Saturday, Feb. 18, 2006 | 12:32 p.m.
The Hohl family hacienda is only one home in the path of a bulldozer. But it's also one more, and when the unique ranch home is razed next month to make way for commercial development, the Las Vegas Valley will be one step closer to erasing its heritage once again.
The "hacienda" was once an isolated outpost in the desert south of town, a one-of-a-kind ranch home hand-built with local pieces of history - the Southwest's Tecopa metal mines and the original El Rancho hotel, lost to fire in 1957.
The Sun wrote about the architecturally distinctive house in 1985, but that was just the beginning of Carol and Lloyd Hohl's labor of love. The wrought-iron cowboys and stucco walls of "Hacienda de la Deseray" went up in the 1980s. Today, the couple points with pride to the hand-finished beams, rough wood ceiling and fireplace built from eight tons of Apache paint rock.
Soon, however, their home and others nearby will be razed to make way for the planned M Resort and other development. The couple stopped working on the house about two years ago when they realized that their neighbors had sold to commercial land brokers.
The Hohls, too, plan to move out by the end of June.
Carol Hohl admits to having a bit of a broken heart.
"Everything you see, we did by hand ourselves," she said. One room grew to be eight rooms and several outbuildings at the hacienda, named after their daughter Deseray.
"We wanted to build a house in the desert, where people could come and enjoy the desert," Lloyd Hohl said.
But the former executive with Western Airlines and Delta said he didn't see the sense of fighting the commercial brokers.
"We knew they were coming after us," he said. "We knew they wanted the land and not the house ... I was the last one to sell."
The Hohls aren't bitter. Carol Hohl, a real-estate broker who runs a small business selling desert plants, said she understands the nature of Las Vegas, a place where few buildings are more than a couple of decades old and the development spreads as fast as the federal government can auction the land.
"Life kind of moves on," Lloyd Hohl said. "This town re-identifies itself every 24 hours. We came out here for a lifestyle, not to build a house. It was very quiet and peaceful when we moved in, really fresh air. That's all changed."
Lloyd Hohl said he and his wife faced the future when the old Dunes Hotel came down in 1993, one of the first of the big implosions that have since become routine on the Strip.
"When it went down, we cried like babies," he said.
The loss of distinctive commercial properties such as the Dunes has sparked calls for historic preservation. Janet White, a UNLV architectural historian and teacher, said the history of properties such as the Hohls' home may be particularly vulnerable to loss.
Already, Las Vegas and its suburbs are losing their architectural past.
"It is something that is happening and it is something we should worry about," White said. "We're losing not just our commercial past but our residential past at a rapid rate."
Housing history may be more critical because there is less of it left, White said, pointing out that it took a concerted effort to save and move the 1930s-era railroad cottages downtown.
At the site of the old Desert Inn, now the Wynn Las Vegas, only one home was saved, that of Sands bandleader Antonio Morelli, White noted. Both the Morelli house and the railroad cottages were moved from the original sites for their preservation, she said, which lessens their historic value.
White said people need to decide now what to save, even if a property is just a couple of decades old.
"Las Vegas is such a new place," she said. "If you don't save some of it now, we won't have the option a hundred years from today. We have to ask, what about the current environment is worth keeping? If we don't do it now in Las Vegas, five, 10, 15 years from now, it will be gone."
White said the obstacle to preserving old homes or commercial buildings is "a perfectly understandable desire to make money off of property," a desire that some people might call greed. The problem with that perspective is that it fails to include cultural or historical value in a property.
"There are aesthetic considerations that can be applied: Should it be saved for artistic reasons? There are also questions of social history: Did something important happen there? Did someone important live there?"
Homes could be more vulnerable to loss than commercial buildings, because they often do not have famous architects or were places of historic events, White said. Still, "a house which is a good example of a particular type, a particular style or era, I think is just as important," she said.
Ron James, state historic preservation officer, works with federal, state and local agencies and nonprofit groups to identify and preserve historic properties. He said some just don't make it, and properties such as the Hohls, which are less than 50 years old, have a particularly tough time qualifying for protection.
"It's a tough one," he said. "Buildings are frequently torn down. That fact makes the survivors all the more precious. That's why the national standard is 50 years - it's a critical bottleneck.
"You have a resource that is 50 years old, that is an obvious resource. You have a house that was moved into 21 years ago, that is a lot harder to get excited about. It is a fact of life that not all buildings survive."
The Morelli house was an exception, and it took the intervention of the Junior League to save it, James said.
"A lot of historic preservation is a reaction to a gut-level planning process where the community says, 'We can't let that one go,' " he said. "That's what happened when the Junior League adopted the Morelli house.
"If that process doesn't kick in for these resources that are younger, than we just have to say, it was not meant to be," James said.
"You can anticipate it might be regarded as a historic resource in the future but the demolition of these kinds of resources in the short term are a fact of life."
Launce Rake can be reached at 259-4127 or at [email protected].
archive
