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The Man Who Reshaped a City
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| George Kress, shown here in Palm Springs in 1940, ran a business that physically moved hundreds of buildings, including many in Downtown. Photo courtesy the George R. Kress Collection. |
One Figure Literally Moved Downtown Around, and 60 Years Later, Another Uncovered His Story
by Jay Berman
George Kress was just shy of his 90th birthday when he died in his cabin in Newberry Springs in the San Bernardino County desert in 1972.
No newspaper stories reported his passing; the only record was a county-issued death certificate.
Kress may not be widely remembered today, but he played an important part in early 20th century Los Angeles. As a self-taught engineer from Pittsburgh, Penn., he had come to California and literally reshaped the city.
Kress moved buildings. Small buildings. Large buildings. Any buildings. He even once offered to straighten the leaning tower of Pisa.
From the time he purchased the D.R. Tripp House Moving Co. in Downtown Los Angeles in 1913 until the Great Depression shut him down in 1940, Kress and his company moved thousands of houses and commercial buildings. Even though he kept meticulous notes about his jobs (and virtually everything else), there is no way to estimate how many buildings he moved.
Rodney Kemerer, who never met Kress, knows the most minute details about the man. For the past 13 years, Kemerer has done all he can to see that Kress is remembered as the visionary he clearly was. This is because Kemerer lives in the only house that Kress ever built.
In 1931, Kress took time from his schedule of moving homes, schools and commercial buildings to build a house for himself and his bride of one year, the former Wanda Taylor Cooper. He put it near the top of Benedict Canyon, astride the Los Angeles-Beverly Hills city line in an area where most roads were still unpaved.
"It was way out in the middle of nowhere," says Kemerer. "There were only two other houses around, and most of the roads were really just trails."
Kemerer and his wife, film producer Lindsay Doran, purchased the five-bedroom, five-bathroom home in 1992. Back then, Kemerer didn't know who Kress was, but he knew that very few changes had been made to the house. "That told me it worked as a building and people held onto it," he said.
Kemerer learned that Kress was the middle son of three of Germanic parents from Pittsburgh. "I am also the middle son of three, my parents were of German descent, and I'm from Pittsburgh," Kemerer said. "That made me really want to know who had done this, and why. I had no idea of the journey I was about to begin."
At the Top of His Game
Kemerer discovered early on that the nearly 5,000-square-foot structure was built in what is known as French high house style with Tudor and German influences, a blending that was common as "people had come back from serving in Europe during World War I. They had seen these styles, they had remembered them and they began to create them here."
Kress had been in business in Los Angeles for about 15 years when he began to build the home. He had been living Downtown in the exclusive Jonathan Club, a clear indication of financial success, before he and Wanda were married in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1930. He and his wife moved into a house he rented near the Benedict Canyon site, from which he supervised the work.
Kress was - borrowing today's vernacular - at the top of his game at that time. His office was at 728 Sunset Blvd., at Grand Avenue, and his letterhead featured an illustration of eight trucks across the top of the page, with the telephone number MAin 7121.
House moving - today generally not financially feasible - was an important profession in Kress' time. The city's streets had been laid out in the 19th century, and buildings went up alongside them. As cars and trucks replaced horses and buggies early in the 20th century, city planners began to order the widening of streets.
Many buildings were demolished to accommodate the wider thoroughfares, and replaced by new ones. But others were worth moving, and that kept Kress busy.
"Wilshire Boulevard, for example, had been a residential street," Kemerer says, "but it was becoming commercial. Owners of houses were paid enough to buy a new lot and move their house onto it."
Kress moved several structures to Hancock Park; others to an area called Fremont Place, near Wilshire Boulevard and Rossmore Avenue; and still others to nearby Windsor Square. Many were kept on their original site, but moved back from the newly widened street.
While there is no way to determine exactly how many jobs Kress undertook, it is known from a 1925 newspaper story Kress kept in a scrapbook that he moved about 250 structures in 1924. His firm received more than $1 million for the work.
Kemerer learned by examining public records that Kress had lost the house in 1940. As the Depression deepened, people who owed him money became slow to repay it. He had taken out a loan of $20,000 against the house in 1939, but was unable to make a single payment before a bank foreclosed on him.
