‘The Whole Second Story Just Rolled Off’

Marilyn Curry had been in earthquakes before, so when the shaking and swaying began, the 51-year-old lawyer was not particularly alarmed. Then she looked across the street and saw bricks popping out of a 116-year-old building whose distinctive, acorn-shaped clock tower had kept time for generations.

“I heard yelling outside, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ ” she said later, as she surveyed the rubble. “It was so surreal, you can’t believe you’re seeing it. The whole second story just rolled off the building.”

It was that torrent of brick and plaster that killed two women as they dashed out of a dress shop on the first floor of the historic building. Monday’s earthquake may have been felt from San Francisco to Los Angeles and beyond, but the center of Paso Robles, population 27,000, is where the blow fell hardest.

Hours after the quake, earthmovers scraped the debris on downtown Park Street, while the shells of a handful of crushed cars sat nearby.

Nick Sherwin held the big iron hands from the broken clock as he described the scene in his shop, Pan Jewelers, when the building started shaking.

“About two seconds in, I knew it was coming down,” Sherwin said. “My wife and I had two older customers in the back of the store and we were escorting them out. The false ceiling and things started to fall, and that must have been when the roof collapsed. The customers fell about 10 feet from the door, and we just leaned over and protected them from the debris. And it stopped and we were able to get them out of the store.”

Sherwin spoke with an odd air of detachment for a man who had just escaped death. He acknowledged as much.

“At this point, I have no emotional reaction,” said Sherwin, who maintained the town’s historic clock. Still, he spoke with conviction when asked what his town was like. Paso Robles, he said, is a great place to live.

“Downtown Paso Robles is the heart of this community,” he added. “We just had a heart attack.”

Paso Robles was founded in 1885, a farm and resort town nestled in a region of rolling, oak-studded hills. The surrounding farms grew barley and almonds; today the big crop is wine grapes. The downtown, likewise, has changed with the times. Once a typical small-town center, with its central park and clock tower, it had fallen on hard times by the 1980s, as suburban stores drew away business.

In the past 10 years, however, as Paso Robles successfully battled its reputation as the ugly stepsister of Central California, at least in comparison to such upscale retirement communities as Cambria and Morro Bay, the area had revived. A gazebo was built in the city park for summer concerts; the old Carnegie Library was fixed up and turned into a museum. And boutique businesses began setting up shop downtown, reversing the decline.

“We bounced back real well,” said Sherwin, 62, whose store was located beneath the town clock in the building that collapsed.

Once known as the Acorn Building and now the Mastagni Building, after current owner Mary Mastagni, the graceful brick structure was built in 1887, in the town’s infancy.

Made of unreinforced masonry, it had survived the vagaries of nature for more than a century, but was no match for Monday’s quake.

Altogether, 82 buildings in the downtown core were ordered closed in the aftermath of the quake, and police spokesman Bob Adams said as many as 18 cars were destroyed.

City officials cautioned against assuming that there were only two deaths.

Karen Arrambide, 59, was in the House of Bread, a bakery and sandwich shop in the Mastagni Building that she co-owns with her husband, Mike.

“There were huge beams, bricks and debris piled up in what was left of the shop,” Arrambide said. She said two employees crawled out of the rubble unscathed, but she was stuck beneath some beams and had to be helped out by firefighters and volunteer rescuers, a process that took about 20 minutes, according to her husband. She suffered only cuts and bruises in the ordeal.

“I thought I was going to die today,” she said.

The entire downtown had the rotten-egg smell of sulfur, contained in water that gushed out of the ground in the parking lot of City Hall.

Hot, sulfuric springs were one of the things that put Paso Robles on the map in the late 19th century, when it was a popular spa town.

The spring under the site of City Hall had long since been capped, but the quake apparently uncapped it, or otherwise opened an aquifer.

The steaming water bubbled up out of the parking lot and streamed down the gutter of the street, sending up an eerie fog.

A crowd of people gathered around the mini-geyser in the afternoon, sniffing the air and contemplating a strange and horrifying day.

The quake hit in phases, city building official Doug Monn said.

First there was a sharp jolt, then a momentary lull, then a long, rolling rumble.

Curry, a civil attorney in practice with her husband Barry Kinman, was alone in her office, preparing bills on her computer. After the shaking stopped, she said, people started coming out of buildings into the street. The ambulances hadn’t come yet. “I tiptoed out of my office,” Curry said.

Outside, she recognized friends and neighbors she had known for years.

“Everybody here is close,” she said. “Everybody loves one another.”

Like members of a family, they began an informal poll: Have you seen Jim? Have you seen Norm?.

“It’s amazing only two people were hurt,” Curry said, unable to admit even after the coroner’s arrival that anyone had died.

She talked to one person who managed to get out of the dress shop before it was buried.

“She was 80,” Curry said. “She said she was knocked to the ground.” The woman didn’t wait around for help. “She got in her car and drove home.”

Curry said the town’s survivors have a lot to be thankful for.

“My God,” she said, “it will be a merry Christmas.”