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HomeMy WebLinkAboutItem 09 - COUNCIL READING FILE_e_Property Description (Papp)Application to Remove from the Contributing List 644 Mountain View Street Introduction 1 CAUG- Timeline 2 Historic Context 3 History of 644 Mountain View 7 Master and Contributing List Comparisons 10 Heimatstil Architecture 12 Architecture of 644 Mountain View 14 Integrity of 644 Mountain View 16 Introduction The health of a historic preservation program depends on (1) identifying and protecting resources of significance and integrity and (2) distinguishing these from resources lacking significance or integrity. Diluted historic resources lists, with designations for which there is not a clear, empirical explanation, risk loss of legal and political support. In the effort to prepare San Luis Obispo neighborhoods for designation as historic districts, there has been, in the past, wholesale designation of old buildings as Contributing resources with little rationale and no documentation beyond a one -word, often incorrect assignment of style. Volunteer surveyors with cursory training were ill equipped to recognize distinctions of significance and integrity that are challenging even for preservation professionals. In addition, when a historic district failed to materialize, what styles contributed to it never became defined. As a result, Contributing designation in San Luis Obispo has in many cases reflected the fear of losing a building rather than an attempt to understand it. The primary residence at 644 Mountain View Street, built in 1927, was put on the Contributing List when the Anholm Tract and Mount Pleasanton Square were initially surveyed as a historic district in 1998-99. It is one of 78 Contributing List and 3 Master List resources in the two tracts, about a quarter of the total number of houses there. The large proportion of listings and the imbalance between Master and Contributing resources suggests that buildings were listed as a preventative against loss—or further loss—of the planned district's integrity without being rigorously assessed for individual significance. Detailed research and analysis of 644 Mountain View shows it did not then and does not now qualify for either the Master or Contributing List, having no association with events or persons of historic significance; not embodying, in any consistent or substantial fashion, the Swiss -German Heimatstil to which it cursorily refers; and lacking integrity of design, workmanship, and materials through the later addition of a sun porch to the entrance facade and aluminum siding over the entire house. As 644 Mountain View has neither the architectural significance nor the integrity to qualify it for the Contributing List, leaving it on would devalue those properties that do belong on the list and undermine the significance of the list as a whole. Submitted for [?] by James Papp, Historian and Architectural Historian, Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualifications Timeline 1887 George Anholm arrives in San Luis Obispo from Danish -speaking Germany as a teenager. He works in construction of the Southern Pacific's Cuesta Grade tunnels and also farms in the Chorro Valley, joining a network of Danish - speaking immigrants 1891 Chris Anholm, George's brother, arrives in San Luis Obispo AWOL from the German Army, and works for George on the latter's farm 1918 George and Chris Anholm purchase equal shares of ranchland between Cerro San Luis and Stenner Creek from McD. R. Venable's widow Alice for $10,500 each. This will become the Anholm Addition. 1921 J. A. Stebbins, former president of the Fresno Realty Exchange, advocate of the City Beautiful movement, and owner of a Sacramento tire store, advertises the thirty -acre Stebbins Tract, with one -acre lots, southeast of the Sacramento city limits, including electricity, water, and room to "make the home help support you" by growing vegetables and raising poultry. In the same year he moves into a bungalow on the tract and begins to offer prebuilt houses for sale. 1924-36 Evabelle Long -Fuller teaches music and drama at the Polytechnic School and San Luis Obispo Conservatory of Music and Arts, directs the First Presbyterian Church choir, and directs a large number of community recitals and plays for the Monday Club, night school, and charity groups 1925 Preliminary plat for the Anholm Tract filed with the City of San Luis Obispo 1927 May The map of Anholm's Addition to the City of San Luis Obispo is filed with the county recorder June J. A. Stebbins visits friends in San Luis Obispo July Rex Fuller and Evabelle Long -Fuller take out a mortgage for $2,500 on Lot Six, T1__1_'•__ A__1__1___ AJJ_v ___ ___7_ •11L __/ 4/ T4_____t____[�___._(�i____ D1U1:1( J1X, H1111U1111 HUU1L1V 11—Wlldt W111 UCl;V111C O`YO 1�1UU11Ld111 V 1CW Jl.l CCt 1928 J. A. Stebbins sells his tire store in Sacramento, takes a "long holiday" in Honolulu, and then arrives in San Luis Obispo. The 40 -acre Anholm Tract begins sales, with prices from $400 to $700 per lot. The agent is Stebbins, who can also provide prebuilt houses. 