Pasadena, like Santa Barbara and a few other communities in southern California, has a very large number of beautiful, well-preserved Craftsman homes. Home to several Greene & Greene masterworks, the town also hosts an annual Craftsman Heritage Weekend (this year's just ended) which is always worth a visit should you be in the area.

With its combination of typical Southern California sun, wide streets and the overhanging canopy of huge old trees, Pasadena is also a photographer's heaven. Here's a little gallery I'm in the process of building on Flickr.

In November, I'll head to Chicago for an annual 4-day trip with my father and uncles. We're all big Craftsman fans and fans of interesting American architecture in general, and would love to take a tour of, say, an interesting architecturally-significant neighborhood and/or a few Frank Lloyd Wright homes, or other buildings of note. Any particular suggestions for tours or groups we should contact?

A nice video tour of Pasadena, including Bungalow Heaven and the Gamble House.

I've never been to Tucson, although my friend Keena used to tell me how pretty it is. After reading today's article on the best neighborhoods in that city at Charles & Hudson, though, I'd certainly like to visit. Beautiful old Tudor, Storybook, and Mission Revival homes dot Tucson, and some of them are particularly noteworthy.

Last week we re-visited our hometown of Tucson, Arizona to join the family in celebrating Father's Day. It's been 12 years since we've lived there and my how things have changed. We checked out the resurgence downtown and hope the new movie Public Enemies shines some light on an already very cool Hotel Congress as this is where John Dillinger and his gang were first captured and is now celebrated by a Dillinger Days festival.

A stones throw from Hotel Congress is the West University neighborhood which This Old House just named as one if it's 50 Best Old House Neighborhoods. The homes consist of Spanish Revival, Craftsman Bungalow, and Prairie-style which range from $175,000 to $400,000. A light rail system is almost complete that will flow through this neighborhood from downtown and up to the University of Arizona. In a city where cars are nearly a requirement, residents of West University could almost forgo their vehicles especially if they work or study at the nearby University or downtown.

Reader Sarah Hilbert writes to tell us about how, earlier today, residents of Pasadena's beautiful Bungalow Heaven Landmark District to celebrate the new, enhanced versions of the neighborhood's signature street signs:

Tracy Doolittle lives here in Sacramento and is just as much a fan of our beautiful old houses as I am. For $300, she'll do very extensive history on your home, finding out a timeline (and biographical highlights) of its past owners & residents, a permit history, the original property or historic neighborhood map, and other information - including, sometimes, historic photographs. She has also written a how-to article if you'd like to attempt this yourself.

A useful service, certainly. Tracy also has a website, Sacramento Historic House, which profiles several representative properties (including the beautiful and enormous Cranston-Geary house, in whose listing she gives a shout-out to us). Several of the most impressive Victorians are already listed, and it looks like she's adding new structures all the time. There's a blog, too, with many recent entries focusing on the historic homes and castles she encountered on a recent trip to London.

Hotpads.com presents various types of housing maps, including those that cost out buying vs. renting over time in certain areas. One new feature of the site is a heatmap showing foreclosures, with most large cities nationwide represented. I didn't find any on my street, but there's a whole cluster - four at the same corner - just a block away, which leads me to be rather suspicious of the map - being that all four listings are for the same house. It's a neat tool, but take the data with a very large grain of salt.

Additionally, to get more detailed info, you need a free trial or paid subscription to RealtyTrac - at least you did for every property I looked at. Not sure if this is just a come-on for RealtyTrac or that was just a coincidence. Still, it's an interesting way to look at how some folks (and by folks I mean both brokers and buyers) greed and bad judgment is costing us all a hell of a lot of the equity we've built up over the last decade.

A good article by Kytja Weir in last week's Charlotte Observer, on the constant butting of heads between historic preservationists who look at a neighborhood as an organic whole and selfish me-firsters who want the freedom to do whatever they want with their own property, damn the neighbors and everyone else. Gee, can you tell which camp I fit into? An excerpt:

Tim Griffin, the association president, had invited builders, architects and others, trying to inspire his neighbors about how to renovate their homes without changing the feel of the newly popular neighborhood.

"I'm just so adamant about no more McMansions," he said.

But he knows his neighborhood has no power to restrict renovations. "We're not a homeowners' association. We're not a historic district. So the next best thing is to educate."

The neighborhood of small homes, many dating from the 1930s, is starting to feel a tension already experienced in Charlotte's older neighborhoods around uptown such as Dilworth, Myers Park, Elizabeth, Plaza-Midwood and Wesley Heights as people with bigger tastes move in.

Today Americans seek more space than their parents. In new developments bigger homes can be built without hindrances.

But the desire for more space creates a tension in some older neighborhoods, built for the needs of the past. Neighbors there find themselves walking a line between preserving the past and maintaining property rights, promoting growth yet controlling how it takes shape.

