Peering inn-side Huntington’s history

JERRY PERSON

This year, Huntington Beach will officially celebrate its 100th

birthday, and in those years the skyline has changed so much.

As some of you know, Huntington Beach had been called Pacific City

in 1901. A group of men comprising Phil Stan, William Newland, Col.

S.H. Finley, Judson House and C.F. Weatherbee formed a syndicate and

bought 40 acres of land and laid out a small resort town.

By 1903, the name had been changed when a post office was

established with the name of Huntington Beach on June 22, 1903. A

group of men from Los Angeles bought out Stanton’s syndicate and

called their syndicate the Huntington Beach Company.

The town was renamed for Henry Huntington, owner of the Pacific

Electric red car line. Huntington was persuaded to bring his

streetcar down into town and after buying a large block of stock in

the Huntington Beach Company, brought his line down and built a depot

too.

The reason for the red car was to bring rich Los Angeles men to

town and sell them lots for a summer resort. After the tracks were

completed into town, the first red car left Long Beach at 2 p.m. on

June 18, 1904, and regular service to Huntington Beach began on July

1, 1904.

But the city has come to recognize July 4, 1904 as its official

birthday. On that day, a huge, free barbecue was given along with a

parade as red cars pulled into the depot and travelers disembarked to

watch the parade and buy land. If buyers wanted to stay overnight,

that was a problem, as no large hotels were available.

In 1905, the Huntington Beach Company constructed a “grand” hotel

at the corner of Eighth Street and Ocean Avenue (804 Pacific Coast

Highway) and named it Hotel Huntington. But for most of its life,

people knew it as the Huntington Inn.

This fine hotel was built on five lots in the Craftsman style

popular at the time. The builders, Martin and Huber, spared no

expense in its design and when finished, it cost them $24,000.

The first floor of the 30-room hotel was constructed with a brick

facade and the upper stories of frame and shingle siding. The hotel

began operations in August 1905 and was run by D.A. Stokes and his

wife.

The hotel’s first manager, Clarence E. Willey, saw to its

day-to-day operations until 1909, when Roy Oliver took over.

On Feb. 17, 1909, the city incorporated, but before this event the

town’s civic leaders held many meeting inside the inn. It’s not a

simple matter to become a city, and many issues had to be resolved.

Oliver continued as manager until 1911, when Thomas Brainerd was

hired. Tom Talbert, Phil Stanton and several civic leaders from

Orange County’s beach towns met at the inn during March of 1912 to

form the South Coast Improvement Assn. to plan roads, public

utilities and other necessary improvements to the coastal communities

from Seal Beach to San Clemente.

In 1919, the association changed its name to the Orange Coast

Assn. and continued to meet and improve the lives of Orange County

residents. Through these early years, there were several owners of

the inn, and the most unusual was when the inn was purchased in 1917

by a colorful heavyweight boxer named Tommy Burns.

He wanted to create a health resort for his friends and changed

the dining menu to reflect this idea. After a while, he sold the inn

to a fellow prize fighter named “Philadelphia” Jack O’Brien and it

became a social gathering place for sports people.

When Lynn Colburn took over in 1920, it became the place for

social and civic meetings, and one way Colburn sought to bring people

into the dining room was to offer tickets for $12, which entitled

ticket holders to 24 meals. That’s only 50 cents a meal, and at the

inn these were full, sit-down meals with fine linens and no plastic

knifes or forks.

When the oil boom came in the early 1920s, Standard Oil took over

the inn for their employees’ living quarters. With the opening of the

coast highway, more people traveled to Huntington Beach, and the inn

was about the only fine hotel in the area.

As more modern hotels and motor courts were built in other coastal

cities, the inn suffered a decline. The depression in the 1930s

contributed to this decline. When Agnes O’Shea took over the inn

during World War II, she called it the Island View Inn.

But everyone just kept calling it the Huntington Inn, and in 1948,

the dining room had been remodeled and was run by C.R. Lyman. Up to

this time, the structure had changed little in outside appearance

since it was built in 1905.

In 1951, Frank Saputo added an addition at the rear of the

building that he called the Log Room Theater and the dining room he

renamed Casa de Ora. The Galvin family now owned the building and the

old inn was beginning to show her age.

In the mid-1950s, the Elks Lodge outgrew its meeting room and

began looking for larger quarters, and the inn looked just right. But

local lodges are prohibited from incurring indebtedness, so a group

of loyal Elks formed a nonprofit corporation called the Ocean Front

Corporation. These men included Joseph Bartoll, Roy Bryant, Ray

Dolan, Byron Fenley, Allen Gisler, S.K. Kowitt, Robert Marshall,

Gerhardt Strangeland and D.C. Terry.

They purchased the inn from the Galvin family in 1955 and it

became the Elks Lodge No. 1959 of Huntington Beach. For the next 10

years it was the social hub of Elkdom, but as they outgrew their

first location, the Elks outgrew this one too.

They sold the inn to Union Oil, who wanted to build a gas station

on the corner, and in December 1969 had the old inn torn down. But

the station was never built, and today a Quality Inn stands on that

hallow ground where once many a rich and important person stayed to

enjoy the view of our majestic blue ocean.

* JERRY PERSON is a local historian and longtime Huntington Beach

resident. If you have ideas for future columns, write him at P.O. Box

7182, Huntington Beach, CA 92615.