1929 Stebbins runs his last advertisement for houses in the Anholm Addition, targeting Southern Pacific workers 1933-34 Evabelle Long -Fuller is founding director of the Little Theater Rex Fuller is mentioned in the Telegram as district administrator and investigator for the new state sales tax and liquor tax Foreclosure sales of Anholm and Mount Pleasanton Square properties take place 2 1936 Rex Fuller is transferred back from Fresno but soon transferred to San Jose. Sidney Lawrence, a clerk at the Sauer Grocery, and his wife Norma Phillips, a young couple who have been living at various addresses including relatives' houses, move into 644 Mountain View. 1940 The 1940 US Census shows the Lawrences and their three children still at 644 Mountain View and Sidney still working as a grocery clerk 1946 Harry Truesdale, former county auditor, is living with his daughter and son-in- law, Margaret and Palmer Nelson, when he is appointed police court judge by the city council 1959 The Nelsons are still living at 644 Mountain View Historic Context Planned mass housing is not a new idea. The housing of ancient farms and hamlets often shows an internal consistency that suggests leaders organized housing to be built for slaves, serfs, or other dependents. Civilization is defined by specialization and the concentration of wealth, and with the rise or urban and suburban agglomerations, the skills for building housing became more specialized: the rich built mass housing for the less well off and became richer for doing so. The Industrial Revolution invented the factory town, where huge numbers of workers had to be housed very quickly by their employers, and vast tracts of cheap, attached, identical rowhouses sprang up. Rowhouses were also developed for the urban middle and upper class, who needed or wanted to live in close proximity to one another but who, having more money and more choice, were offered amenities of size, comfort, and design. Finally, the purpose-built apartment building, a characteristic of Ancient Rome, emerged again in the modern city—sometimes, as in Budapest and Paris, accommodating different classes on different floors; sometimes, as in London and New York, being segregated to a single class. For those who needed proximity to the commercial economy of a city but preferred more space, light, and nature, suburbs were at first serendipitous: once -rural villages in the process of being subsumed. But soon the concept of a purpose-built suburb took hold, sometimes incorporating a more ancient village core, sometimes plowing it under, sometimes creating a twee replica. The first planned mass housing in San Luis Obispo came from the Spanish, who used it as a means of organization and control of the Chumash, who had been living in scattered domed and thatched huts built to be temporary. Father Pedro Font, stopping here in 1776 with the De Anza expedition, described the village complex this way: The Mission of San Luis is situated at a beautiful site on a little height above an arroyo of the most beautiful water, near the Santa Lucia range, nine miles from the sea, with fertile lands and pretty fields. The fabric of the mission consists of a quadrilateral jacalon grande, with a square hall in the middle and four rooms at each corner, with light from two doors: the entrance to the hall and the opening to a small patio and the kitchen and corrals; separate from this is another jacal for the church; and to one side are some jacalitos where sleep, locked up, the converted maidens [... ]; in front of the mission is the barracks and the jacalitos or rancheria of the Christian Indians, which forms a half plaza: all of which is curiously constructed of tule, palisades,' and adobe—because providence has provided nothing else—and there is consequently risk of fire. (Fray Pedro Font Diario Intimo y Diario de Fray Tomas Eixarch, Julio Cesar Montane Marti, ed [Hermosillo, Universidad de Sonora, 2000], pp. 224-25) Jacal is an Indian word from Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico, and jacales are built of palings stuck in the ground and covered with mud with a roof of anything to hand. They are not sophisticated dwellings, and as Font foresaw, the complex soon burnt down—and was rebuilt and caught on fire twice more. After the