As Sleeping Beauty Was in the Fairy Tale, Alhambra Castle Is Being Awakened by Love

Once upon a time a farmer, family man and dreamer built a huge castle on a hilltop where it would overlook all of Alhambra and his farmlands to the south and west.

Sylvester Dupuy styled his home after a castle in the Pyrenees Mountains of his native France, building about 25 rooms, four turrets, observation porches, wine cellars and four six-foot-high fireplaces in a massive concrete structure. He installed Belgian marble in the entry and Holland tile on the roof, and he imported wall sconces and chandeliers.

The castle was home to four Dupuy children before the family sold it in the 1940s. It changed hands several times and slid into decades of abuse and neglect.

Towers Over Alhambra

Today, the castle still towers over Alhambra, its hill now ringed by a moat of busy streets, auto repair shops, pizza parlors and fast-food stores. Where once there were farmlands, there now are Monterey Park and the El Sereno area of Los Angeles.

The castle’s reddish turrets are barely visible through dense trees and shrubs that surround it. Locked iron gates at the entrance to 1700 Grand View Drive keep out visitors and vandals.

Only one of the Dupuy children is still living--Henry, 81, who operates a tire business about a mile from his old home.

“Oh, it was a nice enough place to live, but it was just too big,” he said.

Dupuy remembers helping his father build the castle in the early 1920s, and said he lived there “maybe 15, 20 years.” The family had no servants, he said, and “the place was just too much work.”

Incongruous as a castle in Alhambra is, it nevertheless has mirrored life around it.

It was partitioned into eight apartments during the post-World War II growth boom in Southern California.

Abused by Vandals

A woman later bought it as a home for her and her 25 dogs but never moved in. When she offered it for sale five years after buying it, the castle had been badly abused, inside and out, by vandals.

By the time the castle was put up for sale again last year, fixtures and chandeliers were long gone and the roof was damaged. When a Buddhist group put up the money to use it as a temple, hundreds of neighbors persuaded the city to deny a zoning variance on the grounds that the castle is in a single-family residential area.

But now, a new chapter is being written in the fairy tale of the castle’s life. It has been bought by a Hong Kong businessman who is refurbishing it and plans to eventually retire there.

Orin Berge, a real estate broker and friend of the Dupuy family who claims to be an expert on the castle, handled the sale after advertising nationally.

“You wouldn’t believe the calls and letters I got,” said Berge, showing a heap of written inquiries, many of them offering “inside information” about secret passages and ghosts.

“I must have shown it to 900 people who said they were prospective buyers,” Berge said. “A couple of guys from Hollywood studios wanted it for films. There were lots of doctors who wanted it for a special-care home, and a lot of religious groups. There were developers who wanted to tear it down and put in condos.”

The buyer, for $585,000 cash, is Cris C. Y. Yip, an American citizen and businessman headquartered in Hong Kong.

Yip’s niece, business agent and local spokesman, Eva Hu of San Gabriel, said that after seeing the castle, she described it in a phone call to her uncle in Hong Kong, “and he said ‘I want it.’ ” Yip saw his new home once for about an hour, Hu said, and declared, “I love it.” He immediately ordered $500,000 worth of refurbishing and landscaping that will be in keeping with the structure’s European style.

Broken roof tiles have been replaced with those from the garage, which will get its own new roof, Hu said. A wall that partitioned the grand ballroom during the castle’s apartment era will be removed and all the apartment kitchens will be cleared out. A new modern kitchen is being installed along with new plumbing, electrical, heating and air conditioning systems.

Hu estimates that the house will be finished by the end of September.

Then Alhambra will occasionally be home to a man who has grand houses all over the world, his niece says, and bought this “because it’s one of a kind.”

“Well,” Berge said, “I understand there’s another one in the Pyrenees.”