By Hector Gonzalez
Staff Writer

June 24, 2015 -- Finding the potent artifacts of Santa Monica's past begins by looking up.

“The display windows at the street level have been redone to attract your eye, to make people want to come in and shop,” says longtime Santa Monica Conservancy volunteer Rita Snier, guiding a small group on a recent tour of Downtown’s historic structures.

“If you make yourself look up, you'll find really interesting things.”

Snier has been leading visitors and locals on jaunts around Downtown Santa Monica since the residents-led nonprofit preservation group started them seven years ago. On a recent, brisk Saturday morning, she is outside the Mar Vista Apartments at 1305 Second Street, pointing out the barely visible, faded block lettering crowning the roofline of the reinforced brick survivor from 1914.

“If you look up, way at the top there, you'll see some ghost writing. If you look very carefully, it says 'Mar Vista Apartments' and underneath it says, 'steam heat.'”

Like these bits of little-known local trivia Snier reveals at every stop, architectural elements unique to Downtown Santa Monica's earliest structures often go undiscovered behind modern facades. Bottom floors have been renovated and repurposed sometimes two or three times, but the top floors preserve their original architecture.

Starting inside the Rapp Saloon, 1438 Second Street, the oldest building in the City, the tour traverses the Downtown area's important architectural sites before heading west for a quick visit to the marble veterans' memorial at Palisades Park and a view of the last two remaining Victorian homes on Ocean Avenue, Snier providing history lessons all along the way.

“We call this our art deco treasure,” she says of the clock-topped Bay Cities Guaranty Building at 221-225 Santa Monica Boulevard, a 12-story casualty of the Great Depression.

Erected by a savings and loan in 1929, “just in time for the crash,” the building was restored in the early 2000s. “They've kept it up beautifully and have done a marvelous job of preserving all the details,” she adds.

Other highlights include the Keller Block Building at 227 Broadway, built of brick and stone in 1893 in the Romanesque Revival style and once the City's largest building; the frozen-in-time 1925 art deco designs adorning the Central Tower Building at 1424 Fourth Street; and the former bootleg-era speakeasy at the Georgian Hotel, 1415 Ocean Avenue, once a hangout for the likes of Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone but also frequented by Hollywood stars of the 1950s and '60s.

Stopping at the Hotel Carmel, another favorite retreat for Hollywood, Snier points out the Beaux Arts design topped by terra-cotta lions on the cornice.

“It was a very upscale hotel at one point, but over the years it went downhill, and for a while it was a flophouse,” she said. “In the 1960s, a new owner bought it and completely remodeled it.”  

Snier also provides a brief overview of the evolution of Third Street Promenade, which has its roots as the City's first shopping center, and Santa Monica Place, which was designed by famed architect Frank Gehry and originally opened as an enclosed mall in the 1980s.

When the new, then-modern mall started luring customers and businesses away in droves, the City in the mid-1980s formed a public-private partnership, the Downtown Shopping District, to revitalize the old pedestrian mall, then known as the 3rd Street Mall.

One of the first things the new partnership did was restore many of Third Street's original facades, sandblasting away years of plaster and stucco to reveal the architectural gems underneath, Snier says. Today, much of the Promenade and the rest of Downtown Santa Monica are a blend of the old and the new, a mix of commercial retail and multi-unit housing.

Because of Santa Monica's active preservationist community, facades on most of the older buildings were preserved and incorporated into the renovations, as in the fanciful theatrical masks high on the 1929 Majestic (Mayfair) Theater at 212-216 Santa Monica Boulevard, or the Egyptian goddesses cresting the Lido Hotel Apartments, 1455 Fourth Street, or the intricate geometric art deco patterns above 1354-56 Third Street Promenade.

Another example is the AMC Loews Broadway cinema, formerly the El Miro, a Spanish-language movie house where customers paid 49 cents a ticket, says Snier.

“It is art deco-streamline moderne in style,” she says, pointing out the clashing architectural elements. “They saved the facade, dug in behind it to make the multiplex and built a whole new building around it.”

At roughly two hours, the tours usually end with a Conservancy guide handing out a slim pamphlet, “A Walk Through History, Santa Monica, Downtown.”

“Here you go,” says a smiling Snier as she hands copies to her small group and pointed the way back to the parking lot. “Now you know as much as I do.”