#240: E.A.K. Hackett House (Pico-Union)
Added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 22, 2003
This addition to the National Register introduced me to both an architectural substyle, and a prominent figure in LA’s social and religious circles of the early 1900s. It also opened up a research conundrum that gets more mysterious with every shred of evidence I turn up…more on that in a bit.
The Owner
This 1904 home was once the residence of Edward A.K. Hackett, a newspaperman who made his mark in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as editor and publisher of the Fort Wayne Sentinel for over 35 years. At points in his long career Hackett also published the Indianapolis Sentinel and American Farmer magazine. Hackett was very active in LA religious life, too. He was an active member of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church, a Board member of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University), and acted as the associate secretary of the religious department at the YMCA. According to a 1913 issue of the Los Angeles Times, Hackett was known to visit the city jail every Thursday to minister to the prisoners, sometimes distributing coins or pocket mirrors emblazoned with the image of Christ.
Hackett’s influence spread to China, with the funding of China’s first medical college for women in Guangzhou, as part of the Presbyterian Church’s missionary efforts. His daughter Dr. Martha Hackett, an accomplished physician and teacher, spent years running it.
The Neighborhood
Like many midwestern transplants who moved to LA around the turn of the century, Hackett initially used the home as a winter residence, before moving his family out here permanently. It would have been one of the earliest homes in the triangular chunk of the Pico-Union neighborhood defined by W. Pico Boulevard, S. Alvarado Street and Alvarado Terrace.
The area was once part of a 53-acre parcel owned by the wealthy landowner Doria Deighton Jones. In the late 1890s about half of that land was being used for a nine-hole golf course called Windmill Links, a predecessor to the Los Angeles Country Club. Jones began subdividing her land into housing tracts in 1902, after the golf course had moved. Within a couple years, this area was full of fine homes for well-off families. The above Sanborn Map from 1906 shows homes built on the majority of the lots on S. Westlake Avenue. A couple blocks southeast, Alvarado Terrace was in the middle of becoming the showcase of grand mansions that it remains today.
The House
The architect for the E.A.K. Hackett House is unknown. Style-wise, historians call it a “transitional craftsman” home – an aesthetic caught mid-evolution. It’s got vestiges of the highly-ornamented Queen Anne Victorian style that was just on its way out at the time – check out the scrollwork on those archways over the porch, and the slightly projecting bay window, above the main entrance. But the decoration here is sedate compared to earlier Victorian homes, and you can see just as much influence from the emerging craftsman movement in the wide eaves, low-pitched gables and plentiful windows that yank in as much light as possible.
Peek inside via these color interior photos, and the craftsman connection is even clearer. The pocket doors, lighting fixtures and built-ins (love that “gentleman caller” bench in front of the staircase!), and the way the rooms flow freely into each other, combine for a distinctly California take on the European arts & crafts aesthetic.
The house’s most distinctive feature is its wardrobe of brown shingles, covering it from head to toe. This is the hallmark of “shingle style” architecture, a throwback to colonial American buildings that first sprung up after America’s centennial year in 1876, and was then adopted by craftsman architects 30 years later. The effect of those dark brown shingles is as much spatial as it is visual. In providing that uniform texture around the entire house, the shingles de-emphasize the raw size of the building. It seems like a texture enclosing a space, rather than a mass that takes up that space.
At two and a half stories and 4300 square feet, the E.A.K. Hackett House isn’t quite a mansion, but it was certainly large enough to accommodate the Hacketts’ large family, including five children from Edward’s two marriages, plus a maid who lived on premises. At the back of the property is a separate garage (perhaps once a carriage house?), with a second story where the Hacketts’ chauffeur once awaited his next driving assignment.
Later Owners
Edward Hackett died in 1916, and his wife Susie and family continued living here through the 1930s. After Susie passed in 1938, the Hacketts sold the house to Kenneth and Lillian Merle Strickland, who attached a guest unit to the back in 1943. Lillian continued to live in the house until she died here in 1989; a couple years later it was purchased by Terry duSoleil, the author of its National Register of Historic Places nomination form.
DuSoleil was a serial historic house owner, the previous owner of a bungalow in Berkeley and another historic building in San Francisco. Soon after purchasing the E.A.K. Hackett House she replaced the roof and some aging drywall, and stripped back years of paint from the trim to expose the natural color of the redwood. Some of the old wallpaper had to go, but she kept as much of the historic fabric of the house as she could. When duSoleil sold the home in 2002, she added as a condition of escrow that its new owner had to enter into an easement agreement with the LA Conservancy, to protect many of the historic interior features and the shingled facade.