LAist's "Neighborhood Project" feature included a report this past week on a part of Northeast LA that I'm not at all familiar with - I always assumed that was Highland Park - and found extremely interesting:

Once the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement in Los Angeles and a bohemian artists' colony, Garvanza is today one of Northeast LA's hidden treasures seeking to retain its turn of the century identity while creating a liveable neighborhood for the twenty-first century. Although many consider Garvanza to be just a part of Highland Park, this small and hilly area brimming with historic buildings has more than enough charm and character needed to stand out on its own. Named for the wild sweet peas (garbanzo beans) that used to grow on the hillsides, Garvanza itself is much like a hearty wildflower, blooming stubbornly amidst the dominant concreted landscape, unabashedly colorful and pleasantly surprising to discover.

Check out the whole story for plenty of photographs and maps and a reasonably complete history of the region.

Neighbors in the Decatur, Georgia neighborhood of Oakhurst are definitely not agreeing to disagree about a proposal to turn their area into an official historic district. Scott Henry fills us in on the story, something that may not be all that hard to imagine for many of you who live in historic districts, whether recognized or not:

Threats. Intimidation. Yard signs. Snotty e-mails. Yes, the knives are out in Oakhurst, where the proposed creation of what would be Decatur’s largest historic district has resulted in a nasty neighborhood-wide squabble in which many homeowners have been forced to choose sides.

Terry Michel, a real estate agent who says she supports voluntary design guidelines rather than city imposed building restrictions, says she’s stopped discussing the issue with neighbors because the rhetoric on both sides has become too overheated.

“The vitriol is off-putting to me,” Michel explains. “It’s like watching Ann Coulter debate Al Frankin (sic).”

So what is it about a historic district that has so many peoples’ knickers in a wad?

Mainly, the argument comes down to control over one’s own property. If a house is included in the district, then the owner would need to get a “certificate of appropriateness” to tear it down, build an addition or make significant exterior changes. Construction plans that aren’t seen as keeping within the historic character of the neighborhood – say, replacing a 1920s Craftsman bungalow with a modernist stucco triplex – may not be allowed.

reader Keith Harrison forwards this article about a fellow preserving some of his own neighborhood's character by saving an historic 1917 Craftsman home that was slated for demolition. Nicole Tsong has the full story at the Seattle Times; here's a short excerpt:

Frank-Michael Rebhan was not looking for a new house when he walked his dog past 6317 Phinney Ave. N. in late January.

He already owned a small house a few blocks away. But this sandy-gray beauty was a 1917 Craftsman-style home with leaded stained-glass windows, dark wood built-ins and box-beam ceilings. And a notice said it was slated for demolition.

Rebhan had an outlandish idea: What if he saved the home by moving it to his own lot?

Rebhan hadn't even been inside yet, but the 37-year-old quickly did some intense calculations. He added up costs for moving the house, demolition of his own home, excavation and the other issues involved in moving a house.

He figured out how much it would add to his current mortgage and realized: "It's a no-brainer."

Richard Dodd's May 19 article in the Orange County Register on Brea, California's Union Oil Co. neighborhood is a good one:

The 1882 discovery of oil in shallow wells in Brea Canyon had a major influence in the history and economy of Orange County. Several small oil companies sprang up shortly afterward and in 1890, some of them merged to form Union Oil Co. of California.

Many local communities faced a housing shortage for new workmen during the oil and land boom in the 1920s. Union Oil built 61 homes for their employees in the southwestern part of Brea. This area became known as the "Union Oil neighborhood."

The bungalow period was in full swing at the time. As a result, most of the homes are California, Craftsman and Pueblo bungalows and other variations interspersed with a few provincial revivals.

read the whole thing

A recent article by Ellen Tomson in Minneapolis' Pioneer Press describes local historian and author Larry Millett's research and subsequent book on Minneapolis' historic neighborhoods. excerpt:

Larry Millett biked the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis for three summers to produce his latest book, (the) AIA Guide to the Twin Cities, the first major neighborhood-by-neighborhood handbook of its kind.

But the foundation of his 665-page book was decades of research and writing about the Twin Cities, first as a Pioneer Press reporter, columnist and critic, and then as author of Lost Twin Cities, Twin Cities Then and Now, and Strange Days, Dangerous Nights, all which focused on local structures and events.

"The book is the result of three years of work and, in a sense, it's the work of a lifetime since I've worked here all my life," says Millett, 59, who grew up in North Minneapolis and has spent much of his adult life in St. Paul.

This is one of the most delightful things I've read in a newspaper since long before the current war began, and it's almost enough to distract me for a few minutes from Kurt Vonnegut's death, the rising toll of wounded and killed overseas and the idiocracy we seem to have saddled ourselves with in Washington.

For today's Los Angeles Times, William Deverell, a history professor at USC, has written a quiet and beautifully moving paean to his home, his neighborhood and how he has learned to "live amid history:"

Houses and neighborhoods seduce us. They always have. What starts with limitations — cost and location — often blossoms into habits of living and cherished memories. Our love affair began in Pasadena eight years ago.

It was the fall of 1999. We knew we wanted to be close to Caltech, where I was teaching at the time, and near the Huntington Library, where my wife, Jenny, works. So we drew an imaginary rectangle on a map of Pasadena, hoping that somewhere inside this space we would find our perfect home and our perfect neighborhood.

When we first saw it, the house hid behind 20 years of benign neglect. It was a Mission Revival with old wooden awnings sagging atop wrought iron braces. In the yard, worn-out grass fought a losing battle with brown spots and weeds. Here and there, a few succulents hung on.

