Added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 23, 1986

In its general finish and arrangement, it will be one of the most comfortable and homelike dwellings, as well as one of the most elegant residences to be found in the city.

–Los Angeles Times on the Rindge Residence, May 20, 1902

There’s a lot to admire about the 15-bedroom, nine-bathroom Frederick Hastings Rindge Residence. From the streetside, it presents vaguely witchy French chateau vibes, with rough-hewn sandstone added to the turrets and perimeter wall for some added texture. A symmetrical arcade of archways supported by bulging columns gives the main entrance a monumental Roman feel, with dormers and chimneys standing alert and erect like centurions, just above the balcony. Architect Frederick Roehrig was well regarded for his mansions around the turn of the century (see my visits to the Andrew McNally House and Woodbury-Story House in Altadena), and he certainly justified the $60,000 paycheck with this one. Keep in mind that’s 1902 money.

Inside the house is all handcrafted wood and polished marble, art glass and painted friezes. In addition to being a ludicrously wealthy man, Frederick H. Rindge was a book lover, a poet and author himself, and he adorned his house with sayings. Above a fireplace: “He aims too low who aims below the sky.” Above a bookcase: “Draw down the shade, shut out the night, let in the day of candle light; come round the fire or take a book, be grateful for this cozy nook.” And above an entrance, a Longfellow quote: “The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.” You get the sense that if Rindge had less money and worse taste, he might have embroidered these sayings on a throw pillow instead of embedding them in gorgeous stained glass. 

California shall be ours as long as the stars remain.

-Quote inlaid above a mantle in the Rindge Residence

The Rindges Head West

The LA story of the Rindge family starts in Cambridge, MA, where Frederick H. Rindge grew up in the mid-1800s. His family had lived there since 1639, and like a lot of blue blood New England families, the Rindges controlled a mighty fortune, thanks to papa Samuel Rindge’s successful merchant trade. When Samuel passed away in 1883, Frederick inherited a fortune valued at $3 to $5 million. 

Frederick adored Cambridge, was educated in its public schools and went to Harvard. Even after he moved, he would continue to donate money to the city, funding the construction of civic buildings, libraries, a church and a vocational school for boys. 

But California had Rindge’s heart. As a youngster, he had traveled to the American west with his family, and clearly the trips lodged in his memory. In 1887, Rindge and his new wife May Knight moved to California, initially living in Los Angeles and then in Santa Monica, just a few years after it incorporated. 

It didn’t take the Rindges long to ingratiate themselves among the upper crust of Angelenos. In addition to his generous philanthropy to local Santa Monica institutions, Frederick headed the Edison Electric Company and invested in water power early on. He was a director of the Edison Electric Company, VP of the Union Oil Company, president of a life insurance company and owned property from Stockton to Sinaloa.

In 1892, Frederick and May Knight purchased the old Malibu Rancho land grant, 13,000 acres stretching 25 miles up the coast starting at Las Flores Canyon. They planted citrus groves and vegetables, raised cattle and grain, and built a Victorian mansion at the edge of Malibu Creek in 1893. While the ranch hands did the planting and the cattle raising, Frederick, May and their three kids spent their days exploring their vast ranch on foot and horseback. Frederick wrote and self-published a series of books extolling the majesty of the land: 

In Southern California the summer twilight is especially delightful, even more so than in New England, because in the East, oftentimes, the great heat of the day extends into the evening; while by the Ocean of Peace, the twilight is just cool enough. Then the children, relieved of the strain of the day, find themselves lively again, and happily flit about. Watching for the evening star, he who discovers it claims it for his own. The mother, erstwhile, sits contentedly by, playing sweet-voiced hymns on the autoharp, which was made for twilight; and the father notes down all this on a scrap of paper. And now has passed the twilight, Friend of both day and night; The evening star will fade away, Abashed at the moon’s full light.

-Frederick H. Rindge, Happy Days in Southern California, 1898

All the while, the Rindges fought to keep their land off-limits. They had gates installed on the coastal edges of the property line, and fought with squatters and rural settlers who tried to use makeshift trails in the Santa Monica Mountains side of their property. 

Things Fall Apart

In 1902 Frederick and May Knight commissioned their new home, the very first in the brand new West Adams Heights tract. Within a few years the area had become an enclave of epic mansions owned by some of the LA area’s richest families, a sort of Beverly Hills before Beverly Hills existed. According to an article by Carey McWilliams in the March, 1949 issue of Script, Frederick was more than a resident in the area: he was an incorporator of the West Adams Heights Association, along with Henry Huntington and the banker/investor George Cochran. Many of the Rindges’ neighbors were early on were executives at the Conservative Life Insurance Company, which Frederick had founded after he moved to LA.

In addition to the main house itself, Frederick requested a separate structure that he used as a museum to display art and archaeological materials. Some of the artifacts were made by the Chumash who lived in Malibu for thousands of years before he bought it.

The Rindge Residence was completed in late 1902, and just in time. A year later, in the wee hours of December 4, 1903, a fire broke out on the ranch, completely destroying their Victorian house in Malibu. May Knight would continue to insist it was set by one of the more malicious settlers in the hills. 

