Historic or History

At 119, it may not be the oldest brick building in town. But it is no doubt among the most cracked, crumbling and controversial.

Ever since the city ponied up $150,000 to buy the historic Peirano’s Market building, across Main Street from the San Buenaventura Mission, the former grocery has both hexed and enticed local officials.

Preservationists want to restore the aging structure to its original look, spending up to $1 million to retrofit and renovate what most residents have assumed for years is Ventura’s most historic brick building.

“Peirano’s is a place where people gathered,” said Ruth Hibbard, a docent at the nearby Ventura County Museum of History and Art.

“It’s a connection we have with the way things used to be,” she said. “More than the look of the building, it signifies something in our past that we can keep track of and cherish.”

Others want to raze the troublesome building and erect a replica complex that could house offices, shops or a restaurant. Some want the city to sell it altogether, even though it is one of just five local buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.

City leaders have wrestled over what to do with the shop since 1987, when they bought the building from family grocer Nick Peirano Jr., whose father is said to have once lived in an upstairs storage room.

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Meantime, the place is stuffed with the remnants of old: rickety vegetable tables, warped shelves, dusty scraps of plywood. A pair of boots nests on an old counter top next to a faded newspaper from 1991.

The abandoned storefront also has become a haven for the city’s homeless, who often sneak in after dark to keep warm. Building-and-safety crews shut off the electricity to reduce the threat of fire. But the threat still looms.

Council members will renew the debate tonight at City Hall, when the panel considers a recommendation to include $500,000 in the capital-improvement budget to stabilize the building’s leaning and un-reinforced brick walls.

But spending money on seismic upgrading is by no means a slam-dunk. Even if the walls were reinforced, there are other impediments to reopening the historic structure.

There is no city money available for maintaining the former market. The $100,000 state grant that helped buy the building may be in jeopardy if Ventura sells the property to private interests.

And not many developers are eager to buy into a plan that requires them to preserve many of the historic aspects of Peirano’s, including parts of the original aqueduct system and a 200-year-old lavanderia, an old-time Chumash washing basin.

“When we get into the economics and the bottom line, it just doesn’t pencil out,” Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures said. “That’s why we’ve failed to move forward for so long.

“The $500,000 is only the beginning of the restoration,” she said. “We’d have to put in another $200,000 every two to four years to maintain it.”

Freshman Councilman Ray Di Guilio also has doubts about spending so much money on so ancient a building.

“I don’t favor this recommendation without a long-term concept of what we’re going to do,” he said. “We need to do a lot of things downtown, not just the Peirano building.

“I’m sensitive to the history, but $500,000 is an extremely large amount of money without any clear direction of what we want to see for the place,” he added.

Further muddying the scenario is the recent revelation by city researchers that Peirano’s is not the oldest brick storefront in Ventura. Taking that honor, by six years, is the building just up the street, the current residence of the Rendezvous Room bar, built in 1871.

The upper floor, no longer a part of the refurbished building, served as the first City Hall. Legend has it that, after council meetings, some of the aldermen would have drinks at the saloon, then known as Spear’s Hall.

After money to restore or upgrade Peirano’s was left out of the six-year capital-improvement budget earlier this month, some residents helped persuade a majority of the council to act.

The council then directed staff to review the spending plan and find some funds for the market.

“The old is just as important as the new,” businessman Clark Owens said. “My passion for the building is not necessarily to take funds away from other projects. My passion is to preserve the history.”

Everett Millais, the director of community services, said the historic market has been ignored for too long. He wants the council to make a decision, one way or another.

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The capital-improvement money would not have to be spent on retrofitting, Millais said. But it would be the city’s first step toward doing something with the place in nine years.

“We need to get in there and deal with it this year,” Millais said. “And we have to deal with the structural side first.”

Initial plans call for reinforcing the brick walls, beefing up the integrity of the structure so the city or a private developer could make use of the single-story building.

Based on a retrofitting bid the city received several years ago, that job alone will require all of the capital-improvement money, and perhaps more.

Monica Nolan, an associate planner with the city who remembers shopping at Peirano’s in the mid-1980s, said there are liabilities to keeping the market vacant.

“We’ve had some major problems with transients,” said Nolan, standing inside the landmark grocery. “They work away the plywood so they can sneak in. And we worry about fires.”

What’s more, the city is in violation of its own standards, which call for landowners in the downtown district to earthquake-proof their buildings. That sets a bad example for other property owners, Nolan said.

“The longer it sits here, the greater the probability that there will be problems,” she said.

Developers have long sought to do something with the property, submitting ideas to convert the former market into something worthwhile. All of those proposals have been scrapped as unprofitable.

Two of those projects were pitched by Tom Wood, president of Ventura Realty, which has developed a good portion of downtown Ventura, including the Bella Magiore Inn on nearby California Street.

Despite loud opposition from artists and history buffs, the council in 1994 voted to sell Peirano’s to Wood for about half of what the city paid for the building in 1987.

Wood planned to raze Peirano’s and the former Wilson’s Studio next door and open a restaurant, shops and offices that would preserve and showcase the lavanderia and some of the aqueduct and still turn a profit.

That plan stalled when Ventura Realty shareholders disagreed over how much of the facade to preserve.

Months later, when other developers proposed a multiscreen theater complex at the corner of Palm and Main streets, just up the block, Wood came back with a similar proposal.

But theater developer Victor K. Georgino has since proposed building his movie house on another stretch of Main Street.

“The highest-end use you’re going to get there is probably retail,” said Wood, who still has not given up on developing the Peirano site.

“I could do a 10,000-square-foot project there, two stories, that would be everything we’d want there,” he said. “And we’d have an open west wall to take advantage of Figueroa Plaza.”

But the city would have to meet him halfway, removing many of the preservationist conditions that have bogged down the project, Wood said.

“They [council members] have got to think this through and put their emphasis and energy in the right direction,” Wood said. “I wouldn’t put a dime into retrofitting that thing. It’s not economically viable.”

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Ventura College art teacher Richard Peterson has been frustrated for years by the city’s failure to do anything with the Peirano building.

When the council directed staff two weeks ago to look at setting aside some money in the capital-improvement budget for the aging market, his hopes soared.

Peterson’s worst fear is that the whole block surrounding the mission will lose its charm and sense of history. Preserving the dilapidated grocery and photography studio is a sound investment that would draw even more visitors downtown, he said.

“I understand the fiscal responsibilities, but there comes a time when the citizens are going to have to say that our historic resources are worth $500,0000,” Peterson said.

“If we can take one of the buildings that’s on the National Register and tear it down, that’s saying we care very little for our history.”