Built in 1923, the house was tired. The bathrooms needed work — a lot of work. Every window had heavy iron bars on it. An apartment attached to the garage was decrepit, and a freestanding building out back, with an incinerator plunked down in a corner, was a mess.

The owner had been in the leather business in downtown Los Angeles. He had retired years earlier and brought his inventory home with him. Bolts of leather stood stacked in rooms and corners of the house: raw leather, finished leather and leather in some stage in-between. A couple of rooms were off-limits because we couldn't open the doors; leather was in the way.

Our real estate agent apologized to us on the sidewalk as we left.

"I really like it," Jenny whispered to me.

Lubbock's North Overton neighborhood - once sparsely populated with sprawling ranch-era Craftsman bungalows - is slowly being reseeded with strip malls, tract developments and other signs of the coming apocalypse. One such home is being picked up and moved to make way for that harbinger of class, culture and the real building block of a modern neighborhood, the strip mall.

"This was called a craftsman-bungalow house, it was built in 1911. It's one of the oldest houses in Lubbock, it's also one of the most historic because of the people lived here the first 75 years," said former resident, Frank Potts.

In 1924 A.B. Davis moved to Lubbock. Soon after moving into the home. A.B. served as the manager of the Chamber of Commerce and later as Lubbock's City Manager. His family called 1724 Main their home for 60 years.

Frank Potts is A.B.'s grandson, he said, "lots of memories here, there really are. As a child it was a big world out there, World War II was going on when I first moved here and I just remember everything just seemed, the house seemed like a huge mansion and I was just a little bitty guy and wondering what happens next."

The original plans for the home show a 4,500 square foot house with wide overhanging eaves, deep porches with large square brick posts and beautiful wood paneling, all adding to the charm of this old home. With the vision and financial help of Lubbock attorney Ted Hogan, this old house will be able to stand for another hundred years. He said, "a lot of heavy lifting (will go into moving the house)! and quite frankly the fellas that the credit goes to are the movers because they're the guys that have the technical knowledge."

With the development in the North Overton area, this old houses days were numbered as a strip mall is slated to go here. But in 5 weeks, 1724 Main will get a new address on the corner of 16th and Avenue R after it's moved, piece by piece, down Avenue R.

Hogan said, "we have about 5 weeks to get it done, we have a May 1st deadline. There's new development coming in here. If the weather permits and if it doesn't rain, we should be good to go at the end of April." Giving this old Lubbock home a new lease on life.

It should be noted that Lubbock's Overton Park project is currently the largest private residential development in the state. Questions regarding the number of homes destroyed or moved directed to the McDougal Company, the firm tasked with making rubble of old homes in the way and clearing it, were not answered

Laurie Manny, a Long Beach realtor specializing in older homes and historic neighborhoods, has a nice rundown of those neighborhoods / historic districts on her Long Beach Real Estate blog. The directory includes neighborhood boundaries, a survey of historic home styles in the area, general neighborhood description, maps and plenty of photographs. There's also a sort of reverse-directory by house style - for example, if you are looking for a tudor revival home, it'll be in Belmont or California Heights or Bluff Park, but if you want a Streamline Moderne home, it'd be in Bluff or Drake Parks or Wilmore City.

It's nice to see a realtor with a genuine interest in community history!

A good column from John Canalis in the Long Beach Press-Telegram. He explores two very different points of view on the increased property values in Long Beach's Belmont Heights neighborhood - one, that new development (McMansions, mostly) drive prices up, and the other, that the better-constructed and much more humble Craftsman and Mission Revival bungalows built there in the 1920s sustain prices and make the neighborhood what it is. As Belmont Heights explores ways to keep its character and at the same time allow folks independence in what is built and how, they come up against many of the same challenges that other historic review boards and permitting bodies have faced over the years.

"Gorgeous" is the word Curtis Watkins chooses to describe his neighborhood's newer homes.    

"I consider what is happening in Belmont Heights progress," he says. "The property values are just skyrocketing."    

But Elizabeth Lambe prefers the Craftsman-era houses of the 1920s and 1930s. She believes it is the older homes, not the newer ones, that sustain prices.

"I grew up in Orange County and moved to Belmont Heights because I really loved the look of the neighborhood and the lovely historic homes," she says. "And I think it's important that we preserve that because it's part of our history."

Just as it transformed Belmont Shore, the Peninsula and Naples, "mansionization" - a growth of houses 3,000 square feet and up - is changing the Heights, where homes a third to half of that size were once the norm on many streets.

ZIP Code 90803, which includes the Heights, is the most expensive in Long Beach, with a median home price of $850,000 and plenty of properties in the $1 million to $2 million range.

Well-heeled owners, buyers and speculators often want - and can afford - more room for children, home offices and entertaining than a two-bedroom cottage can offer.

Critics say the new homes, sometimes constructed in Mediterranean, Tuscan and contemporary "box" styles, clash with the lines of original Craftsman, Spanish, Storybook, Tudor and Victorian homes. They complain that the manses dwarf their homes, shade once-sunny gardens and give the nosy a perch to peer into backyards.

