A High-Octane Property Dispute

Their family dynasty once embraced 6,656 acres and included 4 1/2 miles of some of California’s most beautiful beachfront.

These days, descendants of Spanish land-grant owner Francisco Marquez are down to their last 17,000 square feet deep inside Santa Monica Canyon.

And as it’s often been for the last 165 years, Marquez family property is again in the middle of a tug-of-war.

The fight this time is not over entitlement to the sweeping mesa that forms the center of today’s Pacific Palisades. Or the glittering coastline that is now Will Rogers State Beach.

This dispute is over Angelina Marquez Olivera’s filling station.

Until her death two years ago at age 85, “Angie” Olivera lived in the house in which she was born -- a small cottage behind the tiny three-pump gas station that is the last piece of the family’s once vast holdings.

Family members now trying to settle her estate want to sell the Entrada Drive site for $2.1 million. The buyer is a neighbor who intends to remove the station and the cottage and turn the lot into part of his backyard.

But others in the upscale coastal canyon separating Santa Monica from Pacific Palisades want to preserve the 80-year-old gas station, which they claim is a last-of-a-kind Los Angeles landmark.

In hopes of delaying the sale until preservationists can buy the property, the Santa Monica Canyon Civic Assn. has asked Los Angeles to declare the station a “historic cultural monument.” Officials are scheduled to act on the request Wednesday.

Olivera’s heirs contend the neighbors’ appreciation comes a little late. They say the canyon pioneer spent the last 30 years of her life as a widow struggling to keep the gas station in operation. Times were so tough that she had to take a public bus to a housekeeping job so her three children could have medical insurance.

The squabble over the Marquez family’s last chunk of canyon land caps more than 150 years of frequent acrimony over ownership and use of the Spanish land-grant property.

“Where were all these people when my mother-in-law was fighting for variance after variance for that station?” asked Frances Olivera. “People moved into lovely homes in the canyon and then said the station was an eyesore.”

Said Angie Olivera’s granddaughter, Keli O’Connor: “It hurts so much to see what our family has gone through. They’ve pushed us for generations. I’m sick of it.”

Preservationists say the circa-1924 station is one of the few remaining examples of the era that ushered in Southern California’s car culture.

“The station is the soul of the canyon,” says Quentin Fleming, a leader of the canyon association. “If we lose it, we lose something more than a building. This station calls out to us every time we drive by it. It’s a landmark.”

Both sides might agree on one thing: The dispute marks an inglorious end to Santa Monica Canyon’s historic Marquez era.

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No one is more familiar with the Marquez family imprint on Santa Monica Canyon than Ernest Marquez.

The 80-year-old former aerospace industry illustrator is the great-grandson of Francisco Marquez, the Mexican-born blacksmith who in 1831 moved to the canyon from Los Angeles and built the area’s first adobe.

For a half century, Ernest Marquez has been the family’s historian, even writing a book, the recently published “Santa Monica Beach, A Collector’s Pictorial History.”

These days, Marquez lives in Canoga Park. His branch of the family was forced out of the canyon in 1954 when Los Angeles city officials acquired their home through eminent domain in order to expand Canyon Elementary School.

Of the hundreds of Marquez family descendants scattered around Los Angeles, only three -- O’Connor, Monica Queen and Rosemary Miano -- still live in the canyon.

None enjoys the trappings of wealth one might expect from the expansive Spanish land grant. In fact, most of them have no memory of the family’s canyon days. Many are unaware that their ancestors once owned what is now some of the most valuable land in the region.

“None of us are wealthy,” said Marquez. “This family grew up on a rancho, uneducated, not the type of people who sought riches or the advantage of being better than anyone else.

“I try not to think about the land we no longer own. You have to think about the time they were living and the time you’re living now. Just because ancestors did certain things, you can’t let that bother you.”

In his great-grandfather’s day, property didn’t always equate with financial wealth.

“Back then, land wasn’t an asset, it was a liability. You had land, but no money to pay taxes. You were land poor -- there was lots of vacant land all over the place.”

Grazing lands in the hills and canyons northwest of Los Angeles were there for the taking in 1839, when Francisco Marquez and a friend, Ysidro Reyes, obtained rights to what was called Rancho Boca de Santa Monica.

