Rebekah Christensen had recently sold a house in East Sacramento when her daughter spotted the tiny home that would become her escape.
“My daughter turned the corner and she picks up the phone and she goes, ‘Oh my God, Mom, I found this place. I found this place, and it’s just this tiny little house, and it looks like you could pick up the roof and move in,’” Christensen said.
So began another phase of life for one of the central city’s most unique properties, the 632-square-foot, circa 1890 home at 909 22nd St. that Christensen has owned since 2001 and calls “Little House.”
The house, which will be on a Sept. 22 tour of Boulevard Park led by local historian Bill Burg, is one of a scattered number throughout the city where owners have forgone selling the property to developers in favor of preserving history. Some of these properties might be on the historic registry and can’t be torn down or redeveloped. Others, like Christensen’s tiny house, represent owners who fell in love with a house that evokes an earlier time.
These owners take on the cost and work of restoring the houses to good order and knowingly sacrifice some modern conveniences knowing the houses will never be smart homes. But these people get something else for their money.
Four little houses
Originally, it wasn’t just Christensen’s small house on 22nd Street. There were three equivalent-sized houses directly alongside it, leading to an alley midway through the block.
When built sometime around 1890, the four houses might have been affiliated with Union Park Racetrack. This early horse racing venue appears to have been located between B and H streets to the north and south and 20th and 23rd streets to the west and east, based on a review of an 1895 Sanborn map that included an unnamed racetrack.
Michael Schoenleber, a retired attorney whose family has owned an office building next door to Christensen’s house since 2000, said he’d heard that the four houses were “either residences for the horse track employees or they were tack houses for the horses.”
It makes sense these houses might have accommodated jockeys. Christensen’s house is a shotgun-style home with one room opening onto another. The entire lot is just 1,742 square feet, about one-third the size of an average lot. There’s no garage and only a small back patio.
This racetrack land got developed in the early 1900s, but for many years, the little houses stayed, with the Christensen’s attracting different people.
“The cottage hosted a revolving door of residents: a mattress maker, a foreman, and even a hopeful woman seeking laundry work,” Christensen wrote in a history of her house. “The 1910s saw a subtle yet significant shift, with an interracial couple residing at 909, a quiet defiance of the prevailing norms of the time.”
It was a definite defiance of those times, with interracial marriage banned in California until 1948 and not legalized throughout the United States until 1967.
Burg has written of perhaps the house’s most notable resident, Grant Cross, co-founder of the West End Club, a social organization for African American people. Cross and his wife Rose Cross lived in a variety of homes around Sacramento, but Christensen’s is the only one still standing, Burg noted.
A 1949 picture from the Center for Sacramento History shows all four houses standing. As late as the early 1960s, newspaper listings advertised when the cottages were coming up for rent, though times would soon change.
Why three houses are gone and one remains
By the early 1960s, Neva Cimaroli and Adele Taylor had done well enough in their real estate business to construct offices at 911 22nd St.
Cimaroli and Taylor had a building with ground-floor offices and second-floor apartments constructed on land formerly occupied by the little houses at 911 and 913 22nd St. A small parking lot sits today on the parcel where 915 22nd St. had stood.
Michael Corbett, who is now 83 and lives in Davis, designed the office building not long after studying architecture at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His stepfather A. R. Hensley, who’d been acquainted with Cimaroli, was the listed builder for the project.
Corbett had a capable person to work with on the project in Cimaroli, who would forge a long career in local development and was named Woman of the Year by the California Legislature in 2001, according to her 2014 obituary when she died at 87. “She was interested in doing good projects and not just making money,” Corbett said.
Sandy Smoley, who served on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors from 1972-1992, remembered how prepared Cimaroli used to be when she would meet with her about projects. “She was kind of like a pioneering woman,” Smoley said.
For the office project, Corbett had to make use of tight space, with the parcel measuring just over 3,000 square feet.
“I was very interested in kind of a modern approach and I thought the front elevation with the exposed staircase coming up and office below, I just thought it was a pretty good design for that piece of property,” Corbett said.
Years after designing Cimaroli and Taylor’s building, Corbett would win international acclaim for helping develop another project that made use of tight space, the sustainable Lincoln Village in Davis.
Corbett didn’t remember Christensen’s house, either why it was spared from demolition or when the other houses came down to build the office. But it seems implicit that the land at 909 22nd St. might have been useful for the project. The Sacramento Bee noted in early 1965 that Cimaroli and Taylor had been exempted from providing off-street parking due to hardship.
Around this time, though, 909 22nd St. had been embroiled in litigation that might have complicated a title transfer. Mabel C. Clark, who’d bought the house on contract from Philipp Peterson, won a court order in 1963, two years after Peterson’s death, for the property to be transferred to her.
It appears to have taken until 1976, however, for this transfer to be finalized with an additional deed of conveyance, based on a review of records at the Sacramento County Clerk’s Office.
What Little House is today
Around the time that Rebekah Christensen bought 909 22nd St. in November 2001, she began dating Keith Christensen, who she would marry in 2003. He would also prove useful for the heavy amount of work that the house has needed to be brought back. The house was technically habitable at its time of purchase but needed someone willing to put time in to make it shine.
“Keith is just meticulous,” she said.
For such a small house, there was one project after another waiting to be tackled over the course of multiple renovations through the years. Seven layers of linoleum flooring came out of the kitchen. The original hardwood floors were brought back, but only after carefully sanding off paint. There was plumbing, sewer and electric work and much more.
Keith Christenesen owned a house in the Sacramento area, so he worked on the house for a year before he and Rebekah spent their first night there. They would live in the house part-time for some years.
“Little House became our midtown escape and it became the reason that we wanted to live down here,” Rebekah Christensen said.
Today, the Christensens own a four-story house which is within walking distance at 22nd Street and Capitol Avenue. They rent Little House out for events, sometimes as often as a few times a week. The house has also served as a base for business efforts Rebekah Christensen has been involved in, including her nonprofit One World Institute and a government program CAL-IPGCA.
It’s even helped foster the artistic interests of the Christensen’s 19-year-old grandson Vincent Patella, who painted a mural of a rooster on a neighboring garage that’s visible from the house’s living room. Another part of the garage has a second mural by an artist who told Rebekah Christensen they didn’t want to be publicly named.
Patella admits that design-wise, the house reflects his grandparents.
“It’s cute and, like, homey, which is definitely how I describe the relationships my grandparents have,” Patella said. “But it’s – there’s a deep amount of love and care put into the house that I’d say is reflected deeply in who they are as people.”
More information
What: Preservation Sacramento’s 2024 Home Tour takes place in the Boulevard Park historic district.
When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sept. 22
Cost: $25 members, $30 non-members
Where to buy: $30 day-of-tour tickets can be bought at ticket booth and street fair at 23rd and F streets, the former Rite Aid parking lot.
Website: preservationsacramento.org/hometour
If you want to learn more about “Little House,” here is the website at littlehouseon22nd.com
