Three Lincoln Heights historic homes on Griffin Avenue in Los Angeles hold Historic-Cultural Monument status: the residence at 2054-2056 Griffin Avenue, HCM #144; the Bowman Residence at 2425 Griffin Avenue, HCM #443, designated exterior only; and the residence at 3537 Griffin Avenue, HCM #145. Two were designated in 1975 and one in 1989.
Three landmarks stand on one street in the oldest suburb in Los Angeles. The city gave a name to exactly one of them.
Griffin Avenue runs northeast out of Lincoln Heights, and on its way it passes three houses the City of Los Angeles decided were worth protecting. Two of them the city has never given a name to. They sit on the register as addresses, which is a strange fate for a landmark, and it is the reason almost nobody has written about them.
Lincoln Heights was subdivided in 1873 and is the first suburb Los Angeles ever built. The street is named for John Strother Griffin, an army surgeon who, with Prudent Beaudry, developed the ground east of the river when it was still open country. So the street carries the founder's name, sits in the city's first neighborhood, and holds three designated monuments. Debbie Pisaro has spent 24 years with historic and architectural homes across Los Angeles, and this is the kind of record that turns out thinner than anyone assumes once you read it.
This is a deep cut rather than a greatest hit, which for an architectural real estate agent Los Angeles owners actually search for is the more useful kind of page. The Ennis House four monument numbers away at HCM #149 has a foundation, a Wikipedia entry and a century of press. These three have an address on a list.
Which houses on Griffin Avenue are historic cultural monuments?
Three houses on Griffin Avenue hold Historic-Cultural Monument status. The city's own monument list, maintained by Los Angeles City Planning, records all three in the Northeast Los Angeles Community Plan Area, Council District 1. Read in order up the street, they are:
Two of those numbers, 144 and 145, were adopted on the same day. That is worth sitting with. In one meeting in May 1975 the Cultural Heritage Commission put two houses a mile and a half apart on the same street onto the register, and in neither case wrote down an architect, a build date, a client, or a name.
What the city did not write down
The designation record for 2054-2056 and 3537 Griffin Avenue contains an address, a monument number and a date. There is no architect of record for either house. There is no name. HistoricPlacesLA, the city's own inventory, carries both, and adds for 3537 Griffin Avenue a build date of 1910 and one recorded alteration: the exterior wall surfaces have had asphalt shingling applied.
That is the whole public file. Everything else attached to these houses has come from elsewhere, mostly from two blog posts written more than a decade ago. One raises the possibility that 3537 Griffin Avenue was designed by Joseph Cather Newsom, the Victorian architect whose work turns up across Southern California, and is careful to say it may or may not be his. No institution carries that attribution, and neither does the city, so it stays an open question here too.
Compare that to what happens on a documented house. The Ennis House at HCM #149 was designated in 1963 and has been written about continuously since. The Mauer House in Mount Washington, on the ridge directly above the upper end of Griffin Avenue, carries John Lautner's name and everything that name brings with it. The Skinner House in Silver Lake has an architect, a date and a style. Griffin Avenue has three numbers.
How old are the Victorian houses in Lincoln Heights?
Older than the county record says, in most cases. The assessor and ZIMAS carry a build date of 1910 for 3537 Griffin Avenue, and the house standing there is a Queen Anne, a style that was finished in Los Angeles well before 1910. Marketing material that has followed the house gives a date in the 1880s. Neither number can be proved from the public file as it stands.
This gap is not unusual and it is not a defect in these particular houses. Debbie Pisaro sees it constantly. In her words: "It happens all the time. There is a sign on the house of one of my listings, a plaque that says 1903, and public record says 1907." County build dates on houses of this age routinely record a later filing rather than the original construction, because the records themselves were reconstructed decades after the fact. The plaque and the file disagree, and the person standing in front of both is usually the only one who notices.
If you own one of these houses and the year on your record looks wrong, it probably is. The way to settle it is a Sanborn fire insurance map: surveyors drew every building on every block, and the sheets are dated by survey year. Los Angeles is mapped from 1888 onward, and the 1888 index covers East Los Angeles, which is what Lincoln Heights was then called.
Style is the safer ground, and it is the ground an experienced eye can actually stand on. A Queen Anne is a Queen Anne whatever the file says. Debbie has walked several hundred period houses across Los Angeles, from the Victorian four squares of West Adams to the Spanish revivals that fill the eastside, and reads them by their massing and their details rather than by a line in a database.
What it means when only the exterior is designated
The Bowman Residence at 2425 Griffin Avenue is listed as HCM #443, exterior only, which narrows what the designation reaches. In Los Angeles the Office of Historic Resources reviews and approves proposed work on a monument before permits issue, and that review normally covers exterior and interior alterations both. An exterior-only listing draws the line at the walls.
Owners are often told designation stops at the front door. In Los Angeles it usually does not, which is why the qualifier on this one listing matters and why it is worth knowing which kind you have before you plan anything. The rules that govern the work are covered in more depth in the guide to how California protects historic architectural homes, and the process of seeking a designation is set out in pursuing a historic designation for your home.
There is a second layer at the top of the street. HistoricPlacesLA records 3537 Griffin Avenue as a designated contributor to a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, California status code 5D1, and names the district as Highland Park · Garvanza. So that house is a monument and an HPOZ contributor at once, and the overlay it sits inside carries a different neighborhood's name than the one on its mail. Owners in that position have two sets of rules and, potentially, a Mills Act contract to think about. That combination is worked through on the Mills Act and HCM guide and, from the district side, in the West Adams HPOZ guide.
