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Downtown’s Charles A. Buffum House is Long Beach’s newest historic landmark
Long Beach Sep 22, 2020
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The now-historic Charles Buffum House, built in 1905 on the 1000 block of Locust Avenue in Long Beach Tuesday, September 1, 2020. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova. From the street, the house on the northwest corner of 10th and Locust looks like a lot of Downtown houses that haven’t been sufficiently coddled by its owners for the last century. It needs paint, it could use some new window dressing, a week’s worth of scraping and painting wouldn’t hurt. Like so many other places in the oldest part of Long Beach, it has a lot of promise, but who’s got the time or energy these days? And, yet, the City Council Tuesday night designated the house-turned-multi-family residence as a historical landmark. It’s a status the home has achieved for a couple of reasons: one, for its notable architect, and two, for the person who commissioned it. It’s called the Charles A. Buffum House, named for its first owner who co-founded, with his brother Edwin, the Buffums’ Department Store chain that began eight years after the Buffums brothers moved to California from La Fayette, Illinois in 1904. The Buffums, who had been in the dry goods business in Illinois, first formed […]
