The Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation’s restoration of the historic Alhecama Theatre required a complex collaboration and coordination between the trust, Ensemble Theatre Company and the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Santa Barbara. 
One of the first tasks during the Alhecama Theatre renovation was the seismic strengthening of the building’s rafters. 
One of the first steps to returning the Alhecama Theatre to its original configuration required removal of the seats. 
The interior space after the seats were removed. 
The interior of the theater before the drapes, restrooms and mural restoration were completed. 
Volunteers joined the workforce renovating the Alhecama Theatre. Here, Michele Jackman scrapes black paint from a window pane. 
The illustration in this 2014 invitation depicts a relocated Bonilla House next to the Pico Adobe, with a section of the paseo that will be constructed in the future outside the Presidio defense wall. 
A rendering of the presidio front gate after the third phase of the presidio is rebuilt. The view is looking north on Santa Barbara Street, with the 200 block of East De la Guerra Street on the right. Missing from the left corner are the commercial shops that currently occupy the site. 
Artist Rich Untermann imagined how the presidio might be bridged across Santa Barbara Street, then painted it. 
The Museum of the Olive & Greek Olive Oil in Sparta Greece, could be a model for a similar museum at the Santa Inés Mission Mills in Solvang. 
The Museum of the Olive & Greek Olive Oil in Sparta, Greece, traces the mysteries and many facets of the olive from its initial appearance in the Mediterranean in 60,000 B.C. to the present day. 
The youth soldiers group at the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson Museum in Arizona could be a model for a similar group of boys and girls at the Santa Barbara presidio. 
The Asakura Hotel, shown in a pre-World War II photo, was located in the 100 block of East Canon Perdido. It could be rebuilt to house a Japanese presidio area museum.
[Noozhawk’s note: One in a series. Click here for previous columns.]
After El Presidio de Santa Bárbara’s northwest corner — at the intersection of East Canon Perdido and Santa Barbara streets — was completed in 2014, the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation began to gear up for the next phase of “mudslinging” that would include building the northwest corner defense wall.
The project came to be called the “Four by Four Campaign,” but I felt there was something not quite right and began to have a sense of presidio entropy.
Looking back, I believe a lot of it had to do with the departure of SBTHP board members who had driven the project forward. A new generation of board members had not completely bought into becoming “creative mudslingers,” as I earlier described those who founded and sustained the presidio reconstruction.
SBTHP board interest and momentum shifted around 2005 to working out an agreement with the Ensemble Theatre Company. The shift was related to SBTHP’s long-held desire to develop the Alhecama Theatre for El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park use, and the fact that ETC was a longtime tenant at the historic building at 215-A East Canon Perdido and tucked behind La Playa Azul Café.
Obviously, ETC was an important Santa Barbara cultural institution, and SBTHP was patient in asking the nonprofit arts organization to seek a new home. Besides, the 140-seat theater was itself a financial challenge.
Around 2005, attorney Derek Westen entered the scene as ETC’s board president. The organization had hoped to build a new theater by The Granada Theatre, a few blocks away at 1214 State St., but that fell through. Not long after, ETC focused on taking over the old Victoria Hall Theatre, at 33 W. Victoria St., and we were off and running, so to speak.
I suggested that Redevelopment Agency of the City of Santa Barbara funding for the new theater be reprogrammed to both SBTHP and ETC. We would use some of the funds to restore the Alhecama, and ETC would keep the remainder to help defray restoration costs at Victoria Hall. If the Victoria project fell through, we agreed that the rest of the funding would go to the Alhecama restoration.
The RDA staff and board liked our idea and reprogrammed the money. The SBTHP portion was used to upgrade the exterior of the Alhecama. The renovations of what would become The New Vic got underway and ETC moved out of the Alhecama by the end of 2012.
Westen and ETC artistic director Jonathan Fox were a pleasure to work with, and Westen and I also put our heads together to do a small RDA-funded project between the alley behind his building on State Street and the west side of Casa de la Guerra.
SBTHP’s restoration of the Alhecama’s interior began in earnest. Harrison Design — one of whose principals is Tony Spann, a former trust board member — donated a series of architectural plans for the wood-framed building that dated from the 1920s. An engineering firm did work on the project as well.
