Inside a grand house, history is a comforting companion

We BOUGHT THE house, in Hancock Park, Windsor Square, in 1985. My husband, David, and I were dazzled by the gracious boulevard lined with violet-blue jacaranda trees, the rolling green lawns, the elegant architecture, Mediterranean and Tudor, of the beautiful block. We were reminded of the East Coast (which we both missed), of something old Washington Square -- in the middle of Los Angeles.

Our house was built in 1923 by Harry Harlan Belden, who employed a noted architect, Raymond Kieffer, to design an Italian Revival residence for Belden's parents. The house could be included, we learned, in the California Register of Historic Resources, but we would never register it. That would somehow make the house seem less like our home.

Questions of history were far from our minds back then -- though we were quickly introduced to the private historical sense that governed neighborhood relations. For many nights after we settled in, the dog next door -- owned by a couple in their 80s -- barked unceasingly. When I finally asked if he could be quieted down, as my 3-year-old was having trouble sleeping, I was told that the dog had been barking "long before you moved in." As a friend pointed out, our four-legged neighbor was not the "arriviste": We were.

It was easy to feel like an arriviste, a bumbling intruder, in the Edith Wharton-wannabe atmosphere of the neighborhood. But it was true that, beneath the surface, things were changing -- and they had been gradually changing for a long time. Sometimes it was right there to see.

THERE WAS THE

eccentric little village of Larchmont a few blocks away -- with a high-end canned goods grocer, one or two sleepy shops and a down-home cafe called Cafe Chapeau, which would remain cheerfully down-home as the rest of Larchmont Village morphed into an upscale hot spot.

Now the Village sports every avatar of consumer hip: a Starbucks, a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a Blockbuster, a serious yoga center and nonstop sidewalk cafes. Now producers from Paramount and soccer moms rub elbows at Larchmont Florist, where Michelle, the proprietor, makes every floral arrangement, or at Chevalier's Books, where local authors' works are displayed in the window.

Then there's Fremont Place, the gated community where Mayor Tom Bradley lived near Muhammad Ali -- a triumphant rebuke to those who had viciously tried to block Nat King Cole's integration of Hancock Park in 1948.