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One day last spring, the house simply appeared, an apparition near the corner of Washington and Vermont. It was late Victorian in design, white, wooden and two-story, with a steep roof, gables and a wide front porch, and there was nothing around it but empty land. It looked like a Midwestern farmhouse in a freshly plowed field, somehow dropped before the ivy-covered slope of the 10 freeway--an inner-city dream, a hallucination.
Up close, there was a rational explanation. A chain-link fence surrounded the house and the land around it, 14 acres that were the future site of an L.A. Unified high school. Until recently, there had been a neighborhood here; the house at 1548 W. 20th St., hidden for nearly 100 years by a storage building, billboard painting facility and small businesses, was the last structure standing. And its reappearance offered something more rare than a mirage, and more precious: a glimpse of the city's past.
The house went up around the turn of the century, though the precise date has been lost. Fading, barely legible real estate deeds record that on May 5, 1893, a woman named Anna Southwick sold a lot at this location (as well as another) to her husband, Thomas, for $5, but how she came by the land, and whether there was any structure on it, is unclear. A Sanborn fire insurance map dated 1894 shows a building at this address, but it's not clear if the map is original or a later reissue. L.A. County tax records written in ornate, old-fashioned script on crumbling pages show assessments for the site as early as 1901--as far back as the books go--but the names of owners through 1910, including the Southwicks, are written without dates. And the Department of Building and Safety has no record of any early construction; the first permit on file, for the addition of a back staircase, is dated 1912.
But whoever built the house very likely was Midwestern and white, because that's who was flocking to Los Angeles then, part of an early real estate boom, as suburban pioneers staked claims in the middle of nowhere. Downtown was thriving, bristling with big buildings and banks, but the acres west of Figueroa, which had been annexed...