Sara Wiseman has a short article in the Salem, OR Statesman Journal on Bush's Pasture Park neighborhood, a pleasant area that is packed with beautiful '20s highwater bungalows.

When Jenni Green plugged in the hair dryer in the bathroom of her bungalow, the refrigerator used to blow a circuit.

The old-fashioned, single-pane windows add substantially to the charm of her 1920s home -- and to her heating bills.

And the small, detached garage at the back of the house definitely won't fit his-and-her Hummers.

Green, a writer who lives with pianist Randy Byrnes in Salem's Bush's Pasture Park neighborhood, wouldn't have it any other way.

Even as scads of new homes rise in every direction around Salem, Green believes there's just something about older homes that can't be duplicated.

Reader Keith Harrison gives us the heads-up on a disturbing trend in Seattle - tearing-down of sturdy old bungalows to make room for new custom (and in some cases tract) homes. Read Aubrey Cohen's full article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Michael and Kimberly Kocher wanted something bigger and newer than the decades-old bungalows and Craftsman houses that dominate Seattle neighborhoods, but they didn't want the suburbs.

Fortunately for them, more and more builders are providing just the thing -- tearing down small, old houses to build modern, large ones as home buyers in Seattle and nationwide move back to the city, bringing with them suburban expectations of size and amenities.

Al Ostman, who owns Columbia Rim Building Co., is one of many builders catering to the renewed interest in city living.

"It's the commute," he said "If you're not working at Microsoft, why would you want to live in Issaquah?"

Just in Seattle's single-family zones, 492 houses were demolished to make way for a new house or some other use between 2003 and 2005. Citywide, teardowns have picked up since 1998, averaging about 500 homes demolished a year -- a 57 percent increase from the average in the preceding eight years.

Some Seattle neighborhoods, such as Capitol Hill and Queen Anne, are well-stocked with old houses that provide the space modern families want, but teardowns are more common in northern neighborhoods such as Ballard, View Ridge and Greenwood, which are growing in popularity and where older houses tend to be smaller.

Steve Brown has a nice article on the resurgence in popularity (as evidenced by house prices) of the classic Craftsman Bungalow in Chico CA, in their daily paper, the Chico Enterprise-Record.

The bungalow is back. Homes built in this style in California in the 1910s and 1920s are becoming as desirable to early 21st century homeowners as Victorian styles were to homeowners a generation ago.

The avenues neighborhood -- and most of early 20th century Chico -- is full of examples of craftsman bungalows. Kasey Merrill, president of the Chico Avenues Neighborhood Association, said they are "the essence of what gives Chico its character."

Three architecture aficionados talked about the value of bungalows and other older buildings Wednesday at a presentation sponsored by the association. Merrill said one of the goals of the association is to educate the public about subjects that relate to the quality of life in the neighborhood.

Lee Laney, who has had longtime interest in the arts and crafts movement that inspired the building of craftsman bungalows, general contractor Craig Almaguer and architect Paul Lieberum were the speakers.

Laney said craftsman bungalows are part of a movement with "strong philosophical and perhaps spiritual roots." The movement affected furniture, pottery, metal work and textiles as well as housing design. It stressed simplicity, harmony with nature and a hand-crafted look.

I am sad but unfortunately not surprised to read how the television program Extreme Makeover: Home Edition recently documented the destruction of a decrepit but repairable old bungalow in Raleigh, North Carolina (map). Not only did they allow demolition derby cars to smash into the house as part of its demolition, but they refused to allow architectural antique collectors or dealers buy the many features in the house, including heart-pine flooring and wood trim and original windows - money that could have gone to the family who owned the house, or the volunteer organization that pulled together to get the new structure built.

Hopefully Raleigh's Riggins family won't have the same problems that the Llanes family, who participated in an Extreme Makeover Home Edition moment in North Bergen NJ, had; they now cannot afford the much higher property taxes on their new house. The new tax bill, more than $14,000, makes the family feel as if an ax is "hanging over our head. With all the taxes, it's like we're on a chopping block."

The well-built but run-down home in Raleigh, instead of being remodeled or restored (two things it sorely needed!), was replaced with a new house built in one week. Now, I've talked to a lot of contractors, custom home builders and architects over the years, and I talked to a few of them about this particular case. Every one said that there was absolutely no way that a house built in a single week could be better than a half-decent, disposable piece of junk, and certainly wouldn't last half as long as the home it replaced. So: good going, Extreme Makeover. I'm sure the advertisers are happy, though, and that's really all that matters - the event was really for them, and the volunteers were subsidizing them just as much as engaging in healthy and community-building service. The fact that a needy and deserving family got a nice new McMansion is simply a good PR side-effect as far as the advertisers are concerned.

Matthew Brown in Raleigh wrote a letter to his local newspaper, the Raleigh News & Observer, lamenting the loss; many folks in the community share his opinion (although most are happy that a needy family is getting a new house), and Sven Rylesdorn says it better than I could, also pointing out the absurdity of having the demolition derby cars attempt to tear the house down:

The meager humor is that the cars couldn't actually do this - they pulled the columns off, but the porch roof stayed up. The crew had to pre-chainsaw the framing of the house in order to get the walls to fall down when the cars hit it. So then it looks like the place really was not-worth-saving. After all, if a car can knock it down...

