House’s Demolition Looms, but Preservation Persists

THOUSAND OAKS — The leafy, green weeds are waist-high. The once opulent garden has withered. The stone-and-brick backyard barbecue is draped in cobwebs.

But the sturdy, 1940s-era brick house--and the slice of Thousand Oaks history it represents--still stands.

As long as that is the case, local resident and history buff Tina Carlson will work at preserving pieces of the hand-hewn house in the older part of town: The carving of a weeping willow on a slab of gray-veined white marble. The 80-year-old antique roses with feathery leaves that sprout fat, hot-pink blooms. The funky glass-and-brass lighting fixtures.

In so doing, she honors the late Dominick Tringali, a Sicilian immigrant who, at age 60, built the house for his wife and three children. She also pays homage to the roots of Thousand Oaks, which stretch deep and wide below the pastel stucco housing developments and rows of auto dealerships.

The house “represents the heart and soul of, and a lifestyle of, a Thousand Oaks that’s gone,” Carlson said. “A time of more self-sufficiency, more community participation, a more natural type of life.”

The time to preserve that history, though, is woefully short. The Tringali house at 3151 Los Robles Road is scheduled for demolition within the month. By the end of the year, it will be replaced by a much-needed 11-unit transitional living project for homeless and low-income residents.

Oddly, the transition from single-family home to the apartment-style “community house” is as smooth as the patio concrete Dominick Tringali poured almost 50 years ago.

With a nod to history, the builder of the $2.6-million community house, Many Mansions, is allowing Carlson and others to preserve the house’s history before the wrecking ball strikes.

So Thousand Oaks pictorial historian Ed Lawrence has taken photographs of the house’s interior. Carlson has boxed the kitschy ‘50s-style lighting fixtures, preserving them for posterity. Local “rosarians” Bob and Louise Livesay are replanting the antique tea roses at the Stage Coach Inn, where a plaque will detail how Mammie Tringali and her children left their home in Yonkers for Thousand Oaks, transporting clothing, furniture and decades-old rosebushes with their root balls swathed in soggy burlap.

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And history buffs, with a reciprocal nod to the need for low-income housing, are making no effort to stymie the project.

“We’re a community agency--not the federal government,” said Otto Stoll, a co-chairman of the nonprofit group’s board. “Because we live and work in this community, we’re as concerned about its history and its culture as we are about the housing problem.

“The purpose of this change is very beneficial to this community,” Stoll continued. “Here we had a house with historical significance, but nothing other than that to offer to the community. Now we’re going to replace it with a facility that will change people’s lives. Without question, the trade-off is worth it.”

Built over two years on a one-acre plot at the intersection of Los Robles and Hampshire roads, the one-story house with a hand-dug cellar is a reminder of when Thousand Oaks was a country town of 800 residents, a few businesses and no freeway, recalled Dominick Tringali’s oldest child, Hugo, 72.

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While he cannot afford to save the house, Hugo Tringali describes its demolition as “a very, very tragic thing” and a symbol of the death of individualism and craftsmanship.

“It was a little, small country town,” Tringali, a retired high school teacher who lives in Palm Springs, said in an interview this week. “There were no street lights, and T.O. Boulevard was Ventura Boulevard before the freeway. None of the shopping malls were there. There was the old Oakdale Market, a couple of drug stores, Max and Rose’s Cafe and the Jungleland animal compound.”

The family home was the epitome of the immigrant dream, he said, built by his stonemason father on a $5,000 piece of land. A representation of scraping and scrimping your way into the middle class.

The 38-year-old Carlson said she understands the need for progress but also empathizes with Tringali’s loss.

That’s exactly why Carlson wanted to save a piece of the house. Although she concedes that a 50-year-old house is young by East Coast standards.

“It’s all relative,” said Carlson, 38. “It’s a relatively new house, but it’s a relatively new town in a relatively new state. We don’t have much in the way of history in Thousand Oaks . . . to represent where we came from.”