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Seeking to protect architecturally significant buildings from demolition, Palo Alto officials are preparing to notify about 150 property owners that their homes are eligible for “historical” designation — whether or not they want it.
The city is now embarking on two separate but related efforts, each of which may have major ramifications on what counts as “historic.” One component involves examining the roughly 150 properties that had been identified more than 20 years ago as eligible for “historical” status and considering whether some should be added or removed. Another pertains to changing local law to make sure that the city’s criteria for historic structures includes buildings associated with famous people and events.
Both efforts are expected to accelerate in the coming weeks, as planning staff and consultants advance their ongoing effort to update the historical inventory. A key milestone arrived last month, when the city’s consulting firm, Page & Turnbull, released a “reconnaissance survey” that lays the foundation for the update. This involved looking at the 154 properties that had previously been identified in a 2001 survey as well as 13 properties that were subsequently found to be eligible for listing on the California Register of Historical Resources.
The survey found that 13 of the properties on the list had been demolished. Three others were altered so much that they have lost their historic integrity and are no longer eligible for the state registry. The remaining 148 were found to retain their historic significance and integrity, the Page & Turnbull report states.
The Historic Resources Board discussed the survey at its Aug. 24 meeting and largely supported the update effort. Board member Margaret Wimmer said the goal is to “protect and preserve” significant buildings.
“It’s just sad to see a lot of these resources lost and replaced with a big glass box that is impersonal and out of scale for what was a very charming downtown and city. … But it’s also important for the public not to see these as something that will prevent you from doing something in the future,” Wimmer said. “It’s just our step of preserving Palo Alto, because we all love Palo Alto.”
Not everyone, however, is loving the new effort. Lad Wilson, whose family has owned two properties on High Street for more than 60 years, was less than thrilled to see both listed in the survey as eligible for the National Register. The two homes on the 300 block of High were constructed in 1901 and 1902. Wilson said his family has been renting them out for decades to local employees at below market rate.
“I have very few transitions. People are with me for a long time – one person for more than 30 years,” Wilson told the board.
Wilson said he is thinking of redeveloping the properties to create more workforce housing and pitched “suite living” complexes in which five bedrooms share a common kitchen and two bathrooms.
“If we do a redevelopment, I’m going to be more focused on exactly what I do now: cohabitation,” Wilson said.
But having a property listed as historical, while a point of pride for many residents, is necessarily (and intentionally) a barrier to redevelopment. At the very least, property owners would be required to undertake environmental analyses and come up with ways to mitigate the loss of a historical resource. Wilson, whose properties are located near the downtown transit station, said Palo Alto should create exceptions for cases like his, where old buildings are torn down and replaced with workforce housing.
Darlene Yaplee, whose property is also on the inventory, urged the city to do a better job in communicating with residents about what exactly the historic eligibility entails. While the recent survey concluded that her home is on the list of properties eligible for a historic listing, she was also notified that she is currently not bound by the city’s historical ordinances, which makes things confusing.
She urged the city to create a category for people whose homes are eligible for the inventory but who do not want to have them listed as historical, particularly if these homes fall short of the standards for the top two categories.
“I think there’s a lot of language that’s used that could be confusing for residents,” Yaplee said.
In addition to refining its inventory, Palo Alto officials are interested in redefining what it means to be a historical building under local law. The result of this exercise could lead to more buildings qualifying for a historical listing.
Currently, municipal code classifies historical buildings into four categories. Category 1 is reserved for buildings of national or state importance because they represent “meritorious works of the best architects, outstanding examples of a specific architectural style, or illustrate stylistic development of architecture in the United States.” Category 2, which covers “major buildings of regional importance,” similarly focus on structures designed by top architects but unlike in the top category, these buildings may have experienced some exterior modifications since construction.
Buildings listed in Categories 3 and 4, by contrast, are “contributing buildings that represent “a good local example of an architectural style and relates to the character of a neighborhood grouping in scale, materials, proportion or other factors.” These buildings may have gone through extensive or permanent changes since the original design. Unlike buildings in the top two categories, they only get protections if they are located downtown or in the historic Professorville neighborhood.