Mark Turner talks to Myrick Howard, the head of Preservation North Carolina, about the project; Howard had this to say:

"I believe in charity, but if you really care about good housing, then renovate the existing house and it will cost so much less," he said.

Howard added that the Riggins home was not only salvageable but made of better building materials than Extreme Makeover would use.

"We're replacing real wood and plaster with chip board and sheet rock," he said. "They're getting showered with candy rather than a decent meal."

Personally, I think the Riggins family deserved a lot better than this scripted media event, and they deserve a house at least as sturdy as the old one. These are people who give a lot back to the community - Linda Riggins is a social worker who recently had to stop work due to crippling arthritis, and her husband Bill was a tailor until his degenerating vision caused him to give up that work (he is now legally blind) - and they are actively involved with a local ministry devoted to helping underprivileged children and finding homes for low-income families. But a real restoration project, full of detail work and craftspeople taking their time to do it right, doesn't sell TV commercial time, and then the network and its owners, Disney, would have had to pay for staff rather than getting free volunteers to throw up a ready-built. Apparently, the show did generate a kind of ripple effect of volunteerism in the community, at least for a little while, and that is absolutely wonderful, even if it may not last too long. It's a shame that someone had to get a (comparatively) mediocre house for this to happen, though.

Richard Hart, in his Up Front column in Indy, the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill-area independent weekly, tells us, basically, that we should just shove our cynicism. But I'm not cynical about the effects of the project overall; I think it is wonderful that a needy family got a new home and a community came together to do something not necessarily for themselves. I think it's sad, though, that the only way this can happen is in a scripted event meant to make a bunch of money for Disney and its local commercial sponsors, even to the point of denying the local charities in the event discounted advertising time during the airing of the program.

So let's look at the lessons we can learn from the Extreme Makeover experience. Jennings has a few suggestions: The spirit and infrastructure for volunteerism it created should be capitalized upon long-term; all corporate citizens should make addressing the common good part of their business practices; we should support businesses that accept that responsibility; and there should be incentives for them to pursue it.

What else can we learn? Shouldn't we be embarrassed that families like the Rigginses have to live as they do? We need to open our eyes to the conditions around us and press our elected officials to address them. Cities need to aggressively enforce housing codes and create powerful economic incentives for poor families (and landlords) in older areas to repair their homes, improve their neighborhoods and protect our architectural heritage.

Derek Jennings echoes Mr. Hart's editorial in his feature article in the same issue; luckily, he also gives us a photograph of handsome carpenter Ty Pennington and writes that "his hunk value is considered one of the show's attractions." I'm glad the Indy is looking out for their advertisers and sexually frustrated
housewives everywhere, rather than taking a critical approach to an entire community being manipulated by Disney and its advertisers.

Last but not least, Betsy, a local high school blogger, has discovered that ABC is not picking up the bill for police, city inspectors and other government services related to the media circus; the city of Raleigh is expected to pay. After all, isn't it the American way for the public to be subservient to private profit, and for government to subsidize private business? I call it "socialism for the rich."

more: Scott Parkerson's photographs of the circus around 207 Poplar Street in Raleigh, NC; a slideshow of "the start and the finish" of the new house being built; a related article and comments at Endangered Durham; Triangle Homeworks, the non-profit that put the volunteer effort together, gives a bit of background on their involvement with the project; TV news, as usual, is not in the business of asking questions because everybody loves a good public interest story - their first story on the program ended with this very telling blurb:

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was the 15th-rated show in last week's Nielsen ratings.

Multiple emails and a fax to the show's producers and ABC / Disney have so far been unanswered.

  An Example of SLO Real Estate 

Flickr user Vision Aerie gives us a terrific example of how normal human beings are no longer able to afford to do anything other than rent if they want to live in a safe neighborhood with decent schools. After all, those are really only things that the rich deserve.

Well, I missed it this year - the tour was two weeks ago - but Los Gatos' annual Historic Homes Tour was a big success, raising money for both the Los Gatos Art and History museums.

The $30 tour visited six homes in Los Gatos' historic Glen Ridge neighborhood, which is jam-packed with pretty bungalows and cottages, most of them with interesting Craftsman details. Alastair Dallas of the Los Gatos Observer has a good article and several photographs of the tour; homes from the 2001 tour can be visited, online, through Shari Kaplan's October 2001 article in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

