By Winbigler demolition unfortunate

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main . . . if a clod be washed away, the whole is less as well as if a manor of your friends or your own were …”

John Donne, Meditations, circa 1610 A.D.

When, if ever, does a home, a “manor,” cross over from an individual’s property to a community’s treasure?

Such a question comes to mind in the case of the recently demolished house on Fremont Road formerly owned by Stanford Professor H. Donald Winbigler.

The 1926 French Provincial house was felled recently by a demolition crew, much to the astonishment of local residents who had come to view the house as an old friend. The Winbigler estate, after all, was the site of the Rudolph tree, adorned every holiday season with costumes made to look like the famed reindeer.

Was the house officially registered and protected as a historic landmark? No, although the 4,000-square-foot home was considered historically significant.

The new owners’ original plan was to incorporate the old Winbigler house as part of a 23,000-square-foot addition. There were issues of seismic updating and structural decay that had to be addressed. Architect David Bogstead, who said last year the home would be preserved, told the Town Crier this past week that excessive asbestos, mold and termite infestation revealed itself as the work proceeded.

“We really had to disassemble the entire house,” he said, noting that crews saved some of the original material. “We took everything we could save and saved it.”

The new house, he said, will look like a bigger - and better - version of the old one.

The new owners and their architect apparently made a concerted effort to save the old home - it just had too many problems. But what about the impact on the community? Do the owners have an obligation to the neighbors, even though residents’ only contact with the house is by seeing it?

Just as no man is an island, no homeowner is isolated from his community. There are certain standards and expectations that communities require of residents and that residents accept by their decision to live in those communities. Some of these conditions aren’t necessarily written in town codes. They are reflective of respect for the town’s heritage, its past as well as its present.

At the very least, the homeowners owed it to the town and its residents to go through the proper channels requesting the demolition. The town mandated that the owners had to get permission to demolish the structure. In exchange for this agreement, the owners were allowed to build a taller house.

They should explain to the residents why this needed to occur - before the demolition took place. After all, they led residents to believe otherwise. Keeping the residents informed is not something they had to do - but should have done, all in the cause of being good neighbors. Is this too much to ask of anyone making major changes in our visible heritage?