Fire Chars Historic 1920s-Era Structure

One of Huntington Park’s most venerable landmarks, a 1920s clubhouse where generations gathered for dances, plays and socializing, was gutted Friday in an early morning fire that county officials suspect may have been deliberately set.

The Woman’s Club building, a downtown Huntington Park structure now owned by the Good Shepherd Church, was engulfed in flames when Los Angeles County firefighters arrived about 3 a.m. Friday, Fire Capt. Charles Marshall said.

Although the concrete structure of the building remained intact, the first floor was destroyed. The second floor was heavily damaged by smoke and water, firefighters said.

The fire left about 100 members of the Good Shepherd Church’s Spanish ministry without a building for services, Pastor Samuel C. Meza said.

“We don’t know what we are going to do,” Meza said. “I just don’t see how a fire could have started in there.”

Marshall said, “At this time, we really don’t know how it started, but it appears it could have been arson.”

Long-time Huntington Park residents, who treasured the building as a reminder of the past, were saddened. Some even wept when they learned of the fire.

“It makes us all ill because it is a part of our history,” said 71-year-old Virginia Glendon, a Woman’s Club member who remembers watching the building being erected in the early 1920s. “It was the building in Huntington Park. The place where every wedding reception, every dance, every social event was held.”

Anita Craig, current president of the Woman’s Club, lamented the loss of the old clubhouse with its Spanish-style interior.

“It’s just awful. It was so beautiful,” she said.

The Woman’s Club became one of the most powerful and popular organizations in Huntington Park in the 1920s. Glendon recalled that some women took out second mortgages on their homes to help pay for its construction.

Glendon said the building was lavishly furnished. There was a solid golden oak dance floor, a foyer with a fireplace, plush carpeting and a grand piano. A staircase was adorned with wrought-iron railings.

As members of the Woman’s Club grew older and their numbers dwindled from 300 to less than 100, it became more difficult to maintain the building, Glendon said. Many could no longer climb the stairs from the kitchen to the second-floor auditorium.

About six years ago, the organization sold the building to the Good Shepherd Church. The club now meets at the Elks Lodge.

Isabelle Best, 88, held out against selling the building and was the last Woman’s Club member to give in and approve the sale. She said she hated to see it change hands.

“It was always like home when we went there,” she said.

Huntington Park, like many other communities, has undergone tremendous demographic change in the last decade as immigrants have poured in. For the congregation of about 100 Hispanics who gathered at the building twice a week for church services, the sense of loss also was powerful.

Said Meza, the pastor: “To us, it is a tremendous loss, not only for its historical value, but because of its spiritual value. We are reaching the down-and-outers, those who have no one else. It was place of help and hope.”