After lingering on Santa Barbara’s Potential Historic Resources List since 1978, the Alhecama Theatre last month became an official city landmark.
The designation ensures the building’s continued preservation and recognizes the Alhecama’s unique contribution to Santa Barbara’s cultural and architectural heritage.
Located in El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park, at 215-A E. Canon Perdido, the theater was built in the wake of the devastating 1925 earthquake, and originally was called the Pueblo Playhouse.
It was intended as a temporary structure at the time, to be replaced by a Spanish-style adobe building in keeping with the rest of the Presidio.
But today, 93 years later, the original wooden theater still stands. And thanks to a recently completed renovation, it has now been restored to its original glory.
The restoration was spearheaded by the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, which has had stewardship of the theater since 1981.
Mike Imwalle, associate executive director of cultural resources at the Trust, has been one of the driving forces behind recent preservation efforts at the Alhecama. He estimates that the reconstruction came at an expense of some $1.2 million, all of which was raised through grants and donations, but notably without monetary assistance from the State of California.
Imwalle points out that the restoration was crucial to getting the theater its landmark recognition, which the Santa Barbara City Council approved with a Sept. 25 vote.
Originally built to house the School of the Arts, the Alhecama complex has a long legacy as a nexus of art and education in Santa Barbara, as well as a place where some of the city’s most influential figures have congregated.
In the 1920s and ’30s, it was home to the office of Pearl Chase, whose leadership of the Plans and Planting Committee is largely responsible for the Spanish colonial aesthetic that inspires today’s Santa Barbara design.
In the 1930s, Alfred Douglas Harmer, a noted playwright and artist, produced raucous plays in the theater, during which rowdy audiences were reported to have thrown tomatoes and eggs.
Later, when the school closed due to the Great Depression, the prominent local arts patroness Alice Schott rescued the property from foreclosure, saving it from being demolished and turned into a parking lot.
Schott then rehabilitated the complex and deeded it to Santa Barbara City Schools for use as their beloved, free, arts-focused Adult Education Program, which continues today as part of Santa Barbara City College.
After the state purchased the site in 1981 as part of an effort to rebuild the old Presidio on its original footprint, the Trust began renting out the former classrooms as studios for local artists. Local painter Mary Heebner was among the first renters and had a studio on the site until 2008.
She and more than a dozen other artists renting space in the complex held monthly shows and would often open their studios to the public.
She describes the Alhecama in those years as a thriving center for collaboration between sculptors, ceramicists, writers, glassblowers, painters, printmakers, and actors from the Ensemble Theatre Company.
“I had an amazing nearly 30 years in that wonderful studio,” Heebner said, reflecting on her time in the Alhecama. “It helped my work develop in deep ways, and for that I’m very grateful.”
The place became a hub from which the creative community connected with the public to display and sell their work. Museum groups visited to acquire pieces for their collections, artists networked across disciplines and an atmosphere of creativity pervaded the grounds.
Over time, however, the Trust’s mission of preserving the site resulted in the artists being gradually pushed out. The building in which Heebner and other artists had studios has since been retrofitted with solar panels and state-of-the-art technology to make it one of the first certified “green” buildings in the California State Park system.
After renovations were completed, it was rented to The Genius of Flexibility, a center for therapeutic stretching. Other former studios in the complex have been converted into a storage space for Zaytoon restaurant and into the office of an environmental maintenance company.
But the past decade has marked the first time in the nearly 100-year history of the Alhecama complex that artists have not occupied the space.
While the theater hosts frequent performances and remains a rehearsal studio for the Ensemble Theatre Company and Opera Santa Barbara, the artistic community that was once so firmly rooted here has mostly dispersed.
Thanks to a newly formed nonprofit, artists may soon be re-establishing a home in the Alhecama complex.
Local artist and arts activist Thomas Van Stein is one of the leaders of a recent push to revive the School of the Arts in Santa Barbara. The Alhecama Theatre recently hosted his public lecture on the history of the School of the Arts and his vision for its resurrection.
“We have empathetic souls running the Trust now, who understand the importance the place has had as a center for the arts, and they want to bring it back,” he said.
Van Stein explains that the Alhecama complex was once a focal point that connected artists from many disciplines in Santa Barbara, and that the arts community has fragmented and become less collaborative since the art schools there closed.
“There was a symbiosis between the craftsmen back then,” Van Stein said, “and that’s mostly been lost.”
Yet with the arts community mobilizing and the Trust invested anew in honoring the legacy of the Alhecama complex, it seems a change may soon be coming.
Kevin McGarry, associate director of public engagement at the Trust, said recently that the organization “look(s) forward to future opportunities to revive the spirit of the Santa Barbara School of the Arts.”
— Garrett Hazelwood is a local freelance writer.