Seeking to Save Early Bungalows

A handful of Craftsman-style cottages located a few blocks away have been designated as a historic district.

But a larger neighborhood of even older bungalows that West Hollywood residents are struggling to preserve may soon be, well, history.

Officials will decide tonight whether to demolish the heart of a collection of 100-year-old clapboard dwellings to make room for a 63-unit condominium building.

The modest homes on the west side of the 800 block of San Vicente Boulevard are considered the oldest in West Hollywood.

Built to house turn-of-the-century workers employed at a nearby Los Angeles Electric Railway maintenance yard, the homes have long been viewed by preservationists as part of a potential historic district of its own.

Construction of the $20-million Villas de San Vicente townhouse project calls for the demolition of five bungalows--nearly a quarter of the surviving pioneer cottages. Experts say that such a loss would probably make the remaining homes ineligible for listing on the California Register of Historical Places.

“It’s outrageous. This is the kind of neighborhood West Hollywood ought to preserve,” just like the more prestigious collection of Craftsman homes to the east, said Dawn Sandor, a former actress who has lived in the area for 20 years.

Sandor was walking Wednesday along San Vicente with neighbor Todd Bianco. He’s an accountant who lives in a restored 1905 railroad bungalow just outside the condominium project boundary.

Bianco has circulated petitions protesting the condominiums. He plans to turn them over to city planning commissioners meeting at 6:30 p.m. tonight at the West Hollywood Park auditorium to vote on a construction permit for the condos--and a demolition permit for the cottages.

According to Bianco, the bungalows were built starting in about 1896 for Moses Sherman, co-owner of the electric railway. As the neighborhood grew, the tiny settlement became known as Sherman. It adopted the name West Hollywood in 1924.

Helen McDowell, 81, grew up in the Cynthia Street bungalow where she still lives. She shuddered Wednesday at the thought of condominiums replacing the cottages that have been her neighbors for as long as she can remember.

“I’d hate to see this place overpopulated. We have enough people already,” McDowell said.

Artist and designer Alwy Visschedyk rents one of the houses slated for demolition. Built in 1899, it was the home of West Hollywood’s first postmaster.

“We’re losing the flavor of the whole city by losing houses like these,” Visschedyk said.

Rare Survival of Early Settlement

Urban experts on the West Hollywood city staff agree. Senior planner Timothy Foy acknowledged in a report prepared for tonight’s meeting that “to have a substantial portion of a city’s original settlement intact so many years after the city’s founding is a rarity in Southern California.”

Foy recommends that the condominium project be redesigned so that three bungalows can be moved to the northern edge of the project and “incorporated” into it. Failing that, they should be relocated elsewhere in West Hollywood, according to his report.

But the developers’ own effort to buy an empty lot and move them was unsuccessful, said Richard Mahan, a spokesman for Andre Kornelius Hilldale Inc., the partnership planning the project.

“And there were no serious takers when we offered to sell the houses for $1 to anybody who would move them,” Mahan said. “We’ve been trying to bend over backward on this issue.”