City’s oldest house perishes in fire

Eron Ben-Yehuda

HUNTINGTON BEACH -- A historical landmark was lost last week when the

city’s oldest house burned down to the ground.

Fire officials are still investigating last Wednesday’s blaze that

completely engulfed the Northam Ranch Building by Yorktown Avenue and

Lake Street, across from City Hall.

A group of residents had hoped to restore the abandoned home. The group,

made up of members of the Huntington Beach Historical Society, toured the

property in January.

“We could actually visualize the house brought to life,” said Cathy

Green, a Historical Society member.

That dream went up in smoke.

“I’m horrified,” she said.

The Victorian-era home stood on its grassy knoll for more than 100 years.

Back then, the mansion and carriage house stood watch over 1,400 acres of

wide-open agricultural land.

“You could see everything from there,” said Connie Mandic, another

Historical Society member and a city planning commissioner.

Colonel Robert J. Northam, who owned all the surrounding land, had the

house moved there in 1897 from its original spot in Buena Park. With the

high cost of lumber at the time, moving a house was cheaper than building

a new one.

In the early 1900s, a group of real estate investors, known as the

Huntington Beach Co., took over the residence and the land. The ranch

house became the company’s base of operations over the years, with many

of its local managers staying there.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, development crowded around, but the house remained

isolated behind trees and brush.

As recently as the mid-1980s, the best Christmas bashes in town were held

there, Green said.

“You had to be on that [guest] list to be anybody,” she said.

The property fell into disrepair soon after local developer PLC Land Co.

took over in 1996, Mandic said.

Since May 1998, the house was supposed to remain vacant, but vandals and

vagrants kept breaking in, said Bill Holman, the development company’s

director of planning and government relations.

“It was impossible to keep people out of there,” he said.

Mandic said she asked PLC to hire on-site security guards instead of just

relying on a chain-link fence and no-trespassing signs.

Fire officials suspect transients are to blame for the two-alarm fire,

said Birgit Davis, Huntington Beach Fire Department spokeswoman.

By the time fire trucks arrived at 11:19 p.m., the house was fully

engulfed in flames, she said. Because the wooden building was so old,

firefighters didn’t go in, preferring to contain the blaze, which finally

died around 5 a.m. the following day, she said.

Despite the push for restoration, PLC planned to demolish the property to

make way for 17 homes. Holman said the cost of preservation was too high.

“Who is going to pay $1 million to have a house that’s going to sit there

and become dilapidated again?” he asked.

With Northam Ranch House gone, Newland House on Beach Boulevard becomes

the city’s oldest house. That house, which is now a museum, was built in

1898.