Dislodged History

Karen Cole was driving home from business in Diamond Bar recently when something clicked as she passed the Brea Canyon Road exit on the Orange Freeway.

As she pulled off the freeway, it all felt so familiar, even though it had been nearly 40 years since she had last been in Brea. Without using a map she found her way into the city until she arrived at the now-vacant landmark: the Brea Hotel, beige and beaten, with a red-tile roof.

Standing across the street, the Newport Beach resident looked up to the second floor, third window from the left. She spotted the room where her now-deceased grandmother had lived as owner of the hotel, and she cried.

“It’s my farthest-back memory of my grandma,” Cole said.

Soon that memory will be all Cole has. The Brea Hotel, the last commercial building left from Brea’s old downtown, is being demolished. Despite numerous efforts, it was impossible to build support for a building that lacks a glitzy past and sits in the shadow of the symbol of modern Brea: The Birch Street Promenade, with its 22-screen Edwards Cinema, restaurants, shops and two parking structures with 1,900 spaces, is being built just up the street.

Jane O’Brien, president of the Brea Historical Society, said she is saddened that this piece of history will be lost. “It’s really a shame that it’s going down, but I can understand it. The city has tried.

“I’d rather have it destroyed than have it sit vacant and look like what it looks like,” O’Brien added.

It was such a fait accompli that no one even spoke up at a recent demolition hearing to try to save the building. There have been many attempts over the last decade: The hotel was the cornerstone of a redevelopment plan to build a heritage square made up of the city’s oldest buildings. The hotel was even moved 100 feet north and 30 feet east--at a cost of $191,000--to make way for the widening of Brea Boulevard.

But now, the hotel will be torn down. The city has not been able to find enough grant money to give it new life, and no developer has come forward with an acceptable plan for the aging structure.

Built in 1913, the Brea was never the Ritz. At first, workers in nearby oil fields lived there, and eventually it became a residential hotel for older men. No one has lived there for about 20 years, and the shops on the first floor moved out eight or nine years ago.

Today, the hotel sits alone, buffered by empty lots on either side, surrounded by a chain-link fence.

Clara Wright, Cole’s grandmother, owned the hotel from 1950 to 1960. Each week, Cole’s mother would drive her and her sister from their home in West Covina to Brea to visit their grandmother before the children went to their ballet and tap lessons down the street.

Cole remembered walking past the men sitting in the lobby, past the water cooler and going up the stairs to her grandmother’s room. “I cried when I pictured her bedroom window,” she said. “In those days you could just about open the window and fall out.”

Cole’s family moved to Arizona when she was 6, but she returned to Orange County to work as a human resources consultant for an Irvine accounting firm. Her grandmother died in 1986, at 94.

A few years ago, Cole’s husband, Greg, who arranges financing for commercial development, spent some time in Brea on a project. He had told his wife that he had driven by the hotel, and she thought about going out there to look at it.

She never did until she heard the hotel was going to be demolished.

“I was kind of surprised I could find it,” she said. “I can’t explain. It was absolutely startling. I was as surprised as anything that I had these feelings coming after me.”