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City Hall Now at Former Pizzeria

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Special to The Times

The one-story abandoned pizza parlor, the temporary new home for Atascadero City Hall, is a far cry from the 80-some-year-old, seven-story brick beauty employees called home until a magnitude-6.5 earthquake rocked this region a week ago.

A chain-link fence stands around the cracked and damaged Atascadero City Hall on the city’s central mall, and about 50 employees are expected to arrive at their new quarters in a former Captain Kid’s Pizza Playland this morning for work.

When they decided to rent the building, officials were dispirited over its condition. But they have outfitted it with new phone lines, drywall and temporary cubicles.

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“The pizza place looks a lot better than it did at first,” Atascadero City Manager Wade McKinney said Sunday. “But it’s not the old building, which is just awesome.”

While structural engineers believe the building can be saved, it could be at least three years before the city can move back in, according to preliminary estimates by city officials and federal emergency workers.

The brick building has extensive cracks in its exterior and interior walls. Some of the supports for the three-story-high rotunda were weakened, and bricks were knocked from the rotunda itself. Some cracks extend from the top of the rotunda to the ground seven floors below, McKinney said.

After a week in which city services were scattered, officials expect most services to be restored today at the former pizza parlor near the intersection of El Camino Real and California 46.

Atascadero took a strong hit in the earthquake, which caused an estimated $200 million in damage throughout San Luis Obispo County and killed two women escaping from an unreinforced masonry building in downtown Paso Robles.

Nothing that happened in Atascadero seemed to hurt its spirit quite like the damage to the imposing City Hall, which towers above the mostly one-story buildings in the city of 27,500 people.

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It is a building that predates the city’s incorporation by six decades and was designed to be the headquarters of a visionary developer who planned what he called the Atascadero Colony as a utopian agrarian paradise at the dawn of the automobile age.

Even those with no need to visit the building for city services visit a small museum it contains or attend such functions as weddings, proms and anniversaries in the rotunda, which sits atop four floors of offices.

A wedding scheduled Saturday in the rotunda was canceled because of the damage. Wedding and event planners have been scrambling to find new sites to replace one of the most popular event venues on the Central Coast.

Although there have been structural improvements over the years, City Hall was never fully retrofitted to withstand earthquakes.

Now, it is off-limits to all but structural engineers.

“What limited retrofitting has been done probably saved it. That’s why it didn’t end up on the ground,” McKinney said Sunday. “I think we’re like a lot of public buildings in California that aren’t fully retrofitted.”

The quake caused brick buildings to crumble in downtown Paso Robles, and merchandise was damaged in art galleries and antique shops all along the Central Coast. City leaders in Atascadero said 200 homes were badly damaged, with lost chimneys or cracked foundations.

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Officials said there is no question that residents want City Hall repaired, but there is no estimate on the cost.

McKinney said that about 60 employees were in the building when the earthquake struck. They raced down the stairs while walls cracked and computer monitors fell. No one was injured.

Although the epicenter was closer to the coastal communities of Cambria and San Simeon, the strongest force of the quake moved east toward Paso Robles and Atascadero, seismologists have reported.

Officials in other cities say no small community could afford to build a structure today as imposing as Atascadero City Hall.

It was built between 1914 and 1917 by developer Edward Gardner Lewis, and designed by noted institutional architect William D. Bliss of San Francisco.

“After Hearst Castle, it’s probably the most ornate and beautiful building in the county,” McKinney said.

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Lewis’ aim was to create a planned community of 30,000 that combined the best of agrarian and city life. He wanted to turn the 61,000-acre Rancho Atascadero he had purchased in 1913 into a planned community, where people could live on small ranches with farm animals and have ready automobile access to the ocean by an 18-mile road he built, which later became California 46 to Morro Bay.

He used the top engineers of his day to plan the city with the intention of having piped water, good roads and open space. And, there was to be no building on steep hillsides. All of those traits that separated it from more haphazardly planned communities in the region.

The lots and roads were designed to spread out in concentric circles from the E.G. Lewis Building, now City Hall. The layout remains much the same today.

“You can see the impact of that vision today,” McKinney said. “Our average lot size is still one acre. Even today, all the zoning rules for each lot are dependent on exactly how far the lot is from Atascadero City Hall.”

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