Aging Hotel Is Inn for the Long Haul

In its glory days, the Ventura Inn was the diva of downtown hotels, a graceful 93-room manor that catered to movie stars and oil barons.

Its splendid arched entryway welcomed visitors through the Depression and a world war, until boxy motels cropped up along the highway, diverting tourists and beginning the inn’s slow decline.

Today, the stately salmon-colored building stands in the shadow of City Hall, strictly a residential hotel, rented on a monthly basis by lonely seniors, the mentally ill and those who cannot afford to live anywhere better.

Many cash in monthly government assistance checks to rent tiny $470 rooms, which like the building’s exterior are painted in shades of green and pink.

The owners dutifully slap on fresh coats of paint to keep the outside looking nice. But to those who live there, it is just makeup covering an aging face.

A closer look at the worn carpet and the poor tenants who sit for hours outside the lobby tells more about the place than its pretty, green trim.

“There’s no glamour left in the old gal,” says Brian Davis, a recovering alcoholic who rents a room on the second floor. “She’s been kicked around.”

At age 70, the Ventura Inn is a symbol of what the historic downtown business district used to be, what it has become and--in the eyes of some city leaders--could be again.

In the last year, city officials have launched an ambitious revitalization effort to transform downtown Ventura into a thriving corridor of upscale shops and trendy restaurants.

They have invested $4.5 million to widen sidewalks and plant palm trees. Efforts are underway to build a nine-screen movie theater on Main Street, a stone’s throw from the old hotel.

“I think that downtown Ventura is quickly becoming the classic glory place of its past,” Councilman Gary Tuttle said. “I hope as the downtown continues to revitalize that the Ventura Inn will eventually become another Bella Maggiore.”

But mental health workers say the inn’s function as a residential hotel is badly needed at a time when housing services for the poor are lagging.

“Single room occupancy hotels are the cheapest housing available for people who only have $600 or $700 a month,” said Randall Feltman(, the county’s mental health director.

Single rooms at the Ventura Inn, for example, range from $470 to $550 a month.

Although no one at City Hall is trying to squeeze out residential hotels, Tuttle predicts that economic pressure may eventually push them out.

“We do have a need for that type of housing,” Tuttle said. “But I don’t know if it is going to fit with the future of downtown.”

About 100 to 150 mentally ill adults countywide rely on residential hotels as their best option for affordable housing, Feltman said. Downtown Ventura and downtown Oxnard are the only areas that offer such housing, however.

“A lot of our clients have had a lot of pain and suffering in relationships with other people,” Feltman said. “They’ve been rejected and abused. They are very hurt and they want to live privately, and these single-room-occupancy hotels allow them to be by themselves.”

Tom Ostermann knows about the need for privacy and a cheap bed. He has lived in a small room overlooking Main Street for six months and, at least for now, calls the Ventura Inn home.

“Right now, I am just starting to get my life together,” said Ostermann, 37, who was referred there by a mental health caseworker. “I am getting good help now.”

Ostermann doesn’t own much. His room is sparsely decorated with a few stuffed animals that sit obediently in one corner. He also has displayed a small picture of Jesus.

“I read the Bible a lot,” he said. “This room, this is my church, right here.”

Down the hall, 35-year-old Brian Davis rents a slightly larger room for $525 a month. Like Ostermann’s, his room includes a sink, a bed, and a few other pieces of mismatched furniture.

A sheet of plywood covers a hole in the ceiling where an upstairs drain pipe burst a few months ago, soaking his bed in a shower of bathwater. Plumbing, the owner acknowledges, has been a problem.

“I am not really happy about being here,” Davis said. “But I cannot afford a new place plus a security deposit.”

Unemployed and haunted by a long-fought battle with booze, Davis says he has had trouble finding a job.

“There’s a lot of people out there who don’t have my excess baggage, who didn’t drink for 15 years,” he said. “McDonald’s won’t hire me.”

Davis says he often wonders who preceded him in his room, and what the hotel must have been like in its heyday.

Although it still looks like a charming old bed and breakfast, the Ventura Inn is not mentioned in the city’s listings of places to stay.

“I always thought it was a fine upstanding place by the outside until I got in here,” Davis said. “I’d wager if you took a poll, it’s not what most people would think it is.”

The inn was built in 1926 on the former site of City Hall, at the corner of Main and California streets. At the time, it was the largest and classiest hotel in town.

“If you came to Ventura and you were somebody, that was where you stayed,” city historian Richard Senate said. “This was a very, very nice spot.”

Ventura Inn owner Al Bumbarger found a box of postcards in the hotel’s basement when his family bought the building in the late 1970s. One postcard described the inn as “the single most luxurious hotel between San Francisco and Los Angeles,” he said.

“Some place between the ‘50s and the ‘60s,” Bumbarger said, “that changed.”

The completion of the Ventura Freeway in 1962, the construction of the Buenaventura Mall the same year, and new housing tracts in the city’s east end all contributed to its downward slide.

“Everybody left,” Bumbarger said.

Like other hotels in downtown, the Ventura Inn adapted and became a residential hotel. In 1977, Bumbarger’s family bought the building and sunk about $450,000 into restoring it floor by floor.

“We have always felt it is one of the nicest-looking buildings out here,” said Bumbarger, 49, who moved with his wife, Valerie, and three children to Ventura three years ago from Palm Desert to manage the hotel.

Running the inn, he said, is a labor of love.

“From a personal viewpoint, we like doing it. It is not just a job,” he said. “You are definitely providing a service. It is not just money changing hands.”

About two-thirds of the inn’s tenants are single seniors with limited incomes, many of whom have lived in the hotel for years. The remaining tenants are mostly mentally ill adults.

The Bumbargers are highly protective of their tenants, locking the hotel doors at 10 p.m. and requiring all guests to sign in at the front desk.

One former resident likened the owners to the Gestapo for being so strict. But Bumbarger says he just wants to protect his clients “from the outside world.”

The owners offer three meals a day, mostly for the elderly residents. On a recent afternoon, four tenants chattered with each other, another to himself, over a lunch of hot dogs and hamburgers in the Main Street Cafe, just off the lobby. The cheerful diner with vinyl seats and a floral motif is run by Valerie Bumbarger.

At nightfall, residents wander in and out of the lounge with sagging couch and big TV, which drones canned laughter into the lobby. Sometimes they argue over shows. Sometimes they play cards. Often, they quietly disappear up the green-carpeted stairway into their rooms.

About seven years ago, downtown merchants complained that Ventura Inn tenants were harassing shoppers and loitering on the sidewalk in front of the building.

But in the past few years, business owners and police say they have had few problems with hotel residents. Ventura police reported 97 calls for service between October 1994 and 1995, about one every four days, but not a surprising amount given the type and density of tenants, said Lt. Carl Handy. “The problems we have had in there,” he said, “have been minimal.”

Bumbarger said he has not felt economic or political pressure to alter his business. He is satisfied with his less-than-affluent clientele, many of whom have formed close friendships with one another and the managers, he said.

And as far as downtown is concerned, Bumbarger believes the inn and its elderly and mentally ill tenants provide a good mix.

“If anything,” he said, “they add to the character of downtown.”