• 22 Glen Ridge Ave.: A two-story cottage-style house, built in 1904 for lawyer William F. Pierce and his family, will have the original architect's drawings displayed in the library. It has two cutaway bay windows, a hipped roof with widow's walk and a front-facing gable over its front porch. Used for years as a rental, the home has been returned to its original single-family status by its current owner, who tore down a 1908 addition to build a new kitchen and bath in that space.
• 133 Glen Ridge Ave.: Look carefully for the subtle decorative elements on the house built in 1909 by David Crummey, who started the Bean Spray Pump Co., maker of the first high-pressure pump for insecticides. (The company later evolved into San Jose's Food Machinery Corp., a maker of farming equipment and, later, huge military vehicles.) Corner towers have hipped roofs, cantilevered on the front and sides with decorated braces below. A hipped center dormer has exposed rafters under the eaves. Stained glass can be seen in the top panes of the tower windows. And here's where you can see the aforementioned quatrefoil windows. The house retains its original footprint, front facade and entry porch, but the insides have been updated - keeping to the period - by the current owners.
• 219 Glen Ridge Ave.: More fun architectural details are on the cedar-shingled Craftsman-style house with its recessed porch and side-gable roof, built in 1907 for Frank A. Dixon, superintendent of the San Jose Fruit Packaging Co. Carved rafter "tails" show off the skills of a fine woodworker, and the stonework at the sidewalk is original. Inside, many period features remain, including built-in bookcases and dining room buffet, paneling in the dining room and coved ceilings. The current owners extended the rear of the house to remodel the kitchen and add a family room in the 1990s.
• 19 Hernandez:The oldest house on the tour was built before 1891 and is known as the family home of "Judge" Fowler, although Thomas Fowler actually was a senator and may have even died before the family moved into the house. The Victorian Queen Anne-style house has cantilevered bay windows on the right front and side, a porch with turned columns and a central, front-facing gable. The current owner has remodeled in period style and added a second story for a master bedroom and bath in the early 2000s.
• 119 Tait Ave.: The newest house on the tour was built in 1993 to replace a circa-1890 Victorian that was red-tagged and razed after it was knocked off its foundation during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It has typical Queen Anne-style features such as a bay window, wraparound porch with turned columns and hipped roof - all designed to allow the new construction to fit seamlessly into its neighborhood. The current owner purchased it in 1994.
• 142 Tait Ave.: What's called the "Rene Doolittle House" was built in 1923, likely by Doolittle himself. About 12 years ago, the second story was added, but the first story retains its original Craftsman features such as the stucco under the gables and braces and the exposed rafter tails.

Beth Potter's recent article in the Denver Post is a wakeup call to the professional flippers who are doing more harm than good to the neighborhoods they "invest" in. Unfortunately, Potter's article is more fluff than analysis; sure, some flippers need to work to resell houses, but what of the character of the neighborhoods destroyed by flipping? Where I live, self-proclaimed "real estate professionals" have bought up old Craftsman and Mission Revival bungalows, sunk a few thousand dollars into them, and then - while waiting for a seller - rented them out. Of course, the rents price out the working people who used to fill the neighborhood, moving them into clusters of poverty that are a huge spiritual, social and economic drain on them and all other taxpayers.

Some folks decide not to rent out at all, and just wait for the sale - and a large proportion of them end up in foreclosure, with dead lawns and broken windows. Thus prices go up and then down artificially, at the whim of outsiders who have no interest in the culture of the city or our neighborhood and no interest in contributing to it at all. It's simply an extension of the "me first" attitude that has shaped the national character in the last decade.

Nine years ago, downtown Denver resident Barbara Baker was up late with insomnia when she saw a "Buy property, no money down" infomercial on TV.

Her job as a gang prevention coordinator at Jefferson County public schools was ending, and Baker was trying to figure out what to do next in her life. She decided to use the family house as collateral for a "no money down" loan on an investment home.

...

Late night TV shows like "Flip this House" on A&E are drawing first-time investors with visions of quick riches dancing in their heads. On the show, Realtors and others make mostly cosmetic changes to distressed homes in the Atlanta metro area and sell them just months later for huge profits.

"A lot of people watch (that show). It's good for the market because it's getting some fresh blood into (it)," said Wilhelm Estes, a Broomfield Realtor who specializes in finding such properties to sell investors.

Such TV shows can also be misleading, Baker said, because they emphasize homes that need simple changes rather than costly infrastructure overhauls.

"I think it's tough," she said, which is why she consults with people just starting in the business. Said Baker, "Most of them don't know what they're getting into."

Read the full article here.

The Oakland Heritage Alliance - a stalwart organization of grass-roots preservationists - celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2005 and what a quarter century it has been.  In 1980, seven people with an ambitious goal scraped together a $150 to get the organization rolling. Their goal: to stem the tide (at times a Tsunami) of urban renewal projects that were paving over, plowing under, and otherwise obliterating at an alarming rate some of Oakland's precious historic architectural fabric. Whole blocks of Victorians had already been lost. Many of downtown Oakland's handsome early 20th century commercial buildings were knocked down to make way for dreary paved expanses of parking lots. Even the masterpieces, such as Bernard Maybeck's magnificent Packard Showroom by the shores of Lake Merritt, were demolished.  Armed with a fierce determination to protect the precious historic, architectural and cultural legacy of Oakland, the small group began to throw their energy and time into preservation action.

Oakland Heritage Alliance has now grown into an organization of close to a 1000 members. Although the battle to save irreplaceable old buildings continues, the organization has logged an impressive list of historically significant architecture, cultural assets, and unique green spaces, that it has helped save and restore. There is Oakland City Hall, a magnificent Beaux-Arts skyscraper that was nearly demolished because of damage it suffered during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The Fox Oakland Theater, with its exotic blend of Indian, Moorish, Medieval and Baghdadian styles, which one writer dubbed "one part Arab and three parts Hollywood hokum," narrowly escaped becoming a parking lot.

