neighborhoods

• saving historic Seattle bungalow a “no-brainer”

  reader Keith Harrison forwards this article about a fellow preserving some of his own neighborhood’s character by saving an historic 1917 Craftsman home that was slated for demolition. Nicole Tsong has the full story at the Seattle Times; here’s a short excerpt:

  Frank-Michael Rebhan was not looking for a new house when he walked his dog past 6317 Phinney Ave. N. in late January.

  He already owned a small house a few blocks away. But this
  sandy-gray beauty was a 1917 Craftsman-style home with leaded
  stained-glass windows, dark wood built-ins and box-beam ceilings. And a
  notice said it was slated for demolition.

  Rebhan had an outlandish idea: What if he saved the home by moving it to his own lot?

  Rebhan hadn’t even been inside yet, but the 37-year-old quickly did some intense calculations. He added up costs for moving the house, demolition of his own home, excavation and the other issues involved in moving a house.

  He figured out how much it would add to his current mortgage and realized: "It’s a no-brainer."

• Brea’s Bungalows

  Richard Dodd’s May 19 article in the Orange County Register on Brea, California’s Union Oil Co. neighborhood is a good one:

  The 1882 discovery of oil in shallow wells in Brea Canyon had a major influence in the history and economy of Orange County. Several small oil companies sprang up shortly afterward and in 1890, some of them merged to form Union Oil Co. of California.

  Many local communities faced a housing shortage for new workmen during the oil and land boom in the 1920s. Union Oil built 61 homes for their employees in the southwestern part of Brea. This area became known as the "Union Oil neighborhood."

  The bungalow period was in full swing at the time. As a result, most of the homes are California, Craftsman and Pueblo bungalows and other variations interspersed with a few
  provincial revivals.

  read the whole thing

• Minneapolis neighborhoods profiled in new book

  A recent article by Ellen Tomson in Minneapolis’ Pioneer Press describes local historian and author Larry Millett’s research and subsequent book on Minneapolis’ historic neighborhoods. excerpt:

  Larry
  Millett biked the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis for three summers
  to produce his latest book, (the) AIA Guide to the Twin Cities, the first
  major neighborhood-by-neighborhood handbook of its kind.

  But the foundation of his 665-page book was decades of
  research and writing about the Twin Cities, first as a Pioneer Press
  reporter, columnist and critic, and then as author of Lost Twin Cities, Twin Cities Then and Now, and Strange Days, Dangerous Nights, all which focused on local structures and events.

  "The book is the result of three years of work and, in a sense,
  it’s the work of a lifetime since I’ve worked here all my life," says
  Millett, 59, who grew up in North Minneapolis and has spent much of his
  adult life in St. Paul.

• how to live within history – not on top of it

  This is one of the most delightful things I’ve read in a newspaper since long before the current war began, and it’s almost enough to distract me for a few minutes from Kurt Vonnegut’s death, the rising toll of wounded and killed overseas and the idiocracy we seem to have saddled ourselves with in Washington.

  For today’s Los Angeles Times, William Deverell, a history professor at USC, has written a quiet and beautifully moving paean to his home, his neighborhood and how he has learned to "live amid history:"

  Houses and neighborhoods seduce us. They always have. What
  starts with limitations — cost and location — often blossoms into
  habits of living and cherished memories. Our love affair began in
  Pasadena eight years ago.

  It was the fall of 1999. We knew we
  wanted to be close to Caltech, where I was teaching at the time, and
  near the Huntington Library, where my wife, Jenny, works. So we drew an
  imaginary rectangle on a map of Pasadena, hoping that somewhere inside
  this space we would find our perfect home and our perfect neighborhood.

  When we first saw it, the house hid behind 20 years of benign neglect.
  It was a Mission Revival with old wooden awnings sagging atop wrought
  iron braces. In the yard, worn-out grass fought a losing battle with
  brown spots and weeds. Here and there, a few succulents hung on.

  Built
  in 1923, the house was tired. The bathrooms needed work — a lot of
  work. Every window had heavy iron bars on it. An apartment attached to
  the garage was decrepit, and a freestanding building out back, with an
  incinerator plunked down in a corner, was a mess.

  The owner
  had been in the leather business in downtown Los Angeles. He had
  retired years earlier and brought his inventory home with him. Bolts of
  leather stood stacked in rooms and corners of the house: raw leather,
  finished leather and leather in some stage in-between. A couple of
  rooms were off-limits because we couldn’t open the doors; leather was
  in the way.