church and convento were finally rebuilt of adobe brick and more fireproof tile in 1793 by craftsmen sent by the Mexican government, and the mission's utilitarian back buildings were upgraded over the ensuing decade, the Franciscans turned their attention to Indian housing. Between 1801 and 1810, the Indians built 80 adobe and tile houses with windows, in two rows on either side of Chorro Street, measuring 17 feet wide and 20 from front to back (Paul H. Kocher, Mission San Luis Obispo: A Historical Sketch [San Luis Obispo: Blake, 1972), p. 34; Edith Webb, "Pages from the History of Mission San Luis Obispo," California History Nugget, Jan. 1938, p. 117). Some or all of them would appear to have been detached, with front windows and side entries. Of this linear, orderly, and permanent housing development, only three structures survive: the two ground floor interior rooms of the Saner -Adams Adobe and the Sauer Adobe next door. The mission was also behind the next tract housing in San Luis Obispo: the Mission Vineyard Tract. The mission's building, vineyard, and orchard were returned by the American government to the Catholic Church, which sold off the 160 or so acres of the vineyard for business and housing, comprising most of today's downtown from San Luis Creek south to approximately Buchon Street and between Broad and Santa Rosa. In the 1870 R. R. Harris and H. D. Ward map of San Luis Obispo commissioned by the Board of Trustees, the vineyard was yet to be mapped out for city blocks, along with most other areas south of San Luis Creek, including land held by Murray and Pierre Dallidet. In the 1894 map by city engineer C. W. Henderson, these three areas had become the Vineyard, Murray and Church, and Dallidet Tracts. They were joined on Henderson's map by Reed's, South Side, Buena Vista, La Belle, the Phillips Addition, Phillips and Beebe, Phillips Syndicate, Central Addition, Schwartz, Loomis and Osgood, Imperial, Isabel, Maymont, Fairview, Harford, South Side, Brizzolara, Hathway, Arlington, Deleissiguez, Buckley, and Fixlini. The town was ready for expansion from local farmers and speculators. The slump of the 1890s put off much of this anticipated development. In 1888, for instance, Captain Charles Goodall and former California governor George Perkins, owners of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company and Pacific Coast Railway, built a horse-drawn street railway from the PCR depot on the west end of town to their grand new Hotel Ramona—"as beautiful as the heroine after whom it is named"—on the east end of town and subdivided, sewered, and macadamized the area around it, which they called the Central Addition. Their Buena Vista Addition was anticipated to rise to the top of Terrace (then Terraced) 1. Panizada in the original, which doesn't exist; presumably palizada was intended. 4 Hill. Buena Vista also had a trolley extension, was near the PCR's route south, and was next to the surveyed Southern Pacific Line, which would finally be completed in 1894. Goodall and Perkins simultaneously marketed the Phillips Addition around Mill Street between Johnson and Grand, for which they had the street railway franchise but as yet no track. The street railway was never built on Grand. The Hotel Ramona closed in December 1894, seven months after the Southern Pacific arrived, for lack of business. The next year it reopened under the management of one of Goodall and Perkins' minority partners, R. E. Jack. He bought the street railway system, still only two and a half miles long, five years later and shut it down the following year. The Ramona burned down in 1905, seventeen years after it was built, causing Jack and the Goldtrees' County Bank of San Luis Obispo to fail. There is no photographic, cartographic, or built evidence, that any of these areas had been successfully developed during those years, apart from a few scattered cottages at the base of Terrace Hill, despite San Luis Obispo's population rising by 71 percent between 1900—when the SP's line to Los Angeles was completed—and 1910. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tracts in the western United States tended to offer individuals lots to build on rather than ready -built housing in rows. It's not clear whether this was because of a lack of necessity to house large numbers, a lack of capital to build for them, an Old West tendency toward individualism, or all three. The absence of building developments, however, has given late nineteenth- and early - twentieth -century San Luis Obispo its characteristic architectural variety. In the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas there was more tendency to build housing developments than in California's smaller towns, but even there, substantial developer - built tracts only arrived after World War 1, with, for instance, Henry Doelger and Carl and Fred Gellert (the latter Joan Gellert-Sargen's father) in San Francisco's Sunset District, where a cheerful Eclecticism relieved mass production. After World War I1, Doelger and the Gellerts moved their efforts to Daly City. Mid -Century Modernism did less to allay the sense of sameness the hillside tracts gave, and Malvina Reynolds got the inspiration for her hit song "Little Boxes" driving by Daly City in 1962. In late 1923, San Luis Obispans were able to buy lots in Mount Pleasanton Square (Broad, Benton, and Mount Pleasanton (now Chorro) between Murray and Meinecke, and by 1927 in the Anholm Addition (directly south, Lincoln to Broad and Murray). George and Chris Anholm were ethnic Danes from the village Fole (German Fohl) near Haderslev (German Hadersleben) in Schleswig-Holstein, whose disputed ownership between Denmark and Germany inspired the observation apocryphally attributed to Lord Palmerston: "Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it" (Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria [New York: Harcourt, 1921], p. 364). The Anholms were born within the decade after the Second Schleswig War, which assigned Holstein to Austria and Schleswig to Prussia, which two years later seized Holstein from Austria in the Austro -Prussian War. Hence George had good reason to go to America at fifteen and Chris to join him three years later, AWOL from the German Army. Fole and Haderslev returned to Denmark in the Scheswig plebiscite of 1920, but by then George and Chris were in their late forties, American citizens, successful farmers, and had already 5 embarked on a property development that would occupy them for three decades. In 1918—Chris having just returned from Denmark with his new wife and child—the two brothers bought from Judge McDowell Reid Venable's widow Alice equal shares of ranchland between Cerro San Luis and Stenner Creek, for $10,500 each. The Telegram much later referred to the Anholm Tract being built in the area known as Chinese Gardens. According to a map at the History Center, it had held Ah Louis's first brickyard circa 1872- 87 and his vegetable and seed gardens, so presumably Ah Louis rented from Venable. George Anholm lived and farmed nearby. In 1921 James A. Stebbins, a prominent Fresno real estate man who had relocated to Sacramento and opened his own tire and automobile accessories store, subdivided a thirty - acre tract across the southeast limits of the state capital at what is now 58th Street below 14th Avenue. For $75 down and $10 a month, people tired of renting—"Mr. Rent Payer ... use judgment like your landlord did—build a home"—could become owners of an acre lot with all city services and no city taxes (Stebbins Tract advertisement, Sacramento Union, 17 Apr. 1921; Stebbins Tract advertisement, Sacramento Bee, 23 Apr. 1921). This promise was somewhat illusory, as the city insisted on annexation if the tract wanted water from its mains (Bee, 20 Jan. 1922). By June Stebbins and his family had moved into a bungalow on the tract, and he turned his attention to selling built homes for $300 down and $45 a month. In 1927 he began to advertise houses on half acres. (There are few acre lots; they may have been a teaser.) The same year he also visited Sari Luis Obispo, and in January 1928 lie sold his lire slure in Sacramento, in March went on an extended holiday with his wife in Hawaii, and in June was promoting lots and houses in the forty -acre Anholm Addition with full-page ads (L.. F. Could advertisement, Bee,1 Feb. 1928; "Mrs. Stebbins is Honored on five of Departure," Bee, 10 Mar. 1928; Anholm Tract advertisements, San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 8 and 9 June 1928). The Telegram touted Stebbins as having been "for the past twenty years connected with California subdivisions in various parts of the state" (9 June 1928), though there is evidence only of his having rather slowly sold somewhat undistinguished houses on a small tract in Sacramento. Stebbins did not stick with the Anholm Tract as long as he stuck with the Stebbins Tract. His last advertisement was nine months later in March 1929, promising a four -room furnished house at $350 down and $30 a month. From San Luis Obispo he and Mrs. Stebbins went to Caspar, Wyoming, and thence to Alhambra in Southern California. In 1932 he was back trying to sell houses in the Stebbins tract, moving into it again in 1933. His last advertisement there was in 1935. George and Chris Anholm, who listed themselves as dairy farmers in the 1930 census, continued to sell lots and houses in their tract, Chris recording sales as late as 1948 and George taking out building permits as late as 1952. They also lived in their tract, selling off houses and moving to new ones. Their children lived there, too. George and Chris and their wives hosted Danish gatherings at their houses, served as precinct officer in elections, and otherwise participated in the new, white, suburban community they had created from the old Chinese Gardens. 