One of Oakland's most distinctive Art Deco buildings, the Floral Depot, with its brilliant cobalt blue and silver glazed terra cotta, was also almost demolished. Now completely restored to its lustrous beauty, it is about to become a stylish restaurant. OHA fought to save Old Merritt College, a rare surviving example of early 20th century California school architecture modeled on California missions, nearly razed to make way for a shopping center. The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The list goes on and on.

Oakland has some of the most architecturally varied and distinctive residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Its architectural heritage includes Art Deco, Victorian, Beaux Arts, and period revivals (Italian Renaissance, Spanish Eclectic, and English cottage), Stick Eastlake and colonial revival. And in the gently rolling hills of Oakland are a seemingly infinite variety of Craftsman homes-charming, rustic, whimsical, modest and grand -many built to provide homes for San Franciscans who moved to the East Bay after the 1906 earthquake, or who sought a sunny summer place to escape the foggy city by the Bay.  There is the exotic Jesse Matteson house, or Sunset House, in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Built in 1905, one writer described it as a cross between a Japanese Bungalow and a Viking ship. There is Bernard Maybeck's elegant and incomparable Guy Hyde Chick house (1913), which, remarkably, survived the 1991 Oakland Hills fire; there is Julia Morgan's remarkable YWCA building in downtown Oakland; homes by John Hudson Thomas; and Storybook style homes with witch's cap turrets by Carr Jones.

A TAKE ON THE TEMESCAL

On Sunday, October 15, the Oakland Heritage Alliance will present a house tour of homes in one of Oakland's most vibrant and historic areas - the Temescal neighborhood. The tour will be from 1-5:30 p.m. Among the houses featured on the tour will be a 1903 Classic Revival house that incorporates a water tower and a c. 1900 house transformed into a mid-century modern house. A 1910 stucco bungalow on the tour features an unusual collection of antiques such as Chinese cinnabar, antique Chinese children's hats, beaded handbags, Victorian lace dresses, black paper dolls, and 19th century ruby Bavarian glass. The tour will also include an 1880 two-story Italianate, as well as an Eastlake and Arts and Crafts bungalow, both undergoing extensive renovation.

The house tour is self-guided and easy to walk. The starting point for the tour is in front of Acorn Kitchen and Bath, 4640 Telegraph Avenue. Proceeds from the tour benefit the Oakland Heritage Alliance. Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 the day of the tour, and $25 for OHA members and include a reception with refreshments. OHA is looking for volunteers to help with the tour and all volunteers will receive complimentary admission to the tour. Contact 510.763.9218 for information or to make reservations, email [email protected], or visit www.oaklandheritage.org.

Valerie Garry, MS Historic Preservation
Vice President, Oakland Heritage Alliance

for more information: Oakland Heritage Alliance is a non-profit membership organization that advocates the protection, preservation, and revitalization of Oakland's architectural, historic, cultural and natural resources though education and action.

For 2006 summer walking tour and fall house tour information, contact: Oakland Heritage Alliance: 446 17th Street, Suite 301 / Oakland, CA 94612, or send us email or call 510.763.9218.

Situated on the edge of New York City's borough of Queens, Forest Hills Gardens is probably the most successful - and best known - example of an English planned garden community in the United States. Originally built as a commuter suburb - even in 1915, just six years after its construction, it was less than 15 minutes from Manhattan's Penn Station by rail - the community was originally planned and built by the Russell Sage Foundation and Cord-Meyer Development Co. beginning in 1909. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the father of landscape architecture and a great craftsman and technician in his own right, collaborated with architect Grosvenor Atterbury to make a community that worked both internally and as part of the world-class city they both realized New York would soon grow into.

This thriving community still offers a lush, green and very much park-like escape for several thousand residents, and suggests solutions for our conflict between limiting sprawl and creating living, working, and above all livable communities. Forest Hills Gardens was home to many visionaries of the time, including Frederic Goudy, one of the foremost typeface and graphic designers of the age and an important figure in the American Arts & Crafts Movement. Goudy even published a monograph in 1915 detailing his own family's many reasons for relocating to the community; unfortunately, the book has not been reprinted, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a copy today. Gustav Stickley's own magazine, The Craftsman, also featured articles and drawings on the community in 1911.

Susan Klaus has written a terrific book on Olmsted's relationship to the community, focusing on the planning of the community and with many illustrations of its history to the present. It's worth a read if you are interested in planned communities in general and how the Arts & Crafts Ideal can be applied to so much more than simply architectural design. Additional photographs of and articles on the community are available online.

Corey Kilgannon reports on the relentless sublimation of all that is old and/or unique, this time the destruction of the beach bungalows lining the path to Far Rockaway Beach in New York:

Richard George lives in a charming little beach bungalow just off the ocean on the eastern end of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens.

Like the homes of his neighbors, his small, three-bedroom shack is cooled by the salty breeze and surrounded by wildflowers and the sandy walkways leading to other lovely old wooden homes that form a beach colony, parts of which look more like Fire Island than New York City.

Mr. George’s home on Beach 24th Street has cotton bedspreads, quaint tablecloths and kitschy artwork. But don’t be fooled by the surroundings: it’s really a war bunker from which he defends his ever-shrinking seaside neighborhood.

