Redondo Neighborhood Divided Over Home Remodeling Dispute

The most recent battle in the war to preserve what’s left of historic Redondo Beach started last fall with a neighbor’s note tacked to Jackie and Herman Bose’s front door.

“We have to talk,” the note read.

“From then on it was nothing but problems,” Jackie Bose recalls.

Those problems have to with the Boses’ home, their plans to remodel it, and their neighbors’ ideas about how they ought to do it.

Despite its termites, tar-paper patches and splintering siding, the turn-of-the-century house at 303 N. Gertruda Ave. represents a dream to the Boses. They bought the house in one of Redondo’s oldest neighborhoods because they wanted “a fixer-upper to fix up,” Jackie Bose said.

After submitting design plans to the city in October, the Boses won approval to add a second story, install new windows, build a garage and remove redwood shingles from the facade to restore the original clapboard.

But two neighbors objected--and enlisted the support of a few others--accusing the Boses of bad taste, mixing architectural styles, and endangering the neighborhood’s historical status. They have asked the Boses to change the blueprints three times, telling them how the house should look, down to window designs and roof lines, the Boses said.

In the last year, the Boses have attended meetings with dissenting neighbors and conferences with city officials. They have canvassed the block, explaining their plans, asking neighbors to sign a petition of support.

Meanwhile, Sandra Dyan and Don Schweikert, the two neighbors leading the charge against the Boses’ plans, have done the same. By circulating a petition around the block, they got enough signatures to apply to the city for a historic district designation.

In doing so, Schweikert and Dyan forced the matter to pass temporarily from the City Council’s jurisdiction to the city’s preservation commission, halting any work on the home until the historic designation has been decided. The commission, of which Dyan is a member, will begin considering the issue at its May 1 meeting.

The Boses’ house has divided families on the block, Jackie Bose said, with couples disagreeing about whose side to take and whose petition to sign. Some of the neighbors have signed the Boses’ petition; some have signed the opposition’s; and some have signed both.

“Some people have said it has to do with our being black,” Jackie Bose said. “But that’s not it. We’re just another victim of the clan. I don’t mean Ku Klux Klan, I mean of these people who think they should speak for everybody. They’ve done this before.”

North Gertruda Avenue, with its clapboard bungalows and California Craftsman-style homes, is a mix of architectural styles, some restored, others badly worn. It sits in the middle of the original, turn-of-the-century Redondo Beach, at the vortex of a longstanding battle between those who want to regulate the restoration of historic houses in the city and those who believe homeowners should be allowed to manage their property as they think best.

The City Council has passed preservation ordinances in the last several years, establishing a preservation commission to guide the redesign of historic houses. But the commission has little power to enforce regulations, prompting preservationists to use pressure or persuasion to get neighbors to comply.

Dyan, a leading preservationist, believes government not only has a right to regulate the preservation of historic homes, it has an obligation to do so.

The city of Redondo Beach, Dyan said, “is not at all committed to preservation.” The battle over the Bose house “is just a symbol of that lack of commitment.”

Councilman Terry Ward, who has supported the Boses, thinks homeowners have the right to remodel their homes as they see fit. “If Dyan and company want to put their money into it,” Ward said, “let them buy the whole block and restore it.”

Like other South Bay cities that developed rapidly in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Redondo Beach lost most of its older buildings and homes to high-density housing and modern shopping malls. In the last decade, a small group of residents in Redondo Beach’s older neighborhoods have banded together to form preservation societies to protect the few hundred historic homes remaining in the city.

Dyan and neighbor Schweikert have persuaded homeowners to preserve historic houses on nearby streets, and they say they were able to prevent North Gertruda Avenue homeowner Hester Riley from selling her house to investors several years ago. Riley’s family members have said the demands the neighbors wanted to place on the buyers prompted them to back out of the deal.

After winning the Riley house battle, Dyan and Schweikert applied for and received a listing on the National Register of Historic Places for a part of the neighborhood, an honorific designation that fails to protect houses from demolition or alteration.

One of those on the list was the Bose home. The Boses knew the house’s history when they bought it a year and a half ago. “We were told we could build whatever we wanted if it conformed to the rest of the neighborhood,” Jackie Bose said.

The Boses say they listened to their neighbors’ concerns and tried to work with them, asking their architect to ensure that their house would complement the neighborhood’s historic character. Still, Dyan and Schweikert objected. “They would tell us what to do with our house,” Jackie Bose said, “from how to install siding to where to place the pillows.”

Dyan and Schweikert insist that they have nothing against the Boses personally; they simply want to preserve as much of the house in its original form as possible. What most bothers them, Schweikert said, is the Boses’ plan to replace the asymmetrical roof with symmetrical peaks and the original windows with lattice-framed ones. He also wants the Boses to retain the small fish-scale shingles that now surround the windows, but those shingles would be removed under current plans for restoring the clapboard.

If the Boses refuse to comply, it could threaten the neighborhood’s listing with the historic register, he believes. But that conclusion is far from certain.

“Whenever a historic home is altered, there’s a loss,” said Marlyn Bourne Lortie, a state official who administers the National Register of Historic Places. “But I don’t think we would take action to de-list the neighborhood.”

Besides, she said, architectural style is open to interpretation. Dyan describes the Bose house as “Colonial Revival,” but it could be Shingle Style, bungalow, or a period house, according to a guide to architecture published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The debate over the Bose house has lasted for months. Frustrated with the delays, the Boses on April 2 took the matter to the City Council, which sided with them in a contentious 3-2 vote.

“My concern is the historic district and retaining that designation,” said Councilwoman Barbara J. Doerr, who voted against the Boses. “Will this jeopardize the integrity of the historic district?”

Schweikert and Dyan, who say they figured the council would back the Boses, last month devised a plan to thwart them.

Schweikert led a petition drive to make about a dozen houses on North Gertruda Avenue a city-designated historic district, thereby preventing the council from taking action until the preservation commission reviews the Bose design plans, said Paul Connolly, who heads the Planning Department.

“This could take many months more,” Connolly said.

While the commission weighs the evidence, the Boses live in a house falling off its foundation, with most of their furniture in storage, waiting for a decision allowing them to begin work. Their car has a bumper sticker that reads: “This too shall pass.”

Jonathan Eubanks, a member of the city’s preservation commission and a longtime city resident, thinks the Gertruda Avenue dispute is rooted in a fear among preservationists of “losing the city’s history.”

When the city authorized razing the downtown district and replacing it with condominiums in the ‘60s, Redondo Beach lost several blocks of history, along with a bowling alley, movie theater, hardware stores and other shops. “We lost a sense of place and community,” Eubanks said. “Redondo no longer has a heart. That’s what people want in their neighborhoods. People want to go home to a place where they feel familiar and safe and comfortable.”

The Boses, though, are feeling less than comfortable in their neighborhood.

“I really don’t understand why they’re doing this to us,” Jackie Bose said.

“How can we not take this personally?” she asks. “What’s more personal than nosing into someone’s business and taking over someone’s life?”