Historic Preservation Hits the Road

Ringed with yellow lights and moving at a snail’s pace, a 90-year-old classic revival house was transported down Culver Avenue early Tuesday to make room for a new parking lot at Chapman University.

After university officials announced plans last year to build the much-needed 244-car lot, they bought the other houses on the block.

But Carol and Carl Harnack were reluctant to give up their North Orange Street home, which they had bought 13 years ago as a fixer-upper and had carefully restored. So they worked out an agreement with the university to cover most of the costs for moving the house to a new location.

The move became a logistics nightmare because the 1 1/2-story house would have tangled with power lines and Old Towne’s trees. Faced with that, the couple removed the roof and top story for the four-hour trip to the new site.

The move was made from midnight to 4 a.m. Tuesday, with the house barely inching past the home next door as it eased onto its new foundation on Culver.

“It was very close,” said David Younger of Younger & Son, the Santa Ana house-moving company that did the job.

Carol Harnack said it will probably be another year before the couple will finish replacing the roof and reassembling the second floor. Meanwhile, she said, they will live in a small house on the property.

The couple said Wednesday that they feel that have made a contribution to the preservation of the city’s history.

“The house was really worth keeping,” Carol Harnack said. “The houses were so well built in those days. . . . It would be irreplaceable.”

The other buildings on the parking lot site will be moved or demolished this month, university officials said, so that paving can begin in July.