  Our real estate agent apologized to us on the sidewalk as we left.

  "I really like it," Jenny whispered to me.

• old homes make way for strip malls in Lubbock TX (and everywhere)

  Lubbock’s North Overton neighborhood – once sparsely populated with sprawling ranch-era Craftsman bungalows – is slowly being reseeded with strip malls, tract developments and other signs of the coming apocalypse. One such home is being picked up and moved to make way for that harbinger of class, culture and the real building block of a modern neighborhood, the strip mall.

  "This
  was called a craftsman-bungalow house, it was built in 1911. It’s one
  of the oldest houses in Lubbock, it’s also one of the most historic
  because of the people lived here the first 75 years," said former
  resident, Frank Potts.

  In 1924 A.B. Davis moved to Lubbock.
  Soon after moving into the home. A.B. served as the manager of the
  Chamber of Commerce and later as Lubbock’s City Manager. His family
  called 1724 Main their home for 60 years.

  Frank Potts is A.B.’s grandson, he
  said, "lots of memories here, there really are. As a child it was a big
  world out there, World War II was going on when I first moved here and
  I just remember everything just seemed, the house seemed like a huge
  mansion and I was just a little bitty guy and wondering what happens
  next."

  The original plans for the home show a 4,500 square
  foot house with wide overhanging eaves, deep porches with large square
  brick posts and beautiful wood paneling, all adding to the charm of
  this old home. With the vision and financial help of Lubbock attorney
  Ted Hogan, this old house will be able to stand for another hundred
  years. He said, "a lot of heavy lifting (will go into moving the
  house)! and quite frankly the fellas that the credit goes to are the
  movers because they’re the guys that have the technical knowledge."

  With
  the development in the North Overton area, this old houses days were
  numbered as a strip mall is slated to go here. But in 5 weeks, 1724
  Main will get a new address on the corner of 16th and Avenue R after
  it’s moved, piece by piece, down Avenue R.

  Hogan said, "we
  have about 5 weeks to get it done, we have a May 1st deadline. There’s
  new development coming in here. If the weather permits and if it
  doesn’t rain, we should be good to go at the end of April." Giving this
  old Lubbock home a new lease on life.

  It should be noted that Lubbock’s Overton Park project is currently the largest private residential development in the state. Questions regarding the number of homes destroyed or moved directed to the McDougal Company, the firm tasked with making rubble of old homes in the way and clearing it, were not answered

• Long Beach realtor shows off her community

  Laurie Manny, a Long Beach realtor specializing in older homes and historic neighborhoods, has a nice rundown of those neighborhoods / historic districts on her Long Beach Real Estate blog. The directory includes neighborhood boundaries, a survey of historic home styles in the area, general neighborhood description, maps and plenty of photographs. There’s also a sort of reverse-directory by house style – for example, if you are looking for a tudor revival home, it’ll be in Belmont or California Heights or Bluff Park, but if you want a Streamline Moderne home, it’d be in Bluff or Drake Parks or Wilmore City.

  It’s nice to see a realtor with a genuine interest in community history!

• what makes a neighborhood – new building or older, well-kept homes?

  A good column from John Canalis in the Long Beach Press-Telegram. He explores two very different points of view on the increased property values in Long Beach’s Belmont Heights neighborhood – one, that new development (McMansions, mostly) drive prices up, and the other, that the better-constructed and much more humble Craftsman and Mission Revival bungalows built there in the 1920s sustain prices and make the neighborhood what it is. As Belmont Heights explores ways to keep its character and at the same time allow folks independence in what is built and how, they come up against many of the same challenges that other historic review boards and permitting bodies have faced over the years.

  "Gorgeous" is the word Curtis Watkins chooses to describe his neighborhood’s newer homes.
     

  "I consider what is happening in Belmont Heights progress," he says. "The property values are just skyrocketing."
     

  But
  Elizabeth Lambe prefers the Craftsman-era houses of the 1920s and
  1930s. She believes it is the older homes, not the newer ones, that
  sustain prices.

  "I grew up in Orange County and moved to Belmont Heights
  because I really loved the look of the neighborhood and the lovely
  historic homes," she says. "And I think it’s important that we preserve
  that because it’s part of our history."

