2008 Calendar Info & images

This image taken by Bernie Isensee is typical of Isensee’s priceless historic photographs of architecture in the Ventura area in the 1930’s and 40’s. Though no date was found on the original 8x10, the image is dated by using research from the Conservancy’s photo archive and newspaper accounts from the archives of the Star Free Press, available on microfiche at the Museum of Ventura County. The back of the Downtown Ventura Post Office can be seen across from Plaza park in this photo, it was built in 1936. The Ventura Mutual Fire Insurance Company building on the corner of Main and Fir Street was built in 1938-39 and it was not begun when this image was taken. The Victorian house on that corner stands at the left middle of the image. Also visible in the image is the early Mediterranean (Spanish) façade of the Ventura Theater building on the corner of Main and Chestnut Streets. This façade was modernized in the late 1950’s folowing a plan from architect Kenneth Hess.

These two images are both scans of early hand-colored postcards. The image on the right was printed with the title ending in “Ventura Cal.” This misprint was corrected on this postcard by simply striking out the offending text and printing the accurate text below. This magnificent classical Greek Revival building was the result of the philanthropy of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who funded 1678 free public libraries in the United States at the beginning of the 20^th Century.  His foundation donated $12,000 in 1906 for this particular building.  Most of the Carnegie Libraries employed this Greek Revival architecture and extant examples can be found in many modern day cities of California.  The architect was Franklin Burnham and the contractor was Thomas A. Carroll.  Richard Haydock was Oxnard’s mayor who applied for the Carnegie funds and personally chose this design. The building served as a library until 1963 and the lower floor was the city hall until 1949. The building was designated as a Ventura County Landmark in February of 1971 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in July of 1971. Today it serves as the Carnegie Art Museum in the heart of the historic district of Old Oxnard, across from the plaza. More Information at: http://www.vcnet.com/carnart

March - The Pierpont Inn, 550 San Jon Road, Ventura

The building of the Pierpont Inn is important to the story of Ventura because it represents the first substantial development eastward from the Downtown area across the San Jon Barranca. The land upon which the Pierpont Inn sits was the farthest northwest corner of the San Miguel land grant to Raimundo Olivas and Felipe Lorranza awarded in 1841 by Mexican Governor Alvarado. Santa Barbara entrepreneur, Dixie Thompson purchased the Lorranzna portion of the rancho and planted the largest bean field in the world.  With Thompson’s passing in 1903, his heirs sold the land for development.  On April 10^, 1906, the City of San Buenaventura annexed 627 acres, officially beginning what is now called the Midtown portion of the city. A wealthy Ojai socialite, Mrs. Josephine Pierpont-Ginn, had established the prosperous Pierpont Cottages in Ojai and decided to invest in Midtown, Ventura when it was still considered the East End. She hired renowned Los Angeles architect, Sumner P. Hunt, to design the “ultra modern” Craftsman style hotel situated on the bluff to accommodate the dramatic increase in tourism due to the popularity of the automobile.  The Inn opened September 6, 1910, with every dignitary in Ventura County attending the event.  The Pierpont Family continued to own the Inn off and on until 1929, even converting it to the Pierpont Inn & Country Club in the 1920s. In 1929, the Pierpont’s sold the Inn to Mattie and Gus Gleichmann with an $80,000 loan to the young couple given by Mattie’s father, Ashby Vickers.  The Vickers family was a pioneer farming family in Ventura County since the 1860s.  Members of the Gleichmann family owned the Inn for 70 years until 1999, when they sold it to another branch of the Vickers family, Scott and Spencer Garrett.  The Garrett’s restored large portions of the Inn, converting of the Pierpont and Gleichmann family dwellings that surrounded the Inn into period correct guest accommodations like the 1920s Pierpont English Tudor cottages, the 1930s Gleichmann family Spanish Colonial Revival Vickers Estate and the 1950s Mattie Gleichmann ‘50s Flat’ designed by prominent Mid Century Modern architect, Robert R. Jones.  In 2002, the Garretts took the significant step of placing the hotel property on the Historic Hotels of America membership, a branch of the National Trust of Historic Preservation.  The entire Pierpont Inn property is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.

April - The Bank of A. Levy, 143 W. Fifth Street, Oxnard

This impressive structure was designed in 1926 by the prestigious architectural firm of Morgan, Walls, & Clements.  It was designated as a Ventura County Landmark in November of 1979.  In the 1880s, Achille Levy, a native of France, established a commission and forwarding business in Hueneme.  He would buy grain and other products from the farmers and charter sailing schooners to take the goods to San Francisco.  Gradually he began lending money to the farmers and cashing their checks.  When Oxnard was founded in 1898, he moved his business to a wooden building on Fifth Street and in 1902, to a brick building on the northeast corner of B and Fifth Streets.  In 1905, the business was incorporated as a banking institution, Bank of A. Levy.  Achille Levy considered his bank to be an integral part of the community; there were no foreclosures during his lifetime, even during the Depression in the 1930s.  In 1927, with Achille’s son Joe as president, Bank of A. Levy moved to this Renaissance-style building on the corner of A and Fifth Streets.  Many branches of the Bank of A. Levy were opened, but the headquarters remained at Fifth and A Streets for many years.  In 1995, the Bank of A. Levy was sold to First Interstate Bank.  The building has recently been restored.

