87 Year Old Woman has to fight neighbors to build a bedroom

*Update*-It was incorrectly stated that she lived at 1901 Hearst, when that was actually the meeting place for the Commission. Meanwhile, some of you may have wondered why I highlighted this issue. While many of us are not home or business owners in Berkeley, this landmarking issue has made it increasingly difficult to do much of any kind of development in Berkeley. That will make businesses less likely to set up in this town, making the town a whole lot less vibrant. Housing could also be affected by this as well, as less student housing could be made available. Many of these neighbors feared that she would actually rent out these rooms to students. I should have been more clear in stating that. My apologizes.

Boing Boing had a post about Marguerite Rossetto, an 87 year old woman living in Berkeley who had a conflict with her neighbors over adding a bedroom to the ground floor of her home. Two of her neighbors, apparently, complained about her plans petitioned the city to make the home a landmark citing the fact that the house was designed by William Wurster (dean of architecture at Berkeley from 1950-1963), thereby not allowing her to create the room. During her hearing with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the house was given landmark status, but she was allowed to build the room.

In a letter, her son, Louis Rossetto points out the problems with the commission:

The very scariest thing about the proceedings last night was that there were at least two members of the LPC who believed that their job was not just to consider buildings that had been brought to them for landmarking, but they should actively be increasing the number of buildings in the City's "inventory." As one of them put it, "There are 40,000 buildings in Berkeley, and we have landmarked only 300." This, in a city that's barely 100 years old, and which already has more landmarked buildings, as I have noted, than San Francisco which is half a century older and has seven times the population.

And their criteria for landmarking? Berkeley has landmarked parking lots [See Shellmound], has landmarked empty lots, has landmarked rocks, has landmarked factories where "whites and blacks worked together for the first time." Listening to these commissioners, you can easily imagine them finding something in every building in the city that would justify landmarking, and if not in the building itself, perhaps in its relationship to its neighborhood, to the trees on the site, to the "streetscape," to the feeling of the street, . . .

They do realize that by landmarking every building that they become less special right? Here's the city's list of landmarks and Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association's Gallery of them. I haven't been to too many of these sites, but really it doesn't seem to take much to landmark them at all.Email This Post!