Whitley Heights 101

1927 N. Highland Avenue

In 1918, landscape painter E. Roscoe Schrader (1878-1960) hired architects Mead & Requa from San Diego to build a Spanish Colonial Revival house on North Highland Avenue close to the intersection of Highland Blvd. and Franklin Avenue. Mead & Requa also built the Krotona Court located 2117 Vista Del Mar Avenue and a residence for Mrs. V. Knudsen nearby in the Hollywood Dell in 1913.

In the front of the home where was a walled garden with a fountain and an archway entrance. The main room on the first floor was Schrader’s art studio with a stairway leading to the second floor balcony with bedrooms beyond. The house was named one of three “best homes in Los Angeles” in the February 1920 issue of House Beautiful Magazine. Below, Schrader can be seen on his back patio.

In addition, the Pueblo-inspired home received honorable mention as a notable example of small house architecture by the Southern California Chapter of the A.I.A. (Jennings, Frederick, “Los Angeles and Vicinity,” Architect and Engineer of California, June 1920, pp. 108-109). Below is the layout for the first floor.

Schrader was the dean at the Otis Art Institute and and later become the school’s Dean of Faculty and President of both the California Art Club and the Hollywood Art Association. The Otis Art Institute opened around the same time this house was being built and was located at 2401 Wilshire Boulevard and is now called the Otis College of Art & Design, located in the Westchester area of Los Angeles. Roscoe and Elizabeth Schrader frequently entertained Otis Art Institute faculty and students, and Hollywood Art Association and California Art Club members at their home which would one day be directly below Samuel Freeman’s house and R.M. Schindler’s DeKeyser Duplex on Glencoe Way. The Schraders lived in the home until 1929 and put the house for sale or lease in February of 1930.

Between 1931 and 1934 the house was purchased by church organist and director, Kathryn Baird Sullivan, who converted the main room of the house into the “Hollywood Wedding Chapel”. She had been invited by Sid Grauman to play the organ at his theater when the film “Noah’s Ark” premiered in 1928.

Baird Sullivan advertised interdenominational weddings complete with a musical vesper services of a choir. No one would be turned away if they were not baptized or divorced.

On September 26, 1931, MGM actress Faye Pierre (1912-1963) married aviator Dana Boller in the Hollywood Wedding Chapel. Pierre worked at MGM and was a “Goldwyn Girl” in “Palmy Days” which starred Eddie Cantor. Betty Grable was also started out in the business and was another Goldwyn Girl in the film. After that, MGM dropped her and she appeared in several Andy Clyde shorts in 1932 before her acting career ended. She gave birth to twins in 1934 and lived in Sherman Oaks. Tragedy struck in August of 1962 her husband was killed in a helicopter crash. Devastated by her husband’s death, Pierre fell into a deep depression. On March 2, 1963 she committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills at age 55.

On November 26, 1931, golf champion Leona Pressler married Dr. Lewis Cheney, a Los Angeles physician at the Hollywood Wedding Chapel. Pressler was a 7 time USGA Amateur champion.

On June 30 1932, the Hollywood Wedding Chapel was celebrating it’s second anniversary and gave out free weddings that day before closing its doors in 1934.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the house was for sale several times and saw its share of tenants. Between 1954 to 1957 the building became the Colin McEwen School starting with middle and high school and then adding elementary schools. McEwen did not accept “delinquents, drones, or disturbers”. McEwen opened its doors with some former controversy in Portland. In May of 1946, he resigned as principal of Nehalam Valley High School when he refused to remove two novels from the school’s library shelves: The Grapes of Wrath and Strange Fruit. He had been principal there since 1944 and moved to Los Angeles and opened his school on Western Avenue.

Actress Sheree North attended the school before she started her acting career in 1951. (She played Blanche’s sister on the Golden Girls). Childhood actress Beverly Washburn was accepted into his school in 1956 and would star in Old Yeller in 1957. Actor David Stollery was also a student; he was “Marty” in the Mickey Mouse Club. Actress Patty Duke “Valley of the Dolls” also went to this school.

In 1958, they moved into a bigger building located at 1776 N. Highland Avenue. In 1964, McEwen opened another campus in Santa Monica and another in Malibu in 1968 (which still exists) before his death in 1983. Once again 1927 N. Highland Avenue went through a series of owners before it was bought by a land developer who tore down the garage in 2001 and the house in 2005 and built a hotel which is currently the Holiday Inn Express.