This photo is taken from the end of the wharf (pier). Note the cross on the hill and the roof of the Ventura County Courthouse above the Bath House. California Street once ended at the beach. The Hotel La Barr (July) is visible in the center of the image on California St. The Bath House at the end of California Street, has been replaced with the City of Ventura’s promenade parking structure. The Victorian house in the photo was replaced by the 1973 Holiday Inn, which was recently remodeled as a Crowne Plaza. The Bath House originally housed a saltwater plunge with a slide. During WWII the building was used as the Ventura USO. Later the pool was covered and the building served as a roller skating rink. Finally the building was burned down as a drill for the fire department.

The Ventura School for Girls was established in 1913 and became a physical reality in 1914.  It was constructed as a reformatory for girls with social ‘issues’ that were transferred from Whittier State Reformatory. This complex was historically significant because the then Governor Johnson appointed five representative women of the State to be its trustees.  It was hailed as the ‘First School in America Managed Wholly by Women” by the Ventura Free Press on January 16, 1914. One of those trustees was Mrs. Eugene Preston Foster (Orpha Foster), who was appointed a two year term.  Mrs. Foster lobbied extensively for the construction of the school.  In 1912, women belonging to the California Federation of Women’s Clubs began a campaign to start a State owned training school for girls.  Club women pressured legislators and the Juvenile Protective Association of San Francisco to pass a bill appropriating money for this school.  Twenty-five locations were considered within the state with Ventura winning the final destination. The system of the school was patterned after the successful Industrial School for Girls at New Bedford, Massachusetts.  The girls were sent to the school from all over the state by the juvenile courts and would live there until they were twenty-one years of age.  They were given courses in domestic science, dewing and millinery, as well as a complete grammar school course.  They also offered diverse courses in horticulture, husbandry ranching, hair dressing, and manicuring.  The girls lived in the cottages and were put on the honor system with the intent that when they left, and would be able to earn an honest living and be freed from the “temptations besetting the inefficient worker."

Today, this site is occupied by the Vista Del Mar Hospital which specializes in the treatment of mental illness and substance abuse. Only the water tank in the photo remains of the complex.

July - The Hotel La Barr,  239 S. California Street, Ventura

These two modest hotels represent the land boom of the 1920s in the City of San Buenaventura due to the successful development and mining of the oil fields in the Ventura Avenue area. With the first ‘gusher’ pouring forth in 1921, the city experienced an overwhelming growth period until 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression.  The city burst its boundaries through multiple housing tracts on the Avenue and in the Midtown area. This growth period is easy to identify through the popularity of the Spanish Colonial Revival architectural style.  Many hotels, both large and small, were constructed to house the thousands of new workers flooding into the town.  The Hotel La Barr was located on California Street and was demolished after the building of the freeway in the 1960s.  However, the El Patio Hotel, built in 1929, survives as an excellent example of ways in which the city met a housing crisis. This long rectangular, two-story stucco building forms a U-shape on the south side.  The façade is an L-shape with an intersecting low-pitched gable tiled roof and tiled hipped roof entrance.  Mediterranean details include a recessed arch located above two front windows, wooden spindle and spoolwork, carved brackets, shutters and wrought iron lamps.  The builder was C. L. Stennett and was constructed as a large 40-room hotel by D. R. Jennings.  It is one of the few hotels from the 1920s that has maintained a large degree of original architectural integrity over the years.

This Historic photo shows “Camarillo State” as it came to be called, from the top of water tower hill, during construction around 1935. Today this image shows only the back of a new university building and mature trees obscuring all the old buildings and bell tower. The Camarillo State Hospital was located 3 miles south of the city of Camarillo, California and was in use from 1936 to 1997.  During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the hospital was at the forefront of treating conditions that in previously had been thought of as un-treatable. An example of this was the drugs and therapy procedures doctors at the institution developed for schizophrenia. Many of the programs initiated at Camarillo helped patients formerly relegated to a lifetime of warehousing in an institution or lobotomies be able to leave the hospital and move to less restrictive group homes or become independent. The hospital would be a leader in the research of drugs and therapies for mental illness.  They were also one of the first hospitals to deal with autism. The architecture is a stunning example of a planned community in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, with its distinctive tower. Changing ethics over the years meant releasing more of the patients and putting them in community-based group home rather than large, costly, and remote hospitals.  As a result, the number of patients at Camarillo dropped from 7000 in the 1960s to 900 in 1996.  In 1997, governor Pete Wilson closed down the hospital, due to costs by the state.  Originally, it was intended to turn the facility into a prison, however, community protest and interest from the Cal State Universities led to its conversion into a university, California State University, Channel Islands (CSUCI). The university opened in 2001 and most of the buildings were preserved and revitalized, including all the original 1930s, Spanish Revival structures. It became Ventura County’s first public university. The facility has also been used extensively in the movies and television, as well as the inspiration for the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles. More information is available at  http://www.cshemployees.com

