Craftsman Village Historic District is ready for its walking-tour close-up

PHOTO COURTESY CRAFTSMAN VILLAGE

Some of Long Beach’s great, historic houses still go unseen—and some people would like to change that.

“You drive down Seventh St., you’re going so fast that you can’t really see what’s out there,” says Michelle Arend-Ekhoff as we sit at the oak dining table in her restored 1917 bungalow with Sherron Leno, secretary of the city’s oldest historic district. Not surprisingly, Leno, a resident of Willmore City/Drake Park Historic District and a staunch advocate of reviving the city’s oldest residential areas, agrees.

“What I wanted to do, for the community that lives out there, is to educate and start getting some . . . sympathy?—for us,” Leno says, waving at the dining room wall and meaning East Long Beach, a world away from central Long Beach.

That’s why, at 9 a.m. Saturday, Leno will lead a walking tour of the Craftsman Village Historic District, where Arend-Ekhoff and her family live. Part of a Cal State Long Beach extension class for seniors and sponsored by the OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute, it’s also open to, er, walk-up participants.

“Willmore and this area are a lot alike,” Leno says at one point, as Arend-Ekhoff’s shaggy black dog Chip, a rescue, thunders through the house—his house, you realize as he licks your elbow a second time.

This kind of appreciation for one’s surroundings—be it canine or human—is a Craftsman Village standard; and it gives Leno’s words a double-meaning. First, she refers to the fact that both historic districts (Willmore was designated as such in 1978, Craftsman in 1991) keep fighting the urban battle against gangs, graffiti and blight. But drivers are also hurried past both areas along major thoroughfares: Seventh and 10th streets, Walnut and Orange avenues for Craftsman, which continues west of Orange; and—pick one—Magnolia or Pacific avenues, Third, Seventh, 10th or Anaheim streets for Willmore.

“I want to see the corridors dolled up,” Arend-Ekhoff says. “[People] almost don’t want to come off the corridors.”

Saturday’s tour is a reason to do just that. It begins on the sidewalk outside the Museum of Latin American Art, which is just an amble away from Craftsman, with its narrow, cozy streets of darkly splendid bungalows. Many are now restored—past Village residents have included noted architect Brian Ulaszewski—and their peaked front gables shade the decorative attic vents, clapboard siding, wide concrete porches and exposed roof rafters that are emblematic of the style.

The morning will also feature a visit to Ewart Court and Brenner Place—both one-block developments of small Spanish-style units—and to Toledo Walk, which is part of the Village.

A one-block, pedestrian-only street of cottage- and regular-sized bungalows and larger homes (like longtime resident Delora Hunt’s magnificent two-story, flat-roofed, box-shaped Craftsman), it was the last home of famed Pike Amusement Park sideshow the Rev. Leroy Minugh, an Illustrated Man.

“We not only have bungalows, we have evidence of Queen Anne [Victorian houses],” Arend-Ekhoff. “I heard one was moved off Seventh St. when they expanded it. There’s three wooden porches in the neighborhood.” She means that three houses are old enough to have original wooden porches. Homes built slightly later, like her own, might either have been built with concrete porches, or (with the help of an enterprising concrete salesman) could have been updated with them.

Either way, it’s clear that a common thread binds most of these houses together.

“These little bungalows,” Leno says, possibly offering a preview of what you’ll hear Saturday, “were the first modern house that a working person could afford to own.”

Almost a century later, they don’t look working-class at all.

CRAFTSMAN VILLAGE HISTORIC DISTRICT WALKING TOUR MEET ON SIDEWALK OUTSIDE MUSEUM OF LATIN AMERICAN ART • 628 ALAMITOS AVE • LONG BEACH 90813 • SAT 9AM • FREE • CRAFTSMANVILLAGE.ORG

Tags: architecture, craftsman village, homes, Long Beach, walking tour