In honor of PSABC’s 50th anniversary, throughout the year we will be looking back on our greatest successes and hardest losses in our “50 Years of Preservation” series, as featured in the 2026 calendar. Each month, we will feature artwork created by local artist John Toms depicting a project from PSABC’s history. May features one of PSABC’s earliest losses–the Coleman House on Montford Avenue, which became a major catalyst for its later successes.
The Coleman House was built c.1896 by O.D. Revell for John Kennedy Coleman. He resided in the Queen Anne-style with Colonial Revival details from 1896-1979. Though PSABC worked hard to advocate for the home, it was demolished in April of 1979.
According to founding Board member Bob Orr, “Montford was very much early on the focal point—and I don’t remember the timing on when Frank Puett, in the middle of the night, tore down the Coleman house, but that was something that lit a fire under us in some respects, because we saw how easily and quickly historic properties could be demolished. And the challenges we were going to have with businesspeople who own these properties and were more interested in money than in preservation.”
Executive Committee member Betty Lawrence recalls: “That was our first almost win and first loss… it was very visible from the freeway, and it announced Montford to the neighborhood, and we thought it was very important. And it was owned by at least 17 heirs after a death of somebody…Bob Orr got in touch with all of them. We had also been in touch with Frank Puett… He wanted to move into it, and he just told us how wonderful it was going to be to put his restaurant in that big old house. I remember Bob and I had dinner with him there at his steakhouse, and he was just convincing us that this was exactly what we wanted to do.
…One Saturday at the library, Mary Jo Brezny came in and said, they’re tearing down the house. And he had decided, ‘Oh, well, it was going to be too expensive, so I’ll just tear it all down today.’ So he tore it down and it was awful… I was out there staring and wide-eyed, open mouthed, in wonder and horror. That was our first real building that we were involved in.”
Bob Orr says that the Coleman House was the project “that maybe galvanized us for a little more aggressive approach. But starting something new that doesn’t have a whole lot of commonality other than this general interest in historic preservation with no resources and no staff, obviously, was a challenge in the sense of—all right, how do we gain credibility? How do we, you know, start actually making people listen to us? The [Preservation Society] quickly learned that, well, we needed to be far more careful when it came to dealing with owners who were threatening to tear property down. And I think we also started realizing that…we were going to have to try and generate some resources, some financial backing that would allow us to be a more active part.”
Last month’s highlight, the Gudger House, was one of the successful projects that resulted from the lessons learned with the Coleman House, and stands as one of the historic structures that now welcomes visitors to the Montford neighborhood.