Lincoln Heights has its own HPOZ, adopted in 2004, and its Victorian and Arts and Crafts stock is the reason. The neighborhood story, including how a nineteenth-century streetcar suburb east of the river became the oldest Italian neighborhood in California, sits alongside this one.
Why an undocumented monument is worth more attention, not less
A house with a thin public record is harder to sell well and easier to sell badly. The designation is real and so are the constraints, but there is no monograph to hand a buyer and no architect's name to lead with. What replaces it is the work: reading the file, walking the block, writing down what is there. Debbie Pisaro built her practice on that, first in Los Feliz and then across the state.
It is also why houses like these belong on a page at all. The Gell-Mann House in Pasadena's Prospect Historic District and La Casa Nueva both got written up because somebody bothered. Nobody had bothered with Griffin Avenue. California is full of streets in that condition, which is the reason Coastline 840 works statewide rather than in one zip code, and the reasoning behind it is set out in why we built Coastline 840 and why boutique teams outperform big-box brokerages.
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran, founder of Coastline 840, and an Inman Luxury Leader, representing buyers and sellers across Los Angeles and the surrounding neighborhoods. Many of the homes she sells never reach the open market. If you own one of the Griffin Avenue houses, or any monument whose record is thinner than it should be, an architectural real estate agent Los Angeles owners trust is worth more than a portal estimate, and the architectural homes collection is where the rest of this record lives.
Which houses on Griffin Avenue are historic cultural monuments?
Three. The residence at 2054-2056 Griffin Avenue is HCM #144 and the residence at 3537 Griffin Avenue is HCM #145, both adopted May 21, 1975. The Bowman Residence at 2425 Griffin Avenue is HCM #443, adopted June 20, 1989, and is designated exterior only by the city.
Where is the Bowman Residence?
The Bowman Residence stands at 2425 Griffin Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90031, in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood, within the Northeast Los Angeles Community Plan Area and Council District 1. It was adopted as Historic-Cultural Monument number 443 on June 20, 1989, and it is the only one of the three Griffin Avenue monuments the city gave a name.
Who designed 3537 Griffin Avenue?
No architect is recorded. The city's monument listing names none, and HistoricPlacesLA names none. A published local history raises Joseph Cather Newsom as a possibility and states plainly that it may or may not be his work. No archive or institution carries that attribution, so it remains an open question rather than a fact.
How old are the Victorian houses in Lincoln Heights?
Most predate 1900, though county records often say otherwise. Lincoln Heights was subdivided in 1873 and built out through the 1880s and 1890s. Assessor and ZIMAS build dates on houses this old frequently record a later filing rather than original construction, so a Queen Anne carrying a 1910 date is a common and usually misleading result.
What does exterior only mean on a Historic-Cultural Monument?
It limits the designation to the outside of the building. Los Angeles monument review normally covers proposed exterior and interior alterations, and the Office of Historic Resources approves work before permits issue. An exterior-only listing, like HCM #443, draws that review at the walls instead of carrying it through the interior.
Can a house be both a monument and an HPOZ contributor?
Yes, and one of these is. HistoricPlacesLA records 3537 Griffin Avenue as a designated contributor to a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone under California status code 5D1, inside the Highland Park and Garvanza district, while also holding monument status. Two sets of review then apply to the same property, which owners should establish before planning work.
Is Griffin Avenue in Lincoln Heights or Montecito Heights?
Lincoln Heights, per the city. HistoricPlacesLA places 3537 Griffin Avenue in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood and the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council, while noting it also falls inside the Mt. Washington boundary and the Arroyo Seco council. That overlap is why some sources file the upper end of the street under Montecito Heights instead.
Who is a good full-service real estate agent in Los Angeles?
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran and an Inman Luxury Leader, working with buyers and sellers across Los Angeles and statewide California. Her practice covers architectural and historic homes alongside ordinary ones, and many of the homes she sells never reach the open market. She can be reached at (310) 362-6429.
Coastline 840 · 160 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90026 · DRE #01369110
Debbie Pisaro, DRE #01369110, is the founder of Coastline 840, a boutique California practice, and an Inman Luxury Leader with 24 years of experience in architectural, historic, and design-forward homes. Many of the homes she sells never reach the open market. Coastline 840 is a brand of Side, Inc., CA DRE #02014153, responsible broker. She writes about California real estate at debbiepisaro.com, losfelizliving.com, and coastline840.com. Published September 2026.
Los Angeles City Planning, Historic-Cultural Monuments list. HistoricPlacesLA, the Los Angeles Historic Resources Inventory. Los Angeles City Planning, Lincoln Heights Historic Preservation Overlay Zone. Neither monument listing for 2054-2056 or 3537 Griffin Avenue records an architect, and the Joseph Cather Newsom attribution appears in published local history only.
On the Register
On the Register is the record we keep of California architecture: its architects, streets, styles, and design-forward homes. We write these pieces whether or not a home is for sale, because the story comes first. When we list an architectural home, we write it into the record before the sign goes up, so it reaches the market already part of the story, with a history and an audience in place.
© 2026 Debbie Pisaro, Coastline 840 · ontheregister.com