Living Monument : Model Project to Blend Preservation and Affordable Housing

The old Nelson Dunning House in Hollywood, which some believe to be haunted, will still be around to provide shelter for its ghosts. And soon, they’ll have some company: 26 low- and moderate-income families that need a place to call home.

After years of bureaucratic battles, delays and plans, efforts to save the historic ranch house from demolition and simultaneously provide low-income housing will finally come to fruition.

Groundbreaking on the project is expected within the next few weeks.

City officials, developers and preservationists plan to be on hand to proudly call attention to what they say is a model for combining preservation and the creation of affordable housing.

“This is great news for Hollywood,” said William Delvac, president of the nonprofit Hollywood Community Housing Corp. “It just shows that you can harmonize new construction with historic buildings.

“This house has a lot of pizazz--it is Hollywood before the film industry,” Delvac said. “We’re lucky that it has survived until today so we can rehab it into affordable housing and build around it.”

Councilman Michael Woo created Delvac’s group in 1989 in part to save the Dunning House. He said the project “will stand as a monument to our commitment to providing affordable housing.”

A dark and brooding chocolate-brown house with olive and maroon trim, the Dunning House is noted for its huge leaded-glass windows, overhanging eaves and beamed ceilings. It stands, slightly askew, at 5552 Carlton Way, at the southeast corner of St. Andrews Place.

Named after one of the city’s first developers, it was built in 1906 among the citrus groves that have since become Hollywood. At the time, nearby Western Avenue was just a dirt wagon trail heading up into the hills.

Today, the imposing structure is one of the few remaining houses in an area overtaken by graffiti, junked cars and boxy apartment buildings, a stone’s throw from the blighted intersection of Western and Hollywood Boulevard.

Sheltered behind fig, peach and towering date palm trees, the Dunning House remains a classic example of the early West Coast Craftsman/Victorian style architecture--a huge wooden structure built sturdy enough to withstand the elements, yet open and airy enough for its inhabitants to enjoy the California sunshine.

Through the years, the Dunning House has become a legend of sorts, a place which some say is inhabited by ghosts that make the floors creak, rustle the overhanging canopy of avocado trees, and make the wind howl through the eaves. Children used to sneak up the driveway to stare wide-eyed at the old home, expecting to see ghosts and apparitions.

Ghosts or no ghosts, the Dunning House has been the source of controversy since 1988, when a company called Diversified Income Properties announced that it bought the property and planned to build 46 market-rate apartments on the site.

Preservationists, led by a couple who have rented the front part of the house for eight years, blocked its demolition and scrambled to get the city to protect the house as a cultural and historical monument.

In mid-1989, the developer sold the house to Delvac’s group and its partner, the Los Angeles Community Design Center, for $1 million. The two nonprofit groups have received a $1.5-million grant from the city Community Redevelopment Agency, and $1.2 million from a pool of corporate investors that will help pay for the expected $4.1 million in construction and related costs.

Construction was delayed for more than a year as the groups struggled to get tax credits from the state for their corporate investors. The credits, Delvac said, finally came through in March. Two weeks ago, the groups wrapped up all the construction contracts needed to start the work.

Plans call for keeping the Dunning House intact as two apartments. The rest of the apartment units will be built around the house, many of them facing the Grant Elementary School on St. Andrews Place. Rent will be as low as $293, and most units will be for families.

Although Woo supported the nomination of the house as a historic monument, some critics accuse him and CRA officials of taking credit for a preservation effort they initially opposed.

Paul Gordon and Donna Williams, the couple who led the initial fight to save the house, said they tried for months to get Woo, the CRA and local preservationists to help them. They say that they got no help, and even some opposition, at first.

Woo’s office concedes that it didn’t try to protect the house initially, saying that it was too late since the developer had gotten the required demolition permits.

Gordon and Williams were not mentioned by Woo staffers or the CRA as taking part in any efforts to save the house. And they said they have been told to move out of the house before the end of this week. And they said they were never even told of the upcoming groundbreaking ceremony.

“That is the clearest indication of what they feel our place in this is--an embarrassment,” Gordon said. “We won the war . . . and now Michael Woo is taking the credit. We are worried that Michael Woo will be seen as a preservationist, when he is anything but.”

“I think he is way off base,” Woo said of Gordon’s charges. “If it weren’t for me or my office, the money wouldn’t have been there to save the house. He deserves credit for sounding the alarm, but we got the wheels of government moving.”