State Can Help Park Right History

Just off one of the busier stretches of Ventura Boulevard lies a shady patch where time seems to stand still. Unfortunately for Los Encinos State Historic Park, time really did seem to stop on Jan. 17, 1994, when the Northridge earthquake wrecked two of the site’s 19th century structures. Three years later, restoration on the historic buildings is beginning slowly. It’s an encouraging start, but the park still needs help from Sacramento to get the buildings open.

Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency has designated $347,000 for work at the Encino park, there is a catch: The state parks department has to pay for the repairs first and wait for reimbursement. Plus, FEMA and the state are still wrangling over just how much the repairs should cost. So far, docents at the park have raised about $20,000, but nowhere near enough to get the buildings up to snuff.

With the cash they have, park officials plan to solicit architectural drawings to restore the De la Ossa Adobe, built in 1849 to house the family of Don Vicente de la Ossa, who provided rooms for weary travelers on their way to Santa Barbara. Reconstruction of the adobe is expected to cost more than $320,000. Then there’s the Garnier House, a limestone structure built in 1870 to house ranch hands but that took turns over the decades as a restaurant, bordello and chicken coop. No one knows how much that will cost to fix.

So why bother? The state park is one of the last traces of Southern California’s rich history, so often paved over, graded under and forgotten. The hot spring that still bubbles at the site drew local Indians for generations before the first European ever hiked through the Sepulveda Pass.

Thousands of schoolchildren visit the park each year to see firsthand what life was like before traffic jams and Nintendo. For the past three years though, their experience has been less than ideal because the park’s two greatest resources are too dangerous to enter. Visitors are unable to walk in the footsteps of long-dead men and women, critical to understanding history’s texture and context.

Like all state departments, the Parks and Recreation Department is chronically short of cash. Los Encinos needs a champion in the Legislature to help get at least the De la Ossa Adobe up and open. The federal government will pick up part of the tab, but the state also needs to step up and help get history moving again.