Other factors also cut into the house-moving business, Kemerer believes. People hit by the Depression weren't likely to undertake expensive projects. Unionization made labor more expensive, more overhead power lines were making it difficult to move buildings along streets, new city laws added a layer of bureaucracy, and there were fewer vacant lots on which to put the buildings.
Searching for the Family
Kemerer was not immediately able to trace the Kress family. But in 1996, he discovered that George Kress had died in San Bernardino County. He widened his search and discovered Wanda Kress' death in Orange County.
"I discovered that the person listed for notification was a Dianne K. Franklin of Costa Mesa," Kemerer said. When an additional search uncovered a Kress-Franklin marriage certificate, he felt reasonably sure he had found a link to the Kress family, but he didn't know if she was a daughter, sister or some other family member. He soon learned that Dianne Kress had been born in 1935, the only child of George and Wanda.
He found her through directory assistance but was reluctant to call her. Instead, he wrote her a letter, including some photos he had taken of her childhood home.
Within a couple of days, Kemerer said, his telephone rang. "She said, 'Rodney?' I said, 'Dianne?'" he recalled.
Soon, she and her husband, Orange County Judge Selim "Bud" Franklin, arrived at the house she had last seen more than a half-century earlier.
On a subsequent visit, she brought Kemerer the scrapbook her father had kept. It was filled with newspaper clippings about Kress, along with photographs, letters from customers and even original receipts for furnishings purchased by Wanda from Barker Brothers, an upscale department store of the era, while the house was being built.
Eventually, she gave him much of the house's original furniture, which her parents had kept after losing their home.
Kress often wrote notes on photos of his projects. Of the Hotel Norwood, he indicated it had received a "surgical operation on account of widening Flower Street."
Another note ridiculed a competitor. A news photo showed a house, in the process of being moved, which had slipped from its supports and was lying like a piece of pizza, hanging over the edge of its plate. Beneath the clipping, Kress had written, "Why not employ a good house mover?"
During his busy years, Kress moved several structures that were owned by pioneer Southern California families, including the house of San Fernando Valley businessman Isaac N. Van Nuys and another that belonged to an owner of the Bullock's department store chain.
The widening of Spring, Olive and Flower streets brought Kress some of his biggest jobs, including the 1935 moving of the 13-story Commercial Exchange Building at Eighth Street and Olive.
The building was threatened with demolition but Kress saved it by cutting a five-foot section from its middle and sliding the west half of the building - facing Olive - back toward the eastern half. The half he moved weighed 5,000 tons, and his work drew worldwide media attention. Kress' company logo at the time carried the slogan, "If we had room to work, we could move the world."
Kress moved a North Hollywood High School building that is still used today. He moved seven stages from Hollywood to Culver City for MGM. He moved the four-story brick headquarters of the Women's Christian Temperance Union to the northwest corner of Temple Street at Broadway. He moved the landmark Earl C. Anthony Packard dealership at Olympic Boulevard and Hope Street when that intersection was widened.
Along the way, he invented his own equipment for jacking up buildings, moving them onto tracks and rollers or onto truck beds.
"He was energized by the challenge of these jobs," Kemerer said. "He was very much the embodiment of that period of American history when people built bridges and dams and were up to any challenge."
Message to Pisa
Occupying a key spot on a wall in the Benedict Canyon home today is a painting of the house by German artist Andreas Roth. The Kresses commissioned it in 1932, a year after the house was built. Kemerer also acquired the painting from Dianne Kress Franklin, as well as the 11 original blueprints Kress used when constructing the house.
Bud Franklin didn't know the blueprints still existed until after he and his wife established contact with Kemerer and Doran. "I was in a storeroom George had used," Franklin said, "and the floor had a layer of dirt and a few spiders. I thought, 'There's nothing here,' but then figured I had gone that far. I brushed away a few spiders and there were these blueprints."
The foreclosure and sale of the home prompted new chapters for both the house and the Kress family. During the early 1940s, Kress worked in Wilmington, launching ships for the war effort. Dianne married Franklin in 1955 and moved to Orange County. George and Wanda Kress moved to North Hollywood for a time and later to Orange County, near their daughter's home in Costa Mesa.
