Added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 23, 2023

There’s a lot to see in Glendale’s Brand Park. Start with the glittering white Brand Library and Art Center, built in grand Mughal style as the home of Leslie Coombs Brand, “The Father of Glendale.” Then walk up the network of trails behind the library to the Brand family cemetery and its pyramidal tomb, which houses the remains of Leslie himself. There’s a serene Japanese tea house and koi pond, and even an impressive statue of a woman standing on a pile of logs, the symbol of a defunct conservation organization, the American Green Cross.

But no visit to Brand Park is complete without a visit to the Doctors House, one of LA’s zippiest looking Victorian homes. This beauty holds court at the top of a long sloping lawn, surrounded by trees and hedges. Like many late Victorians in the Queen Anne style, this one’s got a gloriously asymmetrical mass, with a complex jumble of rooflines to match. There are multiple porches at the corners, for maximum vegging opportunities; windows are tall and narrow, and most of the siding’s your typical horizontal wood lap. What vaults this into the pantheon of LA’s great Victorian facades are the decorative touches that fall squarely under the Eastlake substyle – the finely-spindled rails, the bracketed hood over the entryway, and especially the oval “moon gates” on the front porches, surrounded by a cacophony of diagonal spindles. This thing is just FUN to look at! 

The Doctors House was built from 1888-1890 for by E.T. Byram, one of six landowners who co-founded Glendale in 1887. Glendale was a small community of around 300 residents at the time, just 150 acres of citrus groves and strawberry fields on large tracts of land. The streetcar system was still about 15 years down the road, and Glendale wouldn’t incorporate until 1906. Byram built this house on spec, a pretty common tactic for developers looking to attract new residents to their startup suburbs – especially during the real estate mania that gripped LA in the late 1880s.

Originally the Doctors House was located in the center of Glendale, at the corner of Third Street (now Wilson Avenue) and Belmont Street. Back in 1888 it was a one-story house with an unfinished attic and no interior staircase. We don’t know much about who lived here for the first eight years of its existence. But we know plenty about the house’s namesake, the four medical men who lived here in succession from 1896 through 1914. 

First up was Dr. Charles Virgil Bogue, a physician who served the Verdugos, one of LA’s first families. Bogue used one of the back bedrooms on the ground floor as his office. Mrs. Bogue didn’t want any patients walking through her front door and parlor, so they would enter from the back porch through a nifty slide-up jib window instead. It was Bogue that added the indoor staircase and began transforming the attic into more livable space. 

Physician Dr. David Winslow Hunt bought the house in 1901 and moved in with his family. Hunt saw his patients in a carriage house in the backyard, which was too termite-ridden to move when the Doctors House was relocated. He added indoor plumbing, and carried on the tradition of expanding the home, by adding another bedroom and bathroom on the west side of the attic in 1902. That same year, Hunt became president of the Glendale Improvement Association; later on he was named VP of the city’s first bank, and purchased Glendale’s first car! The Hunts also had a young daughter Dottie, the only child in the house during the doctor era.

The third physician, Dr. Allen Lincoln Bryant, was only hear for about a year in 1907; by 1908 he had sold it to the unfortunately named Mr. Hurtt, a medical chemist who passed himself off as a doctor, though he was likely never licensed (let’s give him some credit for being the first president of the Glendale Chamber of Commerce). Hurtt made a bunch of alterations to the inside of the house, incompatible with the original late Victorian style. Many of his changes were later rolled back when the house was restored, with the one exception of a porch on the west side that Hurtt enclosed and reused as a service kitchen. Hurtt moved out in 1914. 

Easily the most notable occupant of the Doctors House was Nell Shipman, a Canada-born actress, screenwriter and producer during the silent film era. Shipman was one of a number of woman filmmakers with independent production companies before the major studios dominated Hollywood. She’s known as an early pioneer of location shooting, and for an independent approach that found her writing, directing and starring in many of her films, even doing her own stunts. 

Shipman and her family rented the Doctors House from 1917-1920, a tumultuous time in her life both personally and professionally. She and her mother were both victims of the Great Influenza epidemic in 1918; while Nell survived, her mother sadly did not. Her father passed away just five months later following a stroke. With her husband Ernest, she formed a small production company in 1919, and released Back to God’s Country that same year – the most successful Canadian film of the silent era, and one of the first to feature a nude scene (watch the entire movie here). The following year she and her husband divorced. She moved out around 1920, and moved her production company up north, eventually settling in Idaho. 

Nell Shipman was a great lover of animals, and an advocate for their ethical treatment in filmmaking. If you’ve ever stayed through the end credits of a movie and noticed the “No animals were harmed” certification, Nell Shipman built that policy into her films, decades before American Humane officially certified its first movie, The Doberman Gang (1972). I’ve read several reports that Shipman kept two bear cubs in the yard when she was living in Glendale. I imagine her training them to drink tea in the dining room and play the pump organ for guests in the parlor.

While the sleepy vibe of early Glendale doesn’t seem like it would have been an ideal match for her always-on-the-go persona, Shipman had colorful memories of living at the house. In her 1968 autobiography The Silent Scream & My Talking Heart, she described the Glendale house as “the little, white, fancifully-fretted, balconied and gee-gawed house on a tree-lined, narrow dirt road” with an “old-fashioned, colored-glass front door” and “quaint doorway.” 

