History on Tap: Barrio Artists Work to Save Long-Forgotten Brewery Murals

The year was 1933. America was awakening from 13 years of fitful sleep called Prohibition. And tucked away in a corner of the country, the Aztec Brewery opened in San Diego.

A testament to modern beer making with state-of-the-art technology and equipment, the brewery grew into one of the largest in the West, producing its own ABC brand and several private brands such as Red Spot, Old Dutch, Brown Derby and Associated.

Twenty years later, the business died and the brewery now is only a memory, the old and dilapidated brick buildings at 2301 Main St. surrounded by the barrio of Logan Heights and on the verge of demolition for a warehouse.

But inside one of those buildings--a small taproom known as the rathskeller--is one of the finest and least-known collection of murals, paintings, stained glass, carvings and tile work depicting Aztec life to be found anywhere in Southern California.

For 55 years the artworks have been there but, like the brewery once enhanced by these paintings and murals, they long ago dropped from public view, languishing for decades in the shadows as the sprawling property changed owners and uses. Today part of the old brewery--the bottling shed--is home to a tire distributor.

A month ago, a snapshot of the rathskeller, showing the city’s 1936 softball champions hoisting a celebratory glass of ABC beer, appeared in the back pages of The Reader, a free weekly newspaper.

Snapshot Caught His Eye

It caught the eye of Salvador Torres, chairman of the Chicano Park Arts Council Inc., the nonprofit group of barrio artists best known for its 17 years of work painting striking murals of Latino life on the pillars under the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge.

Torres is an artist whose work mirrors the growth that began in the 1960s in barrios throughout the Southwest, when Chicanos--as blacks before them--used

art as an instrument to define their unique heritage and cultural roots.

Torres speaks reverentially of the rathskeller, calling it a “temple” and a “shrine.” He fervently believes there is a reason why the artworks have remained hidden for so long.

In some twist of fate--yes, he says, maybe by some mystic force--the murals and paintings were entombed, waiting to be discovered again by the very descendants of the Aztecs and Spanish conquistadores whose likenesses grace the rathskeller’s walls.

“The room is designed like a temple. We feel so energized when we’re in here,” Torres said. “It’s our duty and responsibility to strive and preserve them. We believe they rightfully belong to the community. They were created in this community and should stay in this community.”

Artists at Work

For the last several weeks, Torres and a group of fellow artists have been taking photographs and painstakingly tracing the murals and the paintings so that in the event the works can’t be preserved, they can at least be re-created elsewhere.

The object of all this work and attention is a chapel-like room 51 feet long, 18 feet wide, with ceilings 17 feet high. Inside--from the chairs and tables to the tile work--the story of the Aztecs and their gods is told. But also evident are art influences of several eras: Pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, the Mexican muralist movement of the 1920s and ‘30s. There is even a regional work--a picture of Mount San Miguel in Spring Valley.

On the walls are paintings encased in elaborate plaster frames, on the ceiling are wooden panels, each with symbols that tell a story when read in a sequence determined by the ancient Aztecs. A fountain and two intricate stained-glass windows are at one end of the room. There are carvings on the doors. Even the hanging lamps contain symbols of an Aztec spiritual dance.

But the highlight is the large mural painted on the wall behind what was once the bar, where the brewery’s owners poured beer for their guests. The mural symbolically depicts one of the Aztecs’ most sacred rituals--the sacrifice of a human upon a slab of stone and the extraction of his heart by an Aztec priest.

“The mural was highly regarded in its time,” said Bruce Kamerling, curator of collections for the San Diego Historical Society. “It was considered to be a fairly significant art project . . . for San Diego at the time.”

While it appears the room reflects the work of more than just one artist, the main painter was Jose Moya del Pino, the creator of the mural.

Moya del Pino, who died in 1969, was an accomplished muralist and portrait painter. Born in Spain in 1891, at age 10 he was apprenticed to an itinerant religious painter. As his stature grew, he was commissioned to paint the portrait of King Alfonso XIII of Spain in 1923.

He spent many years studying the works of 17th-Century Spanish muralist and painter Diego Velazquez, and Moya del Pino painted 41 copies of Velazquez’s masterpieces, some of them huge 12-by-14-foot paintings.

“He used the original 17th-Century recipes . . . grinding the pigments and all,” said Moya del Pino’s daughter, Tina Kun, who lives in Mill Valley and who, until contacted by The Times, was unaware of what her father had done at the San Diego rathskeller.

It appears, given the anatomical precision of the characters in the brewery mural, that Moya del Pino learned his craft exceedingly well.

His collection of Velazquez paintings was sent by the king of Spain on an exhibition tour of the United States. Because of the collapse of the government in Spain, Moya del Pino never returned home. Working mainly in San Francisco and the town of Ross, he was one of 26 artists selected to paint the murals on the newly erected Coit Tower in San Francisco.

He painted portraits of San Francisco’s leading citizens of the 1930s, and his work graced some of the exhibitions at the 1939-40 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. In 1934, he signed his name to the completed mural at the Aztec brewery.

