At highway speeds, it’s easy to miss: a pseudo-Alpine ski chalet wedged between the concrete canyon of the 2 Freeway and the six-lane expanse of Eagle Rock Boulevard. Flowering vines climb the spear-topped steel security fence, evergreens crowd the eaves, and the oversized roof hides the house beneath it, blending into the parched, tangled dross of roadside Los Angeles.
I stay in the A-frame when I’m in town, thanks to Devin Gallagher, a landscape and interior designer who’s lived here since 2011. In the mornings, the strong—if decidedly subalpine—sun pours through the bathroom skylight, encouraging showers of ethically questionable length. Sudsy and shimmering, I look out across Eagle Rock Boulevard to the Glassell Park rooftops stacked against Mount Washington. My host likes to say that the rush-hour roar “sounds like a river, if you think about it that way.” I do as I’m told, imagining the glistening blacktop and commuter chaos as the confluence of two mighty tributaries.
It was Devin who tipped me off to the chalet’s backstory. “I was doing some work turning a closet into a pantry,” he says. “When I took off this old telecommunications panel, it revealed paperwork inside the wall with the return address of ‘Haida Hide.’” A Google search led him to a grainy 1969 microfiche video of the La Brea Tar Pits, showing what he called “hot hippies with their shirts off building my exact house.”
Curious, I followed the trail through newspapers ads, freeway maps, and archival photos, until the yarn of this anachronistic A-frame began to assemble itself.
Haida Hide, Inc., was a housing manufacturing business founded by Norwegian engineer Einar Svensson in 1965. A cross-country skier and monorail expert at the Alweg company (he helped design the transport system for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair), Svensson meant the name as an homage to the “advanced standards of construction” of the Indigenous Haida people of the Pacific Northwest, though the marketing materials gloss over the tragic history of colonization and displacement. He licensed his chalet packages to an LA lumber dealer, Thomas Fleming, who in 1968 built the city’s first Haida Hide—the same A-frame Devin now leases. With its sloping shake roof and sliding glass doors, the Scandi-shack was meant to sell itself—sidesaddle and sunbaked on the roadside, a prefab portal to the pine-strewn, snow-covered San Gabriels beyond.
The Haida Hide, rescued from its prefab purgatory, might yet end up a beacon of Svenssonian modernism rather than a relic stranded by speculation and sprawl.
Even before the lumber landed on the lot, Glassell Park had already begun to lose the plot. The streetcar line running down Eagle Rock Boulevard was dismantled by 1955. The first phase of the 2 Freeway arrived soon after; it was meant to continue south to the 101, but Silver Lake activists killed that plan. A second phase cut north toward the mountains, slicing the neighborhood in two before carrying traffic away altogether.
White flight and disinvestment followed, as wealth and development leapfrogged to the northern suburbs, while Latino immigrants moved into the hollowed-out housing stock. By the 1970s, the Avenues had established a violent drug trade in the area that lasted for decades. (In a 1995 press conference, Bill Clinton condemned the gang after the widely publicized killing of a three-year-old whose parents “took a wrong turn.”) Stigmatized and left behind, the neighborhood limped along until its “rediscovery” in the 2010s.
“Finally an architecture magazine that doesn’t just interview celebrities or cost ninety dollars.”
But back to the happy trail of those hippie hotties. On “Asphalt Friday” in 1969, besuited county officials gathered on the deck of a freshly erected Haida Hide to reopen the La Brea Tar Pits for fossil digging sixty years after the site had been sealed. Offering views of fiberglass sabertooth cats, the twenty-thousand dollar “observation bungalow” doubled as a laboratory, its sliding patio doors opening onto a residential floor plan outfitted with lab equipment. (It looked less like a research facility than a mountain chalet moonlighting as a meth lab.) After the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries opened in 1977, the A-frame was dismantled, its memory consigned to the tar pit of history.
Even before that, Thomas Fleming’s SoCal franchise had undergone a rebrand, following a failed bid to branch out in the Victorville desert. The debut model for his new Woodhaven Homes venture was built on an Eagle Rock ridgeline. Contemporary photos suggest a Haida hybrid of sorts, the chalet having shed its rustic simplicity for a sharper, more spacious ’70s silhouette.
