What a Find in Lindenwood

Unique atrium Eichler from 1953, nostalgic musings still stir former Atherton resident
By Dave Weinstein
CA Modern Insider
The Abramson family's Eichler home above, at 73 Hawthorne Drive in Atherton, was built in 1953. Before it was lost to teardown, the home blended indoors and outdoors with a prototype of an Eichler atrium (which would not become a feature of Eichler homes for another few years) on a large lot with mature trees. Photo courtesy Chris Abramson

When Chris Abramson muses on growing up in a unique Eichler neighborhood—Joe Eichler's most upscale and the one where Joe and his family chose to live for 13 years—he thinks not about architecture but about adventure.

"Our parents were never concerned about where we were," Chris says of the Atherton neighborhood where Joe Eichler built about a dozen homes starting in 1953, part of a high‐end tract that he was never able to complete. "We'd get on our bikes after we did our chores, and we could go wherever we wanted. And we felt like it was our private sanctuary."

 

CA Modern Insider
Lindenwood as featured in an Eichler brochure from the early 1950s.

On their home's roughly 1.85‐acre lot, Chris recalls, "We made tree houses. It had a long, steel‐chained ladder that led up into the house."

Chris, a bit of a daredevil back then, spent time atop the roof of his T‐shaped home, sometimes repairing tar and gravel to fix roof leaks. He emerged as a neighborhood savior of sorts.

"I had a reputation among my stepparents of being able to climb trees right away," he says. The skill came in handy when neighborhood cats stranded themselves in trees.

 

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Chris Abramson on his 'Note the Past' podcast. Over the years, Chris had a career in human development and cultivated a strong interest in history. Photo courtesy Chris Abramson
  

"I had the unique reputation that I, of all the kids, was called upon to go climb in a tree to get the cat. And I would climb up into these oak trees, and invariably I would grab the cat and was able to inch it down or drop it to a waiting blanket down below."

Lindenwood was built on the former estate of James C. Flood, the Comstock Lode millionaire, whose main house from 1880, Linden Tower, rose nearly seven stories.

The Eichler homes, which ended up being dotted between other, more traditional homes, were never quite that grand, but they were architecturally distinctive—and expensive for Eichlers, or any tract homes at that time, going for $42,500 to $49,500.

 

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Chris Abramson as a youngster. One of eight children in a blended family that lived on Atherton's Hawthorne Drive, Chris recounts a joyful boyhood of roaming the neighborhood with friends. Photo courtesy Chris Abramson
  

Chris lived in the Eichler at 73 Hawthorne Drive, from 1955 to 1969, part of a blended family. Dr. Mason Abramson, a pediatrician, the home's original buyer with his wife, married Chris's mother, Joan, after Abramson's first wife died.

After the death of Chris's mother in 1958, when Chris was eight, Dr. Abramson remarried again. Chris says that eight children from each of the wives were raised in the house. It was originally a four‐bedroom, three‐bath house. Abramson turned the garage into an additional bedroom, and there was plenty of room for all, Chris says.