Crew Levels Landmark Home, Clearing the Way for Project

By this weekend, the red brick house that had stood as a landmark to passersby on Hampshire Road for 50 years will be gone.

Its redwood roof beams and joists will be heading for Mexico on a truck, and its bricks and flagstones will have been neatly stacked and made ready for sale to homeowners looking to add a rustic touch to their tract houses.

The house, near Thousand Oaks Boulevard in an aging neighborhood that was once the heart of the city, has been leveled to make way for an 11-unit transitional living project for homeless and low-income residents being built by Many Mansions.

Wednesday afternoon, a crew from a Moorpark firm made quick work of demolishing the house, using picks to knock down the plaster interior walls after tearing off its roof.

“It’s easy,” crew member Jose Lemus, 54, said as he stooped to pick up plaster and debris and separated it into large piles for salvage. By today, the brick and mortar outside walls built by a 60-year-old Sicilian immigrant, the late Dominick Tringali, were expected to be knocked down.

While most of the materials from the Tringali house will likely be trucked out of the city for sale or end up in a landfill, Thousand Oaks resident Tina Carlson has salvaged many items in an effort to keep the community’s memory of the home from fading away.

“A lot of people volunteered their time to come and help me salvage things out of the house that I consider its heart and soul,” Carlson said.

Among the items: brass and glass lighting fixtures made during the years immediately after World War II, which was when the house was built, and a marble frieze carved with an image of a weeping willow.

Also saved were the 80-year-old roses brought across the country by the Tringali family from Yonkers. They have found a new home outside the entrance of the Stagecoach Inn Museum’s Timber School.

Carlson said that while she understands the community’s need for more housing for low-income residents and others going through tough times, she was sorry to witness the leveling of one of the city’s oldest brick buildings.

“All Many Mansions did was take advantage of a wonderful opportunity to build an apartment building in a good location that’s already zoned and ready to go,” Carlson said. “It’s the city’s fault for zoning that house for the site of an apartment building.”