Wasting Today in a Room With a View of the Past

“Hey, the survivors!”

This big guy with a beer belly splats in through the screen door of a San Ysidro Boulevard speak-easy. He goes over to an older man on a stool. Throws his arm around his neck.

“You’re looking at survivors, man!”

He jerks his thumb across the road.

“The only two people to come out of there alive!”

“There?”

“Yeah. See? Right across the road. Under the pine tree. The Hilton of the South! The Hotel San Ysidro!”

You can make it out, through the red fluorescent “BUD” sign in the milky window. An old building across San Ysidro Boulevard, two-storied, gabled, angular, well-settled under a huge old pine tree. In the midst of scrubby low-rise San Ysidro body shops, it’s a soft-focused flashback to a pioneer’s Midwest. Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” You know, the farmer and his pitch fork and his wife in front of that steep-gabled house that looks like it’s been compressed in a funny mirror.

The sign’s there, hand-painted just above the veranda: “Hotel San Ysidro.”

It is one of those houses that always seemed to have a face. Two window-eyes above, and a sort of mouth-nose veranda-door below. On this mouth-veranda right now, a couple of cowboy hats nod behind two pairs of boots strutted up on the balcony railing. Two old boys sitting out the sundown, watching the world they once ran in go by. You probably passed the scene a thousand times and never noticed it in your hurry to get to the border.

“Serious,” the guy says. He introduces himself as Phil Benson. Vietnam Navy veteran.

“Usually, you check in there, and when you leave, it’s on the coroner’s stretcher. That’s what it is. A place where old men live out their last days. Go across and see. You’ll never see a vacancy sign up there. I checked out because I figured I still got some living to do.”

Across the road. The door creaks open, just like in the movies. The floors squeak like mice in the gloom. It feels like the kind of farmhouse where you visited your grandma in early, fearful childhood. The house and the venerable pine tree sheltering it vie for the honor of being oldest. The tree makes it feel country, too, even though it’s right out there, fronting onto the roaring rivers of border-bound traffic.

Silence Fills the Room

Back in the kitchen, a group of faces looks up. They’re sitting around a big solid farmhouse table, underneath an old Brierley’s bottle ad. Chewing the fat. They’re mostly Spanish-speaking, but now the place falls silent. It’s going to take time. These guys are used to not offering strangers information that might get them in trouble.

Then, Jesus Payan relaxes. Opens up. He has spent 40 years in San Ysidro, working the fields, raising a family. Now, he’s 63 and poor, and has spent seven years here in room No. 1. Well, half a room. They have all been divided into two.

“Here, come up and look.”

Up the creaking stairs to a sloping lime-green passage, to his small trolley car-size room with more green walls, a dresser, a TV, a straight-back chair and a bed. Todo.

The hotel has its drawbacks--like a communal bathroom. But it is home, and it has its veranda where you can sit in the sun evenings. Jesse Rios in No. 2 lives on Social Security as well. He’s mostly Indian, spent his life picking potatoes and onions, been here four years. Yeah. It’s OK. But he hopes authorities will come up with a low-income home for him.

Gabriel Avalos lives downstairs next to the kitchen. Philosophical like the rest of them. Getting old with the hotel. He’s a gentle old man, with that resigned look of the elderly who have seen the best days, and just hope the rest won’t get too bad too soon.

“My father was a vaquero,” he says. “We lived in the country in Colima state (in Mexico). I grew up on a horse. With my shoulder, I couldn’t even get on one now. But my father died in 1937. I started looking for something better.

“But I didn’t get to the United States till 1952. I was naturalized the next year. A better life? Well, I have worked in factories--mostly electrical shops--ever since then. It has more . . . prestige living up here.

Mother Lived to 102

“I married in Los Angeles. We had six children, then divorced. That’s really all there is to tell. Except my mother, she came as far north as Tijuana, and she died last year, 102. She lived to be 102 years old. I think that’s not bad. I don’t see much of my family now. They don’t come down to see me. They live around their mother. I sometimes see my brother in Chula Vista. . . .

