SHAWL House Adds Compassion, Pride to Harbor Area

By Zamná Ávila, Assistant Editor

Maintaining a historic home is challenging and choosing to own a historic home comes with a plethora of city and state rules to abide by.

Support for Harbor Area Women’s Lives, known as SHAWL House, has been making repairs to its neo-classical and colonial revival-style home near 9th and Centre streets. In 2000, grants from the Ahmanson Foundation, the Parsons Foundation and the Weingart Foundation helped to purchase the home SHAWL uses at 938 S. Centre St., in San Pedro.

The house, built in 1910, was constructed in the neo-classical and colonial revival styles near an area known then as “Saloon Keepers Row.” It was once home to Henry Stieglitz, a judge, city attorney and member of the San Pedro Board of Trustees, who also was a volunteer fireman. After the Stieglitz family vacated the house, it became a boys’ home, before SHAWL made the home a women’s shelter.

Recently, the home underwent some much needed repairs. The columns in front of the home started sinking and separating over the course of time. One day when Executive Director Laurie Whalen-Martinez arrived at the SHAWL house, on a weekend, one of the columns had sunk deeply and separated. Because SHAWL is part of Volunteers of America, she contacted that organization and asked for someone to come and look at the column. After coming to the site, representatives from the organization suggested hiring a structural engineer.

“We were trying to figure out, ‘Are those columns really structural, or are they decorative to the house?’” she recalled. “Well, they were structural. And so, the safety of the building was compromised.”

The structural engineer asked them to put wood support to keep the house structurally sound while they figured out an engineering plan to repair the house. The contractor pulled all the proper permits before he started the work.

Because the home is a historic building, the Vinegar Hill Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, known as Vinegar Hills HPOZ, was among the groups that had to sign off on the project. The Los Angeles City Council established the Vinegar Hills HPOZ in 2000. Vinegar Hills HPOZ is one of more than 20 HPOZ zones in Los Angeles. These are designated historic districts in the city that contain buildings and structures from a similar time period. Historic property owners are able to get a property tax reduction and flexible regulations for building permits. However, additions, repairs, replacements and remodeling of the exterior of the home must be approved a by a local five-member design review board or the Los Angeles Planning Department. Interior repair work does not require HPOZ approval.

“It’s a repair and replace job, because we are keeping everything the same as it was before,” Whalen-Martinez said. “We are not changing anything…. A lot of people have characterized it as remodeling, and it’s not, because we are not changing anything. It’s simply repair and replacing, and everything is going to put back to its original form — in fact, better.”

Workers have stabilized the rooftop with new beams that come down. The columns will then go back around the structural part that is holding the top.

All of this came with the stamp of approval from the Vinegar Hills HPOZ.

“SHAWL House does wonderful work helping women, but they also are good neighbors,” said John Mattson, of the Vinegar Hills HPOZ. “They contribute to the community and make it a better place to live in.  I applaud their careful and caring maintenance of the Judge Stieglitz House, which is one of the most important historic houses in San Pedro.  It seems clear that they will soon have that beautiful front porch and impressive columns ready to last the next hundred years.”

SHAWL is a six-month chemical dependency treatment program for homeless women — 98 percent of the women served are survivors of domestic violence.

“Our goal is [that] by the time they graduate from our program, after six months, they have a job and they can be self-sufficient,” Executive Director Laurie Whalen-Martinez said. “We find that once a woman can get back up on her feet and can work, she is not likely to go back to an abuser.”