Landmark or Not, Building Seems Doomed
To some, the old citrus packing house visible from Interstate 15 in Escondido is a cultural treasure, a link to the past when commerce in North County was measured in train car loads of fruit, not the retail sales of a shopping mall.
For that reason, some history buffs had hoped that the sprawling Cal Fame building, the arched behemoth of a structure constructed in 1934 and one of the largest packing houses of oranges in the nation, would ultimately end up as a historical landmark, a bridge to an earlier day. It was, after all, the last orange citrus packing house in town when it shut down in November, 1987.
Enter the U.S. Postal Service, which purchased the property on Mission Avenue in September for $2.65 million after nearly a year of research.
Sigh of Relief
Thank goodness, some folks sighed. The old packing house is in government hands. The feds have congressional marching orders to save old buildings whenever possible. It’ll be renovated and restored and even if it’ll be filled with letters and boxes instead of lemons and oranges, the structure will be preserved.
The postal people had the same notion. They studied the historical significance of the building and agreed it should be added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Then they studied it a little bit more.
The ceiling of the front offices would have to be raised to allow for a security observation deck. But the raised ceiling, they realized, would ruin the visual integrity of the building’s art deco facade. The building’s foundation would have to be reinforced to make it more earthquake safe. Some of the huge wood beams were rotting, so the ceiling--with the skylight running the length of the spine--would have to be reconstructed. And all those wiring and plumbing problems. . . .
The engineers shook their heads. The architects shook their heads. The budget crunchers shook their heads when they heard it would cost upwards of $1 million to renovate the building--even before they started their own interior work to turn the packing house into a post office.
So the U.S. Postal Service is going to tear the old building down. It’s cheaper, and will be more efficient, to build a new post office from the ground up, officials decided.
This may come as good news to persons who are concerned about timely mail delivery and the cost of postage.
But the news has some people shaking their heads with disappointment.
‘Losing the Continuity’
“This building represents our past, and they’re important for us to preserve,” said Woody Zuill, chairman of Escondido’s Historic Preservation Policy Committee and a professional sign maker. “As we demolish these historic buildings, we are erasing our past faster than our culture can withstand. We’re losing the continuity of a community, the cohesiveness of our culture.”
Postal Service officials are sympathetic. But they note, ever so politely so as to not point the finger of blame at anyone else, that no one else in town had tried to preserve the old building, either, and that they shouldn’t be cast as the insensitive villains.
Indeed, the Postal Service even has a person whose whole job is to study the historic significance of buildings and properties purchased for post offices to determine whether, and how, they can be preserved as an anecdote for history. In this case, it’s Steve Stielstra, who works out of San Bruno.
Using National Historic Preservation Act guidelines as established by Congress, Stielstra studied the Cal Fame building to determine its historic importance. It was so important, he concluded, it should be included in the National Registry of Historic Places.
But that designation didn’t necessarily mean the building would be preserved. “We evaluated the building in great detail, in terms of its structural integrity, the building code parameters, and whether it would be a safe place for the public as well as our own employees. We brought in outside consultants--engineers and architects--and they all studied it.
“But our public service mandate is to move the mail, and that requires an efficient facility and modern processing equipment.”
‘Quite a Surprise’
When the Postal Service recently announced its decision to tear the building down, there was nothing that local agencies could do about it. “It came as quite a surprise to us,” said Dawn Suitts, a senior planner at Escondido City Hall whose job, among other things, is to monitor the preservation of local history.
“When the Postal Service was in touch with us, they were asking us questions like, ‘How can we get the building placed on the national registry?’ We thought that was great. To now decide to tear it down,” Suitts said, “is a 180-degree turn from that position. It’s an important building, very important, to our community.”
The building was constructed in 1934 by the Sunkist Packing Co. as a packing house for the Escondido Orange Assn., a cooperative of local growers who helped supply top-grade oranges to the national distributor. It was a state-of-the-art packing house in those days, serving more than 500 local growers and winning trade magazine publicity for its refrigeration units. Hundreds of persons worked inside during the peak of the season, a beehive of activity as they sized, packed and loaded the fruit onto railroad cars parked alongside the building.
In 1962, the independent Paramount Citrus Assn. purchased the packing house, changing the name on the building from Sunkist to Cal Fame.
Because of declining business, the packing house closed down in late 1987--about the same time the U.S. Postal Service was looking for a site for a new post office to serve Escondido. The current post office, at Second Avenue and Orange Street, is no longer large enough to accommodate Escondido’s mail business and, furthermore, the lease on the privately owned building expires in 1992.
Government real estate agents located five other possible building sites in Escondido. Three were deemed to be too far outside the downtown area to be accessible to customers and to be central for mail carriers. A fourth site was a mobile home park, and more than 100 residents would have to be relocated. The fifth site was too near a residential area where there’s a 10 p.m.-to-7 a.m. business curfew. Mail trucks start arriving at local post offices at 4 a.m.
The Cal Fame building got the nod, and Paramount, which operates other packing houses in the state, sold it. Construction of the new post office is scheduled to begin next spring, with completion by early 1991.
“I understand the post office’s point of view,” Zuill concedes. “It’s a matter of economics, and not too many people will say we don’t need a better post office. And putting a post office there is better than, say, a nuclear missile silo.”
Zuill said he wishes, in retrospect, that someone in town--a real estate agent, a developer, City Hall or someone--would have anticipated the building’s ultimate vacancy and have tried to find another occupant. Even a mini-storage warehouse or a repair shop might have been able to use the basic structure, Zuill said.
“Instead, another piece of the town’s history is being scraped away and a guy who moves in next month will never know what was once here,” he said.
But while the packing house itself is doomed, archive-quality photographs of the building have been located and preserved and, along with a detailed written documentary of the building, will be forwarded to the Library of Congress in Washington.
Presumably, Stielstra of the post office said, a copy of that historical research and the old pictures will be made available for local display.
Where? Well, the local historical society’s museum at Grape Day Park, next to City Hall, would seem appropriate. Or maybe it will be framed and hung in the lobby of the new post office--for persons to view as they wait in line for stamps.
