Long Beach Heritage’s annual home tour showcases our oldest, finest houses

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

This Sunday’s Long Beach Heritage tour of historic and significant houses spans several historic districts and virtually every architectural style in the city, plus the kind of personal history you can’t get from books. Such as:

“In the 1970s, everyone wanted Spanish-style houses, and I thought there was something wrong with me because I liked bungalows,” says longtime Long Beach homeowner Robin Nahin, whose 1906 Victorian, the Nahin-Tice House, is on the tour. Which maybe explains why in 1971, you could buy a Victorian near Poly High for $15,000—and still have enough money left over for a bottle of bathtub gin and a raccoon coat.

Nahin and husband Byron Tice paid more than that for their colorfully-painted two-story Belmont Heights Victorian in 2000, but they were fortunate to find one of the city’s oldest homes still largely intact. Built by Edwin Ralph and owned for 90-plus years by his family, their house has an interior which fairly glows with egg-and-dart patterned moldings, baseboards, window seats and wainscoting—all made from . . . well . . . .

“It could be pine. Is it ash?” Nahin asks her husband, as we admire their foyer—which has its own window seats, between the front door and. . . wait for it . . . the parlor! They debate which woods make up all that woodwork, but that’s okay. There’s plenty of time to consider the choices as you admire Nahin’s vintage Fortune magazine collection and the leaded glass windows in all the rooms.

“It was all these little rooms,” Tice says of the rambling downstairs, which runs in a circle from foyer to sitting room to parlor back to foyer—or, at least it would have, except for all those original, natural wood five-panel doors. So they took the doors off.

“We opened the house up a bit, when we realized we could sit in the front of the house and look all the way to the back,” Tice says. And, this being a 102-year-old property—built in a former fruit orchard by the Ralphs, who would later help subdivide much of Belmont Shore and Belmont Heights—they stored those doors in the hayloft of their barn.

Not every house on this tour has a barn, but nearly all have provenance. Like the Reeve-Townsend house, commissioned by well-to-do widow Jennie Reeve and completed in 1904 by landmark Arts & Crafts architects Charles and Henry Greene.

All the Greenes’ signature touches—including built-in furniture and leaded glass light fixtures—were in this house, built at Third Street and Cedar Avenue, then purchased and moved twice by a Dr. V. Ray Townsend. But of the 139 decorative items the Greenes had created for this graceful, two-story, wood-shingled beauty, only four remain with the house—which narrowly escaped demolition in 2004.

“That in 2004 it would have been possible to tear down a Greene and Greene house in the interest of greed means that preservationists still have much work to do,” Long Beach Heritage historians write in their tour brochure.

Now owned by a foundation, the house is being restored, so you’ll have a chance to see its shingles sans paint for possibly the first time in a century.

An even more pristine house, which never so much as flirted with the wrecking ball, is the Bembridge Heritage Homesite—an ornate 1906 Queene Anne Classic Victorian, with extensive carved woodwork, leaded and stained glass windows and curvy porch around half the house. Dorothy Bembridge, a founding Music Department faculty chair at Jordan High School, lived there until her death in 1999, by which point the house was already deemed spectacular.

“With the exception of two modifications made in the 1920s, it has never been altered or refinished,” the historians write. Which makes the city, and all of us who live here, richer for it.

A CENTURY OF STYLE LONG BEACH HERITAGE SELF-GUIDED HOME TOUR | 562.628.1519 | LBHERITAGE.ORG | SUN 12-5PM | $35 | TICKETS BY PRESALE ONLY

Tags: bembridge house, greene and greene, home tour, Long Beach, long beach heritage