Explore Los Rios Street in San Juan Capistrano

By Christine Lampert, Architect, AIA, NCARB | Artwork by David Harris Lang

The construction of the Santa Fe railroad tracks through San Juan Capistrano in 1887 made lumber available by railroad. Many board and batten houses were built along Los Rios Street. When railroad depot was built in 1894, the railroad company made an effort to create a structure that represented the Mission Revival style and Spanish Colonial heritage of the town. Today, the San Juan Capistrano Historic Train Depot, just across the tracks from Los Rios Street, is still a busy, functioning railroad station, with a popular restaurant inside called Trevor’s at the Tracks.

The Montanez Adobe is believed to be one of the original 40 adobes constructed by the mission Native Americans in 1794. The Montanez Adobe was the home of Dona Polonia Montanez, whose father was a mission carpenter. The house became a spiritual sanctuary when Dona Montanez created a tiny chapel inside. She became the spiritual leader of the community, as well as the town midwife. The other original adobes are the Rios and the Silva houses.

One of the most popular shops in the Los Rios District is the Tea House on Los Rios. On any weekend, you’ll find the Tea House front porch crowded with mostly women in flowered dresses and straw hats having afternoon tea. The Tea House building is a traditional cottage from the 1800s.

Walking down this tree-lined street takes one back to the 1800s with the willow trees, eucalyptus and palms. At the top of the street is the Cottage Gallery on Los Rios, which is a wood framed cottage from the 1890s that still has its old kitchen, but is now filled with art. The 40 artists who display their work at the Cottage Gallery are all local to South Orange County. The artwork in this article was painted by one of the artists featured at the Cottage Gallery, David Harris Lang.

Christine Lampert, Architect, AIA
GUEST OPINION | HISTORICAL HAPPENINGS by Christine Lampert

The Bartow Mansion by the Pier

There once was a beautiful Spanish Colonial Revival mansion on the hill just south of the San Clemente Pier, right above the Beachcomber Mo-tel. It was built in 1928 by I.M. and Augusta Bartow. This mansion had 12 rooms and was considered to be grander than any of the other mansions in town.

I.M. Bartow was a wealthy New Yorker who was friends with other wealthy investors in the small San Clemente village in the 1920s. He retired to San Clemente at the age of 44, encouraged by his New York friends, the Weirk sisters, who had built their home at 402 Pasadena Court. The Wierk home can be seen as one drives south up the hill from the pier. The Wierk home is currently being reviewed by the city for major renovations and additions. This home is distinctive for its beautiful garden with a tile waterfall that cascades down the side of the hill to a fountain at the bottom.

The Bartow Mansion, located on Pasadena Court, was demolished in 1972, and a 15-unit condominium complex was built in its place. The demolition of the Bartow Mansion set off a movement by local concerned residents. They created the San Clemente Historical So-ciety, which remains very active to this day. The group then lobbied the city to encourage preservation of the historic buildings of San Clemente. As a result, the city now has a review process for any changes to historic structures.

San Clemente in 1928 was made up of some very wealthy families who were friends with each other. A newspaper article from 1933 mentions the San Clemente elite getting together for their bridge club at the Bartow Mansion.
Mr. Bartow was known locally for spotting illegal alcohol being smuggled at night at the San Clemente Pier. He reported seeing odd lights at sea and called the police, which most likely deterred the smuggling on those nights. The pier, built by Ole Hanson as a gift to the town, had a hidden hatch in the floor of the restaurant at the end of the pier where alcohol was brought up by the boats and delivered to secret bars known as “Speakeasies” during The Prohibition Era, when alcohol was illegal in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933.

Mr. Bartow died at the age of 48, only four years after retiring to San Clemente. He and his wife were married only a few years before buying the San Clemente lot and building their mansion. He was extremely active and was known for his charitable generosity to struggling local families, although he shunned publicity.