11 History of 644 Mountain View The occupants of 644 Mountain View are interesting examples of twentieth-century middle-class life, but they were not, to quote San Luis Obispo's definition of a Master List Resource, "important persons ... in the city's past," that is, influencing or leading our historical development in a way distinguished from a mass of others. The closest was Evabelle Long -Fuller, who in 1933 was founding director of San Luis Obispo's Little Theater, part of a wider movement against the big theatrical chains and their lowest common denominator entertainment. San Luis Obispo's Little Theater is still in existence as the Repertory Theater. But Long -Fuller was director for only one year and vanished from the press after leaving San Luis Obispo in 1936. It is not sufficient justification for Master Listing 644 Mountain View for historical association. A comparable situation would be the Master Listing of the house of Louisiana Clayton Dart, who was the second curator of the Historical Society but remained so, influentially, for a quarter of a century, rather than that of Gladys Norton, the society's first curator, who remained in her post for only a year. Evabelle, with her husband Rex Fuller, a young Rotarian who appears to have been involved in the automobile business in the 1920s—were the first owners. The Fullers were in their house probably by 1927 and certainly in early 1928 ("Birthday Dinner," Telegram, 3 Feb. 1928). They took out a large enough mortgage for a lot and house, prebuilt or to build, on 1 July 1927, six weeks after the Anholm Addition's map was filed with the county recorder (13 May 1927) and almost a year before J. A. Stebbins started promoting the tract. During the Great Depression, Rex Fuller became the local investigator for the state's new sales tax until being transferred to Fresno and then San Jose. The Fullers appear to have sold the house to Sidney and Norma Lawrence, a young and "popular" couple for whom it was a starter home. Sidney Lawrence was a clerk at the Sauer Grocery, and the couple gained brief notoriety for having the first local baby girl in January, "Miss 1937," and winning one of sixty-five refrigerators in a nationwide contest in 1939 (Telegram 2 Jan. 1937 and 12 July 1939). FS the Drama Section of-- the -Monday, Out) - X Plea° for a, Mfe Stene: The of Can Luis Obispo; Dec nibex 17;1847. Colonel Jobu C. - Fremont ........ _.---•-..... ...._._ Duca Ramona Wilson ...•__...__--- _ ............... ?Dan Fuse de Jesus rico.—_ ....... _..._.._..._ 3 Captain, C_ 3..._. C7rderl Prank Holt ktei Fidler Leroe� Ilius. ..................... Roc e .. rets . .............---------------------------••-- Irw iriclfiu�n Senora -Picw............ --------- ---- -._--------- ...... ....... ......•-•........... .... 1k*_'i. J. ai. 5tniiF Friend, of Senora Pico ._.......... ........ •-_---....._ Ladfe.: of the Diama Sei-tion The' Pica' ChKdz r en _.........._-._............._............. _. From the I'letention Hong Directed br Erauelle Lon,-= '`ullez ►: Dialogue by airs. F. J. 'Hari San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 18 Feb. 1930. Note the Pico Children played by actors "From the Detention Home," presumably Sunny Acres. 23 Years Ago Mrs. Evabelle Long -Fuller, a re• cent arrival in San Luis Oblalx3, W been added to the fatulty at the Polytechnic, and will fill a keenly felt want in the organiza- tion, Mrs. Fuller will teach munie and voice. at Poly, and will give private lessons to a iimitefl num- ber especially interested in volev. dramatic art,, piety coaching; or public school mumlc. San Luis Obispo Telegram -Tribune, 22 Aug. 1949 VOICE CULTURE Teaeber of Singing and ' Uramatic Ari MRSA EYASELLE . LONG *I Lim 644'Nountain View Ave. Phone -930 San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 4 Sep. 1928 zir nse -Party ;Given Mrs. Fuller By Theater Players. A, delightful; surprise,party was tendered Mrs. Evabelle Long Ful- ler Monday evening at her home on. ML. View ave, by members of ..6it .;Little Theater Players, the group of,which she was director _,4jgr g the -past theatrical season. San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 12 June 1934 0 Little Theater Move Starts A -definite movement to develop'. a Little Theater for San Luis. Obispo is now under way with Mrs. Evabelle Long -Fuller ap- pointed as director_ Object of the proposed plait is ,- develop dramatic talent and to encourage a deeper appreciation of .the best in plays and produc- 1 tions. Under ,the competent direction, of Mrs. Fuller, well known throughout the county for her AWAY as a --dramatist and direct- or, talent within the city will be used exclusively in the various .productions and the performances at all times will�co3nforin to -a high standard of interest and enter- tainment. . There will be a complete change of program each week and many i4novations are being planned for 1 he pleasure • and comfort of ps.