Added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 3, 1976

I love trees. Unconditionally. Unless they block my view of an eye-popping building, like the ones in front of the Frederick Mitchell Mooers House do. I get it, this house has one of the most distinctive facades of any in LA, and it must be tiring dealing with the looky-loos. But for crissakes, why go to the effort of restoring and repainting such marvelous frontage, just to cut it off from the street?

Before around 2017, you might be strolling up Bonnie Brae Street, minding your own business, when all of a sudden you’re punched in the face with this sculptural, alien take on a Queen Anne/Eastlake Victorian. Nowadays, a miniature urban forest blocks nearly every part of the view that isn’t already blocked by the security fence and barbed wire. 

All that pokes up above the treeline is a second story gable with a looping, swooping asymmetrical cutout in front of it, lined by a bargeboard that appears to be made out of tentacles. Then on the right side there’s a domed tower, bulging upwards like a rocket getting ready to launch, punctuated by dormer windows with sensual “ogee” frames. With all the different shingle styles and curlicues on the facade here, the house looks like it’s half dragon, half octopus. Or at least it would look like that, if I could see the rest of it. 

Thankfully, plenty of photographers with nice equipment thought to take great shots of the Mooers House over the decades. Photos from before the arboreal invasion confirm that the scaliness and elaborate decoration of the second and third floors extend down to the first; the American colonial columns and triangular pediment contain delicate floral carvings, and the fancitude is copy/pasted on every side of the first-floor veranda.

The only historic visual of the interior that I could find dates from an 1899 spread in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (where Mr. Mooers worked for a spell, we’ll get to that soon), with a hand-drawn rendering of what looks like a sitting room. Perfectly lovely, with well-appointed furniture and heavy-framed doors. What you can’t see are the “embossed leather walls and fine wood carving” of the dining room, as described by architectural historian Robert Winter in the house’s 1976 application for the National Register of Historic Places, and the original wallpaper in the seven rooms upstairs.

There are some delicious, contemporary interior pics from 2019, on the Instagram page of Kevin Mu, a friend of the current owner. They were taken a couple years into the house’s restoration, and while I couldn’t confirm how closely the wallpaper and hardwood match the originals, the owner clearly has the resources and the will to do it right. The transom window above the front door in the foyer is sheer divinity, and as much as I love that domed tower from the outside, the inside is even better, light-filled and cozy. The same photographer took some saliva-inducing pictures of the post-restoration facade, too.

The Frederick Mitchell Mooers House went up at a time when LA was rapidly expanding, and wealthier folks were leaving downtown to new suburbs popping up further west. While today the area houses a dense population of low-income people, mostly Latinos, back around the turn of the 20th century, the Westlake neighborhood beckoned LA’s elite. 

This house was built in 1894, four years before the Mooers moved in, for F.L. Wright (no, it’s not Frank Lloyd Wright, though that’d be cool) and his wife May Gertrude for around $7000. It was still early days for Westlake, though lots were definitely selling – a Sanborn Map from 1894 shows the Mooers House as “Being Built,” with five already-built homes to the south, and three empty lots to the north. 

The architect of the house is officially unknown. Robert Winter writes that its uniqueness read as the hallmarks of Joseph Cather Newsom, though he admits it’s just a conjecture. Others have attached Bradbeer & Ferris to it, the same firm that designed the Miller & Herriott House in University Park – though some also attribute that one to Newsom. Grrr! 

I found an October 1897 notice of a property transfer from the Wrights to one “Hon. Thomas Fitch,” a well-known attorney, politician and “silver-tongued” orator. An LA City Directory places Fitch at 818 S. Bonnie Brae in 1898, so it would seem he actually lived there. However as of fall of 1898, we see ads boasting “One of the Greatest Bargains Ever Offered Is that Elegant Home, Completely Furnished. No 818 So. Bonnie Brae St.” It’s unclear whether the advertiser was Fitch or if it somehow transferred back to the Wrights, because on December 24 of 1898 the Los Angeles Herald published a $5,200 property transfer directly from the Wrights to Frederick M. Mooers. 

