12 West Mount Ida Avenue

12 West Mt Ida today. The second front door was added around 1946, the bricktex siding probably in the 1950s and the cupola around 1980.

The company originally built four mid-size four-square houses, each two two-stories tall and full-width front porch, although the designs varied slightly. Most had sleeping porches at the rear either as original features or added later. This house was slightly larger than the one described immediately below, having a footprint of 28x28 feet. There were four bedrooms upstairs without closets as was the practice at the time, one on each corner, with the two on the western side being slightly larger. There was a hall widthwise, with the stairs on the western end and a bathroom on the eastern end.

Downstairs there were two front rooms, separated by a wide arch. The kitchen was in the southeast corner.

This is the only one of those houses still exant. Arthur Brown, a carpenter, and his wife Ella bought the house in 1914. By 1920 Arthur was 68 years old and Ella 62, and they shared the house with their children George, a 32-year-old painter; Ella, a 25-year-old railroad clerk; and Mary, 21 and unemployed. Ten years later, in 1924 they sold to house to J Thomas Cook who, in December 1925 turned around and sold it to Anne Bolling. Amazingly, no trace remains of Anne except that she apparently rented the house out to tenants and was identified as a widow when she sold it in December 1937 to Frances Randolph, who resold it a month later to Joseph and Drusilla Chauncey. They lived in the house with their two children from January 1938 through World War II. Joseph had taken over his father's Julian Chauncey Meat & Grocery, after the latter's death in 1918. In 1945 they moved up to Beverley Hills and rented out Mt Ida. In 1946 they converted it into two units, cutting a new, second, door into the front of the house for the second floor unit. In 1954 they sold it to Norman Mendelson, who continued it as a two-unit rental. It was converted back into a single-family house in 1973.

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12 West Mt Ida today. The second front door was added around 1946, the bricktex siding probably in the 1950s and the cupola around 2000.  Note the closed-in sleeping porch at the rear.