School May Be Built on Stilts to Protect Artifacts

Making concessions to preservationists intent on saving an archeological find, the San Buenaventura Mission has submitted new plans to construct a school building on stilts about 4 feet above the Chumash and mission relics.

But the latest attempt to protect the artifact-rich site has not satisfied critics who question why the school must be built on the mission grounds at all.

Calling the project “ill-conceived” and “a travesty,” preservationists say it’s ridiculous that Ventura would allow its most historic area to be covered up, an area that could potentially contribute to the city’s development and cultural efforts.

“Do the citizens value their history or do they want to see it literally buried?” said archeologist Gary Stickel, who is also a member of the Committee for the Preservation of the San Buenaventura Mission. “Since the city and the county [are] named after the mission, shouldn’t they respect the site?”

City officials are expected to approve the new, more costly design in the next two weeks, and construction could resume within a month.

The school is to be built on top of the mission’s original quadrangle, the 200-year-old compound that includes the areas where the mission’s founders ate and slept.

After much debate over how or whether to preserve the historical material on the site, ground was broken for the new school in September 1997.

But the mission stopped construction in January when the effect on the underground remains was again questioned, and a search for alternative sites began.

The revised design lifts the school’s foundation farther off of the highest points of the quadrangle’s adobe walls. The city’s building department will probably approve the altered plan in the next two weeks, deputy building official Houshang Abbassi said.

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Upset with what they call a halfhearted attempt to find an alternative site for Holy Cross, the school’s opponents say the new design is unsatisfactory.

Building atop the ruins will effectively block any access to the mission’s early history for years to come, said Stickel, the Los Angeles archeologist who supervised the 1997 excavation of the site and walked off the job in a disagreement with Msgr. Patrick O’Brien and other parish leaders.

Backing up Stickel’s position, the Smithsonian Institution weighed in last year, calling the site a “national treasure” and the plan to build atop it an “indefensible destruction of important portions of this landmark site.”

O’Brien said the mission recognizes the value of the quadrangle but that placing the school elsewhere is impossible.

“We are a parish in the west end of Ventura and our church and our school go together,” he said. “We have explored the possibility of moving it, and we have not found any suitable places or available place.”

Parish member Kevin McAtee said the mission spent “many months” considering other sites, including two currently occupied by the Ventura Unified School District, but found none feasible.

O’Brien and McAtee said that archeologists will have easy access to the site, guaranteed for the next 500 years.

“We are preserving it. If they ever want to dig it up, they can,” O’Brien said.

To further protect the remains of the original mission, the new design for the school resembles a waffle sitting on toothpicks, its architect, Curtis Cormane, explained. Rather than building the school’s foundation into the ground, a grid of concrete beams will rest on concrete caissons anchored in bedrock. Three feet of sand or dirt will be filled in beneath the grid to preserve the ruins.

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While the school building will not put any weight on the quadrangle, Michael Sampson of the Society for California Archeology said site burial or capping, as it is called, can pose other problems. Water from irrigation, mixed with chemical fertilizers, can seep into the protected area and deteriorate ruins.

“There are a lot of unknown factors about changes in soil chemistry when you add new soils and put another structure on top of it,” Sampson said.

When construction started last September, the school was expected to open for this school year. Now, Cormane said, “We’re about eight months, nine months . . . from being finished.”

Thus far, the land has been cleared, a portion of the foundation constructed and a retaining wall built into the slope behind what will become a parking lot. The holes are drilled and the concrete poured for several caissons.

The new plan for the school comes with new costs. The revised design calls for more concrete and steel, and the increase in the building’s height requires more stairs and ramps into the school.

And the delay means construction will resume in a less competitive market, with higher bids expected from subcontractors, Cormane said.

Already the delay has racked up about $30,000 in additional charges from the school’s architects and engineers, he estimated.

“It’s going to have a significant impact,” Cormane said.

O’Brien said the entire project will cost about $6 million, with $4 million already raised for the first phase, which includes the ground floor and an auditorium. The second phase will begin once the school’s 200 students, from kindergarten through eighth grade, are moved from the current school on the mission’s west side.

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O’Brien estimated the first phase would take a year to complete. But, he said, “having gone through this past year, I hate to make any predictions.”

The preservationists continue to fight the construction, but barring a donation to pay for a new site or a groundswell of public opposition to the project, there is little that they can do.

And not all archeologists agree with Stickel and his colleagues that what the mission is doing is wrong.

From what he knows of the design for Holy Cross School, archeologist Christopher DeCorse said he is “really impressed by what the mission had done to preserve this site.”

“They’ve invested a lot of money, more than they needed to,” said DeCorse, a Syracuse University associate anthropology professor who is supervising the cataloging of a box of artifacts for the mission.

In DeCorse’s experience, getting underneath the school to the historical remains would not be difficult, he said, adding, “I’ve excavated in worse.”

Unless there is strong community support for keeping the school off the remains and possibly creating a museum there, DeCorse said he thinks it would be best to go forward with construction.

“Reconstructions of archeological sites are very expensive, and you have to balance that against how much it’s going to be used by the people,” he said. “Often the best way to preserve archeological findings is not at the site and not using the actual materials.”