Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Bess Houdini's 1940 residence

The great Jim Steinmeyer recently alerted me to this house at 963 North Mariposa Ave in East Hollywood where Bess Houdini and Edward Saint lived in 1940. According to the 1940 census, Bess and Ed lived here with Saint's 75-year-old father, Mead Grant Myers, and a 30-year-old cook named C. Edward Tyree. It is the lone surviving house on a block of apartment buildings. Here's a photo I took on New Year's Day.


So we now have two surviving houses in Los Angeles that Bess and Ed occupied, the other being the more well-known house at 1616 N. Curson. Below is my list of currently known addresses for Bess and Ed during their Hollywood years:

  • 2435 Laurel Canyon Blvd. Hollywood CA. (1934/1935)
  • 1616 North Curson Ave. Hollywood, CA. (1936)
  • 1851 North Winona Blvd. Hollywood CA. (1937/1938)
  • 963 North Mariposa Ave. Hollywood, CA. (1940)
  • 8565 West Knoll Drive, West Hollywood, CA. (1941)
  • 346 N. Vermont, East Hollywood, CA. (Milt Larsen remembers her here.)
  • San Marcos Hotel, Apt 302 & 301, Beverly Blvd at Western, East Hollywood, CA. (1942)
  • Ceder Lodge Sanitarium, 2030 Griffith Park, Los Angeles, CA. (1943)

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3 comments:

  1. Leo HeviaJanuary 18, 2022 at 10:38 AM

    Holy smokes! This is fantastic! That's a lot of addresses listed. She and Saint never really settled down. And in the end Bess came back full circle and was heading back to the Payson Avenue house when she died.

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  2. John CoxJanuary 18, 2022 at 12:34 PM

    The 346 N. Vermont address is a big question mark. It's an apartment building and Milt Larsen remembers her living there, but Pat Culliton says Milt is remembering the San Marcos. That very well could be. Milt was just a little kid at the time

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  3. Leo HeviaJanuary 20, 2022 at 6:20 AM

    Childhood memories can play tricks on us. Houses and buildings that looked enormous to us as children now appear much smaller in adulthood. I wonder if the apartment at 346 kept records that far back.

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