In the Market for Success : Ventura Hoping for Downtown Renaissance as Restaurant Opens in Historic Peirano’s
For generations it was a place to meet, to sample and to stock up, but Peirano’s Market closed its double doors and rolled down its windows when its owner retired and the superstores came to town.
Wednesday, just before a speech by an expert on community redevelopment, Ventura reopened a part of its history, hoping that it will be a cornerstone for a downtown renaissance.
The oldest commercial brick building in Ventura and the longtime home of Peirano’s grocery store has been reborn as Jonathan’s at Peirano’s, a Mediterranean restaurant that is the latest accomplishment in the city’s redevelopment.
About 50 people, including the project’s developers, city leaders and those who just fondly remembered the old grocery store, milled inside the new restaurant and outside on its Figueroa Plaza patio at the opening ceremony.
Built in 1877, the 4,560-square-feet Mission Revival-style building sits across from the San Buenaventura Mission at 204 E. Main St. An Italian immigrant, Alex Gandolfo, opened a general merchandise and grocery store, which he turned over to his nephew, Nicola Peirano, in the early 1890s.
In the market’s early years, the area near the building became known as Ventura’s “Chinatown” or “China Alley” as more than 200 Chinese, many of them railroad workers, moved in nearby.
The Peirano family owned the store until it closed in 1986, when the San Buenaventura Redevelopment Agency bought the building with $85,000 of the agency’s funds and a $100,000 grant from the State Office of Historic Preservation.
KL Associates of Oxnard bought the property in 1997 and began a renovation project, which took 10 months and about $720,000, to refurbish the building and make it seismically sound.
The 75-seat restaurant, owned by local restaurateurs Jonathan and Sharon Enabnit, opens tonight as the first tenant. The Cheese and Wine Market, an offshoot of a San Luis Obispo store and designed to resemble the former grocery store, will open next door by Nov. 1.
The city is calling the Peirano Market Building “a cornerstone of Ventura’s past” and “a gem of the city’s future.” Planners have dubbed Peirano’s the anchor for the western end of Ventura’s downtown. The new Century movie theater, slated to open in November four blocks away, will hold down the area’s eastern end.
“We are really undergoing a transformation and this building is reflective of that,” Deputy Mayor Ray Di Guilio said. “It is the hope that this really becomes a springboard” for other development downtown.
Richard Keller, a partner in KL Associates, said that building from scratch would have been cheaper, but that refurbished structures tend to be more viable economically than new buildings and draw people who are “looking for something different than another mall.”
Despite the building’s designation as a part of Ventura’s history, few of its original features remain in the design by Mainstreet Architects.
“Basically everything inside here is brand new,” said Jonathan Enabnit. “There wasn’t a whole lot we could do with the inside.”
The market’s hardwood floor, made from 120-year-old Douglas fir, has been restored. The original double doors and floor-to-ceiling windows remain at the front and can still be raised and lowered on a pulley system. A coffee grinder from the early 1920s sits at the entrance.
Peirano’s sign sits above the restaurant’s neon name, and the advertisements on the building’s west facade--one for Ghirardelli Chocolate, the other for Borax, have been repainted.
In 1991, during an archeological study of the building, a lavanderia or laundry was discovered on the site. Between 1792 and 1862, water for the mission was carried in aqueducts to a tank below what would become Peirano’s. The lavanderia has been filled with sand to preserve it and is not exposed in the refurbished building.
“To make the building economically viable, we needed a minimum number of square feet,” said Keller, explaining why the lavanderia was not incorporated into the new design. “At some point in the future, when this becomes important, it’s still there and it can still be exposed.”
In renovating Peirano’s, Keller said, crews discovered several defects that had not been disclosed in an earlier engineering study, among them that the market’s west wall had sunk 8 inches. Also, many of the original bricks had deteriorated and had to be replaced with stronger bricks of the same vintage, taken from a parapet between the old store and the building next door.
