LAKE VIEW TERRACE : Just Another Shake for Home Built in ’98

Ray Shelly’s house did just fine in the Northridge earthquake. But that comes as no surprise to him. After all, it weathered the 1992 Landers-Big Bear quakes pretty well. In fact, the clapboard farmhouse has held its own through 11 major temblors and thousands of aftershocks since it was built in 1898.

“I lost two glass bulbs off the kitchen lights and I got a couple of small cracks, that’s about it,” said Shelly, 57, a member of the third Shelly generation to live in the Lake View Terrace home on Foothill Boulevard.

Grandfather Michael Shelly built the first few rooms of the house in 1898, a year after moving down from Stockton. Over the years, the family kept adding rooms, settling on a seven-room house in the 1930s.

“It’s wood frame--there’s no stucco in it,” Shelley said. “I imagine it flexed quite a bit.”

Several miles east of the quake’s epicenter, Lake View Terrace flexed and shook but escaped the worst of the temblor’s wrath, according to residents. Several houses were deemed unsafe, according to Phillis Hines, a longtime resident and member of the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn.

“The damage isn’t too obvious,” Hines said. For example, the public address system in the community’s recreation center will have to be repaired. And the interiors of homes look like most others in the Valley--a tossed salad of furniture and housewares.

Like most disasters, the quake dwarfed other troubles. Before the temblor, residents complained about damage from the vibration of traffic on the Foothill Freeway and Foothill Boulevard. William Gohl, who was ready to battle Caltrans over cracks in his walls that he said were the result of those vibrations, now has too many fissures to count. He’ll get a disaster loan and repair them all, he said Thursday.

“If I fight Caltrans, it’s just going to be a whole tedious thing,” Gohl said.