The Doctors House was next purchased by the Dzaich and Kordich families, whose story is one of those beautiful multi-generational immigrant tales that are the stuff of movies. In 1921, a twenty-something Katie Dzaich traveled to Los Angeles from Croatia (at the time part of Yugoslavia). She was visiting her sister Mary, who had married an immigrant named Peter Kordich and settled in Bunker Hill. It was supposed to be a short trip, but Katie extended her stay after meeting Joseph Dzaich, who was boarding with the Kordiches at the time. Katie and Joseph were married in 1922, and both families moved into the Doctors House later that year. The house would stay in the family for more than half a century, during which time they adjusted some of the interior partitions, added an additional entrance to the rear facade, and had many kids. In a 1980 issue of the Glendale Historical Society’s newsletter, Katie recalls that the Kordiches bought a radio before anyone else on their block, and the neighborhood kids used to gather around their porch to listen to The Lone Ranger. 

The current chapter of the Doctors House began in 1979. After years of deferred maintenance, Katie Dzaich and Mary Kordich, both widows by that time, sold the house to a developer called Larry Sade & Associates. The company announced plans to raze the home and build a condo complex. Local historians and community advocates sprang into action, forming the Glendale Historical Society for the specific purpose of saving the Doctors House. 

The Society convinced the developer to give the house to the City of Glendale, and took out a $30,000 loan to move the house to its new digs at a vacant section of Brand Park, donated by the City. The move involved cutting the house into two, right down the middle, loading the pieces onto flatbed trucks and driving them on a 10-mile route through the foothills of Glendale. The whole move happened in the middle of the night, and took a painstaking eight and a half hours, because they had to move lampposts and electrical lines so the house could fit through. 

Over the next four years, the Glendale Historical Society brought the Doctors House back to its near-original state through a meticulous restoration spearheaded by Marie Luft, the Glendale Historical Society’s first president. Luft oversaw a corps of volunteers and a handful of master carpenters, engineers and plumbers (including her husband Glenn Luft, an experienced engineer), who spent four years and 18,000 volunteer hours bringing the Doctors House back to health. Some 38 businesses donated supplies or labor to help move the project along. 

The Society researched the construction history of the house, reversed many of the alterations that were incompatible with late Victorian design, and re-created details and missing items based on old photos. Paint layers were analyzed to get back to the fin de siècle color schemes, and wallpaper was recreated based on small fragments leftover from the late 1800s. Some features couldn’t be replicated because of safety codes, for example the inside stairs, which were way too steep for 1980s OSHA standards. The gently sloping staircase we see today extends further into the bottom floor than it did originally, but you’re also less likely to die on it.

Glendale Historical Society member Sue Lazara researched the antique furniture, and oversaw the purchase and donation of period-appropriate furnishings, many of them authentic Eastlake pieces. A next-door neighbor was able to describe the original front door in enough detail that the Society found an identical one, saved from a Victorian home in Monrovia that was being dismantled.

Finally in June 1984, after the new paint had dried, the original fir floors were refinished and the antique chairs were all in place, the Doctors House opened its doors to the public as a house museum. And it’s still open for tours today.

One of the many things to love about the Doctors House museum is how it preserves all the different layers of the home’s history. You’ll see pictures of the four doctors and their families, and some of the original artwork they owned still hangs on the wall. There’s a small display devoted to Nell Shipman’s story in the upstairs bedroom, and on the antique sewing table upstairs I spied a sewing project with Croatian words on it – a sly reference to the 50+ years when the home was occupied by Croatian immigrants and their offspring. 

The story of the Doctors House’s preservation is also enshrined here. The downstairs master bedroom is adorned with photos of volunteers, hard at work during the restoration process. You’ll even see a pair of Marie Luft’s tattered shoes that the Society bronzed and presented to her in honor of her tireless work. 

The Doctors House is open for tours most Sundays from 2-4pm, closed July and December. More information at the Glendale Historical Society’s website. 

Thank you to Laura Crook, Doctors House Museum Director for the Glendale Historical Society, for sending me all the historic photos in this post.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Architectural Resources Group: “Doctors House Museum & Gazebo: Conditions Assessment Report” (PDF) (February 21, 2017 – via Glendale Historical Society)

+ Corrigan, Kelly: “Lifelong Glendale resident Martha Dzaich McDaniel dies at 91” (Glendale News-Press, December 4, 2015)

+ “‘The Doctor’s House’ Seeking New Location” (Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1979 – via ProQuest)

+ The Glendale Historical Society: The Glendale Historical Society newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1980 (PDF)

+ The Glendale Historical Society: “Nell Shipman: Film Pioneer” (brochure handed out during Doctors House tour, May 28, 2023)

+ Goodrich, Andrew & Sydney Andrea Landers, Architectural Resources Group: Doctors House NRHP nomination form

+ Hamilton, Denise: “Commission Agrees to Move, Renovation of E. D. Goode House“ (Los Angeles Times, Oct. 30, 1986) 

+ Harnden, Russell III: “Discovering Glendale’s Doctors House” (documentary) (The Glendale Historical Society / City of Glendale)

+ Maltun, Alan: “ Historic House to Be Moved to New Site” (Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1980 – via ProQuest)

+ Maltun, Alan: “Society to Seek OK of Historical Site” (Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1979)

+ “Nell Shipman/Doctor House” (City of Glendale website)

+ Selleck, Paula: “Group Asks City Funds to Save Old House” (Los Angeles Times, October 14, 1979 – via ProQuest)

+ Walker, Theresa: “Alive and Well: Loving Work Restores Doctors’ House to Picture of Health” (Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1984 – via ProQuest)