The square block now occupied by Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden was once the site of a grassroots community battle that determined the soul — and the skyline — of Santa Barbara for generations.
Both Pearl Chase and Thomas M. Storke remembered around the turn of the century when the downtown adjacent location — bounded by Micheltorena, Garden, Arrellaga, and Santa Barbara streets — served as a pasture where horses grazed. As a schoolgirl, Pearl had lived across the street in a rental house located at 1530 Garden Street, where she loved gazing out her bedroom window at the pastoral scene.
Multiple Owners of the Property
In 1904, Mary Miles Herter, the wealthy widow of New York City interior designer Christian Herter, purchased the entire block and commissioned an extravagant mansion built, and beautiful gardens planted on the spot. At her passing in 1913, her son, Albert, and daughter-in-law, Adele, both artists, repurposed the mansion to serve as the lobby and headquarters for a luxury hotel, named “El Mirasol” (The Sunflower) with several guest bungalows built on the property. Among the prominent guests who vacationed at the resort were Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and the Guggenheims.
After the Depression and over the decades, the hotel was bought and sold by a number of hoteliers, and the luxurious accommodations lost their luster. The final owner, Jacob Seldowitz, fell on hard times, and when two electrical fires in one week in 1966 devastated the ancient wiring, the old hotel was no longer viable. Seldowitz and his wife came up with other plans: They made a pitch to the city and proposed three different large potential projects…