Speaking Out : Fighting for the Survival of an Old House

The house I live in was built in 1906 in the middle of citrus orchards that have since become Hollywood. Owned by one of the city’s first developers, Nelson A. Dunning, the two-story house was never a stately home. It is, instead, a ranch house--rangy and “craggy-tough,” like Gary Cooper’s face.

But details typical of its Victorian/Craftsman architecture give the Dunning house a rare elegance today: The hardwood floors are quarter-sawn to emphasize the oak grain. The large windows, with louvered moldings or edged with leaded panels, give light to rooms with beamed ceilings, heavy portico columns and fireplaces that form into a single chimney.

Today the house is a quaint curiosity, a relic surrounded by apartment buildings. In the evenings, neighborhood children sneak up the driveway to stare wide-eyed at the old rancho--they think the Dunning house is haunted. Perhaps, but by the present, not the past.

I have a photograph from Bruce Torrence’s book “Hollywood, the First 100 Years.” Taken in 1906, it shows the familiar foothills of Griffith Park and the white barracks of Immaculate Heart College, before the trees had grown up around them.

In the foreground, near the dusty intersection of Western Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard--then Prospect Avenue--the frame of a house under construction can be seen rising out of a thicket of lemon groves.

Registered as Historic

The orientation, the roof lines--is it this house? After so much time and change, it is hard to tell.

Certainly, this house is steeped in history, but is it historic ? I am not a historian, and do not know. But the landlord--an architect and ardent preservationist--assured me that it is. The Dunning house, he said, was registered as historic and therefore protected from change.

One weekend, as he often did, the landlord dropped by to pick up some tools. He also took a few pieces of furniture from the basement; his wife dug up some rose bushes and loaded them into the van. Two days before the end of the month, I got a call: “Hold your rent check,” the landlord said. “I got an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’ve sold the house.”

The new owner was a Century City corporation with a four-word name. The Dunning house had been sold to a developer.

I discovered more bad news. A demolition permit already had been issued; a four-story apartment building was scheduled for construction on the site. Though the landlord had registered his own home as historic, the paper work on the Dunning house had not been filed. He’d been right about one thing, though: the old house had turned an astounding profit.

Neighborhood Upheaval

About the same time an event of some significance occurred: A stray dog gave birth under my porch. I gave the pups away, kept the mother. She was a street dog, sharp and savvy--not much bigger than an alley cat, but fiercely protective of her new property. Together we started exploring, first around the block, then farther afield. On walkabouts with the dog I began to see for the first time the neighborhood around me.

The upheaval was extraordinary. Whole blocks of houses were boarded up, waiting for demolition. Site after site had been bulldozed, the vacant lots blooming with billboards, full-color renderings of apartment buildings to come. The old neighborhood was disappearing, had already disappeared.

It was part of a larger pattern. Located on the eastern end of the Hollywood Redevelopment Project Area--barely a block from a proposed stop for the Metro Rail subway--the Dunning house was a tiny postage stamp on an 1,100-acre parcel of land destined for change. One plan called for construction of 2.6 million square feet of office space, 1,600 new hotel rooms, 4,500 parking spaces.

It was a reaction to Hollywood’s Big Blight. Over the years, the town had slipped, drifted into abstraction, then tawdry aberration. Now the beggars of glamour--runaways and tinseled streetwalkers--huddled among the tenements. But redevelopment was like a steamroller under throttle: it made no distinction between a sagging bungalow and an 82-year-old ranch house. Would there be room in the “new” Hollywood for a fragment of history left over from the time before Los Angeles was a movie town?

Received Research Report

Luckily, some procedural safeguards were in place. A survey had identified the Dunning house as a “Class 3” structure--potentially eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. A research report had therefore been required before the demolition permit had been issued. I made some calls and within a few days the report arrived in the mail.

I read the study once, twice, then a third time--but the logic was beyond me. Despite its age and uniqueness, the Dunning house apparently derived significance only from “context”--as a model for other homes in the area. When the planned demolition of these surrounding houses was complete, the report concluded, this historical significance would be “radically diminished.” Reports on two adjacent buildings used the same argument.

It was pure tautology--audacious, and for hire. I soon learned that the survey had been commissioned by the developer--it was standard procedure. Despite some official objections that its conclusions were “inadequate,” the report’s findings were approved, and a demolition permit was issued on the Dunning house.

Have you seen the demolition of an old house? In my neighborhood it happens almost every day. A truck arrives; a group of men tug at the roof with pickaxes and shovels. The ceiling joists are dismantled and carted off.

Soon an Empty Lot

A backhoe leans into the building, a wall falls away. A shower stall dangles on its string of twisted pipe. The context of any person’s life can fade away so easily. A few hours later, looking at the empty lot, you strain to remember what was there.

I looked up at the old Dunning house. I was on the pivot point: Just then I could have washed my hands of it all. But in my hands I held the historical report, while in my head I felt the tumblers of a lock turn over, and I was committed, for better or worse, to a struggle for the house.

I started making telephone calls, one number leading to five others, which led to 15 more. Little by little a ragtag coalition--from grandees in the hills to ‘60s activists living out of vans on the boulevard--formed around the Dunning house.

I started a letter-writing campaign; articles began appearing in local newspapers, the coalition grew. The network took time, patience and yards of stomach lining. I worked mornings and in the evening; afternoons I devoted to the house.

My affection for it grew with every passing day. I felt like the captain of a tough old ship in heavy seas. And slowly, the wind began to shift.

Demolition Halted

On the morning the bulldozers were due to arrive, the demolition permit was rescinded. Environmental-quality regulations had not been fulfilled, and a stop-work order was issued. For a long period the house was becalmed in stays, delays. Then, one day I found the dog barking at three engineers in hard hats poking around beneath the house. “We’re going to save the Dunning house by moving it across town,” they said.

The new lot was lush, under spreading trees, back from the boulevard. But the local neighborhood association could not agree on whether they wanted an old house or a park on the land. A second site was found, but the lot was too narrow.

Now, all the major players--developer, agency, city--wished to move the Dunning house, but the forces of redevelopment were working against expedient solutions: Almost every piece of open land in Hollywood was already in the hands of developers.

Why move the house at all, I wanted to know. The rationale for relocation was familiar: With the neighborhood houses bulldozed away, the “context” of the Dunning house, it was argued, had disappeared. Better to move the old ranch house to a place where single-family homes instead of apartments could keep it company.

‘Out of Context’

Sweet irony: After four months, the original report on the Dunning house had come full circle. Context, which had once condemned the Dunning house, was now to be its salvation. Context has another side as well:

The bulldozing of its surroundings has made the Dunning house perhaps more “out of context,” but more essential. For this neighborhood of empty lots and stucco apartment buildings, the old house is a relic, a quaint curiosity. But also a touchstone. If this house goes, the last vestige of the past will disappear with it--history, remembrance, pictures to share with a pensive child.

The past has a special tug on the imagination. Evenings, sitting up in the eaves of the Dunning house with the dog, I picture us in the crow’s-nest of some deep-draft ocean schooner--sturdy, steady, gliding over the city. Lights twinkle on the hills.

How they must have looked when orchards covered the valley. Who lived here then? Did they imagine us, years before we ever were?

The Dunning house is steeped in history, but is it “historic”? I am not a historian, and do not know.