A new crack in the old neighborhood
The Windsor Square preservation debate has divided the area. Some fear friendships will suffer long after the issue has been decided.
By Janet Eastman
Thursday June 24, 2004
Preservation.
It seems like a concept that is embraced along with motherhood and democracy. Yet it has set neighbor against neighbor in Windsor Square, a courtly slice of Los Angeles known for its historic manors, preened lawns and deep community pride.
Homeowners who spend Saturdays side by side planting crape myrtle and magnolia trees in keeping with century-old parkway designs are divided on a pending preservation plan. It's making sensible people act out on a level that one resident likened to "a church fight."
There are claims of Internet warfare, party snubs and a "Stepford Wives" mentality. The landscape too has changed. Dueling lawn signs -- more than 700 for or against the proposal -- popped up in front yards in March.
Here's what happened to ruffle residents of these 68 blocks in the Mid-Wilshire area:
Five years ago, a few longtimers launched the idea of making Windsor Square a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, which means a homeowner would need the approval of a design review board before changing a house's exterior.
The Los Angeles City Planning Commission approved the special zoning May 27. There will be a hearing by the City Council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee this summer, and the City Council will probably decide the issue soon afterward. Then Mayor James K. Hahn will be asked to approve it.
As the idea has crept closer to becoming a reality, neighbors have separated into two camps: Those who want to keep the period-revival houses -- most of which were built around 1920 -- as they are; and those who don't want to relinquish their right to control what they can do to their own homes.
"People who buy high-income properties do not want to be told what to do," one owner said at a hearing on the new zoning. She moved out of another protected neighborhood because the oversight involved in enlarging a deck was "like living in a prison."
A prison?
Overstatement is common in these charged situations, says Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester in New York.
"Some people think of historic houses as belonging to the community," he says, but "homeownership is also considered by most Americans to be a sacred right. They respond badly to being told what they can and cannot do to their home. It is almost like being told what you can and cannot do to your own body."
When the issue of public good versus individual rights involves the financial and emotional investment of a home, he says, debates can get less friendly and may stay that way.
A Windsor Square homeowner opposed to the historic zone idea says others like her worry about feeling permanently alienated from neighbors once the City Council has made a decision. Will they still be invited to holiday parties? Feel comfortable pitching in for beautification projects? Or will they have to put on their boxing gloves instead of their gardening gloves?
"Whether they have a problem depends on if they act reasonably to resolve conflict," says Reis. "Other neighborhoods have survived."
In Los Angeles, there are 17 Historic Preservation Overlay Zones and 15 that are in line to become one, says Ken Bernstein of the Los Angeles Conservancy, a nonprofit preservation group that guides homeowners in the process. The first HPOZ was named 20 years ago to protect the Victorian homes in Angelino Heights. The latest zone, approved last year, is three blocks of midcentury tract homes in Mar Vista designed by Modernist architect Gregory Ain.
For now in Windsor Square, an Interim Control Ordinance is handling issues including teardowns and monster-sizing, building a home that fills up the lot.
The proposed preservation ordinance -- revised to appease more residents -- would also focus on keeping the area's architectural features intact; that is, the half-timbering treatment of a Tudor Revival, arcaded porch of a Spanish Colonial Revival and iron grillwork of a Mediterranean. Clean-lined contemporary designs would not fit the classic mix and would be nixed.
This has pro-zone resident Bob Burke breathing easier. He mentions a newly constructed home, an unadorned modern, outside Windsor Square but close enough for traditionalists to fret about.
"Frankly, it looks like an army barracks on the northern slopes of Afghanistan," says Burke, who grew up in the neighborhood and was an environmentalist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Jimmy Carter's presidency. "It shows you that you can't rely on anyone's good sense."
With 1,100 houses, Windsor Square has one of the largest collections of period revival-style homes in the county, says the Conservancy's Bernstein. In the early 1950s, the neighbors successfully fought an effort by oil mogul J. Paul Getty to tear down homes to build his world headquarters.
Some single-story ranch- and Craftsman-style houses were built on empty lots then, but the area is known for stately three-story homes designed by Paul Williams and other traditional architects. Movie stars and philanthropists built mansions buffered from the streets by grassy inclines and curving driveways. The mayor's official residence is here too, although Hahn doesn't live in it.
Until recently, Windsor Square has been left to grow old gracefully. A survey, commissioned for the HPOZ review, says 89% of its homes have historic charm. People who bought here were attracted not only to the architecture, but also to the size of the houses and lots that they could buy for less than similar ones in Beverly Hills and other established areas.
This latest real estate boom, however, has lured buyers who don't care about the old dwellings as much as the land and its location, says John LaViolette, a supporter of the preservation zone.
LaViolette, who lives with his family in an ornate Queen Anne built in 1899, says: "Some people object [to the proposed zone] because of civil libertarian or economic reasons, but this is the time for us to not let the property values dictate the aesthetics of the neighborhood. It's not going to be preserved unless we protect it."
Laura Christa, who owns a sweeping Italianate home on the same street as LaViolette, is against the idea because she thinks the ordinance is "drastic" for an area in which residents already respect its history.
"Every person who has purchased a house here has done so assuming they could do what they wanted to it," she says. "Is it fair now to pull the rug out from under them and say, 'Now we're in charge'?"
She questions a design review board deciding what changes would be appropriate for a dozen architectural styles. "I saw a review of 'The Stepford Wives' and it made me think of what an HPOZ would do to Windsor Square: turn it into a museum of Stepford homes," she says. "Rather than embrace and respect the gentle evolution of design choices over the years, an HPOZ would freeze the neighborhood in the year 2004. I won't always like the design choices my neighbors make, but that's life in America."
If the design review board requests that replacement materials match existing ones, Christa says it could be too costly for neighbors on fixed incomes. "Can they afford to make the changes?" she wonders. "If they can't, they won't make them and that could lead to decline."
She said she would accept the proposal if she were sure most of the owners agreed with the idea.
Both sides say they represent the majority, and they have the petitions, letters, e-mails, lawn sign displays and informal polling to prove it. But the numbers are murky: A husband spoke out at a meeting against the proposal, but his home was counted as in favor of it because his wife signed a pro-zone petition.
Margaret Hudson, head of Windsor Square's preservation advocacy group, says she has collected more than 1,000 signatures approving the idea. She fell for HPOZ's brand of preservation after restoring her 1921 Georgian Colonial while watching her neighbors tear out their double-hung wood windows and replace them with aluminum ones.
Hudson, a marketing specialist, says her group's campaign has been copied by her opponents. She posted the benefits of the program on a website that uses her slogan, "Go HPOZ," as its web address (www.gohpoz.org). Soon after, the other side put its views on a site with the same "gohpoz" beginning but ending in the more common ".com" (www.gohpoz.com). "These Internet wars are confusing people," she says.
Where does it end? "A compromise?" asks a hopeful Christa.
The Getty Conservation Institute has a free book, "Incentives for the Preservation and Rehabilitation of Historic Homes in the City of Los Angeles" available online at: www.getty.edu/conservation/publications /pdfpublications/historic-homes.pdf.