The pair assumed control of land stretching from a ravine near what is now Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue westward along the ocean to Topanga Canyon. Their rancho’s boundaries ran inland from the sea to roughly Sullivan Canyon.

The 10-square-mile rancho was under attack almost from the beginning. Neighboring rancher Francisco Sepulveda tried to take parts of it in the 1840s. By the 1870s, investors were nibbling away at it, buying chunks for as little as $3 an acre.

Construction of a rail line to a 4,700-foot ocean wharf touted as Los Angeles’ “port” set off a flurry of development in the 1890s. Most of the Marquez land had been parceled off by 1925, when the family was forced to go to federal court to keep a homesteader from seizing 10 remaining acres of prime beachfront.

But they clung to individual plots in the canyon, including a small cemetery next to what is now San Lorenzo Street. Family members were buried there between 1848 and 1916.

Down the hill from the graveyard, Francisco Marquez’s grandson, Perfecto Marquez, built a family resort in the 1920s that he called the Villa San Pasqual Picnic Grounds. Along with 10 small vacation rental cabins, he installed gasoline pumps in front of a 15-square-foot building he named the West End Station.

Family land holdings, meanwhile, continued to dwindle. A chunk was donated for use by Canyon School. Large swaths were taken in the 1950s for the channelization of the canyon’s creek and for the school expansion. Four acres behind the gas station were sold in 1979 for a 10-house subdivision.

In November, Marquez was in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking to maintain what he described as “a recorded easement” that serves as access to the family cemetery.

These days, the small graveyard, shaded by trees and tucked behind a Spanish-style gateway, is landlocked by privately owned residential property.

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A chain-link fence now blocks the entrance to the Marquez gas station. Queen erected it in November after she closed the station in preparation for its sale.

Queen, 63, is the daughter of Angie Olivera. She lives in her mother’s old home, a tiny, 100-year-old board-and-batten-sided cottage behind the station. Queen was born there.

These days, she shares the house with niece O’Connor, 28. Another relative, Miano, lives in a small house farther down the canyon. They are the last of the family to occupy Marquez Spanish-grant land.

“The station is how we got by, our income,” Queen said. For one 11-year stretch, her mother, who never owned a car, took the bus to a housekeeping job at Santa Monica Hospital -- not only for extra spending money, but to qualify for health insurance.

By the 1960s, the other modest cottages and bungalows left from the canyon’s early days were giving way to multimillion-dollar mansions. And the canyon’s eclectic mix of artists, writers and blue-collar types was giving way to wealthy professionals.

Now, “we can’t afford to live here,” said Queen.

Her brother, Vincent Olivera, a 60-year-old Culver City electrician, worries that the preservation dispute will be costly to him, Queen and three other heirs to Angie Olivera’s estate.

“If the sale is delayed, it’s going to create a hardship for us. We’re still paying for the gasoline tanks we put in four years ago,” he said.

In the late 1990s, Angie Olivera and Queen fought to win a zoning variance so entrepreneur Brian Clark could wash and detail cars at the station. For his part, Clark spent $50,000 retrofitting the station to give it a 1930s look. Soon, actors Anthony Hopkins and Jamie Lee Curtis and comedian Jay Leno were among its celebrity customers.

Angie Olivera died in 2002 as a canyon neighbor was waging a dogged campaign to overturn the car-detailing variance. When city officials turned resident Theodore Stolman down, he sued in Superior Court and lost. Earlier last year, he took his case before the state Court of Appeal and won, forcing the city to rescind Clark’s variance Aug. 17.

By that time, Angie Olivera’s survivors were attempting to sell the gas station site for $2.3 million. Although Clark and other station supporters talked of buying it, the family entered into escrow with Chris Hoffmann, owner of the adjoining property. He’s an investment banker whose plan is to leave the Marquez lot undeveloped, although it is large enough to allow construction of several homes.

Family members said Hoffmann has agreed to uproot the gas station and give it to the Petersen Automotive Museum. They argue that the agreed-to sale price of $2.1 million will preserve both the station’s history and a Marquez family inheritance.

“This is my history. My grandmother preserved this property for us,” heir Michelle LaFreniere told the Cultural Heritage Commission in November.

“Even though land was stolen from us in the past, we have given to the history of Santa Monica Canyon because we are the history of Santa Monica Canyon.”