Written on an Alamo Tombstone: Remembering Bakersfield’s Padre Hotel - By Greg Goodsell

Padre Hotel, Bakersfield, California circa 2002

Now that the Random Times has folded, writer Greg Goodsell is once again in need of an outlet. Greg remembered that he can always submit stories to the Paperback Writer blog. You can too... just send me an email with your story attached: nl@nlbelardes.com.

I added a few photos I took in 2002 to add even more flare to Greg's article...
-n.l. belardes


Written on an Alamo Tombstone: Remembering Bakersfield’s Padre Hotel

By Greg Goodsell
E-mail: gregoodsell@hotmail.com

Younger people growing up in Bakersfield, to a certain extent, are missing out. To them, the Padre Hotel at the corner of 18th and "H" Streets is little more than an ugly gray building, shuttered long ago, jutting up into the heavens in the heart of downtown Bakersfield. If you’re an older Bakersfieldian such as this author, however, you remember the Padre Hotel as an ugly gray building, jutting up into the heavens in the heart of downtown Bakersfield teeming with all manner of scandalous and benign activity.

Constructed in 1928, the Padre retained the status of Bakersfield’s premiere bar, long after the hubbub and nightlife on Union Avenue (the professional birthplace of a young comic and magician named Johnny Carson -- hence all those snide comments on his late night TV chat show) died out in the Fifties. The hotel’s bar, the Town Casino hosted a girl in a swing, high in the rafters over revelers’ heads. At one point, a girl would cool her heels in a Lucite bathtub as patrons whispered naughty things in her ear through a telephone. At the piano was musician Ernie Kelly, a longtime hipster that at one point was voted "the most well-liked man in Bakersfield." A downtown fixture since 1946, Kelly would work the crowd with songs and jokes of a decidedly older vintage. Longtime Bakersfield residents recall the nights when lines of people would snake through the lobby waiting for a table to clear for a whiff of that Padre magic.

In the Sixties, the hotel was bought by Milton "Spartacus" Miller, a flamboyant cigar-chomping iconoclast falsely rumored to have connections to Chicago’s underworld. When City Hall slapped him with all manner of building and fire code violations, he did what most people did in the Sixties: he plastered protest signs all over his building. Slogans such as "Infamy rules our town!" and "Watergate is here!" screamed underneath the hotel’s windows in rusted red letters.

Most notorious was the decorating Miller did to the town’s roof. A mock missile was affixed in the direction of city hall, and the sign "Alamo Tombstone" was erected in protest. This phase of the hotel’s history can be glimpsed in a wall mural still extant at Guthrie’s Alley Cat.


Ah, the good old days...

As the years went on, Miller kept right on fighting City Hall and Kelly kept right on playing the piano. The clientele would always include older people who remembered the hotel’s glory days, but for the homophobic, the Town Casino would become known as a -- gasp! -- "gay bar." The bar was the one place in the somewhat provincial town of Bakersfield where all were welcome. Other watering holes would come and go, with their own brand of barflies. If you were a well-respected figure in the community, from one of Bakersfield’s most illustrious families, it wasn’t held against you at the Padre. You would get the same cocktail as the transvestite prostitute plying her wares in the lobby.

While the Padre was widely known for its impropriety, not many knew of its safe haven for sobriety. Scarfing down my breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant, I would spot many longtime friends of mine in the lobby’s morning Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. While I would hold court with buddies over copious amounts of liquor at night, I would later rekindle many old friendships at the Padre in the bright morning sun over cups of coffee.

It was said that underneath his gruff exterior, Spartacus could scarcely disguise his heart of gold. It was said that he would let many of the hotels less fortunate tenants skate by on their rent during lean periods.



A favorite pastime of this writer during the Nineties was gathering with friends on the Padre’s eighth-floor fire escape to drop our highball glasses on to the pavement below. Terrified by heights, but buzzing with several gin and tonics, I would watch as glasses fell with terrible inevitability to the ground through the grate underneath my feet. My frequently drunken escapades didn’t endear me to a few of the people in the bar, and for many I had worn out my welcome.

The Padre was also notorious as being a "lover’s leap" or suicide point as many full of self-pity and alcohol would throw themselves to oblivion from the hotel’s windows and fire escapes. One legend surrounding the hotel was the time a cowboy, jilted by his gay lover went rushing to meet the cement dressed in full western gear clutching a Teddy Ruxpin doll.

In one of the hotel’s more recent chapters, that will remain deliberately vague, certain forces conspired to wrest the ownership of the hotel away from the elderly and infirm Miller in the late Nineties. Miller died in 1999, and the hotel went through a period of ill adjustment with its new owners.

The hotel was eventually sold, and all of the regulars gathered at the Town Casino for one more go round in late November of 2001. One last drink, one last chorus of "Natural Woman" with pianist Dena Reynolds (who stepped in for the long-gone Ernie Kelly), a final tear shed for a local institution as the Town Casino closed forever.

It appears that scandal still dogs the Padre, even in its disused state. The San Diego-based firm Pacifica Enterprises began renovations on the hotel, sandblasting away all the gargoyles and character that the original building once had. Talk of making the hotel an upscale area for condominiums circulated.



But, hello -- what’s this? The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District and Kern County has filed a lawsuit against Pacifica Enterprises for hiring untrained workers to illegally dispose of the hotel’s asbestos in open landfills! Sad to say, this is keeping in with the structure’s longtime brushes with authority. Only this time, no one is able to enjoy the atmosphere of what once was Bakersfield’s premiere hotspot. The Padre today remains boarded up, a few stray businesses still operating on the ground floor.

Hope springs eternal. The Nile Theater, just around the corner on 19th Street was little more than a just place for pigeon droppings until one plucky entrepreneur rolled up his shirtsleeves and transformed the former grind house into a bustling state-of-the-art nightclub.

Sadly, whatever shape the Padre may take in the future -- as a ritzy hub of downtown activity or as a literal Alamo tombstone -- the hotel this writer remembers will have to stay forever as a happy, inebriated memory.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Thursday, January 18, 2007. You can leave your response.