SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The California Historical Commission (Commission) will consider eight nominations for federal historic designation and one nomination for state historic designation on Wednesday, May 8. The Commission meeting will be held at 9 a.m. in the Plaza Ballroom at the Hilton Palm Springs, located at 400 East Tahquitz Canyon Way, Palm Springs.

Some of the nominations being considered by the California Historical Commission include the Bank of Italy Building in Los Angeles, significant for its role in the economics of the motion picture industry, and Santa Monica’s Bay Street Beach Historic District that served as a primary beach recreation and leisure site for African American Angelenos during the Jim Crow era. The Gilroy Southern Pacific Railroad Depot, built in 1918 and in use until 1971, is also being considered.

All properties being considered at the meeting include:

National Register of Historic Places Nominations

Bank of Italy Building

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County

The 12-story commercial building designed in the Beaux Arts style by the firm Morgan, Walls and Clements was the Los Angeles headquarters for the Bank of Italy, later known as Bank of America. The building is significant for its role in the economics of the motion picture industry, lending money for Hollywood film production; for its association with Grace Stoermer, a pioneer in the field of women’s banking, and for its Beaux Arts architecture.

Bay Street Beach Historic District

Santa Monica, Los Angeles County

Approximately 53 seaside and nearshore (below mean tide) acres include a grass open space, a beach area, a nearshore area and a pergola. The district served as a primary beach recreation and leisure site for African American Angelenos during the Jim Crow era. While Los Angeles beaches were not legally segregated, the area was near an important African American civic institution and historic local neighborhood. The beach was a primary seaside public resource where its visitors, including prominent African Americans from Santa Monica and the wider Los Angeles area, felt comparatively safe from harassment.

Commercial Exchange Building

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County

The 1924 Beaux Arts building is 13 stories—rectangular in plan with a classical, tripartite composition conveyed by a horizontal division of base, shaft, and cornice—the typical format for downtown Los Angeles architecture in the 1920s. To accommodate a street-widening project in 1935, a portion of the building was cut out and removed, and the western half of the building moved to reconnect it to the eastern half—an unprecedented move specifically designed by the engineer. Apparently, not a single window was broken during the move, nor were the building’s tenants impacted. At the time, it was claimed that the Commercial Exchange Building was the tallest building in the world to be moved.

Gilroy Southern Pacific Railroad Depot

Gilroy, Santa Clara County

The Mediterranean Revival style passenger/freight depot was built in 1918, replacing an earlier depot dating from 1869. The depot is significant for its association with transportation, from the year of its construction until the end of Southern Pacific’s passenger service to the depot in 1971.

Hunt House

Malibu, Los Angeles County

Completed in 1957, Hunt House embodies the distinctive characteristics of Mid-Century Modern residential architecture designed by the renowned Los Angeles architecture firm of Craig Ellwood Design, under chief designer Jerrold Lomax. Three one-story, wood-framed buildings are arranged on a north-south axis—the garage and guesthouse fronting Malibu Road, and the house downslope from the others overlooking the ocean.

MacGregor Building

Albany, Alameda County

Built in 1934, this two-story office building in downtown Albany combined elements of Spanish Colonial Revival and Mediterranean Revival in a style representative of its designer and builder, master builder Charles MacGregor. The property was the principal office for MacGregor Homes, a high-volume builder of residential housing in the East Bay during Albany’s most prolific period of residential building, from its construction until 1944. It is eligible for the role of MacGregor Homes as a significant business, for its direct association with the working life of Charles MacGregor, and for its architecture.

Mission Creek Bridge

Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara County

In addition to the 1891 masonry arch bridge, the nomination includes two attached stone masonry walls: the South Wall (including a fragment of the Mission Santa Barbara aqueduct and the Oliver Trough-Fountain), and the North Wall, also known as the Stegosaurus Wall due to its unique stone coping. The property’s naturalistic landscape design elements integrate into the adjacent Mission Historical Park and Rocky Nook Parks, transitioning to the natural landscape of Mission Canyon. A cantilevered wooden walkway, added in 1929 and expanded in 1930, was the latest addition to the bridge and its landscape.

Mountain House Historic District

Mountain House, Butte County

Mountain House is associated with the development of a route over the Sierra Nevada originally called the Beckwourth Trail, then the Oroville-Quincy Highway, and finally California State Route 162. Mountain House served as an emigrant trail and stagecoach stop, and developed into a small community ranging between 10 and 100 people with a diversified economy of commerce, mining, agriculture, and lumber. The 1854 to 1945 period of significance ends after the opening of a gas station in 1944. Extant resources are a hotel, a grocery store/post office, a barn, a service station, a five-acre orchard, and a few minor landscape features, including a surviving macadamized segment of the Oroville-Quincy Highway.

California Register of Historical Resources Nomination

Belmont Square

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County

The distinctive garden courtyard residential complex is located in the Westlake neighborhood, one of the earliest suburbs that developed in Los Angeles with the advent of the streetcar. The buildings have a design similar to East Coast row houses and were constructed as connected parcels in three rows. Rows 1 and 2 face each other along Columbia Place, a narrow footpath that opens to West 2nd Street and Miramar Avenue, and Row 3 faces Columbia Avenue. The flanking gardens and the double row of homes along Columbia Place create an enclosed space with vegetation and trees that provide relief from the hardscape of the Los Angeles’ thoroughfares.

The National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program that coordinates and supports public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archaeological resources. The California Register of Historical Resources includes buildings, sites, structures, objects, and districts significant in the architectural, engineering, scientific, economic, agricultural, educational, social, political, military, or cultural annals of California.

All nominations and photographs of properties under consideration are available online.

Notices and agendas for Commission meetings are available online 10 days before a meeting at www.ohp.parks.ca.gov. The public may present oral statements at the hearing at the appropriate time. Inquiries and written comments on the agenda may also be emailed to the Office of Historic Preservation at calshpo@ohp.parks.ca.gov or submitted via mail to Julianne Polanco, State Historic Preservation Officer at Office of Historic Preservation, P.O. Box 942896, Sacramento, CA 94296-0001.

General inquiries on the Commission are handled by Twila Willis-Hunter. She may be contacted via phone at (916) 445-7052 or at the same mailing address listed above.