A Many-Sided Issue : Historic Group’s Octagon House Restoration Stalled

Just off the Pasadena Freeway north of downtown, in sharp contrast to the tidy, historic village around it, an eight-sided house sits on wood and steel supports, four years after it was moved there to be refurbished and displayed.

Time has not been kind to the Octagon House at Heritage Square Museum.

Its paint is peeling. A window has cracked. A sash hangs open.

Family disputes surely transpired under the home’s cupola in the 93 years that it housed descendants of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But it seems unlikely that the Octagon House has seen such mayhem as the paper work war that has been waged since its controversial move from Pasadena to Heritage Square in 1986.

Heritage Square officials say the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety has lost two sets of their construction plans, erroneously charged them fees and then refused to allow them to build a foundation on fill dirt they believe is adequate to support the Octagon House.

“We can’t restore it until we can get it down, and we’ve gone through hell with the city trying to get the permits to do that,” said Mitzi March Mogul, the museum’s development director. “It’s just been a nightmare.”

Museum officials are hopeful, however, that the logjam of bureaucratic obstacles to the project may soon loosen. A meeting this week among Heritage Square representatives and the city’s chief of grading, Jerry Takaki, produced a promise from Takaki that he will seek a variance so work on the foundation may soon begin.

“I think we’ll get it off the dime,” he said, “but it may take a couple of weeks.”

In the meantime, the future of the Octagon House is a nagging question revived every weekend by visitors to the living-history museum. Sadly out of place, the rundown Octagon House sits on its perch while costumed guides lead such Victorian-era festivities around it as an old-fashioned baby parade and a Mother’s Day fashion show.

Surrounding the Octagon House are a handful of meticulously restored historic homes. Next door is the John J. Ford House, the 1887 residence of an accomplished wood carver who spent years whittling ornate beams and banisters throughout the house. Across the street, visitors wander into the Hale House, also built in 1887 during Southern California’s post-Civil War construction boom.

The Octagon House, a rare example of an avant-garde form of architecture for the time, would be a perfect complement to the other Heritage Square homes, museum officials say.

“We’d love to be able to get people into the Octagon House to see it,” Mogul said. “We want to integrate it into the historic interpretations we do here, and make it into a living, breathing house again.”

As it stands, “We can’t get into it to do even the most basic maintenance, never mind restoration,” Mogul said.

The years of delays have taken a financial toll on the plans for the Octagon House, Mogul said. The original contractor lost interest and abandoned the project, and costs to prepare the home’s foundation have risen an estimated $10,000.

Readying Octagon House for public viewing may ultimately cost $200,000, but Heritage Square officials have only “$18,000 and some change” remaining in an original budget of $114,500, Mogul said. Fund raising is difficult when the home’s future is in limbo.

The senior city inspector on the Octagon House, Joe Gras, said he cannot explain how the city lost two sets of building plans for the house. But he said the current delay, stemming from a dispute over soil safety, is not the city’s fault.

Museum executives believe that decades ago, crews prepared the soil underlying Heritage Square Park to support houses. But they have been unable to prove it with documentation, as the city required before a foundation could be built for the 1893 treasure.

The Octagon House was designed in a tradition spurred by Orson S. Fowler, a utopian philosopher of sorts who argued in an 1848 book that an eight-sided house would bring light and air into every room.

It was built by Gilbert Longfellow, a cousin of the poet, near the California Institute of Technology. The house was moved in 1917 to Allen Street in Pasadena. It is the only remaining octagonal house in Southern California.

Heritage Square’s parent organization, the nonprofit Cultural Heritage Foundation of Southern California, 20 years ago helped Walter Hastings, a Longfellow descendant, restore the old house when he was ordered to make substantial improvements to meet city codes.

In turn, Hastings promised the house to the foundation, and years later he kept his vow. When Hastings moved to Stockton in August, 1986, building movers lifted the roof and cupola off and took the Octagon House, piece by piece, to Heritage Square.

Hastings died last month, his house still on blocks at Heritage Square.

While Heritage Square Executive Director Barry Herlihy admits that “some of it is probably our own damned fault,” he is irate about the years that have passed since the summer of 1986, when the first set of permit applications were submitted to the city of Los Angeles.

At first, a permit was delayed for months while the city checked construction plans, Herlihy said. Then, when Heritage Square applied for an exemption from various permit fees because of the home’s historic value, the city lost the plans.

What’s more, Herlihy said, the city charged Heritage Square the fees when they resubmitted their plans. And another set of plans was lost the following year, Herlihy said.

“At first, I thought they were out to get us,” he said. “At this point, I don’t think it is animosity. A lot of stupidity, maybe, but no animosity.”

In the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, no central file can be found that tracks the Heritage Square project from the filing of the first permit, said Mike Lee, an inspector for the Bureau of Community Safety.

Lee acknowledged that $1,311.72 in fees were incorrectly assessed to Heritage Square, first in 1986 and then last year. The money was refunded last April, Lee said.

Beyond the issues of the fees and lost plans, the project remains stalled by concern about the land where Octagon House will sit.

Much of the ground under Heritage Square is fill dirt dumped there from an adjoining arroyo and from Bunker Hill. Houses can be placed on fill, but it must first be compacted and approved by city inspectors.

Heritage Square officials always felt sure the soil was compacted, because two other historic houses at the site were placed on city-approved foundations in the 1970s and neither has settled.

Gras conceded that the worst that could happen if the soil was not compacted enough would be that the Octagon House’s windows and doors might not close properly.

“It’s not going to topple over,” Gras said.

For now, Heritage Square officials are hoping for a successful search for records to support city soils engineer Burr E. Peck’s recollection that, 20 years ago, the soil at Heritage Square was compacted under his supervision. Peck came forward with the information last week and assured Takaki at this week’s meeting that the soil had indeed been prepared.

“We’re just saying, ‘Let’s get on with it, folks,’ ” Herlihy said.