Historic Buildings, Museums Escape Major Damage

With a few notable exceptions, historic buildings, libraries and museums in the Los Angeles Basin seem to have come through Thursday’s frightening quake with relatively minor damage, although some have been closed for structural inspections.

Officials from the California Historical Society, Los Angeles Conservancy and Pasadena Conservancy said they had no reports of serious damage to historic buildings in the areas hit by the quake. But some adobe buildings dating to the Spanish and Mexican era were shaken hard, according to Catholic church officials.

In San Gabriel, damage was extensive enough at the San Gabriel Mission to close the 182-year-old mission church and adjacent museum indefinitely, said Claretian Father Arnold Gonzalez, the pastor. The bell tower and baptistery ceiling are cracked, the floors were strewn with fallen crucifixes and candles, and a statue of Father Junipero Serra was damaged, Gonzalez said.

Closer to the quake epicenter, exhibits in the Dominques Rancho Adobe--an 1826 adobe housing a museum of early Spanish California--were knocked about and broken. “We got more damage than in the (1971) Sylmar earthquake,” said Father Pat McPolin, curator of the museum. The museum is to be closed for two weeks to assess damage, he said.

In Pasadena, the 80-year-old main building of the Huntington Sheraton, closed two years ago because engineers found it vulnerable to earthquake destruction, was still standing Thursday with no external signs of damage. However, examination revealed new horizontal and vertical cracks in the lobby, said general manager Denis McDowell. “We won’t know what it means until our structural engineers arrive,” he said.

Seven of the Los Angeles County Library system’s 91 branches sustained “major damage,” according to spokeswoman Sandra Reuben. Hardest hit were the branches in Montrose, Huntington Park and Montebello, near the quake epicenter. She said 26 of the branches have been closed for inspection.

The city-run Los Angeles Public Library’s main branch downtown, which has been closed for more than a year due to a fire, seemed to come through the quake without serious damage. But officials said six branch libraries built with unreinforced masonry walls have been closed pending inspection to determine the extent of structural damage. Most of these buildings date to the 1920s and are on historic registers, according to Robert Reagan, a library spokesman.

Other than getting a hard shake that knocked pictures from walls and spilled books and papers on the floor, other historic sites and museums appear to have come through the shake in relatively good shape.

At El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park on Alvarado Street near downtown, Archivist Teena Stern said: “We are in good shape. There are new cracks in the plaza. We had things come off our desks. Maps and pictures fell from the walls and the crown on the Madonna in Avila Adobe came off, but that’s all.”

Los Angeles’ oldest art institution, the Southwest Museum, seemed to have sustained the most damage of any local visual art institute. However, even that building, built in 1914, suffered only minimal damage, both structurally and to its collection of hundreds of thousands of Native American and Spanish colonial materials.

The museum will probably remain closed until Saturday, a spokeswoman said.

And at the Museum of Neon Art downtown, the “Vienna Bulls Choir,” a sculpture with bulls that dance to a Busby Berkeley tune, was “pretty badly destroyed” by the quake.

Ironically, the earthquake may have settled a dispute over preservation of one historic building, the 98-year-old administration building at the Romona Convent in Alhambra, a school for girls from the seventh through 12th grades.

The four-story convent building was heavily damaged, and bricks falling from the upper stories smashed three cars parked below, pushing one car 75 feet, according to Sister Annunciata Bussman, school principal. Bussman said the school will be closed while the damage is assessed.

Last year school officials sought to demolish the structure because it could be hazardous in an earthquake, but city officials objected, imposing a moratorium to block the demolition because of the building’s historic importance.