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After years of abandonment and several attempts to save it, the 130-year-old home of early Mountain View businessman Charles Pearson has been turned into rubble in order to make room for an office building.
“I hope it’s for a good cause,” said Chez TJ owner George Aviet, who looked on from his restaurant’s balcony as the home was demolished the morning of April 25.
“Of course it’s a shame to see it go, but nobody took care of that building.” He added that the neglected home, its porch overhang propped up by a temporary structure, had been an eyesore for many years.
A four-story office building called “Bryant Park Plaza” will go in its place with a ground floor parking garage and cafe. It already has a tenant lined up as downtown office space is under high demand from tech startups. The City Council approved the project in January.
Developer Roger Burnell had offered to move and restore the home at 902 Villa Street – at his own expense – to be used as part of a city history museum that was once proposed for the Cuesta Annex. But after residents complained that development would ruin the Annex, the City Council declined the offer. A more recent effort to move the house to a city-owned Shoreline Boulevard lot for use as an art gallery also failed to gain support. Bonita Drive resident Josephine Manoli had expressed interest in moving the home into her large backyard, an offer Burnell was interested in which turned out not to be feasible. The City Council had even entertained using city funds to buy the property in 2010.
For a number of years the home was protected by law. Its proposed demolition in 2001 to make way for another development proposal sparked the creation of an ordinance that protected it along with dozens of historic buildings in Mountain View. But later court decisions have made that ordinance legally irrelevant, said community development director Randy Tsuda.
Built sometime before 1887, the home was believed to be the fourth oldest in the city. According to a report on the home’s history by the Dill Design Group, the house was was developed by Doctor Bowling Bailey, a state Assemblyman, farmer and school trustee who developed the area between 1859 and 1888. The first known owners were Mathurin and Georgette LeDeit, from 1888 to 1892, Mathurin was a French-born butcher who likely commuted to his job in San Jose on the train line a block away.
Charles Pearson owned the house from 1892 to 1946 while he owned a grocery store in a building he built at 220-230 Castro Street and ran the “Old Haverty Corner Saloon” at Castro and Villa. In 1947, Pacific Telephone used the home as an office. Its last known use was as a used-toy store called “Forgotten Treasures.”
What was saved on the site is known as the “Immigrant House,” a tiny home which was moved to a city storage yard until a permanent home can be found. A campaign by Marina Marinovich, the grand-daughter of Croatian immigrants who once lived there, persuaded the council to have it restored as an example of the tiny homes orchard workers and immigrants once lived in at the turn of the century.
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March 26, 2013, Mountain View, California, United States: The Swiss Solar airplane Solar Impulse at Moffett AFB during a solar cell test charge. Solar Impulse’s HB-SIA prototype arrived in crates from Switzerland in February on board a Boeing 747 cargo plane and was reassembled. at Moffett. It will fly across America in stages over May-June-July from San Francisco to Washington D.C. and New York City. (Jean Revillard/Rezo.ch/Solar Impulse/Polaris) /// -
The Solar Impulse takes off from Moffett Field on Friday, May 3, en route to Arizona, the first leg of the solar-powered plane’s cross-country trip. Courtesy Solar Impulse.
Finally. One eyesore gone, several others remain. Thank you Mr. Burnell.
Developer Roger Burnell had offered to move and restore the home at 902 Villa Street – at his own expense – to be used as part of a city history museum that was once proposed for the Cuesta Annex. But after residents complained that development would ruin the Annex, the City Council declined the offer.
“I hope it’s for a good cause,” said Chez TJ owner George Aviet.
That is what all the gesse said too… Now if we can just do something about that overpriced feed bin next to the Tide House.
I doubt I’ve ever seen this house but I wish MV had found a way to preserve it. I like old stuff and I like old historic stuff. Mostly humans are destroying these relics in any country you want to mention in the name of “progrss”. But without touchstones to our past how will we build a better future?
People and Nations that destroy their past have no future.
“People and Nations that destroy their past have no future.”
wow that’s deep.
wise words from a guy who still is living in a log cabin with no running water or electricity and comes to the library to use the internet on horseback
They should have scraped that dump 20 years ago. Who’s NEXT?
I love Mary’s phrase “touchstones to our past”so true and saddened
by the loss of yet another precious “touchstone”.
Too busy, no time, no one stood up to the plate, I tried, I failed, Mr Burnell, was patient, but in the end a could of would of should of, and no Art Museum. But typical garbage. Sorry dead Founders, a big zero. So now we are still only less than a handful of history in our midst, but oh yeah, I can hang my hat on the Berlin Wall.
Buildings are special, but ll we see is vertical rise to benefit the coffers of a dot com city. Hope it all does not come crashing around its shoulders like redevelopment did and remember the dot com crash of 2000, and then the two wars? Today its Syria, Chechnya, and an over bloated social media huchster of an economy.
Oops better get some sleep, work tomorrow and no time for this, remember……………………. Sorry Pearsons.
they finally got rid of that termite infested, flea ridden so called house. thank goodness.
I was looking at the site this morning and I noticed all that junk on the roof of chez tj. that restaurant needs to clean that up. they are better then that. I guess they were able to hide that mess for years, but now that it is exposed they need to do something about it.
Sad to see house torn down but if no site was offered suitable for house. Then house is a gone, change is welcomed. We lost so many other landmarks and will lose more.
But have many others, look at downtown. We kept so many buildings on Castro St, even rebuilt a train station from scratch.
What is the point of repairing–for who knows how much– and staffing that house as a museum when there is probably 5x the amount of space that old wreck would offer in the open spaces of city hall…which we use to show things off from various projects/schools/etc. already?
Even with volunteers there is no point in it. That’s how you end up with museums/historal______ open non-election Tuesdays from 1:19pm to 4:42pm and on the second Thursday of every 3rd month from 10:07am to 3:28pm unless it is an odd-numbered day of the month during a Leap Year.