Someone just bought Nitt Witt Ridge — Cambria’s ramshackle folk art landmark
Imagine paying just $155,000 for a famous two-story, two-bedroom, one-bath Cambria hillside home with a distant ocean view.
According to Zillow, a buyer or buyers apparently did just that on June 9. The same page listed comparable two-bedroom home prices in the area at from $740,000 to $999,999.
The catch is the recently sold property is Nitt Witt Ridge, a state historical landmark.
There’s no current water service to the property, the home isn’t livable as it is, it’s in a residential area, and demolishing the structure could be problematic, as would trying to restore it.
As the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2002, “the property was judged unsuitable for a public park and is not zoned for business. It’s too close to neighbors’ homes, with not enough parking, and was manufactured of such an unstable hodgepodge of materials that the safety of visitors could not be assured by the county.”
It’s been referred to, not entirely tongue in cheek, as “the poor man’s Hearst Castle” or “Cambria’s Watts Towers.”
The ramshackle, folk-art-style structure was assembled by Cambria eccentric trashman Art Beal over two decades starting in the 1930s. Beal lived there till 1989 before moving to a care home. He died in 1992 at age 96.
The compound sits on 2.5 acres of steep land that may have some toxic materials buried within.
The sprawling domain is constructed entirely out of junk that Beal collected and repurposed, such as the picture frame he made out of a toilet seat and pillars he made by stacking concrete-filled tire rims.
The current owners of Nitt Witt Ridge, Michael and Stacey O’Malley, declined to comment on June 13 about whether their property had sold.
Zillow’s sales record shows that the most recent sale of the property (to the O’Malleys) was for $42,000 on Sept. 3, 1999. Those records indicate that the Ridge has been on the market periodically since 2018, with prices ranging from $155,000 to a high of $525,000 in April 2019.
Angelica Rodriguez of Remax/Sky in Downey apparently handled the sale. When this report was published, she had not yet returned a request for additional information about the transaction.
This story was originally published June 16, 2022 at 9:00 AM.