I took the lead raising the funds. I had met with Helen Pedotti, a former SBTHP board member whose Schott family once owned the property and had abbreviated the names of her and her three sisters to come up with the Alhecama name for the building, which originally was part of the then Santa Barbara School of the Arts. After her death in 2010, an annuity she had set up was used to help restore the theater.
I also worked with the Mosher and Santa Barbara foundations, both of which provided grants.
The largest grant came from the Hind Foundation of San Luis Obispo. I asked a local contractor to come up with a cost estimate (not a bid) to complete the interior work and we submitted it with the grant proposal, which the foundation funded down to the penny.
I was very proud of myself with this swan song effort. By the time I stepped down as CEO of the trust in 2016, more than 80 percent of the money had been raised and a similar percentage of the restoration finished through a time and materials approach.
I felt great pride to hand off a final community success story. A SBTHP board member once asked me if I thought all the time I had put into the Alhecama was worth it. At first I wasn’t sure, but I could finally say it was indeed worth the challenge. The restored Alhecama Theatre has been designated a City of Santa Barbara landmark.
Since I left the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, the “mudslinging” world has slowed down. The SBTHP has more or less downsized the adobe fort to being part of the “Presidio Neighborhood.”
Among the board’s interests are preservation and restoration of El Cuartel and the Cañedo Adobe, both remaining original adobe rooms of the 18th-century presidio, and the restoration of the 19th-century Cota-Knox House in the park at 914 Anacapa St. These are worthy goals.
SBTHP recently invested time and money in repairing the commercial building on the northwest corner of De la Guerra and Santa Barbara streets. These are commercial spaces that the Park General Plan says should eventually be demolished.
All of the current tenants leased space after the State of California purchased the property. State Parks will have to decide how these commercial spaces are to be used to advance interpretation of the park.
Another fact worth noting is that when including street parking, the presidio has more than 250 parking spaces. I think these should be leveraged to advance the interpretation of the history of the presidio and SBTHP’s other interests, such as the Santa Inés Mission Mills property in Solvang.
Here are some my final “impossible dreams”:
» Complete the northwest corner defense wall to Santa Barbara Street and create a paseo outside the wall from Santa Barbara to Canon Perdido streets.
» Relocate the Bonilla house off the foundations of the presidio.
» Plant native plants on the paseo pathway; inside the presidio grow plants the Spanish introduced.
» Build the presidio front gate and the corrals as approved in the General Plan
» At the Santa Inés Mission Mills, build a barn and corral for horses that can become part of both the presidio and Santa Inés Mills State Historic Park living history programs.
» Rebuild the southeast corner of the presidio defense wall from Santa Barbara to Canon Perdido streets as approved in the General Plan
» Develop an ongoing “green” education adobe program in concert with the Archaeology and Adobe Resource Center.
» Rebuild the Soldados del Presidio de Santa Bárbara living history group with a youth program that includes both boys and girls. The Santa Barbara Police Activities League would welcome such a program.
» Develop a museum at the Santa Inés Mission Mills on the history of the olive in California. The museum could also interpret other crops, not to mention having sheep on site. Of course, the inner workings of the mills must be rebuilt.
» Rebuild the Asakura Hotel slightly offset from its original foundations west of the presidio defense wall to interpret Japanese history. The presidio’s Japantown deserves more than one room in a presidio adobe. Appropriate locations for further interpretation of the presidio area’s Chinese history is something that needs to be explored. The Chinese lived primarily in the Whittaker Building that neither SBTHP nor the state own.
» Remove the parking but maintain the sidewalk on the presidio side of the 100 block of East Canon Perdido and extend the plaza out to enlarge the performance area of the park. Just removing the parking would open up the feeling of the site. Which reminds me: it appears that parking will be removed in front of Casa de la Guerra under the current planning for De la Guerra Plaza. It’s an excellent idea and one I had pushed for a long time.
The Presidio project was conceived by Pearl Chase and many other great Santa Barbara civic leaders who thought big. Over time, these visionaries restored and preserved an accurate, well-balanced flow of presidio history.
Continuing the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation tradition of “creative mudslinging” will result in a state historic park worth sharing with the world.
— Jarrell Jackman is the former executive director of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. After receiving his Ph.D. in history from UC Santa Barbara, he taught for six years in Europe and Washington, D.C. In 2015, he was honored as a knight of the Royal Order of Isabel la Católica by Spain’s King Felipe VI and was named an honorary state park ranger by the California State Park Rangers Association in 2016. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.