Taking a Walk Into the Past : Brochure: Self-guided tours of Ventura will highlight residences and other buildings, some dating to the late 18th Century.

Dozens of historic Ventura residences now languishing in obscurity may become landmarks along self-guided walking tours planned by the city’s Historic Preservation Committee.

The city developed three walking tours and published a brochure in 1984 to coincide with the Los Angeles Olympics. But copies of the tour booklet soon ran out at City Hall and local hotels, and when committee members decided recently to revise and reissue the guide, a longtime committee member had to bring in a personal copy from home.

Ventura’s historic buildings, dating to the 1780s, are often ignored. “A lot of times people walk by them and don’t even look,” committee member Richard Peterson said.

People walking down South Chestnut Street past the Ventura Theatre, for instance, may not realize it is the only theater in the county built in the tradition of the great movie palaces of the 1920s. It dates back to 1928, and the proposed walking tour text says the theater’s elegant interior “helped people escape from their everyday lives into a world of opulence and glamour.”

And passersby on North Chestnut Street may not realize that the Packard Garage is one of the few remaining, elegant auto showrooms of the 1920s. Before the invention of the Auto Mall, cars such as Packards were sold out of Spanish Colonial revival buildings like this one.

Organizers of the self-guided tour program hope to tell the buildings’ stories--and the histories of the people who lived in them.

“We could get people to be more aware of their various landmarks,” committee Chairwoman Jo Rogers said. “You really don’t notice the buildings until you stop and really look, and then you notice the character of the buildings.”

Rogers said the tours would coordinate with ongoing efforts to spruce up Ventura’s downtown, because that is where most of the city’s old and architecturally significant buildings are.

The committee is still seeking funding for printing the guides, but editing and design work is moving forward, and city staff say they hope the guides will be available soon. Committee members plan to send letters to Ventura business owners asking for money for the tour books.

While City Hall and the San Buenaventura Mission are already well known to most city residents, the self-guided tours will include 57 other sites, from churches and banks to private residences.

The first proposed tour, of the mission area, focuses on Ventura’s Chumash tribe of Native Americans and on the Spanish settlers who arrived in the 178Os.

That tour includes stops at the San Buenaventura Mission, the Albinger Archaeological Museum, and the site of a large Chumash village named Shisholop. Some more recent sites are also on the tour route, including the 1884 Charles Bonestel residence at 84 N. Palm St. and the 1897 Peirano house at 107 S. Figueroa St., with its graceful spindle and spool porch detail.

The second tour, of the Main Street commercial area, includes stops at the Ventura Theatre, the 1926 First National Bank building and the 1929 Masonic Temple.

A group of eight houses listed on the National Register of Historic Places is the backbone of the third walking tour.

The 600 block of East Thompson Boulevard, intact since the turn of the century, is known as the Mitchell Block after the Mitchell brothers, bricklayers and bartenders who built two of the houses. The Mary Mitchell House, built in 1890 by bricklayer Edward Mitchell for his daughter Mary, features a square tower reminiscent of the top of a medieval castle.

Peterson, the chairman of the Historic Preservation Committee, said he hoped those who walked among the old buildings would learn more than details about the Italianate or Queen Anne styles of architecture. The larger point, Peterson said, is “the benefit of taking care of what we have.”