L.A.'s Quirky Victorian Village

If you blink while passing you'll miss it, but just before the Avenue 43 exit on the Arroyo Seco Parkway amidst the working-class homes and small businesses of Montecito Heights sits a small,  picturesque Victorian village. A restored collection of nineteenth-century houses, a huge Carpenter Gothic church, a red trolley car and a shingled yellow train depot make up the Heritage Square Museum, a "living history museum" that has been quietly working to preserve L.A.'s Victorian architectural history. More impressive is that they have been doing so without the assistance of big donors or crowds for more than 40 years.

Established in 1969 by the Cultural Heritage Board, The Heritage Square Museum was a response to the rapidly increasing demolition of Los Angeles's historic landmarks and neighborhoods. The five-member panel was given the authority to designate Historic-Cultural Monuments in the city of Los Angeles and it was among the first of its kind in the country, predating New York's Landmarks Preservation Law by three years. Most of the buildings sprung up during the first L.A. land boom of the 1880s, and some of these structures stood nearly alone in neighborhoods like Bunker Hill (which had been razed to make way for modern developments). Others no longer fit in with their neighborhoods, like the train depot that sat condemned behind a furniture store in Palms. Over the past four decades, Heritage Square Museum has acquired and begun the restoration on eight historically significant buildings along acres of period appropriate landscaped grounds.

As the pictures below show, the village is fascinating glimpse into the past. A perfect example is the beautifully restored Hale House, built in 1887 at the base of Mount Washington by real estate developer George Morgan. The multi-colored, turreted, upper-middle class house  is a mixture of the Queen Anne and Eastlake styles of architecture and definitely lives up to what the L.A. Times called "'picturesque eclectic" from the "age of exuberance". Another standout is the 1876 William Hayes Perry residence (also known as Mount Pleasant House), considered by many to be the first proper "mansion" built in Los Angeles. 

Perhaps the oddest building is the 1893 Longfellow-Hastings Octagon House, one of the two examples of this strange, fad architecture left in the state. Conceived in the 1840s by amateur architect and scientific quack , Orson S. Fowler, the octagon house plan enjoyed a brief heyday in the East and Midwest in the years before the Civil War. These eight-sided houses, featuring flat roofs and wraparound verandas and were believed to be healthful and cost efficient, letting in more natural light and cheaper to construct and heat. Their popularity had died out by the 1860's so the end-of-century construction date of the one in Heritage Village is an anomaly.