San Diego, California
by Amy Muschik
Most people walking by stop to take a photo of her. She is impressive after all. Standing two stories above a 5-foot platform and elegantly wrapped in verandas on both levels, the Cosmopolitan Hotel in San Diego California is the quintessential stagecoach hotel.
Beneath the painstakingly restored clapboard, however, lies an even deeper past. Although restored to its 1880s appearance this building actually holds the stories and perhaps the spirits of two distinctly different time periods and two different prominent men who made their mark on the history of this state. The Cosmo, as she is affectionately known, has been called one of the most historically significant buildings in Californian history.
Usually in such a place, you may only view rooms from a doorway and snap a photo, so imagine my delight to find that for the same price as the Best Western a few blocks away, you can spend the night in this piece of living history.
Entering on the main level the walls are several feet thick and the temperature feels a few degrees cooler than outside. Standing here, you are actually in the original 1827 adobe home of Juan Bandini, a Peruvian born cattle rancher who built his family home here when these lands were still a part of Mexico.
At the desk I am greeted by a young man in a long tailed black coat, vest and hat. David Villegas is well versed on the history of the hotel and all things Bandini. We walk as he tells its story.
Mr. Bandini was known for both his huge parties, and his political involvement. Guests travelled long distances to attend his famous 3 day fandangos involving food, drinks, music and a favorite of Mr. Bandini’s, dancing. Though known as a gracious host, it was not all fun and games for Juan Bandini. Many important political meetings that shaped the history of California were held right here in the salon. Here, along with other prominent Californios, Bandini planned revolts against more than one Mexican ruler of the day. During the Mexican-American war Juan Bandini was an American supporter and this home was the headquarters for Commodore Stockton. It was here that scout Kit Carson was sent by General Kearny to request aid in the battle of San Pasqual.
Heading upstairs and walking along the expansive 2nd story veranda overlooking San Diego’s old town, it’s easy to daydream about what life might have been like in the hotels’ heyday. Close your eyes as the dry dust rises in small clouds from the dirt streets below. Listen for the clatter of the horses pulling the stagecoach up in front of the hotel to unload passengers, weary from the 35 hour passage from Los Angeles. Imagine the laughter of the saloon crowd, the bustle of the town, and the rustle of crinolines as women pass on their way to the haberdashery.
Opening the faux finished door from the veranda reveals a room filled with period furnishings. A globe shaped lamp, fashioned after the old kerosene style, sits on the table beside the dark, ornately carved bed. Wallpaper, in vintage patterns of leaves and vines form a backdrop for the thick red velvet curtains trimmed with large gold tassels. Double hung, wood framed windows on either side of the door look out onto the veranda and the town below. Each room has its own characters and features, like fireplaces or sitting rooms, though you will not find a TV in the room to distract from the authenticity of the place. The comfy cotton quilt seems like a perfect place to curl up with a book.
When Seeley built his grand stagecoach hotel with 20 guestrooms in 1869, it may surprise you to learn that it did not include indoor plumbing. Chamber pots and outhouses were the facilities of the day. Indoor plumbing was not added until 1930. Don’t worry though, although the 2010 restoration, overseen by teams of experts and historians, included the use of as much of the original materials as possible, the bathrooms are not original. The 20 rooms were converted into 10 unique guestrooms, accommodating guest bathrooms that include pull chain toilets, pedestal sinks, modern rain head showers and in some cases antique copper or wooden soaker tubs. It still has that 1880s feeling but with all the modern conveniences.
Before he returns to his station, I quiz David about the resident spirits. “Every day when I come in to work, I greet Mr. Bandini and Mr. Seeley. One day I experienced a glowing light orb of energy as it crossed the room and disappeared into Mr. Bandini’s portrait. I think he was greeting me back. I have also smelled cigar smoke in Mr. Bandini’s dining room, heard footsteps, and once I saw a man in a top hat on the upper balcony, when there wasn’t anyone up there.” Considering the number of visitors that have been here, it might not be too surprising if a few stayed on. A guest book rests on the night table to record any interesting experiences.
