DISCOVERING OUR VALLEY - 2011
At the onset of the “Roaring Twenties”, an Austrian immigrant by the name of Fred R. Cyriasks commissioned the architect Charles Grolle to built a 10 room “mansion” on the border of Toluca Lake and North Hollywood. The house was simply spectacular.
Newspaper clipping - 1971 - Archives of The Museum of the San Fernando Valley (click on image to enlarge) - note storks on the roof.
Eventually the Cyriasks House was sold to Lt. Col. Paul Bell and his wife Ann, who lived in the Valley until Paul died suddenly in 1958. Ann continued in the “grand old place” until her children left home. She had the structure stripped of its architectural treasures and sold Cyriasks House to a developer, who had the building demolished for an apartment complex. Today no trace of the once impressive gate house, the bar-b-que house in the rear garden or the handsome wrought iron railings remain.
Members of The Museum Community are encouraged to be on the lookout for photographs and artifacts from historic Cyriaks House. We can’t restore the old mansion’s beauty but we can tell its story.
Note: As a result of this blog posting, The Museum received information from a branch of the Cyriaks family. It's really interesting!!! http://hollywood.fred.cyriac-fhp.com/
Note: As a result of this blog posting, The Museum received information from a branch of the Cyriaks family. It's really interesting!!! http://hollywood.fred.cyriac-fhp.com/
2 comments:
That is a nice find. One of the things I longed for, growing up in SFV, was a sense of continuity and the past.
Downtown San Diego was much better about preserving its old buildings and, to its benefit, was able to turn a once fairly derelict downtown into a tremendous tourist attraction and visitor site. Much of the charm emanates from the preservation.
Los Angeles has been very guilty of tearing down the old to make way for the new. Such a waste.
http://www.cyriac-fhp.com/fred/index.html and http://www.cyriac-fhp.com/fred/trlywood.htm are the two pages where everything we know about Hollywood Fred Cyriacks is located.
We knew nothing of this first of two mansions until this page was created last January. We know of and thought the second mansion at 4301 ~ 4323 Lankershim Blvd. was "the 1919 built" mansion of Fred - that's what some of the locals had thought back in the 1970s, too. It was torn down in 1980 to make way for the tire shop and large apartment complex behind it. We have no pictures of it - would have had we known it was the 2nd mansion back while it was still around when we visited it back in the 1970s. See the web site for the latest we have on all this - have been working for a month just on it.
Ben Ciriacks, genealogist, webmaster, family historian
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