-Historic Survey-

II. Goals and Priorities

The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Preservation Planning emphasizes the need to develop goals and priorities in order to effectively identify, evaluate, and register historic properties.²

A survey can be conducted at many different scales and with many different emphases, but the kind of survey undertaken should reflect the needs of the community.³ The goal of this historic resources survey is to provide framework that enables the City of West Covina to move towards consideration of historic resources in its local planning activities. Once resources are identified, they can be included in an Inventory of Historic Resources.

Goals and priorities should arise from developed historic contexts of an area. In order to formulate the goals and priorities of this survey effort, an historic context was developed for the City of West Covina. The context identified themes and patterns of development that provided the basis for goals and priorities. For example: it was found that the area had strong agricultural ties until the 1950s when it underwent a tremendous population boom and subsequent shifts in development patterns. It was also found that West Covina lacked an early commercial core, which differentiated it from surrounding San Gabriel Valley communities.

Given these findings, the goal of the survey was refined to place emphasis on the City's early agricultural roots and the historic resources associated with those homesteads. Due to the City's lack of early commercial buildings, the survey focused on residential property types. From this larger goal, the following priorities were established:

• Identify residential architecture built prior to 1946 that has potential
• ties to agriculture
• Explore and document the architectural styles utilized in homestead
• architecture built prior to 1946

After the development of goals and priorities for the survey, a reconnaissance of pre-1946 properties was performed.⁴ This yielded an additional area of consideration. It was found that numerous estates existed with designed landscapes. This produced an additional priority:

• Identify and document estate properties built prior to 1946 where the landscape and setting significantly contributes to the significance of the potential resource

In accordance with the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Preservation Planning, survey activities were refined to meet determined goals and to deliver a usable work product within a reasonable amount of time. The scope of work was defined to provide an effective product within available program resources.

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² "Archaeology and Historic Preservation: Secretary of the Interior's Standards and Guidelines for Preservation Planning, Identification, Evaluation, Registration, and Documentation," Secretary of the Interior's Standards and Guidelines [as amended and annotated] (Washington DC: National Park Service), n.p.

³ Anne Derry and others, eds., "Guidelines for Local Surveys: A Basis for Preservation Planning," National Register Bulletin (Washington DC: National Park Service, 1977, revised 1985 by Patricia L. Parker), n.p.

⁴ The properties determined to have construction dates prior to 1946 were compiled in a list by the City of West Covina Planning Department and supplied to HPP as a starting point for the Historic Resources Survey project.

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