“He tried to make his murals historical,” said Kun, noting how her father tried to read widely about his subject before placing his brush to the canvas. “He was interested in the Aztecs. . . . He was interested in history.”

While Moya del Pino paintings and murals remain at the University of California at Berkeley and other places, such as the Biltmore Hotel Auditorium in Santa Barbara, and there is a small museum in his honor in Ross, Kun says she is delighted someone is attempting to save his art at the brewery.

That there is any interest in the paintings comes as a pleasant surprise to Chester Dorman. Dorman and his family bought the old brewery in the early 1960s and owned it until a few weeks ago, when it was sold to a Los Angeles development company that plans to construct a warehouse on part of the six-acre property.

Dorman, who lives on the outskirts of Escondido, always enjoyed the paintings and murals in the rathskeller, but rather than keep them under lock and key, he felt the best thing to do was give them away to an institution that could care for and appreciate them. “We made an effort. . . . We talked to San Diego State and the history department,” he recalled recently. “But there was no interest.”

“It was very disappointing,” he said. “Some people told me, ‘There’s nothing there.’ There was no value in them and no interest. Zero.”

So the artwork sat there for nearly three decades.

Then came the snapshot, followed closely by Torres.

What started as an effort to at least make tracings of the paintings has turned into a full-blown attempt to save the entire rathskeller.

Even Torres concedes, though, that that may be very difficult, given it may take upward of $250,000 to take down the building and reconstruct it--money the artists don’t have. They are now trying to raise $35,000 for the project.

Torres has contacted the mayor’s office and City Councilman Bob Filner, who represents Logan Heights. They have taken an interest and put him in touch with the city’s Historical Site Board. But he hasn’t stopped there. Torres has appeared before several groups, including a Kiwanis Club, and has appealed to a group of Latino professionals for help. Some have promised to donate their services, such as drafting new foundation plans.

But perhaps most important, the Los Angeles company that now owns the old brewery, Ramser Development, says it wants to do what it can to preserve the paintings.

“It’s been our intention all along to preserve those artworks in that structure,” said Scott Benjamin, a partner in the company in charge of San Diego projects. “We want to do the right thing with them.”

Demolition of the rathskeller is still about 90 days away, Benjamin said. In the meantime, the firm is studying how best the paintings and other artwork can be removed without damage and which can be removed at all. The Moya del Pino mural, for example, is painted on some type of panel board that is attached to the wall, and thus can probably be removed without great damage.

Both the company and Dorman have agreed to pay up to $40,000 to have an architect precisely measure the room, catalogue everything inside it, and take down and crate the artworks.

Torres said he opposes any plan to crate the artworks because “once it’s mothballed, that’s the end of it.”

There is, however, another potential problem for the developers. The City of San Diego is recommending to the Historical Site Board that the entire property be designated a historic site, and not just because of the rathskeller. The original buildings were constructed in 1911 and used for the Savage Tire Factory, a business founded by A.W. Savage, best known as the manufacturer of the Savage hunting rifle.

Historic Site Hearing

More important, the tire factory--part of which was later converted into the brewery--was the city’s first large-scale industrial facility. That, combined with the rathskeller, has led to the recommendation that the property be made a historic site.

The significance of such a designation--which will be considered at a meeting March 23, and which can be appealed to the City Council--is great. For Ramser Development it could, in the worst case, scuttle its plans, and, at a minimum, make construction of its warehouse more difficult than it anticipated.

For the artists, such a designation could go a long way toward their ideal goal of keeping the rathskeller where it is and not having to move the art.

“It was a significant industrial development at the time,” said Ron Buckley, the city staff member who has recommended the historic designation to the 15-member board. As for the rathskeller, Buckley says that standing alone, none of the paintings is of great significance but that taken together they are.

“It’s a potpourri of Aztec, Mayan and other motifs,” Buckley said. “No piece is significant by itself apparently . . . but it’s significant as a total ensemble.”

Benjamin says keeping the rathskeller and other brick buildings is dangerous because they aren’t reinforced and could collapse during a major earthquake. His company, he said, is opposed to any historic-site designation. He notes that the City Council has already designated the area as an enterprise zone--which provides developers with special tax incentives--and that Ramser’s warehouse proposal is the first project to move forward since then.

“We hope we can all come to a win-win situation, and that everyone gets what they want,” he said.

What the company doesn’t know yet is who gets control of the art.

“From what we’ve been told, there are certain (legal) procedures that have to be followed,” Benjamin said. “We want to make sure they get into the right hands.”

Torres says that, if the rathskeller can’t be preserved at its current location, his group wants the rathskeller or its replica built in the barrio, on land under the freeway in front of Chicano Park that his group has leased from the state. There, for 17 years, Torres and others have cultivated a garden of cactus, trees and flowers.

“That’s the perfect site for it,” he said. “We’d make it into a museum information center.

“We want to raise the dignity of this work. . . . Time has waited for us, and now we want this beauty revealed.”