Century-old home makes a move

By: JOHN HUNNEMAN - Staff Writer | Tuesday, May 8, 2007 11:53 PM PDT ∞

TEMECULA -- History was on the move Tuesday in Old Town Temecula.
View A Video

A house that had sat on a corner at Mercedes and Fourth streets since President William Taft occupied the White House began a journey that will take it from one side of the local historical district to the other and preserve it for future generations.

About 9:30 a.m., workers from Younger Brothers House Moving of Riverside pulled a small home built in 1910 by Ventura Arviso -- and used since 1999 as an antique and collectibles shop -- onto a trailer for a short trip across Fourth Street to a vacant lot at Mercedes and Main streets.

Early this morning, the house was scheduled to be traveling once again, this time south on Mercedes, across Old Town Front Street and over the First Street bridge to its final destination on Pujol Street, a distance of about two miles.

There, the Arviso house will become part of what building owners Otto and Nancy Krieger Baron plan as a half-acre history park called Temecula's Heritage Ranch.

The Arviso family were members of the Pechanga Indian Band. Ventura Arviso, who worked for the Vail Cattle Ranch, and his wife raised at least four children and added onto the small bungalow as the family grew.

By the 1990s, the roughly 1,000-square-foot house had been condemned as a fire hazard, Otto Baron said.

For more than two decades, the Barons had run Krieger's General Store in Los Angeles. When the couple decided to move to Temecula in the mid-1990s, they bought the Arviso house to be the new home for their business.

After thousands of dollars in renovations to bring the structure in line with current building codes, the Barons in 1999 opened Krieger's General Mercantile at the site. The store remained open until last month.

When an offer came last year to buy the property -- which is amid a whirl of building activity and not far from the site planned for a new City Hall -- the couple, both admitted history fanatics, sought to sell the land while saving the historic building.

"We're already losing a lot of what Temecula was," Otto Baron said.

The Barons approached city officials for help. To continue to operate their shop in the residential neighborhood on land they had purchased for Heritage Park next to their Pujol Street home, a zoning modification was needed.

"They were very concerned about saving the building," said Debbie Ubnoske, Temecula's planning director. "The city worked it out and they were able to preserve the building. Everyone was pleased."

Although the sale of the original Arviso home site is now on hold, the couple decided to go ahead with the move this week.

When the relocation is complete, they will begin renovations to maintain the front portion of the house as an antique store and to make the home's back section a museum replicating a typical shopkeeper's dwelling of the early 1900s.

The Barons hope to be open for business in July on Pujol Street.

-- Contact staff writer John Hunneman at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2603, or hunneman@californian.com.