Writer Rallies Activists to Help Save Buildings

For historian Judith Triem, a quick trip to old Rancho Sespe near Fillmore two weeks ago was to be another visit to a little-known jewel of Ventura County’s past.

But Triem found only bare land. Gone was a distinctive two-story bunkhouse built in 1910 to segregate Japanese laborers from Mexican, Chinese and Sikh field hands who also worked the 4,500-acre citrus ranch after the turn of the century.

“It was a gem of a building--one of the most unique in the county,” Triem said. The structure could have been a centerpiece at a planned agricultural museum, she said. “Now it’s gone.”

The razing of the bunkhouse, whose importance Triem documented in an inventory of historical sites in 1987, has crystallized for her the need to better protect significant buildings in Ventura County.

The bunkhouse and the demolition since 1985 of a historic ranch house in Oxnard and another near Fillmore show that Ventura County needs an activist group whose mission is to save buildings distinguished by their architecture or by their place in local history, she said.

“I think there needs to be a group of people that will go to bat and not be afraid to stir up a little controversy,” she said.

Such aggressive advocacy runs against the grain of many of this county’s historical organizations, which since the mid-1960s quietly have catalogued hundreds of important buildings and encouraged owners not to destroy them.

It also is contrary to the soft-spoken style of Triem, 51, a college-educated former homemaker who since 1980 has followed her passion for local history into a second career as an author and architectural historian.

“I wouldn’t want it to come out that I’m this wild-eyed person who wants to preserve everything,” she said. However, she warned that if aging structures don’t get a full review, “they will be destroyed and it will be the county’s loss.”

Over the last decade, Triem has contributed to the county’s knowledge of its historical assets.

In 1985, she wrote the first countywide history to be published since 1940, a terse 231-page illustrated volume that took a year to complete and which is in its second printing.

As a consultant, she has also conducted detailed surveys of historical buildings in Ventura, Oxnard, Ojai, Fillmore and Santa Paula--and in the Santa Clara Valley. And she has written three guides to walking tours of Ventura’s historic downtown area.

Today, said Charles Johnson, librarian for the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, Triem is “the architectural historian for the county. She knows her stuff.”

Triem’s work has emphasized the importance not only of the county’s grand buildings--its ornate Victorians, restored adobes and public edifices--but of structures tucked away in corners of private property and not usually considered assets. They are buildings such as the Japanese bunkhouse, which can be destroyed without notice or a second thought.

“It happens in a lot of communities all the time,” Johnson said. “There is a significant building with a great story behind it, but the people who know the story don’t share it.”

Triem has also gained a statewide reputation for her work in Los Angeles County, where she has researched the roots of hundreds of buildings for the county’s Community Development Commission.

She is the only consultant in California whose evaluations of historic buildings for a federal housing program are accepted without review by the state Historic Preservation Office, officials said.

“Our disagreements with Judy were so few,” and Triem’s production for Los Angeles County is so voluminous that officials decided state oversight was unnecessary, staff historian Lucinda Woodward said.

Triem is respected because she carefully documents not just the architectural characteristics of structures but also their historical significance, Woodward said. “She is one of the outstanding consultants in that area,” Woodward said. “It’s not just ‘What a pretty building, thumbs up or thumbs down.’ She puts in a lot of thought and care. . . . And she’s not afraid to take on difficult projects.”

It was Triem’s analysis that convinced the state that the Wichstand coffee shop near Inglewood qualifies for the National Register of Historic Places, although it was built only 34 years ago, Woodward said.

Triem’s nominations also have led to placement on the register of six Ventura County buildings: the Women’s Improvement Club in Port Hueneme; the Venture Theatre and Feraud Building in Ventura; and the Glen Tavern, Union Oil Building and Faulkner House in Santa Paula.

But even placement on the register, the nation’s most prestigious list of landmarks, provides no legal protection for historic buildings. In California, ordinances passed by city councils and county supervisors do that.

Triem’s concern is that local officials have not gone far enough. She fears that fast-growing Ventura County, which has lost relatively few of its historically significant structures so far, could see many more vanish before they are all identified and protected.

Historic buildings are in jeopardy because surveys of them have not been completed for the Oxnard Plain and Port Hueneme, she said. And hundreds of important buildings already identified in surveys have not been classified as landmarks or protected at all, she said.

Even with landmark status, there is no prohibition against razing a structure in most local cities or in unincorporated county areas. Those jurisdictions do force owners to wait 180 days before altering such buildings.

