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Your help is URGENTLY needed to
· save an important piece of Los Angeles literary history
· prevent the loss of LGBTQ history and collections
· preserve old Hollywood and early Los Angeles history.
The project: RED HILL HOUSE ARTIST RESIDENCE & LIVING ARCHIVES
Without your help—and MORE IMPORTANTLY your posts and connections to sympathetic foundations and individuals—many decades of important history will be lost, especially since the owner/curator of this collection is in extreme ill health and hopes to transfer title before she dies.
Aleida Rodríguez, author of Garden of Exile, is the first Latina and lesbian in Los Angeles history to start a literary magazine and press (rara avis/Books of a Feather, 1977–84). Her aim was to showcase the work of underrepresented artists and writers, with a focus on L.A. As a working-class immigrant, she managed to accomplish this without outside support, working a 9–5 job for $5 an hour.
Since the 1970s, her work has appeared in print and nationally recognized with such awards as a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and most recently the City of Los Angeles (COLA) master artist award in literature. Through her editorial and activist work she has promoted and championed the art and writing of marginalized others. A seminal literary figure in Los Angeles, she recognized how much history had already been lost. She made it her mission to preserve her historic home as a repository of L.A. cultural history in order to protect important treasures that belong to all of us—vintage furnishings and art dating from the 1930s, a substantial library, and cultural archives dating back to the early 1970s.
Aleida’s home, Red Hill House, is located on Red Hill, a vintage nickname from the days when Communists and WPA artists resided in L.A.’s Echo Park/Elysian Heights district. Built in 1932 by an LAPD police captain during the city’s storied “Chinatown” era using convict labor, the property was subsequently purchased by film and TV editor Bernard Burton (The Rogues, The Big Valley, The Rifleman, Honey West), who has the added distinction of helping transition Harold Lloyd from Silent Films to Talkies, establishing the home’s ties to old Hollywood and early television history.
In 1985, Aleida’s factory-worker mother lent her the down payment on the property. For 36 years, Aleida has lovingly and painstakingly restored it by hand to its Hispano-Moresque glory, filling the home with period furnishings and art (including some important 1940s paintings of the local hills, rescued from the local trash, though covered in motor oil and mold that took weeks to remove).
Since Aleida is dying, she is trying to donate the home to the Los Angeles creative arts community as a historic center and retreat for writers and artists RIGHT NOW. It remains a monument to its origins and its neighborhood, a vibrant and lovely piece of the Los Angeles cultural puzzle at a time when gentrifiers are mowing down surrounding vintage homes and destroying the historic neighborhood’s characteristic beauty. Within its walls are unique and exceptional artworks by local creators that deserve to be preserved in their original home forever and serve as inspiration. Think: Tenement Museum in NYC, but habitable. Living in a preserved historic environment conducive to creativity by its authenticity.
Now bedridden and largely incapacitated, Aleida is completely alone and fending off multiple illegal attempts by predatory lenders to sell this home out from under her. At one point--and despite the fact that Aleida had missed no payments on the mortgage--the lenders attempted to sell it by secret online auction. She discovered and thwarted the action only 24 hours before the illegal sale was scheduled. Lawyers who were supposed to represent and protect her worked in collusion with the lenders, draining her of an entire year’s income and leaving her destitute. The lenders keep changing hands, changing names, and adding more service fees and charges instead of honoring her original refinance rate. We need to get her out from under this ongoing threat to her home and her physical and mental health.
In order to find reputable and experienced lawyers to secure her home, to stop ongoing harassment, and to reverse excessive and bogus charges by these predatory lenders, Aleida needs to raise sufficient funds to hire the ethical representation she needs. She has been refused pro bono assistance because the nature of this type of property theft—as too many Angelenos know—is complex, time-consuming, and requires proactive, formidable professional experience. She also needs legal help to place the home in a trust to the community, as the Red Hill House Foundation.
Though sum has grown due to fraud, Aleida must raise $400,000 to ensure her house and all its invaluable history and cultural treasures are not foreclosed upon and lost. All funds will be applied entirely to the rescue of this historic property. And time is of the essence as her health continues to decline.
The property is available for artistic use right now. Aside from being allowed to spend her remaining days in peace in this home she has curated for nearly four decades, Aleida will not profit personally from this help. “I am simply trying to give the house for the creation of works about the Los Angeles few know about, the invisible history. And I need to do this fast before I die. Won’t you please help? All of Los Angeles would benefit from the preservation of this historic property.”