Frederick died just two years after, aged 48, during a trip north to see his sister in Yreka, CA. May Knight Rindge continued to live at the house in West Adams Heights for another 36 years. All the while, she squandered much of the money that her husband left her in legal battles trying to keep Malibu private. When she wasn’t fending off trespassers with guns or blowing up the hill settlers’ trails with dynamite, she was laying a private railroad to keep the Southern Pacific from passing through. 

One very positive contribution from May Rindge was the founding of Malibu Potteries. In its short six years of existence between 1926 and 1932, the company developed a reputation for colorful geometric patterns inspired by Moorish, Egyptian, Mayan and Saracen designs. Perhaps the greatest showcase for Malibu Potteries tile is the Adamson House, a historic home which was (naturally) owned by Frederick and May’s daughter Rhoda and her husband, Merritt Adamson.

Eventually, a major court case decided the fate of the Rindges’ Malibu Rancho. In the 1923 case Rindge Co. v. County of Los Angeles, the US Supreme Court found that a county government has the power of eminent domain to take land from a private property owner in order to build roads. In 1929, the Roosevelt Highway (later renamed Pacific Coast Highway) opened on the ranch; a few years earlier May had reluctantly begun leasing homes to Hollywood elite on an exclusive stretch of coastline called Malibu Movie Colony. The area remains one of the most desirable stretches of real estate in the city.

After May

May continued to live in the house in West Adams through the 1930s. By 1940 she owed millions in back taxes, and had to sell off most of her Malibu Rancho to stay solvent. She died in 1941 with just a few hundred dollars to her name. By that time, West Adams Heights was changing. No longer the province of the city’s wealthiest whites, the neighborhood now attracted prominent Black celebrities and businesspeople. Norman Houston, co-founder of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company (see visit #70), moved in around the corner in 1938. Actress Hattie McDaniel, the first Black American to win an Oscar, lived five doors up from the Rindge mansion. The neighborhood also counted Drs. John and Vada Sommerville (founders of the Dunbar Hotel) and Ray Charles as residents. Just across the street from the Rindges’ pad is the iconic First AME Church, home to LA’s oldest Black congregation.

After May Knight Rindge passed, her daughter Rhoda Adamson gave most of Frederick’s archaeological collection to the Southwest Museum. The house itself was donated it to the Roman Catholic Church in 1944, and it became a convent called Jeanne D’Arc Hall; by the late ’40s it functioned as a maternity home. It would return to private ownership in the 1970s, and in the 1980s it was purchased by attorney Harold Greenberg, whose offices are still located there today, on the ground floor. Greenberg happens to be the legal advisor to the West Adams Heritage Association, a sweet little footnote for a home tied into so many parts of LA’s cultural history.

All in all, Castle Rindge functions vert efficiently as a hostel. It is spacious and roomy; the grounds are extensive, with walks and benches; and the austere, castle-like exterior makes for an atmosphere of inaccessibility well adapted to its present use. One leaves the place with the feeling that its spirit is aptly defined in the florid legend: “California Shall Be Ours as Long as the Stars Remain.” Obviously Frederick Hastings Rindge wanted this mansion to suggest a permanence-of-possession, an ownership projected in time, a deeply rooted identification with California. But Castle Rindge, which once offered prodigal hospitality to its guests, now furnishes shelter for the indigent; once a showplace, it is now a hostel. In the long, cool pantry where champagne bottles were once uncorked, ladies in maternity garments shuffle about preparing lunch. The stars still remain and who owns California now?

-Carey McWilliams, “The Evolution of Sugar Hill,” in the March 1949 issue of Script

Thanks to Rina Rubenstein of the West Adams Heritage Association for sending over the full Carey McWilliams article

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Abeel, Daphne: “Frederick Hastings Rindge: Brief Life of a Model Citizen: 1857-1905” (Harvard Magazine, November 1998)

+ Bariscale, Floyd B.: “No. 95 – Rindge House” (Big Orange Landmarks, December 13, 2007)

+ “F.H. Rindge Dies on Visit North” (Los Angeles Evening Post-Record, August 29, 1905 – via Newspapers.com)

+ McWilliams, Carey: “The Evolution of Sugar Hill” (Script, March 1949)

+ Meares, Hadley: “How Malibu Grew” (Curbed Los Angeles, November 21, 2018) 

+ Meares, Hadley: “The Thrill of Sugar Hill” (Curbed Los Angeles, February 22, 2018)

+ Rindge, Frederick H.: Happy Days in Southern California (1898 – via Library of Congress)

+ Ryon, Ruth: “Rindge House Fate Uncertain: Mansion Represents an Era Not Likely to Return” (Los Angeles Times, Aug 1, 1982 – via ProQuest)

+ Smith, Michael & Greg Stegall: “West Adams Heights: A Historic Neighborhood Faces Challenges” (West Adams Heritage Association)

+ Starzak, Richard: Frederick Hastings Rindge Residence’s NRHP nomination form