Planning Commission grants demo permit for old Highland Avenue building
By Andrew Edwards
Staff Writer
SAN BERNARDINO -- The "Agape House," a nearly-century old building that has been used for a drug treatment program and as an engineer's residence, is set to be demolished to make way for possible expansion work at St. Bernardine Hospital.
The house sits near the hospital near the southwest corner of Highland and Highland avenues. The sand colored, single story building was constructed in 1912 as a home for an engineer to live near a well site at Perris Hill, according to a city document.
The house took its name "Agape House" from its use a rehabilitation center from 1973 to 1975.
The evergreen scent of nearby cedars hangs in the air around the house and a large oak also grows on the site. The house itself, however, has fallen into disrepair. Its windows are boarded up and on its porch are a sleeping bag and other assorted stuff that shows anybody who lives there now would be someone from among San Bernardino's homeless.
The city's Planning Commission on Tuesday granted permission for the Agape House to be demolished. The panel's members made their decision after San Bernardino's Historic Preservation Commission decided that the old house is not worth saving.
"It could not be refurbished and it could not be moved and it needed to be demolished," said Jim Smith, vice chairman of the historic commission.
The commission formed six months ago, Smith said, to prevent historically-valuable structures from being torn down in the way that buildings like the California Hotel were done away with.
It might seem ironic that the Historic Commission's first decision was to OK the demolition of the Agape House, but Smith said commissioners judged that the house could not be practicably saved because it is an unreinforced masonry building.
The Planning Commission's approval also included the condition that a historical marker be built on the site to recognize the history of the house and Perris Hill.
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Can't be moved??????????
Ask Rialto how they moved the old Adobe station on Walnut to the Little League park on Lilac. It surely was non-reinforced MUD!
Doesn't San Bernardino have any preservationists willing to SAVE buildings like this?
Unreinforced masonry buildings can be saved, if there is the will to do it. For example, the Stone House in East Highlands Ranch. I am a past grand president of the Native Sons of the Golden West, and I know that even some of our own NSGW meeting halls -- Santa Lucia in Salinas comes to mind -- have been successfully retrofitted. The Agape House is unquestionably a distinctive San Bernardino landmark (and, by its location, might have potential as a mini-museum).
I'm frankly dismayed at the way San Bernardino's Historical Preservation Commission seems to function. Shouldn't a community's history-minded groups at least have been invited to furnish input? (This reminds me of the "under the cover of darkness" techniques that were used several decades ago to demolish the Atwood Adobe and the other historic adobe in Seccombe Lake Park.) This will be the second time that a historic building SITTING ON CITY PARKLAND in San Bernardino will have been demolished.
Putting on my non-Native Sons hats, as president of the Conference of California Historical Societies, and as a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the California Council for the Preservation of History, I am just appalled and grieved to see something like this happen right in my own hometown.