When you hear Frederick Mooers’s backstory, you’ll understand why this house is most commonly named after him, its third owner, instead of the person who commissioned it. Mooers was born in Ithaca, NY in 1847 and moved to New York City when he was a young boy, getting a job as a drug store clerk for Demas Barnes & Co. When his boss became co-owner of the prominent Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper, Mooers moved over into the paper’s business office. He was soon elevated to business manager, and in 1872, met and married his wife Frances Demarest. It was a happy life. But the dude’s naturally peripatetic nature (plus his penchant for drinking) got the best of him. Within six years he had left his job at the Daily Eagle, and headed west to seek his destiny. 

Mooers puttered around in Chicago, writing for various local papers, before returning to New York. Despite his wife’s best efforts to encourage him to stop drinking, he became a full-blown alcoholic, known to pawn his clothing for wine or whiskey. He developed an appetite for prospecting that brought him to Montana, Wyoming, Mexico and the southwest. Friends back east would lose contact with him for months or years at a time, then they’d hear rumors that he was traversing the Sierras, or that he had turned up in New Mexico. While his wife Frances supported the family by running a boarding house, and later working at an insane asylum, Frederick courted poverty and starvation as he rode around the mountains for months on end on a burro. When his latest expedition inevitably failed, he’d return back home to New York. All the while, Mooers never gave up on seeking his El Dorado.

He finally found it in 1895. After a decade of fruitless searching around San Bernardino and the Mojave Desert, Mooers’s geological know-how and some old-fashioned tenacity led him and two other prospector pals up to the top of the Rand Mountains in the Mojave, where they discovered a vein of gold. They pitched a tent at the bottom of one promising peak, staked their first claim on April 25, 1895, and formed the Yellow Aster Mining and Milling Company, named after a novel that one of the trio was reading (A Yellow Aster by Hunt Caffyn). 

By the beginning of 1895 the town of Randsburg was established at the base of the range, with about 30 tents, horse stables and a saloon. The word got out, and within six months hundreds of miners, prospectors and investors had poured into Randsburg to work the mines and explore the area, and about $250,000 in gold ore had been extracted from this one camp. Mooers would claim in a lengthy Brooklyn Daily Eagle feature that Yellow Aster produced $650,000 in gold bullion in 1898.

Yellow Aster would grow to encompass dozens of mines. It was extremely productive and long-lasting, with operations running consistently from the late 1800s until the late 1930s. A report from the California Division of Mines and Geology found that “Between 1895 and 1939, more than 3,400,000 tons of ore was milled, and about 500,000 ounces of gold was recovered.” Mooers described himself and his two partners as “virtually down to our last pot of beans in April, 1895.” The Yellow Aster mines made the three of them extremely rich men. 

With his newfound wealth, Mooers bought the house at 818 S. Bonnie Brae in late 1898. From what I can tell, Frances didn’t live with him there, at least not for long. The LA city directory from 1899 places Frederick there along with his mother Eliza and his brothers Charles, James and William, but no Frances. A 1901 article in the LA Times states that “Several times Mrs. Mooers tried to live with her husband, but owing to this penchant for the black bottle she gave it up each time.” 

Frederick stayed active in the mining industry after the big strike, but unfortunately, he didn’t have very long to enjoy his new home. He died on May 24, 1900 of heart failure, during a trip to New York. A bitter fight over his will spilled into the papers, with Frances contending that brother Charles, the will’s executor, had tried to convince Frederick to alot her less than she deserved; and Charles in turn accused Frances of being an unfaithful wife, and attempting to defraud her estranged husband of his property while he was alive. The dispute might have gone to court, but all parties were big boys and girls about it, met up in LA to talk over the accusations and misunderstandings, and work out some more equitable terms for the will. 

In the end, the house went to Frederick’s mother, Eliza. After she passed in 1902, it was transferred to her surviving sons, and within a few years there were no more Mooers living there. 