The architect for the Bartow Mansion, also known as “Nuestra Casa,” was most likely Virgil Westbrook, who designed many of the well-known buildings in town.

The house was sold in 1946 and was described as a 12-room Italian villa with unobstructed ocean views and with a 20-foot by 35-foot living room, 5 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms and maid’s quarters.
Christine Lampert is a member of the San Clemente Historical Society, as well as the American Institute of Architects (IA), and has designed many projects in San Clemente and California.
She has been a professor of architecture at USC and SCAD Hong Kong. She and her family have lived in San Clemente for more than 46 years.

History Lesson:

The San Clemente Pier
By Christine Lampert, Architect, AJA, NCARB

Ole Hanson, the founder of San Clemente, built the pier and then gave it back to the community as a gift. The pier was a great place for locals and visitors to fish and to enjoy the ocean.
For years, the San Clemente Pier was the main fishing pier in the area with boats docking alongside for loading passengers. It was the place to catch a boat in South Orange County until 1971 when the Dana Point Marina was built.

The San Clemente Pier was once the center of illegal smuggling. When the pier was built in 1928, a prohibition law that forbade the sale of alcohol in the United States was in place. The 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution made the sale of alcohol illegal; it was repealed by the 21st amendment in 1933.
Liquor was smuggled into the United States and sold in secret bars which were called “speakeasies.” The San Clemente Pier had a hidden hatch under the snack bar at the end of the pier where alcohol was brought in by boats at night and delivered to speakeasies in the area.

The local coast was very isolated and undeveloped in the 1920s San Clemente was the perfect place to bring in secret contraband in the middle of the night. Ships brought the liquor up the coast and transported it onto smaller boats, which would bring it into San Clemente and other locations along the coast.
The pier has barely weathered some major storms over the years. In the winter of 1939, a huge storm took away most of the pier and it had to be rebuilt. The storm scattered pings and debris from the pier as far away as Dana Point. It happened again in 1983 with an El Nino storm. This time, the city fire department anticipated the storm and they came onto the pier the day before and hacked away an 80 foot section to try to save the restaurant at the base. That night, waves washed over the entire pier, and even though a large section of the end of the pier was ripped away, the restaurant survived.

It took almost two years and $1.4 million dollars to rebuild the old wood pier, which was reconstructed with steel reinforcement to better protect it from the next storm. The next storm came in 1989, and this time the pier survived with less damage.

For years, a small shock at the end of the pier sold fishing bait and snacks. At the base of the pier was the boat storage for the local fishing club, In the 1970s, the boat storage facilities were remodeled into Fisherman’s Restaurant & Bar.

The original pier was 1,200 feet long, but when it was rebuilt, it goined 96 feet and it is now 1,296 feet long-almost a quarter-mile. 

Today, Orange County is home to only five piers: San Clemente, Balboa, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, and Seal Beach
Christine Lampert, Architect, AIA, NCARB

The San Clemente Lifeguard Buildings

By Christine Lampert
Reference: https://www.sanclementejournal.com/2024/11/19/513639/the-san-clemente-lifeguard-buildings?fbclid=IwY2xjawHWYcNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTJtn1YOH6iOEuAFET-qb7smlOxp5ruzjsBZogzc1MJfbLaE63ZmTl4s7g_aem_D5qevjrnI4TbyFHrijoBHA
The founders of San Clemente built the San Clemente pier as an attraction to the people coming to buy lots in the new master-planned community. Ole Hanson was the visionary of the founding group that planned on creating a town with everything needed for a great lifestyle including the pier and other public buildings; a community pool and the downtown hotel.

Popularity Stirs Need for Beach Lifeguards

San Clemente beaches had become such a huge tourist attraction by 1931, that the city council voted to approve the first beach lifeguard service to help prevent any drownings. Just south of the pier was the first lifeguard observation tower which was finished in 1938. This was the legendary Tower 1 on which lifeguards had to climb a ladder over 20 ft. high in order to see the other side of the pier and to assure the safety of the swimmers. Over the years, Tower 1 was replaced many times and was always the busiest tower on the beach.

