Landmark List Grows Quickly as Long Beach Hails Heritage

The Blackstone Hotel. The Sovereign and Crest apartment buildings. The Breakers Hotel. Suddenly this city is naming cultural and historic landmarks at an unprecedented clip, rapidly adding to an architectural treasure list that had stayed the same for years.

It took a decade for the city to name 28 landmarks, but only the past five months to name another eight buildings. Many others are being proposed.

“We’re going lickety-split, as they say,” said Ruthann Lehrer, who as the city’s new neighborhood and historic preservation officer is sheepherding examples of everything from Art Deco to Beaux Arts buildings onto the landmark list.

Not only are many more landmarks being named, but there is a wider variety. Last week, for instance, the Planning Commission recommended that Buffums Autoport, a Streamline Moderne, pastel-colored parking garage built in 1940, become a landmark.

Preservation buffs attribute the trend to several factors. Lehrer’s hiring last winter meant that for the first time the city has a staff member devoting all her energies to historic preservation in Long Beach. Lehrer and members of the volunteer Cultural Heritage Commission, which nominates landmarks for approval by the Planning Commission and the City Council, also have been able to draw on a wealth of historical research in a 1988 consultant’s report.

New Era of Preservation Cited

And it does not hurt that historic preservation gets a warmer reception at City Hall these days than it used to.

“We’re just in a new era,” said Lehrer, who pursues her duties with zeal. That new era was helped along, she said, by last year’s loss of the Pacific Coast Club and the Jergins Trust Building, which were leveled after wrenching community battles.

So far, she said, “nobody has slapped my hand” or complained that she is attempting too much, too fast.

Ultimately, however, preservationists have to face the reality that they may be able to delay demolition of a landmark for up to a year, but they can’t stop it. “We can’t guarantee the preservation of anything,” Lehrer said.

Preservationists hope to strengthen their hand with revisions to the 10-year-old cultural landmark ordinance and with new proposals. Lehrer said she would like to see incentives created that would make landmark status more attractive to building owners. For instance, parking or zoning requirements might be eased for a building that is a landmark.

A proposal barring demolition of a landmark until developers obtain building permits for its replacement on the site was shelved because of constitutional questions, Lehrer said. Instead, there is some talk of imposing new restrictions that would require owners of landmarks to prove they would suffer unreasonable economic hardship if they were not allowed to tear down their buildings.

In the meantime, the Cultural Heritage Commission is casting its lure for other landmarks, some of them grand, like the Breakers, some of them a little a little offbeat, like the Autoport, which marked the arrival of the automobile and the demise of the Red Car trolleys in downtown Long Beach.

“Cultural heritage is all about a city’s identity and what makes it distinctive,” said Lehrer, proclaiming the parking garage just as worthy of preservation as more serious remnants of Long Beach’s architectural legacy.