Caleb Patton, who lives there with his wife and two kids, points out two recurring quirks: the heat and the paneling. “Every room has a different paneling,” he says, as if the builder “was just using whatever he had left on the shelf from the lumber store.” He adds that angled walls also take getting used to. Luckily, he’s a cabinetmaker and architectural restorer.
If the Eagle Rock house, with its south-facing wall of glass, hinted at the A-frame’s limits in sunny LA, Haida Hides seemed to thrive anywhere up north. Ads show them sprouting across Alaska, and Svensson’s Seattle flagship likely did brisk business too; a 2022 obituary in The Seattle Times notes that he successfully licensed his house kits in locales as far as Asia, though it does not specify what country. (Perhaps it was South Korea. Incheon City is home to a Svensson-engineered monorail.)
My host likes to say that the rush-hour roar “sounds like a river, if you think about it that way.” I do as I’m told, imagining the glistening blacktop and commuter chaos as the confluence of two mighty tributaries.
In California’s mountains, the chalets found scenery more conducive to their quirks. Bruce Dickson, a cinematographer whose parents bought Haida Hide plans and precut lumber at a sales event for the Pine Mountain Club development, recalls the DIY construction fondly. (He especially remembers how his father “craned in this Japanese soaking tub before finishing the roof.”) The cabin, he says, is “locked in time,” a cozy winter haven where the family “spent many a snowy Christmas.” Built by hand at the edge of a planned mountain community, it felt closer to Svensson’s original vision than anything baking beside the freeway.
Sometime after Fleming picked up sticks, a light-up sign advertising Real Estate by George! rose on the Glassell Park property. When the mysterious George moved out, the new buyer converted it into a residence for her mother before listing it for rent.
Devin, who found the cabin on Craigslist (“it was out of my budget but I wrote them a really nice letter”), was up for the challenge. Over the years, he’s installed era-appropriate furnishings, added a greenhouse, and planted flora tailored to “dusty-ass LA” that also helps mitigate the noise from the boulevard. “It’s loud as fuck.”
The heat isn’t much better. The chalet, Devin continues, “doesn’t work in this climate. It’s the opposite of what you want. There’s no attic, no buffer zone. Inside, it’ll get to the high nineties by three in the afternoon, and if I don’t run the AC, it just keeps getting hotter.”
After the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries opened in 1977, the A-frame was dismantled, its memory consigned to the tar pit of history.
Today, the lodge serves as both a residence and design studio, a model home once more, selling lifestyle over lumber. Yet after watching a YouTube video of someone building a Haida Hide from scratch, Devin felt compelled to share his present dilemma in the comments: “Someday I would love to move out of this place, as it’s unfortunately located right on top of the highway, and construct one for myself in a more natural setting with a view.”
I imagine other options. Maybe he uses my research to buy another Haida Hide in a better setting. (Real Estate by Eric!) Maybe the house takes off—homeward bound—its gable-ends flapping free of dust as it soars above the freeway. Or maybe it takes the slower route, shimmying salmon-like down the on-ramp, flopping into a rewilded LA River, swimming upstream toward the San Gabriels. Or maybe it stays put, watching as Svensson’s monorail glides miraculously down the 2 while the high-speed rail barrels along the 5, Eagle Rock Boulevard is dug up like the tar pits, the streetcar returns, and the whole basin slowly transforms into some postmodern Pleistocene park—a habitat of woolly chested woodworkers and saber-tooth tiger mamas.
After the foreboding security fence finally comes down, Devin, Bruce, and Caleb could clink their vintage Dansk mugs together to toast a job well done, retiring as cabin caretakers. The Haida Hide, rescued from its prefab purgatory, might yet end up a beacon of Svenssonian modernism rather than a relic stranded by speculation and sprawl.
As for this columnist, as long as there’s a coffee shop called Habitat catty-corner from the cabin, I’m happy looking both ways—across Eagle Rock Boulevard, across past and present—rediscovering the utopian potential of a hot hippie enjoying his precut wood.