Quick Take
Santa Cruz County supervisors voted 4-1 on Tuesday to delist the Watsonville mansion from historic registers after years of deterioration, with plans to salvage materials.
Any hurdle to the demolition of the Redman-Hirahara House in Watsonville was cleared after the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday to delist the home from the National Register of Historic Places.
The “grande dame” of Watsonville architecture will now be removed from the local, state and national registers, according to a staff report. The building off Highway 1 near the Santa Cruz-Monterey county line “lost its historic integrity due to deterioration,” county staff said. Once the building is delisted, the county will publish an ad in a local newspaper offering the building for “dismantling for salvage” at no extra cost to the property owner, according to Senior Planner Matthew Sundt.
Built in 1897, the Redman-Hirahara House has suffered years of neglect. The last Hirahara family member living there died in 1986, according to the county staff report. In 2004, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Later, the Redman-Hirahara Foundation was established to save the home and turn it into an educational center to showcase the area’s agriculture history and Japanese community. After buying the house for $1.9 million in 2005, the foundation went bankrupt soon after in the Great Recession, and the property fell into foreclosure, according to Sundt. It has sat in quiet disrepair ever since.
The history of failed historical preservation at the site weighed on some among the five-member board of supervisors.
“I’m really conflicted with allowing some of our historic buildings to just deteriorate, and then wiping the history away in our communities,” District 3 Supervisor Justin Cummings said. The vote was 4-1, with Cummings in dissent.
Larry Hirahara, no relation to the home’s namesake and a former president of the Buddhist Temple in Salinas, told the board it should seek a second opinion on the building’s condition. An exterior inspection of the building was done last year that deemed the building “uninhabitable,” and a historic review was done that reported the loss of historic “integrity.”
Ultimately the decision came down to the lack of money and interest from the community in saving the iconic landmark.
“If someone had showed up with a check today that might change my mind,” District 1 Supervisor Manu Koenig said.
District 2 Supervisor Kim De Serpa asked if there was “any chance” the house could be saved.
“I don’t know about chances,” Sundt said. Rebuilding the house would be a massive effort, costing millions of dollars for the land, not to mention buying the redwood lumber to restore the building to its original state, he said.
“Here we are 40 years later, this grande dame that’s been advertised to the world with thousands of people driving by every day, and all it takes is one person to say, ‘I’d like to rebuild that’ and that never happened,” Sundt said.
Sundt said the county’s historic resources commission was the one that recommended delisting the building based on a periodic review of the county’s historic resources. “The property owner didn’t come up to me and say we want to tear this down,” Sundt said.
The property’s owner, Elite Development, built the gas station and Hampton Inn across the street on Lee Road.
The company has no plans to develop the land under the Redman-Hirahara House, according to Elite president Jagjit Tut.
“I’m not going to tear it down tomorrow,” Tut said in response to Lookout’s question. “I have no plans for it. I have so many things. It’s just they [the county] wanted to clean up the registry.”
District 4 Supervisor Felipe Hernandez said he supported some type of commemorative plaque for the building and that he hoped the house’s materials would be given to the Japanese American Citizens League, given the building’s significance to that community.
County staff confirmed that a historic placard or some type of memorial for the building would happen as part of the salvaging of the building’s physical materials once it is demolished. This could be added in the future as an on-site placard if a future development project is proposed there.
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