- trons.. . Memberships in the Little Thea- ter will be sold in order to fint+n(!e costumes, scenery and rentals. San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 15 May 1933 Mrs.: Lativrenc� �Ti.ns:: in y� pori test -. Proud passessar of a stew vel: Fiectrvlu,reiiigerainr is Nara Gene Lawrence of �M-6untaisa � View -street.= San Luis Obispo Telegram -Tribune, 12 July 1939 Deodorized skunk, nice pet. 644 Mountain View. Phane. 1858-1. San Luis Obispo Telegram -Tribune, 16 May 1955 Palmer and Margaret Nelson lived at 644 Mountain View from the mid 1940s till at least 1959. They enlivened the narrative of the house by advertising a "deodorized skunk" as a pet in 1955 but otherwise were unexceptional. Margaret Palmer's widowed father, Harry Truesdale, was living with them when he was appointed by the city council as police court judge to succeed Paul Jackson in 1946, holding the post for six years. Truesdale had worked 17 years as a mail carrier and 16 as county auditor and also owned a popular candy store, but extended service in a bureaucratic position—even an elected one—in the twentieth century does not in itself make the holder historically significant, and Truesdale's association with 644 Mountain View was brief. �7 Master List and Contributing List Comparisons: American Craftsman The Master List Crossett House, E. D. Bray's well articulated Craftsman with references to Japanese architecture The consistent but far from masterly Craftsman at 858 Buchon Street, on the Contributing List 10 Master and Contributing List Comparisons: Italianate A A �' The well preserved veranda structure and facade of the Master List Dana -Parsons House The Contributing List 651 Buchon, with Italianate massing and gable angles but its well articulated Italianate veranda having lost integrity by partial enclosure 11 Heimatstil Architecture The Contributing List Heimatstil house at 1421 Garden Street, circa 1888-91. This consistently articulated house has not only hipped gables—authentically proportioned by the narrow wings they top—but lobed knee braces, matching lobed bargeboards, board and batten under-gables, and hooded window frames. This building would qualify for the Master List but for inelegant front and side additions repiacing rhe originai verandas. 12 a Villa Fallet, 1905 Heimatstil and Jugendstil house in La-Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. This was thefirst commission of International Style master architect Le Corbusier, designed when he was eighteen. Note the hipped gables, carved knee braces and bargeboards, and varying treatment of the building fabric, a souped up version of 1421 Garden Street. 13 Architecture of 644 Mountain View The architect of the primary residence at 644 Mountain View Street is unknown. Three hipped gables on the front and sides and fourteen notched and beveled rafter tails on the front are vestigial nods to the German and Swiss Heimatstil (homeland style) of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century folk revival, but the theme is not carried out in the remainder of the structure, which is a utilitarian bungalow with mostly nondescript features, apart from a flanking pair of windows on the entrance facade inspired by the already out -of -fashion American Craftsman style. The house does not, therefore, "embod[y] the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction," as National Register guidelines define architectural significance, and therefore it cannot meet the Master List criterion of architectural significance or the criterion of rarity. It may be, by a few months, one of the oldest buildings of the Anholm District, but this marginally greater age does not seem to warrant Master Listing, and it also disqualifies it from any significance that the later Stebbins -built structures may have. The city's current definition of Contributing List Resources is so broad as to be almost meaningless and essentially unworkable: "resources at least fifty years old that maintain their original or attained