“There are 16 of us here in the hotel,” Avalos continues. “All men, getting old. Most of our stories are the same. We talk at this table, but we’re separate. We each have our own food. We sometimes worry about others stealing our supplies from that refrigerator. We live our own lives, just . . . quietly. People are quite private in here.

“Yes, I think about days with my father sometimes, but I’m too old for that kind of life now. It was hard. Family parties? Now? Ha! My children are too caught up in their own lives. So this is my life. In the Hotel San Ysidro. Just like the others here. They’ll tell you the same story.”

Back across the road, all of the locals say the hotel has been there as long as they can remember. It was there when Buster Keaton’s brother Harry used to come in and spend most of his time feeding the 10-cent cashews machine here.

Lots of horse owners used to stay there to be near Caliente back around the time when Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles pulled up in their Rolls-Royce at the cinema next door to see the woman who worked there, Lita Belasco. Turned out she had taught Rita Hayworth how to dance. Boy! Did she become a heroine overnight!

The Same Since 1929

Joe Moreno, who came to San Ysidro in 1929, says the old hotel was there then, just the same. It’s about the only thing that hasn’t changed around here.

There’s gotta be a story to it.

“You bet your boots there’s a story,” says a woman in the little San Ysidro library, which has tried to gather the history of the town. “That place was here before San Ysidro was here! If you knew what dreams were hatched, what lives changed in that place.”

We’re on the porch of the hotel. It’s Jan. 11, 1909. The two or three houses of Tia Juana, the little settlement just north of the border, are not far off. Three carloads of pioneers who have brought their all and bumped down from San Diego are standing around waiting for a strong-faced, bearded man to speak. He is about to change their lives.

William E. Smythe stands up and says something like “Welcome, friends, welcome! Here is where we shall create a new idea! We are here not so much to succeed in life, as to succeed in living!”

He presents a hat. Tosses a few tickets in. And one by one, the families come up and draw out a number.

These are the Little Landers. A colony of idealists, refugees from the cities, middle-class people all, doctors, professors, artists, second sons on tiny stipends from Father who have felt the draw back to the land and the simple, affordable life. And the Hotel San Ysidro will be the center of their lives for the foreseeable future.

Little Landers Took Root

Each ticket represents a plot of land which will be theirs to make fertile. Each, say the Little Lander rules, according to the amount he can till with his family but without hiring labor. This is a return to the “Independent Man,” Jefferson’s Yeoman Farmer, servant to no man.

W.E. Smythe is their guru. The journalist and compelling orator has spent years spreading the gospel of the Little Landers, the idea that each man needs only an acre and a willing heart, and nine-tenths of his needs can be taken care of.

With a supporting community, he can grow food, be free of landlords, and find the contentment that the seedy cities will never provide. Not the isolated farm life, but educated people clustered together in close settlements like French villages, with their lands spread out around them. Living on the edges of cities, supplying their food needs. Getting the best of both worlds. Perhaps the century’s first middle-class hippie movement.

Smythe had come to the Tia Juana Valley and found it empty and fertile. The days of the Californian ranches were dwindling. He formed a corporation that bought 150 acres, then 550 acres of the Belcher Ranch right next to the Mexican border, including the ranch house, for a total of $15,000.

And then he changed the name from Tia Juana to San Ysidro, named after the patron saint of farmers in Spain, the “Plowman Saint.” The beatified Bishop of Seville in 7th-Century Visigothic Spain also apparently farmed and was reputed to be so saintly that whenever he felt tired, the angels did his plowing for him.

Hotel Born Before World War I

This year, 1909, was also the year that the Hotel San Ysidro was officially born. Until this moment it had just been the farmhouse of the Belcher ranch. Smythe had bought it with the land with the idea of turning it into a social and administrative center for the commune. And, more importantly, the place where all his newly arrived followers could come and stay while they chose their land and erected their cabins.

