When Ute Baum went house hunting in 1976, she fell in love with a very old house on Cottage Grove Avenue. It was the only wood-sided dwelling on a very short street in the Adams Hill area. The others were stucco structures from the 1920s.
Very little had changed since the houses had been built, and Baum liked that. As time passed, she wished she could do something to preserve her street.
But she didn’t buy her old house with the idea of it being historic or leading a preservation drive.
“I just liked the neighborhood,” she said.
Baum came here from Germany with her parents in 1956. She enrolled at Glendale High, graduating with the Class of 1958. She moved away for a while, then returned and bought the house on Cottage Grove.