06/19/2026
The Barry Building and the Sturges House make one thing painfully clear: Los Angeles still treats historic preservation as an elective, not a requirement.
On one side is the 1951 Barry Building—a designated Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM) the City nevertheless recently voted to demolish after years of vacancy and deterioration by its longtime owner. The lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Conservancy and Angelenos for Historic Preservation isn’t just about saving one midcentury landmark; it’s a response to a system that rewards neglect. Let a historic building rot long enough, return with inflated cost estimates, and you can suddenly cast rehabilitation as “infeasible” and demolition “responsible.” This isn’t fate, though it is becoming de facto policy, and something the Conservancy is working to prevent.
On the other side is the 1939 Sturges House, a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece now on the Conservancy’s L.A. Watch List because it, too, is edging toward crisis. A watch list is a siren, not a life raft. It can raise awareness, generate outrage, even galvanize community action, but it cannot force an owner to patch the roof, secure the site, or treat the house as anything more than a speculative asset.
Beyond their shared Brentwood address, Barry and Sturges are linked by a growing citywide trend: intentional neglect and vacancy works when there are no real deterrents, and the burden and nuisance falls on the public, especially nearby neighbors. Yesterday's decision by the City's Cultural Heritage Commission issuing a 180-day stay on demolition of the Barry Building provides a critical window to press for alternatives—though the owner is under no obligation to pursue a collaborative solution. If Los Angeles is serious about calling itself a global city of culture, and ready to welcome the ’28 Olympics, it needs tools that make maintenance non-negotiable and demolition by neglect legally and financially indefensible.
*Welcome to , an ongoing series that explores Los Angeles through the people and places that matter—written by Adrian Scott Fine, President & CEO of the Los Angeles Conservancy.
📸: Barry Building (left). Photo by Robert C. Cleveland.
Sturges House (right). L.A. Conservancy archives.
