Photo Essay: The Dying Padre Hotel: A Bakersfield icon becomes a ghost tower - By N.L. Belardes

No more springtime for the Padre Hotel, Bakersfield, CA

I wandered around downtown, just taking a walk, really. There was the Padre Hotel, a once strong beacon of Bakersfield as a growing city, now a relic that says: even guilded, this relic is no more.

When will it be torn down, chopped up, fished out as construction chum for the industrial construction scavengers to eat?

It's just one building, in one small city. Drive to L.A., weave downtown among towering piles of refuse, and you'll forget the Padre Hotel even exists.

It's a dead relic of past Hollywood-Bakersfield days. Movie stars, extras, producers, directors, all hanging out and mingling after a long Kern Canyon Western Movie shoot--stagecoaches rumbling down canyon trails, the mighty Kern River in the distance--white men in brown make-up: Indians on hillsides... the Old West. Bakersfield-Hollywood dimmed. And now the gilded Padre, retrofitted on the outside, decayed on the interior. The Old West.


The retrofit diseased



Yet I'm sure people are happier now, right? Downtown has been cleaned up. The construction site headache with its flotsam of decayed Padre bits and pieces has been swept away to the city dump.


Look at the clean lot, with the gilded shadow in the background



Local music can sing songs of heyday once again now that the lot has been cleansed of its demons. Until you walk up to the building itself, and peer beneath the scabs.


A wounded, dying structure, waiting for its last gasp?


Local news washes ashore, adds to the wooden scab wounds


Peer in through dirt-covered windows to the truth


Focus in on pock-marked steps: boils burst, wounds exposed


A lone bucket makes for ghostly abandonment


Empty, torn, broken, alone... walls with echoes?


Coffee blood. Building abandoned. Construction waste gone. Guilded image hiding the darkness. Boards covering community memories. A dying Padre. Dead.