106
summer
|
fall
John McEntee Bowman
C
anadian-born John McEntee Bowman learned the hotel
business from one of New York City’s premier hoteliers, Gustav
Baumann of the Holland House. On New Year’s Eve 1913, Gustav
opened a new hotel across from Grand Central Station. Commissioned
by New York Central Railroad and designed in the Beaux-Arts style,
the hotel took up the entire block bordered by Madison Avenue, 43rd
Street, Vanderbilt Avenue, and 44th Street.
A Dearth of Hotels
T
he only hotel near the beach, the Potter/Ambassador Hotel,
burned to the ground in 1921. The 1875 Arlington Hotel, which
had arisen phoenix-like in Mission style plumage after a 1909 fire,
tumbled to the ground forever during the 1925 earthquake. Afterward,
only two hotels catering to the luxury traveler existed in Santa Barbara.
One was the Samarkand near Oak Park. The other was the exclusive
El
Mirasol
, which took up an entire city block that today is Alice Keck Park
Memorial Gardens. Created by the artists Albert and Adele Herter, it was
owned by Frederick C. Clift of the Clift Hotel in San Francisco in 1925.
By this time, the Douglas family had moved to New York, and
their visits to Santa Barbara were fewer and fewer apart. Several Santa
Barbara citizens, who had decided to remedy the hotel situation,
believed the Montecito Park area would be an ideal site. They formed
an investment group and acquired the title to Montecito Park and the
residences of
Inellan, La Chiquita,
and
Gull Cottage.
When officials from the Bowman-Biltmore Corporation
expressed interest in developing a hotel in Santa Barbara, the investors
rolled their assets into the newly formed Santa Barbara Biltmore
Corporation. Its directors were Harold S. Chase, developer of Hope
Ranch, and Santa Barbara lawyers Francis Price and A.C. Postel, as
well as six men from Los Angeles. Harold Chase and C.K.G. Billings
were major investors.
The corporation hired Pasadena architect Reginald Johnson, who
had designed several homes in Santa Barbara and Montecito. These
included the 1915/1918 redesign of the 3rd clubhouse of the Santa
Barbara Country Club as a residence named
Mira Flores.
Today this
house anchors the Music Academy of the West campus.
Ralph Tallant Stevens was hired as the landscaper architect. Ralph
grew up at the
Tanglewood
estate where his father, also a landscape
architect, had his residence and business. Today it is called
Lotusland
.
The stage was set, and on March 5, 1927,
The New York Times
reported, “President John McEntee Bowman, in his room in the
Giralda Tower at Coral Gables, touched an electric key and flashed
the signal to Santa Barbara, more than three thousand miles distant,
setting the steam shovels to work on the excavation.” Ground was
broken; a new era was begun.
Landmarks
(above)
John McEntee Bowman, president of the Bowman-Biltmore
Corporation (Courtesy Library of Congress)
(below)
Grand Central
Terminal in New York City connected via underground passages to the
26-story Biltmore Hotel (Courtesy Library of Congress)