During the Strickland and duSoleil eras, the homeowners and their families weren’t the only residents of the E.A.K. Hackett House. I spoke with duSoleil about her time there, and she told me that she inherited a tenant who was living in the old maid’s quarters during the Stricklands’ ownership. Later she would rent out extra rooms to grad students studying at the USC film school. One time, she let them film in the house, and they broke one of the antique chandeliers in the living room. Woops!
The Mystery
So here’s the conundrum: When I was researching this piece, I kept turning up references to other families living at the same address around the same time that the Hacketts were supposedly there. The Los Angeles Herald published a short notice in late 1903 about a “Mr. and Mrs. Willis G. Hunt” moving in – a year before the E.A.K. Hackett House was completed, according to the NRHP nomination form:
In 1904 the Herald has Mrs. Hunt entertaining her sister there. Two years later, the 1906 LA city directory lists a “Hunt W G” living at S. Westlake Avenue, near where it intersects Pico – so definitely the same home:
In 1908 the Herald reports that Hunt’s wife Bessie had died of breast cancer at the home. In 1909, we find a building permit for work requested by Edward Hackett – the earliest permit I could find with anyone’s name on it – and in 1911, the Herald announces the wedding of E.A.K. Hackett’s daughter Helen to John C. Johnson at the house.
The 1927 city directory shows a Grace G. Myers residing at 1317 S. Westlake, at the same time that Edward’s widow Susie was still living there herself:
Is it possible that Willis and Bessie Hunt were boarders, living in the Hackett House until Ms. Hunt passed away? That seems unlikely, given that Willis G. Hunt was the president of the Pioneer Roll Paper company, and would likely have owned his own home. Perhaps the Hunts lived there for the months out of the year when the Hacketts didn’t? Also unlikely, as none of the contemporary newspaper stories mentioned any connection between the two families.
Another intriguing scenario could be that the house was actually a duplex from the beginning, with the two halves sharing the same address. Starting in the 1950s, during the Stricklands’ residence, building permits refer to it as a “2-family home” or “duplex,” and on one permit from 1991, the given address is “1317-1319 S. Westlake Ave.” One other clue as to the home’s duplicity: the garage shares a wall with the garage on the next lot east, at 1311 S. Westlake. Perhaps this is a sign of some old attachment to another property? Interesting idea, though there is no evidence that the Hackett House was intended as a duplex from the start, and none of the permits for 1311 S. Westlake reference the Hacketts or the Hunts.
One final possibility is that the Hacketts weren’t the original owners of this house. It’s plausible that the Hunts commissioned it, and the Hacketts only moved in after Mrs. Hunt died in 1908. Then after Edward Hackett died in 1916, Mrs. Hackett started taking on boarders for the extra rooms. That might explain all the different names that show up in city directories over the years. It would also track with a tidbit of information I got from one of the house’s current residents, that the woman who owned it during the Great Depression (that would have been Mrs. Hackett) used to let military men stay there. No clue what type of military men that would have been, since she died before the outbreak of WWII.
If you’ve got any smoking guns on who exactly commissioned the house and lived in it early on, please hit me up via my contact page.
The Bones
A lot of people have lived and died in the E.A.K. Hackett House over its 120-year history. It’s nice to see that so many waves of owners have appreciated what it is and preserved a lot of what makes it unique. Granted, the 2022 color photos show evidence of repainting and some remodeling decisions that would make a preservationist cringe. But it’s rare to find a house of this age with so much of its original materials still intact. The bones are still strong in this one. And those shingles? They still give me tingles. Still divine, after all these years.
Oh, and PS: buried in the classified section of a 1929 edition of the Spanish-language paper La Opinión is an advertisement stating someone at 1317 S. Westlake wanted to sell a walnut “pianola,” or player piano. I couldn’t find any equivalent ads in English-language newspapers. Who could this mysterious Spanish-speaking pianola seller be? Another rabbit hole for another researcher…
Thanks to former owner Terry duSoleil for filling me in on some of the undocumented history of the E.A.K. Hackett House, and to Melissa and David from CAST Location for securing permissions for the color interior pics.
Sources & Recommended Reading
+ CAST Locations Property #4660 (CASTLocations.com)
+ Craven, Jackie: “A Look at Shingle Style Architecture” (ThoughtCo., July 9 2019)
+ DuSoleil, Terry: EAK Hackett House’s NRHP nomination form
+ “E. A. K. Hackett House” (LAConservancy.org)
+ “Edward A. K. Hackett” (FindAGrave.com)
+ “Pays to Save Sinful Souls: Fort Wayne Editor Presents Coins to Prisoners (Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1913 – via ProQuest)
+ “Society” (Los Angeles Herald, May 21, 1911 – via UC Riverside California Digital Newspaper Collection)
+ “Social Notes” (Los Angeles Herald, December 26, 1903 – via UC Riverside California Digital Newspaper Collection)