The dining room was to become the first focal center for the lectures, the inspirational evenings, the places where the Great Man would counsel desperate would-be farmers unable coax carrots from their God’s little acre.

The San Ysidro Inn, as Smythe called it, is reputed to have been standing on its present site since the 1880s, though some present day locals insist it had been a railroad depot in Nestor until it was hauled south on a platform by a team of horses.

It also bears a striking resemblance to the historic William Heath Davis house on State Street and F Avenue in downtown San Diego. Researchers with the San Diego Historical Society have speculated it was actually a sister to Davis’ house, shifted down from San Diego when Davis’ scheme for a new town center for San Diego flopped way back in 1852. He was known to have transported several prefabricated buildings by sea around Cape Horn from Portland, Maine.

Whatever its origins, the old farmhouse became the first meeting place for the little band of idealists, who were determined to live the “spiritual life” as well as the earthy one.

Often, the hotel was so crowded that tents had to be erected to take the overflow.

From Cabbage to Guavas

Under his genteel but tough leadership, Smythe’s colony prospered. The fertile fields of San Ysidro did in fact seem to be becoming the “heaven on earth” the great man had dreamed of. Within two years, Little Landers who had come knowing not the slightest thing about agriculture were spending their days growing everything from cabbages to guavas.

A truck would pick up their surplus and take it to sell in their farmers’ market in downtown San Diego at 6th Avenue and B Street. Every other Monday, members would gather at first in the hotel, later in a hall they built, to argue out their problems in town meeting-style direct democracy. On alternate Mondays, they would gather for philosophical discussions, music, Spanish lessons.

At their height, there were 300 working the fields. Through Smythe’s publicity, the San Ysidro experiment was becoming known throughout the States. He wanted it to become a world movement, to free the oppressed of the Industrial Age.

San Ysidro’s influence probably did have a real effect in--of all places--Israel, according to Smythe, possibly contributing to the kibbutz system.

A certain Mr. A. Aaronsohn, head of the experimental stations of the Zionist colonies in Palestine, paid the Little Landers a visit in 1912. After looking around, he spoke to them, probably in the hotel’s dining room. He characterized as “horrifying” the soil waste in America, then told the group: “In your vision. you have foreseen that in the near future these conditions cannot prevail, and you have undertaken to show immediately what the future agricultural generations will have to do.”

International Influence

“The sincerity of the interest shown by these distinguished foreigners,” wrote Smythe in West Coast magazine in June, 1913, “is evidenced by the fact that Little Landers colonies shaped on the San Ysidro model, are already under serious consideration for Australia and for Palestine.”

But above all, Smythe wanted to be an integral part of San Diego, not cut off from its commercial and artistic life. He was always inviting performing groups to come down. He encouraged his people to produce surplus whose profits could be put to the general good.

One of his best success stories was L.E. Scott, a 63-year-old former journeyman shoemaker from Brockton, Mass., who became self-sufficient on only one-sixth of an acre.

“I can get in my garden today, March 24,” he told Smythe in 1913, “10 varieties of vegetables, with strawberries and guavas for dessert, peppers for seasoning, horseradish for a relish, parsley to garnish my dishes, and plenty of roses, geraniums and nasturtiums to decorate the table.”

Senators, congressmen, even a statesman from Australia made pilgrimages to see this answer to the problems of bloated cities. Smythe lectured throughout the land. San Ysidro was becoming Smythe’s shining confirmation that small-scale, self-sufficient intensive farming could provide the answer to industrial misery.

But, within eight years, the Little Landers of San Ysidro were history. In the vulnerable Tia Juana River Valley, they fell victim one night to a flash flood, in 1916, which swept away their homes and ruined their soil. The flood, the Great War, and the influenza epidemic signed the colony’s death warrant. That, and an unevenness of effort. Some folk in the colony resented sharing the wealth they thought they had worked harder for than others.