It wasn’t until the late 1950s that a local police officer, Dick Hazard, would gather a group of local ‘watermen’ to form the first San Clemente Lifeguard Department. Orange County assigned every beach a two-digit call sign and San Clemente became Station 56, which is still used today. 

By 1958, ‘White Box Towers’ were built along the beach. These towers had ramps instead of stairs and the lifeguards were expected to do everything from trash pickup to rescues. Dick Hazard ran his department like the police department with uniforms and equipment inspections and lots of physical training and mock rescues.

By the mid-1960s San Clemente had become a popular surfing beach. There were also fishing boats docking off the end of the pier since Dana Point Harbor didn’t exist until the 1970s. The Gallery Restaurant was at the end of the pier with its huge neon fish sign. The ‘White Box Tower #56’ which is still there today, was built on the pier for better viewing of the entire beach.

In 1967 the city announced that it was going to do a three-phase project including a lifeguard headquarters building, restrooms and a huge three level parking structure at Linda Lane Park. 

The three level parking structure at Linda Lane Park never came about. However, they did build a new Lifeguard Headquarters Building. 

Today, just north of the pier is the current Lifeguard Headquarters Building. Prior to this building there was a garage for equipment. In 1968 the city decided to replace this building with the one that is there today. They hired a local architect named Eric Boucher to design the new headquarters varied offices, a dispatch office, first aid room, locker room, training room and garages. There was much discussion about whether the building should be built in the Spanish Colonial Revival Style. The city fathers decided that the white stucco walls were too susceptible to graffiti and dirt and that the Spanish tile roof would be subject to damage and was more expensive than a rock roof. Eric Boucher suggested the tower, complete with clock, would be the key element so that children playing on the beach would know when it was time to go home.          

Lifeguard Headquarters
The headquarters was built for $75,000. Eric Boucher designed the building to sit directly on the sand and included pilings along the side facing the water. This is why the building has withstood the many storms and sand erosion over the years. In 2019 the City voted to spend $2 million dollars on reinforcing the seawall and remodeling the building. 

A New Design?
Early in 2021 the City posted a Request for Proposal for a study to look at the future of the Marine Safety Headquarters and its potential replacement. The City selected HMC Architects to prepare the study and after six months of working with the city, HMC came up with two options. The first would be to replace the existing building with a new two-story facility in the same area. The bottom floor would be considered a ‘soft story’ which could allow water to flow underneath the building. Every year there are incidents where large waves wash into the existing building. It is expected that the ocean will be invading our beaches even more in the future. 

The second option is a very creative use of the existing bluff behind the railroad tracks. This design won the 2022 Design Awards for both the AIA San Diego and AIA Orange County. 

This design concept would place the new building within the hillside. The underground occupiable space would have plenty of natural light and passive ventilation and would be extremely energy efficient. The building would be 87 percent more energy efficient than the average building. The roof of the new facility would become a public plaza directly accessed from the existing parking lot off of Avenida Victoria. Functions such as loading, maintenance and storage, which can be unsightly, would be hidden below grade. The 1968 building would be removed and the public would benefit from all the additional space that is currently the footprint of the building.

At this point it is only a feasibility study. They will need to coordinate with the California Coastal Commission, plus the method of paying for the cost of building this project (estimated at $8M in 2022 dollars) will need to be resolved.

It is easy to see that parts of Corsica looks look a lot like the hills of San Clemente before the town was built in the 1920s. The big difference is the architecture. Corsica has many small villages that were built hundreds of years ago mostly out of stone. However, red tile roofs are very common, just like San Clemente. Many of the newer structures in Corsica are stucco and resemble the San. Clemente style of architecture.

It is easy to understand how these two locations have a lot in common and both places are close to being paradise.