[Noozhawk’s note: Fifth in a series. Click here for the first column, click here for the second, click here for the third, and click here for the fourth.]
In previous columns, I have described the 18th century building of El Presidio de Santa Bárbara and the Spanish soldiers and their families who occupied it. Now we begin to head toward the eventual rebuilding of the fort and the founding of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, the organization behind the reconstruction.
As the American period in Santa Barbara unfolded after 1848, what remained of the Presidio was used as residences, except for the original chapel which continued as the town’s parish church until it was destroyed by the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake.
A section of the comandancia was still occupied and there were a few other rooms that were, literally, in the way of the wheels of progress — that is, a grid was laid out to cut streets right through the adobe fortress, and these streets were actually plowed through in the 1880s, resulting in the demolition of some of the original adobe rooms in the way.
A classic example of this destruction was taking half of one of the rooms and then sealing up the wall facing the street. This left the half room attached to a full room that eventually was called the Valenzuela adobe and was to become known as El Cuartel.
The oldest building in Santa Barbara and the second-oldest in California, El Cuartel was one of the two remaining local buildings surviving into the 1950s.
The 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake destroyed what remained of the comandancia, and a row of Presidio adobes behind El Cuartel was demolished in 1937 for a parking lot for the new U.S. Post Office building at 836 Anacapa St. A story I have heard often is that some of citizens welcomed this “improvement” as those adobes were supposedly the city’s red light district.
The 1925 earthquake was a critical moment for the future of the Presidio. With many of the State Street buildings leveled, city leaders decided to rebuild downtown in the Spanish Colonial, Mediterranean architectural style for which it is known today.
This is a well-known story told in scholarly detail in architectural historian David Gebhard’s catalog for the exhibition he curated at the UC Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1982 entitled “Santa Barbara: The Creation of a New Spain in America.”
Among the leaders involved in this architectural rebirth was Santa Barbara’s leading citizen, Pearl Chase, who through the Plans and Planting Committee, helped guide Santa Barbara through this unique process of city planning. As Gebhard pointed out, the culmination of Santa Barbara’s turn back to its architectural past was the rebuilding of the Presidio, and it was going to be Chase who spearheaded the project.
I submit that without Chase, the project likely would have gone nowhere; as one of her admirers told me, she was a “force of nature.” By the 1970s, she had become a statewide and national figure, being named an honorary state park ranger by the California State Parks Rangers Association, and receiving special recognition from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
There had been talk of preserving and rebuilding the presidio over many decades in the 20th century, with plaques laid in the sidewalk around various locations identifying the area as the former site of the fort. But as we close in on the founding of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, I don’t think there were many in the city who really believed the presidio would ever be rebuilt.
There was one man who had been studying the presidio and was promoting it: Russell Antonio Ruiz. A direct descendant of various presidio soldiers, Ruiz’s most well-known relative was Comandante Felipe Antonio de Goicoechea. He even went so far as to propose that Pershing Park be renamed after Goicoechea, which never happened.
Ruiz’s voice would become more prominent after the Trust for Historic Preservation was founded in 1963. A future column will focus on him, as well as Presidio volunteers.
It was Chase, however, who knew what it would take to get the Presidio reconstruction off the ground, an interesting turn of phrase since the project is grounded in the earth, as it were.
But the task was daunting. By the 1950s, only two separate buildings remained intact, the previously mentioned El Cuartel and the Cañedo adobe across East Canon Perdido.
The Santa Barbara situation, however, was not much different from that of the other three presidios in California.
In San Francisco, the Spanish presidio had been incorporated into the U.S. military fort and there is a small row of adobe buildings whose construction date is uncertain, possibly built in the Mexican versus the Spanish period.
The Monterey presidio was completely gone except for the original chapel, the version there dating from its extension and roof replacement with fired tiles in the 1790s.
In San Diego, nothing remained of El Presidio Reál de San Diego but foundations in a park above Old Town San Diego. It could be much more easily rebuilt than Santa Barbara’s, because the city owns that land and no buildings are in the way of reconstruction.
But San Diego has lacked one thing: a Pearl Chase, or at least the the will to make it happen.
In fairness, I do not want to diminish the efforts and commitment of others to the Santa Barbara presidio project. They were proud to make the reconstruction happen and were instrumental in the project’s success. There were hundreds of people who made key contributions, and I look forward to giving many of them well-deserved accolades in the full manuscript that will be published in the future.
This brief overview of the other California presidios highlights the fact that this important part of the physical heritage of California’s Spanish Colonial history has been more or less lost in contrast to the missions, all 21 of which are major historical tourist sites today.
This point became apparent to me when I first was hired by the SBTHP in 1981. The presidio project is grounded in Santa Barbara’s special commitment to preserve and interpret its birthplace, but its significance transcends our community.
It is a key part of our early state history, and has national connections as part of Northern New Spain’s expansion into California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mississippi and Florida — not to mention its international ties to the history of Mexico and Spain.
My next column will outline the important relationship between the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation and California State Parks that leads to the presidio becoming El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Park.
Another major event in the history of the SBTHP is the donation of the famous El Paseo complex to the organization in 1971. As SBTHP stalwart Jerry Hass told me, the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation was no longer a “mom and pop nonprofit.”
— 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.