HIGHLAND PARK, LOS ANGELES (KNX) — If walls could talk, a modest home in Highland Park would have a lot to say about the history of Los Angeles.
Standing for more than 120 years, the “Throop House” on Highland Park’s San Pascual Street is one of the last remaining “pyramidal folk houses.”
On Thursday, the Cultural Heritage Commission agreed that the home’s history is worth preserving and voted unanimously in favor of nominating it as a cultural monument.
“It's a very simple house, but it's a surviving house that has been largely true to how it was originally built,” Jamie Tijerina told Eastsider L.A.
“It's lack of alteration is a very important aspect because that makes it a ‘survivor,’ a last remaining example.”
Pyramidal folk houses in the region were never common, Sam Andrel, the commission’s media and government relations deputy said in a statement to KNX, but the few that remain are “rapidly being lost to development or insensitive remodeling.”
Though Throop House will need some work, it retains much of its original integrity and was documented by Survey L.A. as a “rare example of early residential development in Garvanza” and one of the few remaining examples from the period.
“The home lies on what is called the ‘Mary Throop tract’ and was occupied by Mary herself,” the commission said in a statement, adding that Mary paid off the mortgage on the property and then subdivided the tract.
“The Throop House is in the community of Garvanza, much of which is included with a large portion of Highland Park, in the Highland Park-Garvanza Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ),” the Heritage Commission said, adding that it predates the townsite of Garvanza, which was subdivided in 1886 — and therefore meets “criteria one…as one of the significant property types that are representing important periods of early residential development in neighborhoods of Los Angeles.”
A second hearing for the nomination is set to take place in January 2022.
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