Architect Sumner P. Hunt

Sumner P. Hunt was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1865, and arrived in Los Angeles in 1889. Hunt had apprenticed since his teen years for architect Clarence Cutler of Troy, N.Y., remembered today for the Park Street Railroad Station in Medford, Massachusetts.

In Los Angeles, Hunt initially toiled for the firm of Eugene Caulkin and Sidney I. Haas, potentially contributing to Haas' Mission Revival designs for the California Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

But with Hunt's first independent commission, the famed Bradbury Building (1893), he embarked on a career of stunning innovation and achievement, contributing (sometimes in partnership with other distinguished architects including Theodore A. Eisen, A. Wesley Eager, and Silas Burns) to the design of iconic structures such as the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, the Automobile Club of Southern California, Casa de Rosas, the Southwest Museum, and El Alisal.

Along with Silas Burns, Hunt designed many early Los Angeles park buildings, including the city's oldest branch library in Vermont Square. The library, opened in 1913, was built in the Italian Renaissance style, with a grant from Andrew Carnegie.

Hunt lived for nearly twenty years in West Adams, for a time on Severance Street, in a house he designed. His residential designs are scattered throughout the area, from Alvarado Terrace to the Menlo Avenue Twenty-Ninth Street Historic District. An especially strong concentration can be found in the Kinney Heights tract, from whence the accompanying images come.