· save an important piece of Los Angeles literary history
· prevent the loss of LGBTQ history and collections
· preserve old Hollywood and early Los Angeles history.
The project: RED HILL HOUSE ARTIST RESIDENCE & LIVING ARCHIVES
Without your help—and MORE IMPORTANTLY your posts and connections to sympathetic foundations and individuals—many decades of important history will be lost, especially since the owner/curator of this collection is in extreme ill health and hopes to transfer title before she dies.
Aleida Rodríguez, author of Garden of Exile, is the first Latina and lesbian in Los Angeles history to start a literary magazine and press (rara avis/Books of a Feather, 1977–84). Her aim was to showcase the work of underrepresented artists and writers, with a focus on L.A. As a working-class immigrant, she managed to accomplish this without outside support, working a 9–5 job for $5 an hour.
Since the 1970s, her work has appeared in print and nationally recognized with such awards as a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and most recently the City of Los Angeles (COLA) master artist award in literature. Through her editorial and activist work she has promoted and championed the art and writing of marginalized others. A seminal literary figure in Los Angeles, she recognized how much history had already been lost. She made it her mission to preserve her historic home as a repository of L.A. cultural history in order to protect important treasures that belong to all of us—vintage furnishings and art dating from the 1930s, a substantial library, and cultural archives dating back to the early 1970s.
Aleida’s home, Red Hill House, is located on Red Hill, a vintage nickname from the days when Communists and WPA artists resided in L.A.’s Echo Park/Elysian Heights district. Built in 1932 by an LAPD police captain during the city’s storied “Chinatown” era using convict labor, the property was subsequently purchased by film and TV editor Bernard Burton (The Rogues, The Big Valley, The Rifleman, Honey West), who has the added distinction of helping transition Harold Lloyd from Silent Films to Talkies, establishing the home’s ties to old Hollywood and early television history.
In 1985, Aleida’s factory-worker mother lent her the down payment on the property. For 36 years, Aleida has lovingly and painstakingly restored it by hand to its Hispano-Moresque glory, filling the home with period furnishings and art (including some important 1940s paintings of the local hills, rescued from the local trash, though covered in motor oil and mold that took weeks to remove).
Since Aleida is dying, she is trying to donate the home to the Los Angeles creative arts community as a historic center and retreat for writers and artists RIGHT NOW. It remains a monument to its origins and its neighborhood, a vibrant and lovely piece of the Los Angeles cultural puzzle at a time when gentrifiers are mowing down surrounding vintage homes and destroying the historic neighborhood’s characteristic beauty. Within its walls are unique and exceptional artworks by local creators that deserve to be preserved in their original home forever and serve as inspiration. Think: Tenement Museum in NYC, but habitable. Living in a preserved historic environment conducive to creativity by its authenticity.
Now bedridden and largely incapacitated, Aleida is completely alone and fending off multiple illegal attempts by predatory lenders to sell this home out from under her. At one point--and despite the fact that Aleida had missed no payments on the mortgage--the lenders attempted to sell it by secret online auction. She discovered and thwarted the action only 24 hours before the illegal sale was scheduled. Lawyers who were supposed to represent and protect her worked in collusion with the lenders, draining her of an entire year’s income and leaving her destitute. The lenders keep changing hands, changing names, and adding more service fees and charges instead of honoring her original refinance rate. We need to get her out from under this ongoing threat to her home and her physical and mental health.
In order to find reputable and experienced lawyers to secure her home, to stop ongoing harassment, and to reverse excessive and bogus charges by these predatory lenders, Aleida needs to raise sufficient funds to hire the ethical representation she needs. She has been refused pro bono assistance because the nature of this type of property theft—as too many Angelenos know—is complex, time-consuming, and requires proactive, formidable professional experience. She also needs legal help to place the home in a trust to the community, as the Red Hill House Foundation.
Though sum has grown due to fraud, Aleida must raise $400,000 to ensure her house and all its invaluable history and cultural treasures are not foreclosed upon and lost. All funds will be applied entirely to the rescue of this historic property. And time is of the essence as her health continues to decline.
The property is available for artistic use right now. Aside from being allowed to spend her remaining days in peace in this home she has curated for nearly four decades, Aleida will not profit personally from this help. “I am simply trying to give the house for the creation of works about the Los Angeles few know about, the invisible history. And I need to do this fast before I die. Won’t you please help? All of Los Angeles would benefit from the preservation of this historic property.”