Leaving the hotel to explore, you are just steps from museums, interpretative displays artisans, shops, restaurants, and a theater. When night falls and the park closes, you are left with unique access to Old Town, to quietly contemplate what it was like for those early settlers of the Wild West.
The development of railroads brought an end to the Stagecoach business and the glory days of the Cosmopolitan hotel came to a close. Over the years the building served as a home, store, hotel, barbershop, restaurant, and an olive packing plant. From 2007 to 2010 a multi-million dollar renovation peeled back the layers of renovations from the 1930s and 1950s to reveal its 1880s splendor.
In the midst of Old Town San Diego State Historical Park, known as the birthplace of California, many tourists snap photos as they pass through these halls, on their way to dinner in the Hotel’s restaurant. Some come just to take a look at the 1880s saloon complete with gleaming dark wood bar, and whisky barrels. A few may even be searching to see if any of the resident ghosts are around. As a guest however you will have the privilege to lift the tasseled cord, marked for guests only, slipping upstairs to the guest rooms, to experience this vintage hotel first hand. This is a unique experience I recommend you don’t miss.
If You Go:
♦ The Cosmopolitan Hotel & Restaurant is Located in Old Town San Diego at 2660 Calhoun St, San Diego, CA 92110.
♦ The hotel has a restaurant that is open for lunch and dinner. Available for Weddings and special events.
♦ A delicious continental breakfast is included and served for hotel guests in the salon.
♦ There is so much to explore in Old Town, you should plan a whole day. The admission cost is by voluntary donation.
Ultimate Private San Diego Sightseeing Tour
About the author:
Amy Muschik is a freelance writer and photographer. She specializes in creating Google Streetview 360° virtual tours for businesses and tourism, and her stock photography work has appeared in such places as Readers Digest UK, Disney online, and The Tonight Show. Amy’s writing and photography has been published in Travel Post Monthly, Our Canada Magazine, Great Escape Publishing, TryBelleMag.com, and Appehtite.ca. Her love of travel and photography has led her to freelance writing, and literally to the end of the earth ‘Rounding the Horn’ in South America, sleeping in a room made of ice, and zip lining across a gorge in Ecuador. When not searching for something interesting off of the beaten path, Amy enjoys life at home in London Ontario with her husband and two Australian Shepherd dogs. www.imagerybyamy.com
The Cosmopolitan Hotel at night
David Villegas provided a very informative tour
Jaun Bandini portrait in dining room
Veranda view overlooking historic Old Town
Room interior
Another room interior
Saloon with gleaming wood bar
Quezada’s modest gallery is on the corner of the main street across from the historic, refurbished railroad line. As I enter, the artist, now in his early seventies, breezes in from the side room. Dressed in a faded tan cowboy hat, trim, medium height, bantamweight, looking fit as an Oklahoma rodeo wrangler, he welcomes me: “Buenas tardes, señor. Mi casa es su casa,” His rugged, suntanned face exudes a quiet humility and keen curiosity shaped by his many years of desert life. Later, he puts his arm around me, and Dick snaps my photo.
The pale sky-blue adobe walls in the front room are lined with ollas and vases, glazed in a rainbow of rust-red, brown, and eggshell hues and painted with intricate, geometric designs. Sunlight, streaming through the thin violet-blue curtains, casts an iridescent glow on them. I am mesmerized by their spiral, thin-walled shapes and meticulously painted and etched patterns.
My mind wanders as the room slowly fills with the lyrical beauty of Garcia’s baritone voice and guitar strumming. I gaze out the window. The heat glimmers over the parched, dust-colored land. Nothing seems to be alive except patches of creosote and agave clinging to the desert emptiness. How could such incredible artistic beauty come to exist in such a remote, hardscrabble place?
“The first time I saw those pieces,” Juan tells me in Spanish, “I knew I had found a hidden treasure. I knew that the ancient ones must have found the materials here.” Over many years, he has patiently experimented with different clays, pigments, drawing and firing techniques to make ollas or pots with the ancient culture’s iconography and design.