But only Santa Paula prohibits demolition of landmarks. And there a controversy over property rights dramatically shrunk the size of the city’s only historic district to just three blocks before it was approved in 1988. Thirty-five houses in the district are protected--all with owners’ permission--as are 10 landmarks designated years before.

Triem supports added protections countywide. She wants the county recorder’s office to attach a notice of historic importance to the deed of a property, a move that would not limit use but would educate buyers who might otherwise demolish ramshackle buildings.

The recorder’s office said such a notice could legally be part of a property’s records. The county’s chief administrator, Richard Wittenberg, said the proposal seems reasonable.

More controversial is Triem’s support for stronger restrictions countywide. Other preservationists point out that designation of landmarks in Santa Paula has slowed since that city passed its anti-demolition policy.

Just one new landmark has been named in Santa Paula since 1988, officials said. By comparison, the county Cultural Heritage Board has added 25 new landmarks over the same period.

“Common sense tells me that homeowners don’t like people telling them what they can do with their property,” said Katherine Garner, staff adviser to the 25-year-old heritage board. The National Register of Historic Places won’t award landmark status against the wishes of owners, she noted.

In Ventura, where the city Historic Preservation Commission has been active since 1973, officials also said their policy is to award landmark status only when property owners want it.

However, when owners take out permits to alter or demolish historically significant buildings, officials are notified by a computer alert and try to talk owners into keeping the structure or moving it, said Monica Nolan, staff adviser to the commission.

As a result, no potential landmark has been destroyed in recent years, Nolan said. “People really do want to preserve what’s here,” she said.

About 315 buildings are protected in the city of Ventura--more than in any other local community--either as landmarks or because they are within three historic districts in the downtown area. Another 150 buildings were identified as potential landmarks in Triem’s 1983 survey.

Ventura County also has a flagging mechanism similar to Ventura’s for buildings in unincorporated areas, officials said.

But such steps still would not save buildings whose owners are determined to destroy them, Triem said. She cited two cases in which owners apparently defied wishes of preservationists.

In 1988, the owner of the Burson House in historic Bardsdale near Fillmore agreed to meet with the county Cultural Heritage Board to discuss saving the dwelling, but instead burned it without a permit the day of the meeting.

In 1985, the county heritage board asked the Oxnard City Council to help save a 1919 ranch house, known both as the McGrath House and the Doud House, that was on the site of the city’s proposed new shopping center along the Ventura Freeway.

Instead, according to city and county documents, the city Fire Department burned the structure as a training exercise with approval from property owners E.P. (Bud) Maron and Dorothy Maron, a city councilwoman.

The Marons and the city said that despite the heritage board’s letter, they were unaware of its request until it was too late.

Preservationists also argued that the demolition was illegal because an environmental review, including a historical analysis, had to be completed first. City officials disagreed.

Such disagreements have drawn limited attention, and Triem said she fears for the continued existence of other buildings. Of specific concern is a tiny 1870s Gothic cottage that is the only original structure on a commercial block of Thompson Boulevard in Ventura.

On the wall of Triem’s home, an 82-year-old California bungalow in Santa Paula, is a pen sketch of the Ventura cottage.

“That’s one of my favorite houses,” she said. “It’s so typical and so unchanged it could be on the national register. But the city has never declared it a landmark. The owner feels it might interfere with what they want to do with the property.”

AN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIAN’S SAMPLER

3 Favorites of Judith Triem

GOTHIC COTTAGE, Ventura. Built 1870s

“It’s so typical and so unchanged it could be on the national register. . . . That was where all of the original houses were located--on Figueroa, Thompson, Palm and Santa Clara. There’s only a few left. It’s a perfect and truly rare example of the Gothic style of architecture with wooden pediments over the windows. I like it because I envision in my mind what it was like down there.’

COOK MANSION, Piru. Built 1890

“Around the turn of the century was when most of the important buildings were constructed. As far as agriculture goes, the Cook Mansion and the Faulkner House are probably the most distinctive buildings. They epitomized the height of agriculture and the success of it. The county’s success then, and even now, is based on agriculture and oil.’

COUNTY COURTHOUSE, Ventura. Built 1912

“The Ventura County Courthouse is the epitome of the grand design of the time. It was part of the City Beautiful movement across the country. It contains elements of Romanesque and neoclassical style. The exterior is sheathed in terra-cotta. Friars heads across the exterior frieze tie into the mission theme. The interior contains lavish ornamentation, the marble staircases, the stained glass skylight in the council chambers.’