Killed by Urban Sprawl

Perhaps what would inevitably seal the doom of the Little Lander dream was the unforeseeable sprawl of urbanization that, more surely than anything else, was destined to smother the most fertile lands of the Tia Juana Valley.

But the hotel had been on higher ground in the flood. It continued. In the roaring days of Prohibition when San Ysidro turned into the gateway to fun and liquor and horses just across the border, it became a regular stop for people stabling their horses in San Ysidro. Celebrities and movie stars streamed south in search of chic fun. Some took a breather at the Hotel San Ysidro.

After World War II, one of its most celebrated regulars was Jay Silverheels, Tonto in “The Lone Ranger” TV series.

But gradually, along with San Ysidro itself, history passed the old hotel by. The town has been ripped apart, at the tail of two cities. The hotel forgotten.

San Ysidro’s people have made a few efforts to have it recognized as a historical building, but it is not near enough to the shakers and movers, history’s patrons.

In fact, Ron Buckley of the Historical Sites Board said he has only a vague awareness of its existence.

What’s more, the San Diego City Council is about to break a promise it made to San Ysidro last summer to do a survey of historical sites in the San Ysidro area.

Last week, the Public Services and Safety Committee voted to recommend against spending money on any survey for San Ysidro and Logan Heights.

The campaign for “zero funding” was led by City Manager John Lockwood, according to Buckley. Buckley stressed that he already has “200 worthy candidates” for his board’s attention. Each prospective site needs a report with recommendations and a hearing before it can join the register.

No Pressure for Recognition

“Also,” he said, “we respond to pressure. So far, San Ysidrans have shown no interest in bringing that hotel to our attention.”

Buckley added that the value of a piece of property that does get on the Historical Sites Register usually goes up.

Joyce Hettich, an 81-year-old teacher whose sister still lives in one of the original Little Lander houses not far from the Hotel San Ysidro, says the recognition is hard to get. She and her husband decided in the ‘60s to try to buy the hotel and turn it into a genuine outdoor Mexican restaurant, but figured the place was going to need too much work, too much money.

In the meantime, it has just trundled on, much as San Ysidro has itself, gradually settling back on its piles to take old boys who come to stay--mostly to the end.

Perhaps the town’s, and the hotel’s most telling moment came in 1915, not long before the great flood, when ideals and hopes were highest. The hotel was welcoming more newcomers. The produce was selling more and more to the residents of San Diego. The Little Land movement was gaining worldwide respect.

And in the spring the most exciting news of all rippled through the little settlement. The first through-train of the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway was to come through from the Imperial Valley. It was a direct, permanent connection.

Little Landers made great plans to welcome it in front of the Hotel San Ysidro. A welcoming committee of local residents was gathered. There would be songs, dances, orations. This was the beginning of the future. The train came whistling into town as they struck up with a chorus--but it never stopped. San Ysidro wasn’t important enough. The train went straight on through to San Diego, the town that was really going places.

In Coronado on Feb. 19, the Grand Dame of old hotels, the Hotel del Coronado, will be celebrating its centenary. Guests will be staying the weekend at a cost of $5,000 each. There will be celebrity tennis, parades a grand ball and a ceremony during which owner Larry Lawrence will open a time capsule containing all the glorious history of the beloved old inn.

Down here in San Ysidro, he wouldn’t need to. Nothing has changed. The Del’s Cinderella sister sits waiting for that frog to kiss, just hoping the termites in her foundations go on holding hands.

And the old boys won’t have to worry about forking out $5,000 a weekend either: They’re on about $140 a month. It’s probably a tribute to San Ysidro’s many shattered dreams that the Hotel San Ysidro is still here at all. Progress would surely have knocked it over--or stuccoed it over--years ago if it hadn’t been in San Diego’s Forgotten Corner.

But maybe, with today’s farm crisis in full swing, people will look at it again, and the dream it was part of.

In the meantime, Jesus Payan and Jesse Rios and Gabriel Avalos are sort of happy it is still the refuge for displaced dreamers she always was.