Like a tale out of the Wizard of Oz, it began in 1976 when MacCallum stopped off at a second-hand swap shop in the New Mexico border town of Deming where he bought three unsigned pots. Intrigued by their intricate beauty and wondering if they were pre-Columbian in origin, he embarked on an adventure south that would take him to Mata Ortiz and the unknown potter.
The homes, some humble brick adobes; others larger cinder-block buildings, resonate with an infectious warmth and vitality for work. Children breeze in and out as if flying on broomsticks. Pots and vases line oilcloth-covered tables. I look over the shoulders of men and women as they shape, polish and paint at tiny sunlit work stations. They shape the lower portion of the object in a plaster mold, place a single coil of clay atop it, and then by hand work the clay upwards to form their thin-walled bowls, jars, and pots.
Today, one of Quezada’s pots can sell for thousands of dollars. In 1999, he received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes, Mexico’s highest award given to a living Mexican-born artist.
I wound my way through the ruins on a trail which took me backward in time. Pueblo Grande began as a small settlement around AD 450 and grew to over fifteen hundred people. The mound village was one of the largest Hohokam settlements in the area. At one time there were over fifty mound villages in the Salt River Valley. They got their names from the platform mounds at their centre. The mounds were urban centres with large open plazas where ceremonies were likely performed and were built with trash or soil and then capped with caliche, a lime-rich soil found in the desert which makes a good plaster when mixed with water. Pueblo Grande also included residential “suburbs”, astronomical observation facilities, waste disposal facilities, and ball courts.
I walked past the remains of the platform mound, the ball court, special purpose rooms, and the Solstice Room. At summer solstice sunrise and winter solstice sunset, the sun’s rays passed through the corner door and onto another door in the middle of the south wall of the Solstice Room. Some researchers think the room may have been used as a calendar.
Pueblo Grande was built at the headwaters of a major canal system. The Hohokam cultivated many plant species, including maize, cotton, squash, amaranth, little barley, and beans. Unlike today, The Salt River ran year round during Hohokam days. But the arid desert environment did not produce enough rainfall to grow crops. The Hohokam built over one thousand miles of canals and engineered the largest and most sophisticated irrigation system in the Americas, no small feat considering the primitive tools they had.
Mesa Grande Cultural Park contains the ruins of a temple mound built by the Hohokam between AD 1100 and AD 1400. At first glance, I was not impressed with the site. Just a mound of dirt and a ditch. The site became more interesting as I walked through it and viewed it in context of the historical information provided on sign posts. The Park of the Canals contains no mound village but displays the remains of over four thousand feet of Hohokam canals in three different sections. Also located with the Park is the Brinton Desert Botanical Garden, a small garden containing plants found within the desert environment.
Canals remain important to irrigation within the greater Phoenix area today with nine major canals and over nine hundred miles of “laterals”, ditches taking water from the canals to delivery points. Paths alongside the waterways are used for walking, running and biking. Scottsdale, one of the other cities in the greater Phoenix area, has turned a canal area into a modern meeting place and tourist draw. The banks of Scottsdale Waterfront, in a revitalized area of downtown Scottsdale, are lined with palm trees, public art, courtyards, fountains, and walking paths. The area contains restaurants, outdoor cafés, specialty shops, and high-rise residential buildings, and hosts music and art festivals. It feels worlds away from its ancient Hohokam roots.
About the author:
There are places that tell your body and mind to slow down; to let the world come to you in unhurried steps. Places as beautiful as they are restful, as intrinsically informative as a guided tour yet far from the madding crowd.
Though frequent visitors to the island this trip was a first for we had rented an oceanside cabin at Overbury Farm Resort. Still in the family of the original 1909 homesteader Geraldine Hoffman the farm, which originally gained renown for its eggs, became a resort in the 1930’s and pursues that legacy with manored elegance to this day. Our self-contained, modern cabin was a short forest walk to the gracefully aging and carefully tended manor house on Crescent Point, which owns a magnificent setting and ocean view, set amidst lawn, gardens and trees.
