VENTURA : Home for AIDS Patients May Become Landmark

If all goes as planned tonight, Christopher House will not only be Ventura County’s sole residential-care facility for homeless AIDS patients when it opens in the fall, it will become Ventura’s 81st historical landmark.

At the property owner’s request and with the city Historic Preservation Commission’s recommendation, the City Council will vote tonight on whether to designate the 99-year-old Queen Anne Victorian house in downtown Ventura a historical landmark.

Noting that the house is a “fine and unaltered example of a Queen Anne Victorian with Stick/Eastlake influences,” Everett Millais, Ventura’s director of community development, carried the commission’s recommendation to the council.

“The house stands . . . as an example of the many homes that were located in this neighborhood at the turn of the century,” Millais wrote.

The structure, named in city documents after its original owner, A.D. Briggs, is at 856 E. Thompson Blvd. It is slated to open in the fall for six AIDS patients.

The house’s namesake, AIDS activist Christopher Dye, died in 1990 of complications from the disease.

Dye’s sister, Santa Barbara resident Trisha Davis, sits on the board of directors of Christopher House, Inc., which bought the house this year with a grant from the city of Ventura and a loan. The group has sought public and private grants and donations to refurbish the house.

“We’re really thrilled,” Davis said of the proposed special designation. “It means a lot to us that the city thought enough of the house to make it a landmark.”

Edie Brown, executive director of AIDS Care Inc., a social services service agency that assists AIDS patients, said she thought the center’s landmark status might raise the morale of some of the house’s residents when it opens.

“It was always (Dye’s) dream to have a residence where we could put people where they could be comfortable and properly cared for,” Brown said. “That dream came from his having to visit rundown hotels and motels where they (people with AIDS) weren’t receiving proper care.”