The Padre Hotel

When the Padre Hotel opened on Chester Avenue in downtown Bakersfield in nineteen twenty-eight, it was the tallest building in the city and among the most architecturally ambitious in the Central Valley. The eight-story reinforced concrete tower, designed in a restrained Mediterranean Revival style, was built by a partnership of local investors who believed that Bakersfield's combination of oil money and agricultural commerce had finally produced a city worth a first-class hotel.

They were not wrong about the money. The late nineteen twenties in Bakersfield were prosperous, and the Padre Hotel served as the headquarters for a particular stratum of that prosperity: oil company executives on long-term projects, land speculators, the legal and financial professionals who collected around the commodity economy. The hotel's rooftop restaurant and bar were the social center of the city's business class.

The hotel survived the Depression, the wartime economy, and the nineteen fifty-two earthquake, which damaged it but did not bring it down. What it did not survive, at least initially, was the postwar shift away from downtown. By the nineteen seventies, the hotel had declined from first-class to marginal, and by the nineteen nineties it had closed. The building sat empty for more than a decade, an eight-story monument to what Bakersfield's downtown had once been and was no longer.

The renovation came in the two thousands. A local development partnership reopened the Padre Hotel in two thousand ten after a restoration project that preserved the original architectural character while adding modern systems. The rooftop bar reopened. The Chester Avenue address, which had once been the center of downtown, regained something it had not had in thirty years: occupants who chose to be there.

The Padre Hotel's trajectory, from boom-era ambition to Depression survival to mid-century decline to abandonment to careful revival, is a reasonably accurate summary of what happened to downtown Bakersfield over the course of a century. The building absorbed each phase without falling down, which in California seismic country, for an eight-story concrete tower built in nineteen twenty-eight, is its own form of accomplishment.