Owner Norm Kasting told us of a short cut trail through the forest to St. Margaret’s Cemetery and from there to the Capernwray grounds which cut off a good 30 minutes in our trek to the Telegraph Harbour Marina and Pub. As it is our wont to walk and explore we found our way to the cemetery and read, amid the tended lawn setting, how it was donated as a cemetery by early Island resident Henry Burchell in 1927. Its turf was even earlier turned to welcome the remains of a Burchell in 1924. It has since become the final resting place of a number the Overbury Farm-owning family, including pioneering Geraldine Hoffman.
A gateway opened to the grounds of Capernwray and access to wide grinning Preddy Bay beach where you can wander and explore with tended grounds behind and Vancouver Island panorama before. Capernwray asks that if you wish to enjoy walking their idyllic grounds that you check in at their office behind Preddy Hall. The whitewashed hall stands singularly elegant at the centre of the grounds. And walking their grounds is worth it. There are cared-for lawns with gardens, ponds and visiting Canada Geese, sedate Holstein cattle dotting the greens and views out to Chemainus from whence you can spot the ferry leisurely making its endless crossing. Capernwray offers the opportunity to dine at their hall, which dates back to 1927, along with the students. (Call to reserve 250-246-9440).
A stroll along Foster Point Road to the south of the island takes you past a massive Arbutus tree compelling the road to go around it. Grand as it is it is but second best to another, which rests near the community hall, and is acclaimed the largest Arbutus in B.C. A spider network of paved and unpaved roads offers up miles of leisurely strolling and exploring.
A quiet inland hike can be picked up near the one room school house. Here the solitude of an enveloping forest can hush the busiest of minds.
All photos are by Glen Cowley:
Back in the early 1900’s, Olcott Beach was a resort area. When a trolley line was put in place between the towns of Lockport and Olcott in 1900, summer visitors flocked to the beach to enjoy the cool breezes of Lake Ontario and entertainment. Also vacationers arrived by steamship. During the early years of the 1900’s, over 100,000 tourists arrived yearly.
Unfortunately, due to the Great Depression when people had little money to spend, in addition to the increase in automobile ownership, the hotel business at Olcott Beach and many other Lake Ontario tourist communities floundered. People could drive to the beach for a day and return home without spending money on a hotel. In 1927 a huge fire wiped out many buildings and the amusement park along the main part of the tourist area. The Grand Hotel was repaired, but only survived a few more years. Due to deterioration, the building was demolished in 1937.
When we parked near the shops, we immediately heard the “oom-pa-pa” of a carousel’s Wurlizer Band organ. The Olcott Beach Carousel Park was developed in 2003-2004 by local volunteers who raised funds for building a vintage amusement park.. It features an old time Herschell-Spillman two-row carousel and a few other kiddie rides for only 25 cents a ride! They can do this because the park is staffed by volunteers and is incorporated as a nonprofit organization. When you enter this quaint park you feel like you are going back in time to around 1945.
After a stroll through the mini-boardwalk and the park, we went around the corner to eat at the Mariner’s Landing restaurant. We chose to eat inside due to the heat that evening. But we could have eaten on an outdoor upper deck which offers a stunning view of Lake Ontario and nearby Krull Park. The inside was filled with nautical decor, especially on an upper ledge that ran all the way around the dining room. It was filled with models of ships, lighthouses, sea captains, and other knick-knacks. They were fascinating to look at.
Both of us ordered fish dinners. The waiter seemed a bit impatient as we asked questions about substitutions for potatoes and coleslaw, but he also was quite busy covering several tables in the dining room as well as out front on the sidewalk. Later he stopped by and in a more friendly way chatted about how to cook cabbage. We enjoyed our dinners and viewing the decor. We had to wait awhile to get our check, but overall eating there was fun.
After our meal we needed to walk off some calories and wandered across the narrow street into the beautiful 325-acre Krull Park. The park overlooks the lake in the area where the old Grand Hotel once stood. We didn’t go down the steep stone step pathway to the beach below where the swimming area is, but enjoyed the view from above. The park is pleasantly arranged with benches, picnic areas, and pavilions. We heard that over the summer several festivals take place at the park. Across Main St. is another section of the park. In a drive-by, we could see busy recreation fields and courts that were full of kids playing sports, along with spectators. A cheerleading squad was practicing within sight of the street also.