George Kress later bought and sold real estate in Laguna Beach. If he had bad memories of losing the house, he didn't share them. "I never heard him talk about the house," Franklin says. "He was colorful, great with the [four] grandchildren. He was always thinking."
In 1960, Kress wrote to the mayor of Pisa, Italy, offering to straighten that city's famed leaning tower. It is not known if he received a
reply.
At 89, not long after Wanda's death, Kress asked his daughter and her husband to take him to a cabin he had built in Newberry Springs, a desert village near Barstow. He died in the cabin later that day.
The house was purchased out of foreclosure in 1940 by George Stoll, who had been assistant conductor a year earlier on The Wizard of Oz. Stoll went on to be the conductor or musical director of dozens of films, including Love Me or Leave Me, Girl Crazy, Meet Me in St. Louis and Anchors Aweigh, a 1945 Frank Sinatra-Gene Kelly movie for which Stoll won an Oscar.
Stoll and his wife Dallas occupied the house until 1965. They sold it to a developer who sold it a year later to actress Anna Maria Alberghetti. She and her husband had two daughters, but after the girls were raised and following a divorce, she sold it to Kemerer and Doran in 1992.
Kemerer decided to seek official historical status for the house, a step he said would make it more difficult for a future owner to demolish or even radically change it. Today, the house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the California Register of Historical Resources and as a Historical and Cultural Monument of the City of Los Angeles.
Kemerer learned on Oct. 3, 1998 that his application for landmark status had been granted. That was a Saturday. Two days later, he received a call from Bud Franklin, telling him Dianne had died of cancer. Kemerer had not known she was ill. She had never mentioned it.
In the 13 years since Kemerer and his wife bought the Kress house, they also have purchased some surrounding property, so that it now sits on 7.5 acres. It is another way of keeping the home as it was when Kress built it three-quarters of a century ago.
"It's still his house," Kemerer said. "I believe there is another force in nature. I felt like I was being guided. It's as though there was some unfinished business that I was finishing up for him.
"It's never quite over."
page 1, 4/18/2005
© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to redistribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
No newspaper stories reported his passing; the only record was a county-issued death certificate.
Kress may not be widely remembered today, but he played an important part in early 20th century Los Angeles. As a self-taught engineer from Pittsburgh, Penn., he had come to California and literally reshaped the city.
Kress moved buildings. Small buildings. Large buildings. Any buildings. He even once offered to straighten the leaning tower of Pisa.
From the time he purchased the D.R. Tripp House Moving Co. in Downtown Los Angeles in 1913 until the Great Depression shut him down in 1940, Kress and his company moved thousands of houses and commercial buildings. Even though he kept meticulous notes about his jobs (and virtually everything else), there is no way to estimate how many buildings he moved.
Rodney Kemerer, who never met Kress, knows the most minute details about the man. For the past 13 years, Kemerer has done all he can to see that Kress is remembered as the visionary he clearly was. This is because Kemerer lives in the only house that Kress ever built.
In 1931, Kress took time from his schedule of moving homes, schools and commercial buildings to build a house for himself and his bride of one year, the former Wanda Taylor Cooper. He put it near the top of Benedict Canyon, astride the Los Angeles-Beverly Hills city line in an area where most roads were still unpaved.
"It was way out in the middle of nowhere," says Kemerer. "There were only two other houses around, and most of the roads were really just trails."
Kemerer and his wife, film producer Lindsay Doran, purchased the five-bedroom, five-bathroom home in 1992. Back then, Kemerer didn't know who Kress was, but he knew that very few changes had been made to the house. "That told me it worked as a building and people held onto it," he said.
Kemerer learned that Kress was the middle son of three of Germanic parents from Pittsburgh. "I am also the middle son of three, my parents were of German descent, and I'm from Pittsburgh," Kemerer said. "That made me really want to know who had done this, and why. I had no idea of the journey I was about to begin."
