More about Santa Rosa in the summer of 1925. See INTRO for overview and index.
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Of all the places demolished during the urban renewal debacle to clear land for the downtown mall, the ones mourned most heavily are A) the California Theater B) the Occidental Hotel and C) the Elks’ Building. What? You don’t know about the Elks’ Building? Maybe that’s because it was called the former Elks’ Building for most of its existence.
The main part of the building was completed in July 1925. It was on the west side of A street, running a full block wide between Fourth and Fifth streets. The architect was Frank T. Shea who also designed St. Rose church and had been the architect for the city of San Francisco from 1893-1897. As seen in the drawing below, this was to be a classic Beaux Arts design although as the inset 1941 view shows, the final design was more conventional. Besides retail space at street level, it had a gym, bowling alley and locker room plus a very large meeting hall. There was a women’s room for relatives of club members while their menfolk upstairs enjoyed three-martini lunches (what is this Prohibition of which you speak?) as they made city, county, and courtroom deals. The Elks lost the building to foreclosure in 1933 and it took the insurance company nearly a decade to find a new owner. It seemed the stores were rarely vacant and hosted a procession of the usual barbershops, tailors, coffeeshops and luncheonettes. The rooms upstairs were used as offices, Dr. Bogle’s medical clinic and a post office mail sorting center. Even during the worst of the Depression the cavernous 6,000 sq. ft. hall was often rented for large meetings and celebrations. There were serious discussions in the 1930s the city should buy it to create a long-desired civic auditorium and then later of making the whole building a courthouse annex. After WWII the upstairs became best known as the “Skyline Terrace Ballroom,” Santa Rosa’s sort-of nightclub with live music on Thursdays and other times when a C-list big band toured the area. When that finally closed there were still dances held regularly. In Press Democrat articles and ads it continued to be identified as the “former Elks building” though 1954, which gives it the curious distinction of being known for (at least) 21 years as its FORMER self, far longer than the eight years when the Elks actually owned it. Thus any reference to the location was meaningless to out-of-towners not versed in Santa Rosa history. It was demolished August 1974 (the Aug. 30 PD had photos) but the details were not easy to confirm; there were no more mentions connecting it to the Elks. I found the information by skimming the papers for that year, which, of course, brought its own rewards. Behold my new favorite PD headline: “Blaze of gunfire over pickle salad” (June 21, 1974).
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