Historic 1935 Irvine Farm House Endangered : Preservation: If the city can find a new site and pay to move dilapidated home, the Irvine Co. will give away the structure and help to restore it.

Badly battered now, torn apart by vandals and littered with broken glass and overgrown weeds, the house that James Harvey Irvine Jr. built near his family’s bean and grain warehouse has seen better days.

Irvine died before the carefully crafted green-and-white ranch house was completed, but historians say generations of warehouse managers bedded down there. One even killed himself in the garage out back after embezzling thousands of dollars from Irvine’s company.

Nestled beneath a shady stand of trees and surrounded by a white picket fence, the little structure stood as one of the county’s precious few links to its agricultural past.

But now, half a century after it was completed, the house is at the center of a storm pitting the company that bears Irvine’s family name against a historical community trying to protect his family heritage.

“This house has just simply been trashed,” Judy Liebeck, historical curator of the Irvine Historical Museum, complained as she toured the crumbling home Tuesday. A fence lies in pieces alongside the house, every window has long since been shattered and holes mar most of the walls and ceilings.

“The Irvine Co. has made no attempt to protect it, and now it’s going to build the road that will destroy it,” Liebeck said.

At issue are the company’s plans for Sand Canyon Avenue, which passes just in front of the old house. When the road is widened and an underpass created beneath the railroad tracks, it will mean the end of the house, unless plans can be made in time to save it.

“We’re hopeful that the house can be saved, but it’s really up to the community now,” said Kathleen Campini, a spokeswoman for the Irvine Co. “We’re developing that property into a separated grade crossing.”

Campini said the company is willing to give the house to the city of Irvine and is even willing to help restore it if the city can move it to a new location within about six months.

But moving the house and finding land for it are the city’s problems, company officials say, so if no one comes forward to pay, the house stands to be destroyed.

That strikes Liebeck and some others as precious little support for the structure.

The home’s fate appears to rest in an unlikely and somewhat shaky alliance between historical preservationists and advocates for the homeless.

“We’re thinking about putting it adjacent to our current farmhouses and rehabilitating it for a family to live in,” said Clyde E. Weinman, executive director of Irvine Temporary Housing Inc.

“It seems like an opportunity to preserve a house that’s destined to be destroyed and that the historical society wants to save.”

Weinman and the housing group have applied for a $27,500 federal historic-structures grant that would pay to move the house. They are working with the Irvine Water District to see whether the district will provide land, Weinman said.

County supervisors, who administer the federal grant money, are scheduled to vote on the request in February, Weinman added.

Liebeck is not thrilled by the prospect of the home’s being saved from demolition only to become a facility for the homeless. As a low-income residence, it would be off limits to the public, she fears, so the architectural and historical significance of the building would not be widely shared.

Still, she conceded, saving the house is better than letting it be destroyed.

“If that’s what it takes, I’m all for it,” she said, scuffing plaster off the floors to show off the walnut strips underneath. “I can’t bear to let this house just go.”

Those same sentiments were expressed, if less stridently, by one of the few remaining Irvine family members. Athalie Clarke, 86, widow of James Irvine’s son, James (Jase) Irvine, never lived in the little ranch house, which was completed just after Irvine died in 1935. Clarke and her husband spent their six years of married life in the family mansion a few miles away.

And though Clarke does not remember her husband’s making much ado about this particular house, she has watched much of the Irvine family’s history disappear beneath the county’s progress.

She said Tuesday that she hopes that the company will save this structure: “There’s just so little left from those times. It seems a shame to lose the rest.”