Even the two highest categories, however, fall short when compared to state and national standards, according to consultants. Notably, they don’t account for buildings that are associated with famous residents, events or cultural associations. This is an area that could be targeted by future code revisions, according to a new report from Chief Planning Official Amy French.
The city’s consultants have recommended that the city consider broadening the definitions to include these types of characteristics, a suggestion that the Historic Resources Board broadly endorsed. Christina Dikas, consultant with Page & Turnbull, said the goal is to align local categories with the standards used to determine eligibility on the California and national registries, which take into account famous people and events.
While that effort to update the local definitions is still in its infancy, one member of the Historic Resources Board raised concerns about the implications of the revision. She cited as an example a home where a bandmate of Jerry Garcia lived and where the Grateful Dead front man had stayed for a spell.
“Is that significant?” Heinrich asked. “How do you determine it? To a Deadhead that would be very significant but the rest of us it’s … ‘So what? It was a bandmember.'”
Dikas said that the properties would be judged based on whether they offer “the best representation of the reason why they’re significant. They have to be directly linked to an important individual or event.
“It’s not just that George Washington slept here,” Dikas said.
The question over what counts as historical is already casting a large shadow over one of Palo Alto’s most significant development proposals: The Sobrato Organization’s plan to demolish a portion of the cannery building that until 2019 housed Fry’s Electronics and to construct 74 townhomes at the site. The plan, which was outlined in a development agreement that Sobrato negotiated with the city last year, also calls for Sobrato to contribute 3.25 acres of land to the city for creation of a park and a future affordable housing complex.
While the former cannery is not on the local inventory, Page & Turnbull concluded in a 2019 analysis that the building at 340 Portage Ave. is eligible for the state register because it is a “rare surviving example of Palo Alto’s and Santa Clara County’s agricultural past.” The site is thus included on the list of 148 properties in the new reconnaissance report.
“The trajectory of canning operations at the plant — which began in the early twentieth century, peaked in the 1920s, increased production to meet the demands of World War II, and then quickly declined as residential development and new industries began to replace agriculture industries in the postwar period – corresponds closely to the broad pattern of the history of the canning industry in Santa Clara County,” the report stated.
Because the cannery building has seen numerous modifications since its inception, it lacks the integrity to qualify as historically significant under the architecture criterion, the study found. The consultants also concluded that Thomas Foon Chew, who created the factory, made some of his most famous inventions (including a new technique for canning green asparagus) at other canneries. The building’s eligibility for the state registry is thus based solely on the cannery’s contributions to regional agriculture – a criterion that local categories of historical buildings would not consider.
The Fry’s site is, however, a notable exception. The vast majority of the 148 buildings in the Page & Turnbull survey are homes. Most of them are located in north Palo Alto neighborhoods such as Crescent Park, College Terrace, University South and Downtown North – areas where many of Palo Alto’s earliest buildings were constructed, according to the survey.
The council signaled its intent to protect these buildings from demolition when it directed staff last year to move ahead with an expansion of the historic inventory. The goal at the time was to shield these properties from Senate Bill 9, which allows property owners in single-family zones to split their lots and construct up to four dwellings.
The city plans to host a community meeting in fall to discuss the upgrade, Chief Planning Official Amy French told the board. City officials and consultants are also preparing to send out letters to the property owners in the coming weeks to alert them that their properties had been found to be eligible for historical listings. But the question of whether or not to actually include these properties on the local inventory — or to nominate them for the state or national listings — will ultimately be up to the City Council.
Board member Carolyn Willis acknowledged that some property owners may be opposed to having their properties listed as historical. That, however, should not stop the city from moving ahead with doing so, she argued.
“Because we can’t just lose these. We can’t go back. … We can’t just say they’re not historic because the current owners don’t want them to be,” Willis said.