Kemerer discovered early on that the nearly 5,000-square-foot structure was built in what is known as French high house style with Tudor and German influences, a blending that was common as "people had come back from serving in Europe during World War I. They had seen these styles, they had remembered them and they began to create them here."
Kress had been in business in Los Angeles for about 15 years when he began to build the home. He had been living Downtown in the exclusive Jonathan Club, a clear indication of financial success, before he and Wanda were married in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1930. He and his wife moved into a house he rented near the Benedict Canyon site, from which he supervised the work.
Kress was - borrowing today's vernacular - at the top of his game at that time. His office was at 728 Sunset Blvd., at Grand Avenue, and his letterhead featured an illustration of eight trucks across the top of the page, with the telephone number MAin 7121.
House moving - today generally not financially feasible - was an important profession in Kress' time. The city's streets had been laid out in the 19th century, and buildings went up alongside them. As cars and trucks replaced horses and buggies early in the 20th century, city planners began to order the widening of streets.
Many buildings were demolished to accommodate the wider thoroughfares, and replaced by new ones. But others were worth moving, and that kept Kress busy.
"Wilshire Boulevard, for example, had been a residential street," Kemerer says, "but it was becoming commercial. Owners of houses were paid enough to buy a new lot and move their house onto it."
Kress moved several structures to Hancock Park; others to an area called Fremont Place, near Wilshire Boulevard and Rossmore Avenue; and still others to nearby Windsor Square. Many were kept on their original site, but moved back from the newly widened street.
While there is no way to determine exactly how many jobs Kress undertook, it is known from a 1925 newspaper story Kress kept in a scrapbook that he moved about 250 structures in 1924. His firm received more than $1 million for the work.
Kemerer learned by examining public records that Kress had lost the house in 1940. As the Depression deepened, people who owed him money became slow to repay it. He had taken out a loan of $20,000 against the house in 1939, but was unable to make a single payment before a bank foreclosed on him.
Other factors also cut into the house-moving business, Kemerer believes. People hit by the Depression weren't likely to undertake expensive projects. Unionization made labor more expensive, more overhead power lines were making it difficult to move buildings along streets, new city laws added a layer of bureaucracy, and there were fewer vacant lots on which to put the buildings.
Kemerer was not immediately able to trace the Kress family. But in 1996, he discovered that George Kress had died in San Bernardino County. He widened his search and discovered Wanda Kress' death in Orange County.
"I discovered that the person listed for notification was a Dianne K. Franklin of Costa Mesa," Kemerer said. When an additional search uncovered a Kress-Franklin marriage certificate, he felt reasonably sure he had found a link to the Kress family, but he didn't know if she was a daughter, sister or some other family member. He soon learned that Dianne Kress had been born in 1935, the only child of George and Wanda.
He found her through directory assistance but was reluctant to call her. Instead, he wrote her a letter, including some photos he had taken of her childhood home.
Within a couple of days, Kemerer said, his telephone rang. "She said, 'Rodney?' I said, 'Dianne?'" he recalled.
Soon, she and her husband, Orange County Judge Selim "Bud" Franklin, arrived at the house she had last seen more than a half-century earlier.
On a subsequent visit, she brought Kemerer the scrapbook her father had kept. It was filled with newspaper clippings about Kress, along with photographs, letters from customers and even original receipts for furnishings purchased by Wanda from Barker Brothers, an upscale department store of the era, while the house was being built.
Eventually, she gave him much of the house's original furniture, which her parents had kept after losing their home.
Kress often wrote notes on photos of his projects. Of the Hotel Norwood, he indicated it had received a "surgical operation on account of widening Flower Street."
Another note ridiculed a competitor. A news photo showed a house, in the process of being moved, which had slipped from its supports and was lying like a piece of pizza, hanging over the edge of its plate. Beneath the clipping, Kress had written, "Why not employ a good house mover?"
During his busy years, Kress moved several structures that were owned by pioneer Southern California families, including the house of San Fernando Valley businessman Isaac N. Van Nuys and another that belonged to an owner of the Bullock's department store chain.
The widening of Spring, Olive and Flower streets brought Kress some of his biggest jobs, including the 1935 moving of the 13-story Commercial Exchange Building at Eighth Street and Olive.