Based on building permits it would seem that the Frederick Mitchell Mooers House hasn’t changed too much since the late 19th century. A new barn was built in 1908 out back; a storage area / workshop was added onto the existing back garage in the early 1950s; the old butler’s pantry became a bathroom around the same time; the whole thing was re-roofed in 2005, and in 2016 right after the current owner bought it, we see a permit for a kitchen and bathroom remodel.

Westlake has changed a lot since the Mooers’ time. It’s no longer a neighborhood for the well-to-do, and while there’s a whole district of intact Victorians further south on Bonnie Brae, these couple blocks are full of low-income apartment buildings without anything to recommend them, architecturally speaking. It’s a bummer that one of the finest houses in the area is willfully obscured by fencing and foliage. But if that’s what it takes to preserve this beauty, so be it. It’s worth stopping by just to admire the cresting wooden wave on that left gable, and the dramatic onion dome on the right tower (that’s pretty much all you can see). They’re vestiges of a time when wealth and architectural whimsy could co-exist peacefully.

Thanks to Kevin Mu for granting permission to post his superb color photos of the Mooers house. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “818 S Bonnie Brae Victorian Building Restoration Designed by Gregory Yu” (@gregyu6250 on YouTube, November 14, 2019)

+ “A Modern Monte Cristo” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 2, 1899 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Bariscale, Floyd B.: “No. 45 – Mooers House” (Big Orange Landmarks, July 16, 2007)

+ Blake, Lindsay: “The Frederick Mitchell Mooers House from ‘Mod Squad’” (Iamnotastalker.com, May 22, 2015)

+ “Building” (Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1894 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Death of F.M. Mooers of Yellow Aster Mine Fame” (Los Angeles Evening Express, May 25, 1900 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “For Sale” (AD – Los Angeles Evening Express, September 24, 1898 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “For Sale: A $200 Side-Bar Top Buggy” (AD – Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1900 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Frederick Mitchell Mooers House, Bradbeer & Ferris, 1894, Los Angeles” (@kevinmu on Instagram, January 6, 2019)

+ “Frederick Mitchell Mooers House, 1894, Los Angeles” (@kevinmu on Instagram, January 10, 2019)

+ “Frederick Mooers’ Will Has Been Contested (Los Angeles Evening Express, June 30, 1900 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Gebhard, David and Robert Winter: Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1994)

+ “He Threw Money Away” (The Boston Globe, June 25, 1900 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Land and Building” (Los Angeles Evening Express, October 9, 1897 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Los Angeles City Directory, 1898 (via Los Angeles Public Library)

+ Los Angeles City Directory, 1899 (via Los Angeles Public Library)

+ Los Angeles City Directory, 1901 (via Los Angeles Public Library)

+ “Lost, Strayed – and Found.” (Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1898 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Miglino, Malia: “818 s Bonnie Brae St, Los Angeles” (@la_history_girl on TikTok, January 31, 2023)

+ “Mine Owner’s Son Sued for Damages” (Brooklyn Eagle, May 29, 1899 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Miss Linck.” (Los Angeles Evening Express, July 17, 1899 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Mooers, Mining Man, Dead.” (Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1900 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Paonessa, Laurie: “Frederick Mitchell Mooers House.” (Clio: Your Guide to History, May 19, 2023)

+ “Rand Mining District Map” (SCVHistory.com) 

+ Sanborn Map Company: “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Los Angeles, 1894” (via ProQuest)

+ Sanborn Map Company: “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Los Angeles, 1906” (via ProQuest)

+ “Transfers, $1000 and Over” (Los Angeles Herald, December 24, 1898 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Wanted – First-Class Woman Cook” (AD – Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1899 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Why Dolly Hit Edward” (Los Angeles Evening Post-Record, May 22, 1900 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Winter, Robert W.: Frederick Mitchell Mooers House’s NRHP nomination form

+ “Yellow Aster Will Contest Settled.” (Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1901 – via Newspapers.com)