At the table in his galley-size kitchen, he assembles legal briefs used to sue developers and city agencies to ward off efforts to demolish the bungalows for newer, bigger housing.

Back when the Rockaways was still a popular ocean resort for New Yorkers, these bungalows were abundant, with many built in the 1920’s. Groucho Marx is said to have invested in 24 of them. Now the largest remaining patch of the historic shacks are the roughly 120 that line three city blocks leading to the dunes in Far Rockaway.

With each passing year, more of the bungalows along Beach 24th, 25th and 26th Streets between Seagirt Boulevard and the boardwalk are demolished by developers building new housing. So far, Mr. George has not been able to get the city to declare the bungalows, many of which are abandoned, landmarks. So he fights local development by filing lawsuits claiming that the projects violate federal coastal regulations by illegally diminishing public access to the waterfront.

Read the complete article online at nytimes.com.

TurnHere ("short films - cool places") is a well-organized library of short video snapshots of residential neighborhoods around the world, mostly shot and narrated by the people who live there. This would be the perfect tool for real estate agents - especially those who handle lots of corporate inter-city relocations - to help their clients pick where they want to concentrate a property search. It's also a great way for real estate voyeurs like us to peek into neighborhoods throughout our country and the rest of the world.

Here's Albany, California, where I grew up; one of my dad's favorite restaurants; and my wife's favorite deli. Pasadena has several films, including one that touches on the Gamble House; you can poke through almost every San Francisco neighborhood in a few dozen short bites, and even take a walk through downtown Santa Barbara - a town with some of the nicest bungalow-full neighborhoods on the west coast.

It'd be great to get more architecture-centric tours - maybe video versions of your own home town's historic home tours? - up on the site. Every film on the site was shot and edited by volunteers, though, so there's certainly plenty of room to contribute an architectural tour of your favorite bungalow neighborhood.

I live in Sacramento, California where a well-built and maintained vintage Craftsman home in one of the older, tree-lined neighborhoods of Midtown runs at quite a premium. I grew up in Berkeley, California, where such houses are even more in demand and real estate costs are so high that dual-earner families must often come close to indenturing themselves or selling off a child to afford a home. However, there are parts of the country where beautiful homes are affordable: for example, this beautiful home, 632 Bonton St. in the charming town of St. Joseph, Missouri, is for sale for $120,000, which makes me shiver when I consider what I paid for my smaller and plainer Mission Revival home. The Bonton house has some unique features, such as this sort of Craftsman / Queen Anne facade with a recessed dormer, an inglenook and a beautiful tiled fireplace, a second fireplace in a formal parlor, a second-floor sleeping porch, sliding pocket doors, and some great internal woodwork. I wonder if I could telecommute from St. Joseph?

PAST (Palo Alto Stanford Heritage) might have worked a little hard on their acronym, but the rest of their energy is even better placed: they are constantly trying to bring attention to Palo Alto's quickly-vanishing historical heritage, as more and more university-related big money renovates, destroys and builds over the historical homes of the area. As of 1997, a huge number of historic homes in Palo Alto's historic neighborhoods of College Terrace, Crescent Park and Professorville (what a name!) had been either drastically remodeled or torn down to make room for new development. Palo Alto's city government has never been nearly as interested in large-scale restoration or conservation of its historic architectural heritage, which is unfortunate; a lot of really beautiful buildings have been lost.

Unfortunately, many folks know Anaheim only as the home of Disneyland. However, the town has a distinguished architectural history and is one of the earliest and best-preserved collections of Arts & Crafts bungalows in Southern California. Resident Phyllis Mueller gives us this short history of the colony:

Anaheim was founded as a colony in 1857 when George Hansen purchased 1,165 acres of land on behalf of the Los Angeles Vineyard Society for the purpose of subdividing the land into vineyards and house lots. Its original boundaries were North, East, South, and West Streets. Anaheim’s wine industry flourished during the early years, but in 1885 the vines were stricken with disease, and the profitable wine industry was destroyed. Soon after, the enterprising colonists recovered by replacing the vineyards with orange groves, lemons, walnuts, and chili peppers.

Greg Clinton, Board President of San Francisco's Westwood Park Association, tells us about one of the earliest and most interesting & architecturally important planned residential neighborhoods in the city - an area many outsiders know only for Louis Mullgardt's entry gates.

Development of Westwood Park began in 1917 by Baldwell and Howell under the architectural supervision of Ida McCain. Westwood Park was the first planned subdivision in San Francisco, consisting of 686 single-family homes mostly in the California bungalow style.  Each house has its own unique detailing. Some bungalows have an Arts & Crafts influence, while others have elements of Spanish Mission or English Tudor.  Several public green areas are dispersed throughout the neighborhood, which provide a feeling of spaciousness and nature, rare in a dense and crowded city like San Francisco. Historic gates and pillars that mark the main entrances to the Park were restored by the Westwood Park Association in 2004.  On the inside, most of our homes have open floor plans, lots of windows and natural light, extensive gumwood trim, custom built-ins, and numerous architectural detailings.

Visit our Westwood Park photo album to see some of the remarkable and varied Craftsman, Deco and Mission homes of this neighborhood!