Shuttered Icon : Hopes for a Renewed Riverside Rest on the Mission Inn’s Reopening

From his threadbare barbecue eatery, outfitted with Naugahyde booths and dated video games, Bobbie Bratton looks across a busy downtown street to a dizzying, block-square architectural jumble that evokes visions of garish Spanish palaces, Gothic cathedrals and Moorish forts, for starters.

“People drive by to see it all the time,” said Bratton, who in his three years in business has struggled to keep the place open. But the painful reality, he mourns, is that all those people inevitably fail to stop and sample his tangy ribs, tasty chicken and homemade sweet potato pies.

One day, Bratton and other merchants hope, the Mission Inn, Riverside’s best-known landmark--shut down and fenced off since early 1985--might bring patrons, not just gawkers.

The long-awaited reopening was supposed to take place last year, but the gaudy monument to early Southern California entrepreneurial eclecticism stands shuttered despite virtual completion of a $45-million face lift more than a year ago.

Here, the Mission Inn is more than a hotel. It is a cultural icon, a palace of whimsy that seems to provide a sense of cultural definition to this Inland Empire city of 225,000 about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. It has been a traditional gathering spot since it opened in 1903. Its absence is regarded by longtime residents as a gash in their midst, its fenced-off, guarded property an affront to its historical role as a place of regional conviviality and commerce, site of noted galas and simple good times.

“It’s critical to Riverside. It’s long been a kind of focal point to the community,” said Knox Mellon, executive director of the Mission Inn Foundation, a nonprofit trust.

The inn’s current state, a stark testament to the force of the nation’s economic downturn, is also emblematic of the maddening twists of circumstance and 11th-hour glitches that seem to have bedeviled the structure during its recent decades of decline.

Although a Philadelphia-based hotelier, John Desmond, seems on the verge of an agreement to buy the inn from the New York-based Chemical Bank, no one is taking anything for granted. (The anticipated purchase price is said to be around $16 million, less than half the cost of the rehab--an indication of the real estate market in Riverside’s core.)

“Short of a catastrophe, there isn’t very much left blocking the way of the inn’s opening,” said Ralph J. Megna, the city’s deputy director of redevelopment, who then checks off a list of recent obstacles: the recession, the Persian Gulf War (which apparently scared off some investors), and tremors in the banking community in the wake of the savings and loan debacle.

“We’ve gone through all of that. Isn’t it about time that we get on to opening the inn?”

The sprawling, 240-room structure covers a square block right in the city’s urban heart; its reopening is considered a cornerstone of efforts to create an Inland Empire regional downtown in the middle of this onetime citrus-growing center. The hotel’s continued vacancy has spelled hard times for businesses counting on it to generate sales.

“No single piece of real estate is more important to the city of Riverside. It’s as simple as that,” Megna said. “The hotel and its restaurants and shops were the social and cultural core of the city for 70 years. And we see the inn serving a similar purpose well into the 21st Century.”

Downtown Riverside has a way to go, despite its attractive palm tree-lined streets and the striking array of turn-of-the-century architecture that harks back to its days as an agricultural mecca.

While a downtown pedestrian mall and an eclectic mix of offbeat shops and restaurants point toward a prospective revival, the city’s once-elegant downtown remains moribund, particularly after dark, when there is little street life.

City officials are endeavoring to spur the renovation of several other historic downtown buildings, with an eye toward encouraging commercial and residential activity. But the inn remains the missing centerpiece, its elegance and history a novelty in Southern California. Riverside has pumped $4.8 million in public loans into efforts to redevelop the inn. The city also built a 350-space parking garage for the inn’s eventual use.

The Mission Inn was the brainchild of Frank Augustus Miller, a peripatetic entrepreneur who sought to create a world-class but uniquely Californian resort amid the orange groves beneath then-smogless skies. He gathered together great regional architects, each of whom contributed something over the years. He stocked the place with a hodgepodge of artifacts--from stained-glass windows and skylights to hand-painted tiles to a Spanish-style chapel and Buddha statuary from Asia--collected during his travels.

Its style is as eccentric as its founder’s wide-ranging taste, creating a pleasantly kitschy atmosphere of grand arches and great courtyards, sedate alcoves and graceful balconies, fine mosaics and sweeping spiral staircases. Movable artifacts are gathered in an on-site museum. Guests have included statesmen and authors, tycoons and thieves. Theodore Roosevelt was among the first to spend the night. The Nixons were wedded here. Ronald and Nancy Reagan passed their nuptial evening under its roof.

Miller died in 1935. His family continued the tradition of hostelry for another 20 years.

But hard times followed when the Miller family sold the inn in the mid-1950s. Suburban malls began to drain off business from downtown. The threat of demolition prompted the city to take over the inn for 10 years beginning in 1976. The inn was declared a National Historic Landmark a year later. The city eventually sold the property to a private development firm, which went broke as the ambitious face lift was under way.

That is how Chemical Bank ended up with the inn in December, 1988. Bank officials, who decided to finish the renovation, unsuccessfully sought to close on a sale last year, said Joyce Oberdorf, a Chemical Bank spokeswoman. The bank now is hopeful the deal can be concluded with dispatch, she said.

“The sooner they open it up the better it is for me,” said Bratton, the barbecue show owner, who opened Gram’s Mission Bar-B-Que Palace just across the street from the hotel three years ago in the hopes that the inn’s unveiling would spur business.

“If I knew two or three years ago that this was going to happen, I would have moved to a shopping center somewhere. The inn was going to be the draw. That’s why I came down this route.

“You get your dreams up, and then nothing happens,” Bratton said. “A lot of people have gotten burned already. We’ll just see what happens, that’s all.”