Hotel Draws Old Friends for Last Visit

It’s not the oldest hotel along the coast, or the most beautiful. The furniture tends toward laminated fiberboard. The towels are hardly plush. And the ubiquitous paintings of gulls and sailboats are dime-store tired.

Yet dozens of guests and neighbors came calling this week at the Miramar Hotel here, waxing sentimental over the loss of a place they consider an old friend.

The more than 100-year-old seaside resort will close Sunday, beginning a 15-month renovation by New York hotelier Ian Schrager.

The style savant of Studio 54 (and a string of acclaimed hotels worldwide) has promised to preserve the best of the Miramar while conjuring a new “barefoot chic” amid the elegance of “English cottage gardens.”

But as the old Miramar’s last hours approach, many friends and allies can speak only about the loss of the landmark blue roofs that have been Santa Barbara’s gateway, the fear that room rates will jump way beyond their means, and the fleeting wish that their frowzy, familiar old hostess could just stay the way she’s always been.

“There is bougainvillea here older than I am, and those old, blue roofs. There are ghosts and atmosphere,” said Kathy Horowitz, a Tehachapi psychologist who squeezed in a final visit with her family. “It’s like my old antique cupboard. You just can’t replace it.”

The estimated $25-million renovation continues a Southern California trend toward the creation of upscale resorts that bring the well-heeled to the shore. From San Diego to the Newport coast to Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach, new and planned lodgings offer opulence and pampering.

The just-opened Bacara Resort & Spa west of Santa Barbara in Goleta, starting at $375 a night, is the most recent example. A brochure notes that it’s only a 90-minute drive from Beverly Hills.

The Miramar, however, had always seemed cheerfully immune to the vagaries of the outside world--drifting along since the 1880s under just two family owners--before Schrager and company paid $31.7 million for the hotel and 13-acre grounds two years ago.

Rather than plunging ahead with a development in notoriously staid and exacting Montecito, Schrager’s team slowly “wined and dined” the locals, according to one resident.

At a series of small meetings, neighbors were asked what they wanted to see at the hotel. Any concerns were quickly addressed in follow-up meetings or in notes from top hotel executives.

A local newspaper columnist originally wondered if Schrager’s redesign of the Miramar would be like asking the Rev. Robert H. Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral to remake the Santa Barbara Mission.

But Schrager’s plan to maintain the current total of 213 rooms, to preserve cottages dating back almost a century and to replace six acres of asphalt with lawns, gardens and orchards convinced locals that the hotelier sincerely hopes to evoke the property’s past.

He also pledged to reorient the Miramar to the Pacific Ocean rather than the freeway, moving tennis courts and trees to build a long, wooden promenade from a new lobby to the strand. A restaurant, pool, spa and bar will also be much closer to the powdery sand and tranquil cove beyond.

“We are restoring the sensibility of a seaside resort,” said Tim Andreas, Schrager’s design director on the site for the last two years. “The hotel had a period oriented toward the highway, and now it’s turning back to the sea.”

The new owners did their job so well that, by the time hearings were held before the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission last spring, neighbors of the hotel uttered barely a whimper of protest.

Still, the final days of the old Miramar left some locals such as Bruce Burke deeply ambivalent.

“The Miramar is beautiful the way it is. It has its own funky ambience,” said Burke, a contractor who has lived in the Santa Barbara area for 13 years. “But Schrager will do a nice job with it and preserve some of its nature. What can you do? Things change.”

Fans Charmed by Annoyances

The old Miramar did not captivate everyone. Trains, after all, can thunder through the grounds at 4 a.m. Tar from natural oil seeps spots the beach, and the whoosh of traffic from U.S. 101 is a constant.

But, for the Miramar’s true believers, every annoyance had its charming counterpoint. The onrushing trains evoked the past and gave thousands of kids their first sight of a locomotive, not to mention a chance to smash a penny on the tracks. Beach tar might stick to the feet, but it could be a joyous reminder of time spent on the fine sand. Even the oil derricks on the horizon seemed charmed at night--lit up like golden baubles.