The beautiful brick building represents the first “Auto Center” in Ventura. The 1920s saw an Oil Boom period of development in the city of San Buenaventura. In addition, the Ford Motor Company had perfected the assembly line process of manufacturing automobiles and put cars in the hands of the common man.  All along this part of Main Street there was a proliferation of automobile dealerships that proudly displayed their wares. The Sanborn Maps of 1966 show that this building still existed at that time. Its floor plan followed the common layout of auto showrooms of the period with the display area at the street with large windows and the auto repair and machine shops at the rear of the structure. There were several more of these showrooms on this block and across Ventura Avenue on West Main Street. They eventually were demolished in order to make way for the construction of the present Vons shopping center, condos and office buildings. One of the best extant examples of this type of auto dealership structure is located at 430 E. Main Street, which was originally the Nash Motor Sales building. Auto sales moved from this area to Midtown Ventura in the mid century, when Thompson Boulevard was the 101 highway through town. Then after the raised 101 freeway was built through town, the car dealerships eventually moved to the current “Auto Center” at the eastern edge of the City of Ventura along the 101 freeway.

Fire Station One opened with a professional staff of 13 men in late 1941. The Station was closed in the early 1980s and the building was transformed through adaptive re-use into a hotel & restaurant. For years it was known as Pastabilities Restaurant, in 2004 was remodeled into the Table 13 Restaurant & Bar, and most recently into HUSH Restaurant and Lounge.  The Clocktower Inn is also part of this building, notable because the “Clocktower” was originally the fire station’s drill tower. This is where firemen trained in climbing and catching jumpers with a large canvas frame (safety net), and where the fire hoses were hung to dry after fires. On the Figueroa Plaza side of the building is the A. J. Comstock Fire Museum, which includes two hose carts, a historical display and photographs of Ventura firemen and the Chinese Volunteer Fire Company (c. 1870 to 1906).

This building located at the corner of Santa Clara and Chestnut Streets is an outstanding example of the modern, forward-looking Mid Century design that became popular during the prosperity of the Post World War II years. It was originally designed by architect Harold Burkett and constructed by general contractor George Macleod as the “new” City Hall in 1951. Prior to its construction, City Hall had made its home in the leased first floor quarters of the Ventura Masonic Lodge built in 1929 on the corner of California and Santa Clara Streets.  The building was featured in the Ventura County Pictorial 1951. It was described as a “one-story building, completely fireproof in construction, which will house all of the city offices, with the exception of the police and fire departments, which have locations of their own.” 

In recent years, the building was sensitively restored for adaptive re-use. It is currently occupied by the loan offices of Affinity Bank.

The corner of Main and Palm Streets currently is home to a modern building housing Rabobank. The second building on this block still exists and houses the Red Brick Gallery. The rest of the block has changed completely, with the removal of buildings, and the building of newer structures. There is even a pocket park in the middle of the block where a building once stood. This is an extraordinary photograph of the south side of the 300 block of Main Street between Palm and Oak Streets.  In 1910, the Sanborn Maps show that this was then numbered as the 700 block of East Main Street.  The large Mission Revival façade at the corner of Palm and Main Streets was the location of the Chaffee department store and its address was 724 Main Street.  In 1928, the Chaffee store re-located into the ‘brand new’ Ventura Theater building.  Directly adjacent to the Chaffee store was the Bartlett Jewelry & Stationary Store.  Charles Bartlett established this store in the late 1870s. Both the Chaffee store and the Bartlett store appears on the earliest Sanborn Maps created for the city in 1886.  What is of particular architectural note is the almost unbroken line of prismatic glass transoms above the storefronts. Physical improvement of city structures from 1903 through the late teens was an outgrowth of the nationwide City Beautiful Movement. A City Beautiful League was formed in Ventura in 1903. In 1913, the Ventura Free Press reported that “the Great Eastern (of which Charles Bartlett was a partner), and the Rains Shoe store would be fitted with modern steel fronts with prism glass and large plate glass display windows.”  The goal was to form an unbroken line along Main Street to unify and connect the commercial district. Prismatic glass tile transoms would become a signature design element of Main Street commercial building during the first two decades of the 20^th Century. These glass transoms are still evident at Jonathan’s at Peirano’s at 204 E. Main, the Mission Gift Shops at 225-231 E. Main, the Nash Motor Sales at 230 E. Main, and 422, 440, 456, and 466 E. Main.  It is not known how many other remnants of this element are possibly encased behind current, existing facades.