No Design Landmarks but Lots of History

There’s not a single Frank Lloyd Wright or Richard Neutra design among the eclectic clusterings of houses in rapidly changing Manhattan Beach.

During the arts and crafts heyday at the turn of the last century, the Greene brothers never built one of their famous bungalows in what was then a sleepy new enclave of modest seaside vacation cottages.

And, despite a recent, controversial building boom that has attracted promising young architects, the city does not have a landmark on the par of Wright’s Hollyhock House in Los Angeles or the Greenes’ Gamble House in Pasadena.

So when longtime civic leader, graphic artist, writer and local historian Jan Dennis decided to write a book on the architecture of this increasingly upscale, mostly residential city of almost 34,000, skepticism abounded.

“People said, ‘Are you crazy? There isn’t any architecture in Manhattan Beach,’ ” Dennis recalled.

Her recently published “Shadows of the Dunes,” a 200-plus-page architectural history of the town that she has called home for four decades, is her rebuttal. It traces the city’s evolution from the wood cottages of the 1900s to the yard-gobbling mansions that began popping up in recent years as affluent newcomers flocked to the picturesque community with good schools and a friendly hometown ambience.

The median sale price for single-family homes in Manhattan Beach has reached $720,000, according to the real estate research firm DataQuick Information Systems. With virtually no undeveloped land left, the older homes are being “scrapped” to make way for opulent abodes, measuring 4,000 to 5,000 square feet, that tend to dwarf their surviving neighbors--and often stir resentment among old-timers.

Dennis said she wrote the book--with guidance from two of the now many local architects who keep busy designing the new homes--to give residents an appreciation of what had come before. She wanted to provide a different twist on her 1987 history of the town, “A Walk Beside the Sea,” by chronicling the buildings that marked the various chapters of the city’s past. Although the majority of the homes pictured in the book still stand, Dennis included photos of some that have been demolished.

“So much has been torn down. . . . I felt it was important to give generations to come an idea of what the town was like,” said Dennis, who laments her town’s lack of an official historical preservation agency.

Elected to the City Council in 1984, Dennis worked to preserve the city’s small-town ambience and history-laden houses before she and another slow-growth advocate were voted out of office in a pro-development tide four years later.

She published the book herself, under JanStan Studio, the name of the graphics arts business that she and her late husband owned and operated for many years in town.

The book, priced at $40, celebrates the old--and some of the new. Among the photographs of homes still standing are a few Queen Anne Victorians and the Craftsman bungalows of the early days, some Spanish Revivals from the 1930s and 1940s, even some post-World War II tract homes on the east side of town, where aerospace and defense workers raised their families in the 1950s and 1960s.

A few of the old homes were moved in from their original sites in Los Angeles over the years. One is a now restored 1903 Queen Anne Victorian brought to a lot east of Sepulveda Boulevard from the MacArthur Park area in 1987. Most of the city’s housing, however, was designed by contractors who borrowed elements from the popular styles of their day.

Dennis pays tribute to such local builders as Austin Blankenship, who gave his postwar California Ranch homes distinctive flared roof lines. One photograph captures--in mid-construction--the town’s first steel-frame house, built in 1960 on the oceanfront walk known as the Strand.

Most of the oldest homes featured in the book are long vanished, and some of their less venerable counterparts also are disappearing in the wake of soaring property values and the demand for spacious new houses. Dennis provides the general location of each remaining home, along with a map of the town’s 11 neighborhoods.

“I hope people use this book to get out and walk the different sections and see what is there. That’s the way to really get to know the town,” Dennis said in a recent interview in her antiques-filled, traditional home with English Tudor touches, nestled on a hillside a few blocks inland. She will sign copies of her book this month at two local businesses, the Hillside Pharmacy and Dave’s Olde Book Shop.

Unlike some longtime residents, Dennis does not find objectionable the styles of the mammoth new houses in the city’s Hill Section, a neighborhood of ocean-view crests a few blocks from the beach in the south end of town.

“The architecture is absolutely lovely,” Dennis said. “They would look wonderful with big lawns. They are just too much bulk for the lot sizes we have here, and that is why they seem so out of place to people.”

She does not, however, eschew all things new. Dennis said she has come to admire the modern, International-style houses springing up on the Strand and elsewhere for their clean lines and expanses of glass that make the most of ocean views. Yet Dennis uses the closing paragraphs of her book to make a case for saving more of the city’s older homes.

“The soul of a community is its history, not only the heritage of its residents, but also that of the architecture and the land,” she writes, adding a plea for “the realization that there is more to be gained by selective preservation than merely getting rid of the old to make way for the new.”