The building was threatened with demolition but Kress saved it by cutting a five-foot section from its middle and sliding the west half of the building - facing Olive - back toward the eastern half. The half he moved weighed 5,000 tons, and his work drew worldwide media attention. Kress' company logo at the time carried the slogan, "If we had room to work, we could move the world."
Kress moved a North Hollywood High School building that is still used today. He moved seven stages from Hollywood to Culver City for MGM. He moved the four-story brick headquarters of the Women's Christian Temperance Union to the northwest corner of Temple Street at Broadway. He moved the landmark Earl C. Anthony Packard dealership at Olympic Boulevard and Hope Street when that intersection was widened.
Along the way, he invented his own equipment for jacking up buildings, moving them onto tracks and rollers or onto truck beds.
"He was energized by the challenge of these jobs," Kemerer said. "He was very much the embodiment of that period of American history when people built bridges and dams and were up to any challenge."
Occupying a key spot on a wall in the Benedict Canyon home today is a painting of the house by German artist Andreas Roth. The Kresses commissioned it in 1932, a year after the house was built. Kemerer also acquired the painting from Dianne Kress Franklin, as well as the 11 original blueprints Kress used when constructing the house.
Bud Franklin didn't know the blueprints still existed until after he and his wife established contact with Kemerer and Doran. "I was in a storeroom George had used," Franklin said, "and the floor had a layer of dirt and a few spiders. I thought, 'There's nothing here,' but then figured I had gone that far. I brushed away a few spiders and there were these blueprints."
The foreclosure and sale of the home prompted new chapters for both the house and the Kress family. During the early 1940s, Kress worked in Wilmington, launching ships for the war effort. Dianne married Franklin in 1955 and moved to Orange County. George and Wanda Kress moved to North Hollywood for a time and later to Orange County, near their daughter's home in Costa Mesa.
George Kress later bought and sold real estate in Laguna Beach. If he had bad memories of losing the house, he didn't share them. "I never heard him talk about the house," Franklin says. "He was colorful, great with the [four] grandchildren. He was always thinking."
In 1960, Kress wrote to the mayor of Pisa, Italy, offering to straighten that city's famed leaning tower. It is not known if he received a
reply.
At 89, not long after Wanda's death, Kress asked his daughter and her husband to take him to a cabin he had built in Newberry Springs, a desert village near Barstow. He died in the cabin later that day.
The house was purchased out of foreclosure in 1940 by George Stoll, who had been assistant conductor a year earlier on The Wizard of Oz. Stoll went on to be the conductor or musical director of dozens of films, including Love Me or Leave Me, Girl Crazy, Meet Me in St. Louis and Anchors Aweigh, a 1945 Frank Sinatra-Gene Kelly movie for which Stoll won an Oscar.
Stoll and his wife Dallas occupied the house until 1965. They sold it to a developer who sold it a year later to actress Anna Maria Alberghetti. She and her husband had two daughters, but after the girls were raised and following a divorce, she sold it to Kemerer and Doran in 1992.
Kemerer decided to seek official historical status for the house, a step he said would make it more difficult for a future owner to demolish or even radically change it. Today, the house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the California Register of Historical Resources and as a Historical and Cultural Monument of the City of Los Angeles.
Kemerer learned on Oct. 3, 1998 that his application for landmark status had been granted. That was a Saturday. Two days later, he received a call from Bud Franklin, telling him Dianne had died of cancer. Kemerer had not known she was ill. She had never mentioned it.
In the 13 years since Kemerer and his wife bought the Kress house, they also have purchased some surrounding property, so that it now sits on 7.5 acres. It is another way of keeping the home as it was when Kress built it three-quarters of a century ago.
"It's still his house," Kemerer said. "I believe there is another force in nature. I felt like I was being guided. It's as though there was some unfinished business that I was finishing up for him.
"It's never quite over."
page 1, 4/18/2005
© Los Angeles Downtown News. Reprinting items retrieved from the archives are for personal use only. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission of the Los Angeles Downtown News. If you would like to redistribute anything from the Los Angeles Downtown News Archives, please call our permissions department at (213) 481-1448.
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