  Just as it transformed Belmont Shore, the Peninsula and
  Naples, "mansionization" – a growth of houses 3,000 square feet and up
  – is changing the Heights, where homes a third to half of that size
  were once the norm on many streets.

  ZIP Code 90803, which includes the Heights, is the most
  expensive in Long Beach, with a median home price of $850,000 and
  plenty of properties in the $1 million to $2 million range.

  Well-heeled owners, buyers and speculators often want – and
  can afford – more room for children, home offices and entertaining than
  a two-bedroom cottage can offer.

  Critics say the
  new homes, sometimes constructed in Mediterranean, Tuscan and
  contemporary "box" styles, clash with the lines of original Craftsman,
  Spanish, Storybook, Tudor and Victorian homes. They complain that the
  manses dwarf their homes, shade once-sunny gardens and give the nosy a
  perch to peer into backyards.

• Pasture Park, Bush OR

  Sara Wiseman has a short article in the Salem, OR Statesman Journal on Bush’s Pasture Park neighborhood, a pleasant area that is packed with beautiful ’20s highwater bungalows.

  When Jenni Green plugged in the hair dryer in the bathroom of her bungalow, the refrigerator used to blow a circuit.

  The old-fashioned, single-pane windows add substantially to the charm of her 1920s home — and to her heating bills.

  And the small, detached garage at the back of the house definitely won’t fit his-and-her Hummers.

  Green, a writer who lives with pianist Randy Byrnes in Salem’s Bush’s Pasture Park neighborhood, wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Even
  as scads of new homes rise in every direction around Salem, Green
  believes there’s just something about older homes that can’t be
  duplicated.

• bungalow tear-downs in Seattle

  Reader Keith Harrison gives us the heads-up on a disturbing trend in Seattle – tearing-down of sturdy old bungalows to make room for new custom (and in some cases tract) homes. Read Aubrey Cohen’s full article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

  Michael and Kimberly Kocher wanted something bigger and newer than the
  decades-old bungalows and Craftsman houses that dominate Seattle
  neighborhoods, but they didn’t want the suburbs.

  Fortunately for them, more and more builders are providing just the
  thing — tearing down small, old houses to build modern, large ones as
  home buyers in Seattle and nationwide move back to the city, bringing
  with them suburban expectations of size and amenities.

  Al Ostman, who owns Columbia Rim Building Co., is one of many builders catering to the renewed interest in city living.

  "It’s the commute," he said "If you’re not working at Microsoft, why would you want to live in Issaquah?"

  Just in Seattle’s single-family zones, 492 houses were demolished to
  make way for a new house or some other use between 2003 and 2005.
  Citywide, teardowns have picked up since 1998, averaging about 500
  homes demolished a year — a 57 percent increase from the average in
  the preceding eight years.

  Some Seattle neighborhoods, such as Capitol Hill and Queen Anne, are
  well-stocked with old houses that provide the space modern families
  want, but teardowns are more common in northern neighborhoods such as
  Ballard, View Ridge and Greenwood, which are growing in popularity and
  where older houses tend to be smaller.

• “the bungalow is back” in Chico – it left?

  Steve Brown has a nice article on the resurgence in popularity (as evidenced by house prices) of the classic Craftsman Bungalow in Chico CA, in their daily paper, the Chico Enterprise-Record.

  The bungalow is back. Homes built in this style in
  California in the 1910s and 1920s are becoming as desirable to early
  21st century homeowners as Victorian styles were to homeowners a
  generation ago.

  The avenues neighborhood — and most of early 20th century Chico —
  is full of examples of craftsman bungalows. Kasey Merrill, president of
  the Chico Avenues Neighborhood Association, said they are "the essence
  of what gives Chico its character."

  Three architecture aficionados talked about the value of
  bungalows and other older buildings Wednesday at a presentation
  sponsored by the association. Merrill said one of the goals of the
  association is to educate the public about subjects that relate to the
  quality of life in the neighborhood.

  Lee Laney, who has had longtime interest in the arts and crafts
  movement that inspired the building of craftsman bungalows, general
  contractor Craig Almaguer and architect Paul Lieberum were the
  speakers.

  Laney said craftsman bungalows are part of a movement with
  "strong philosophical and perhaps spiritual roots." The movement
  affected furniture, pottery, metal work and textiles as well as housing
  design. It stressed simplicity, harmony with nature and a hand-crafted
  look.