Monday, March 31, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
CALL IT A MIRACLE in the desert.
A piece of history was saved last week from the all-consuming, steel-toothed, diesel-breathing Las Vegas demolition machine.
The historical building in question is the circa 1929 "Whitehead House," a stately two-story Mission Revival structure on the corner of Seventh Street and Mesquite Avenue, just a few blocks east of City Hall. Built by prominent Las Vegan Stephen Whitehead, the first elected county assessor, and his wife, Gertrude, the five-bedroom home was designed by noted architect A. Lacy Worswick and was inhabited by U.S. Sen. Berkley Bunker before becoming a nunnery.
Ten days ago, however, it almost became bulldozer chow.
The home sits on a half-block now owned by ITC Associates, which wants to build a high-rise, all-suites hotel on the property. Demolition permits had been issued for the site and the dozers were rolling when members of the Junior League of Las Vegas and the Whitehead family found out and took action.
The Junior League had made inquiries into buying the house to refurbish and use as its headquarters. ITC, however, wanted more than the league could afford.
When the league and family learned of the impending demolition, they lit up the phone lines, eventually getting Las Vegas City Councilman Matthew Callister and Plaza Hotel owner Jackie Gaughan involved.
"We all went up to the site," says Callister, "and the bulldozer was going. It was like bad daytime TV."
Together, Callister, Gaughan and league member Louise Helton persuaded the developers to hold the bulldozer and wrecking ball at bay, at least temporarily.
ITC spokesman Allen Nel says Councilmen Arnie Adamsen and Gary Reese also contacted the company. "They persuaded us," Nel says, "to work together to prevent the demolition of that building."
Imagine that: A piece of old Las Vegas that doesn't get knocked down.
ITC donated the building, Callister promised to provide money to move the building, and Gaughan donated a lot at 10th and Carson streets to temporarily store the house until the league can find a permanent site.
The money is still a question mark, however. Callister doesn't yet know exactly where the estimated $25,000 to move the house will come from.
"It's very preliminary," he says, "I have not even pitched it to my colleagues."
But when he was a state lawmaker, Callister helped set up a state historic preservation fund, and he's "pretty confident" the Whitehead House will qualify for a grant to pay off any city loan. Most of the grant money usually goes to Northern Nevada, he says, so any "well-packaged" project from the South has a good chance.
Thus, miraculously, the Whitehead House will remain standing somewhere, much to the relief of the remaining family.
Especially 73-year-old Betty Willis, who moved into the house with her parents and seven older siblings when it was brand new.
"It used to be golden yellow," she says, looking wistfully at the house where she spent 11 years of her childhood.
"It was much prettier, much prettier. It was the nicest house in Vegas, that's for sure."
Walking around the locked and boarded-up building, Willis reminisces about the good times she had growing up in the "Big House," as the family calls it. She talks of sleeping out on the roof under bright summer starlight, of Christmas presents for 10 lining a whole living room wall, of large family dinners by the hand-painted frescoes in the dining room, of playing for hours in her mother's cedar-lined closet, of climbing the tall cottonwoods that used to line the unpaved Mesquite.
"Those were the good old days," she says, smiling.
Willis lived in the house, which she says cost $15,000 to build, from age 8 until she was 19. After her father died, her mother tried to hang onto the house by taking in boarders, Willis says. But the mortgage payments got too worrisome and her mother finally sold it in 1942 to the Sisters of the Holy Family.
Historian Frank Wright says the Whitehead House, which has qualified for the National Historical Registry, is important partly because it was designed by Worswick, whom he called "Las Vegas' preeminent architect of the '30s and '40s." While the San Franciscan designed many buildings in the city, Wright says, very few are still standing.
The Whitehead House is also "one of two or three outstanding examples of the Spanish Revival style of architecture that was so popular in Las Vegas."
"It's a splendid example," says the State Historical Museum curator, "of the kinds of things we want to be trying to preserve."
To Betty Willis and many of the Whitehead grandchildren, however, the house will always be more than history.
"It was a good house," Willis says. "We had good times here."
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