An Amtrak passenger car, just off the tracks, was converted to a diner by the Gawzner family, owners for almost 60 years. The food might have been mediocre, but kids loved the setting.

The old Miramar was a place of few pretensions, where you could buy not just a beer at the boardwalk snack stand, but an entire six-pack. In the final week, true to form, some guests crowded into their rooms with their dogs, which salivated for a walk on the beach.

Someone said the place had a “Catskill kitschy” sort of feel--with its shuffleboard courts and waiters who once tooled around the grounds on bicycles, trays from the kitchen mounted on their baskets.

A day’s greatest joy might be a swim out to the wooden ocean raft, tethered by a rope about 50 yards offshore. That swim became a rite of passage for young guests and the raft’s May launching a symbol of summer for Santa Barbarans.

The Miramar wasn’t just a fixture for tourists. The Santa Barbara Writers Conference gathered there for 27 years. On Wednesdays year-round, a smaller group of writers and editors convened in the dining room to talk about life and politics. Authors like Ross Macdonald were sometimes joined by performers such as Jonathan Winters and Anne Francis.

“And this joint would always go along with us getting separate checks, bless them,” said Fran Halpern, a writer and radio commentator, leaving the last meeting at the Miramar at mid-week.

State and national politicians also made the hotel a frequent stopover, usually to address a civic organization, the Channel City Club, which held regular meetings there. Hubert H. Humphrey, Alan Cranston and Ronald Reagan were among the guests.

But the Miramar was not a “who slept here” sort of place. It was defined more by the everyday folks whose lives it changed: people like Jackie and Herb Handelman, retirees from Roseville who came back this week for the umpteenth time, playing canasta under a boardwalk umbrella and recalling “joyous, joyous times.” Like Harley Haas and wife Dianne of Los Angeles, who returned because a weekend at the Miramar a decade ago reignited their romance and spawned a marriage. (Two-year-old Rose was along for the trip this time.) Like Marianne Lefebvre, 71, who came back with trepidation after losing her husband not long ago.

Lefebvre still was able to revel at the scene of her honeymoon--listening to the ocean waves and gazing up at a flock of pelicans overhead, flying in a perfect, undulating V.

Some of the old Miramar had already slipped away in recent years with the deaths of some of its quirky staff.

Gone, in short order, were June Gawzner Outhwaite, who tended orchids and other exotic plants around the grounds her family owned; Jacques Renon, the ancient Frenchman and lifeguard of 35 years, whose Gallic bray and disdain for intruders seemed only to grow stronger each year; and Hilbert Lee, the tennis coach for more than two decades, who seemed to know anyone and everyone who ever hoisted a racket south of San Luis Obispo.

In recent days, the usual end-of-summer languor has been infused with an extra melancholy. The gift shop has closed, as has the rail car diner. Dozens of trees have been painted with orange slashes--in preparation for their uprooting next month. Neighbors and guests have passed through to snap a last photo or to filch a pen or other memento.

Even amid the sadness, Miramar acolytes acknowledged that the newcomers’ plans look inviting. The increased greenery is a plus, as is the promise to post signs welcoming the public to the beach. Schrager wants to evoke the sensibility of the first owners, the Doultons, who turned their farmhouse into an inn that greeted wealthy guests from around the world for long summer sojourns.

Longtime guests doubt it, but Schrager’s staff insists that there will be “a range of room rates” for everyone.

No formal closing ceremony is planned. But the 100 or so families in the Miramar Beach & Tennis Club--locals who pay to use the beach and courts--plan a potluck and “empty-the-liquor-cabinet” party along the boardwalk and beach Sunday.

One employee predicted a gathering in the bar, adding a mournful quip: “We’re all going to drink ourselves into oblivion.”

Santa Barbara house painter Russ Rogers twice extended his stay this week, hoping to linger until the last moment with his wife, mother and a few clients.

“It will be Sunday and they won’t have to clean the room for anyone, so I can check out as late as I want,” Rogers said with a chuckle. “I am going to cling onto this place like a barnacle.”