. Mary’s College use the house as a residence for some of its students.

“We had 27 or 28 students there at one time,” said Sister Patricia Zins, former director of residential housing for the Doheny campus of Mount St. Mary’s College. “They loved being there. The house had a warm kind of aura about it. The students were really able to create a nice family-type spirit while they lived there. Whenever anyone walked into the house they would marvel at how gorgeous it was. The wood is just beautiful.”

With the college now housing all its residential students on campus, the Carondelet Sisters decided to once again use the house as a residence since some of its convents have closed. Renovations and repairs to the plumbing, the kitchen and the first two floors have been funded by a grant from the Daniel Murphy Foundation and private donations.

The sisters hope to raise more money for seismic repairs and work on the third floor including painting, refinishing floors, filling cracks, redoing ceilings and general mending, by renting to film crews interested in using the exterior and parts of the inside for location shots, Sister Mary Allen said. Most of the income from filming, however, will be used for the sisters’ retirement fund.

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At least seven more nuns are expected to join the five living there now. Meanwhile, the current residents are thoroughly enjoying their old house.

Sister Lana, principal of St. Jerome’s elementary school, said: “We’ve each picked responsibility for different rooms. We’re always discovering new nooks and crannies.”

The other residents are Sister Genevieve Marie, a semi-retired nurse, Sister Maria Angela, a campus minister and instructor at Mount St. Mary’s College, and Sister Josefa Therese, a cosmetologist who works with retired sisters at the Carondelet Center.

“We’re all involved in different ministries, so when we come home at the end of the day we all have something different to bring to the dinner table,” said Sister Lana. “And Sister Genevieve entertains us with tales about the latest projects of the plumbers, the exterminators or the electricians.”

Sister Mary Allen, who doesn’t live in the house but as the daughter of a lumber man clearly enjoys every chance to look around, said the sisters have had little time to add their personal touches to the house.

“They’ve been doing what has to be done to live here,” she said. “After a while we’ll begin looking at what can be done to bring it back to life. It is our home but it’s so beautiful we do want to share it.”

On the Cover

The Stimson House, built a century ago by lumber tycoon Thomas Douglas Stimson, is one of the few remaining South-Central mansions that have passed the test of time.

The 30-room mansion, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has served as a convent, a frat house, a dorm and a popular site for film crews. It is now home to five Carondolet Sisters, an order devoted to teaching, nursing and social work.