The Rowland Wrecking Ball

 

From our front yard in Rowland Heights, a short walk of three blocks led to a gentle rise, where another five-acre plot cradled an old adobe mansion. Built by a descendant of John A. Rowland the mansion stood as a relic of a storied past. Rowland, the original land grant holder, had acquired nearly 50,000 acres of Southern California’s breathtaking landscape in 1842 for a mere thousand dollars in gold, granted by Alta California’s Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado. John Rowland was a merchant from Santa Fe, New Mexico, he had journeyed 900 miles to Alta California after losing his first wife in a Native American attack. To secure the Mexican land grant, he married a Mexican citizen, converted to Catholicism, and became a Mexican citizen himself—though rumors persisted that a bribe to Alvarado sealed the deal. When the United States defeated Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1848, Rowland, unlike many others, retained his grant. His skills as a surveyor and geologist ensured his land’s borders were precisely documented, anchoring his claim in the newly American territory.

 

The adobe stood as a testament to his legacy, whispering history to a boy wandering its shadow-draped grounds, in Rowland Heights, just across from Rowland Elementary School on Batson Avenue. It was known to us as “The Old Adobe” or “The Rowland Adobe.” Built by John A. Rowland’s granddaughter, this Spanish-style mansion was a breathtaking relic, nestled on a five-acre plot veiled by fifty-foot eucalyptus trees. As third graders, we toured this historic gem, passing through a chain-link gate to cross a stone bridge over a moat-like stream that encircled the hilltop estate. Only after thirty steps did the mansion emerge, its red clay-tiled roof and grand arches radiating both simplicity and decadence. Behind it lay an Olympic-sized pool, cracked from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, surrounded by untended bougainvillea and peacocks that strutted freely or perched in the trees. We couldn’t enter the house itself, but through century-old windows—warped with tiny bubbles yet clear—we glimpsed a staircase adorned with wrought iron handrails and vibrant blue Spanish tiles, their intricate designs fired into eternity.

 

Tragically, just a few years later, on its centennial, the Rowland Adobe was demolished, replaced by a sprawling low-income (HUD) apartment complex. When I worked at the Hacienda Heights restaurant in the 1980s, a waitress named Sharon lived there. She threw a party, only for it to end in horror: after her boyfriend flirted with another woman, Sharon killed him and was sentenced to life in prison. Violence, prostitution, drug dealing, and burglaries soon plagued the complex, transforming a once-majestic homestead into a place to avoid, even in daylight. The loss of the adobe felt personal, like a piece of my childhood had been erased. I recall a saying, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, about a neighbor moving into a house and cutting down a beloved tree for casting too much shade, stripping away a piece of someone’s youth. Whether or not Hemingway said it, the Rowland Adobe’s destruction felt like that tree—its fall a symbol of the beauty and stability lost to my family and me.