historic and architectural character and contribute [...] to the unique or historic character of a [... ] district or the city as a whole." Virtually any structure has "architectural character" of some kind. Any resource with integrity, whether significant or not, maintains its architectural character, and any resource without integrity maintains its attained architectural character. Any structure can be said to contribute something to the city as a whole, without constraints -of character -defining neighborhood style. This vagueness has allowed the Contributing List to subsume both significant and insignificant resources with and without integrity or historic district relevance. In practice, however, the most clear and meaningful Contributing Resource listings recognize a second tier of architectural embodiment below masterworks or an integrity that is cmmnrnmiserl but still allows the resource to communicate much of its significance. Compare, for instance, E. D. Bray's Master List Crossett House, with its complex references to Asian forms and interplay of planes, to the less articulated but still sophisticated Contributing List 885 Buchon. Or compare the Dana -Parsons House, with its intact veranda facades, to the Contributing List 651 Buchon, with the later partial enclosure of its entrance veranda. Under this practice—as opposed to the all -structures -encompassing guidelines—would 644 Mountain View qualify for the Contributing List as a building of the second tier of architectural embodiment, a less than masterly execution of a definable style? No, because rather than being built in a consistent architecture, it has only two decorative features (the three hipped gables and fourteen rafter tails) that make cursory nods to a style long out of fashion by 1927, tacked on a standard bungalow that in its massing and shape has nothing to do with the Heimatstil. Indeed, the 1999 surveyor did not recognize it as Heimatstil, guessing at "Georgian." 14 Photograph of 644 Mountain View, Hill Street facade, from the 1998-99 survey. Hipped side gables top wings too wide with eaves too narrow to communicate a Heimatstil aesthetic. Two added lean-tos with different pitches further detract from the original effect. A muscular kitchen window has been expanded into an inconsistent triplet. The entry facade today. A Streamline -style sun porch dating from the late 1930s or early 1940s has enclosed an original open veranda and was probably installed by the Lawrences. An oversize vent under the gable is likely contemporary with this enclosure. The porch door is notfrom the original house front, and the door between porch and interior is also a replacement. 15 i Craftsman windows obscured behind the enclosed porch Integrity Oroinal sashes and muntins removed from the right-hand windows Of the seven aspects of integrity, 644 Mountain View retains its ■ Location • Setting, to a substantial degree, between natural hillside and orderly suburban houses • Association is not relevant, as the building is not associated with persons of historic significance The Contributing List is focused on architecture, however, rather than association, and in the aspects central to architecture . Design ■ Materials • Workmanship 644 Mountain View lacks the integrity necessary to communicate its original architectural character, lacking in significance as that original character may be. Two inconsistent lean-tos, as well as less substantial wings on an original window, do not greatly affect the character of the secondary, Hill Street fagade. The main facade on Mountain View, however, is no longer able to communicate its original character through design, materials, or workmanship. Almost the entire facade is glazed with a stylistically later porch enclosure, one that by its near -Streamline evocation is antithetical to the folk Heimatstil references, as if the front of the Madonna Inn were replaced by a modern glass curtain. The glass porch enclosure additionally obscures the fagade's American Craftsman triplet windows, which, though inconsistent with the Heimatstil references, were at least original. The Craftsman muntins from one of the triplets has also been replaced with modern plate glass, as the front door has also been replaced by a post -World War II flat and out -of -character one. 16 In addition, the entire structure has been sheathed in aluminum siding, obscuring not only almost all workmanship and materials but undermining • Feeling All of these conditions were in place in 1999 and would have, if noticed, precluded historic listing. It would be a stretch to argue that the aluminum siding and porch enclosure achieve any kind of attained architectural character. 17