A snapshot history of 27 Petlauma Boulevard North
The parking lot between the Lan Mart and McNear buildings on Petaluma Boulevard has seen many incarnations since 1853, when it housed the local post office and the first doctor’s office in town.
When Dr. Samuel W. Brown rolled into town in the spring of 1852, Petaluma was a very new community. It had been established just months before by George H. Keller, a failed gold miner from Missouri.
Brown, a physician and former postmaster from Hartford, Connecticut, Brown, came west in 1849 for the gold rush, then settled in Sacramento. Keller sold him a large lot running from Lower Main Street to Kentucky Street. Here he built one of the first houses in town. It served as a home for his family, as well as an office for seeing patients.
In the fall of 1853, after Brown was appointed Petaluma’s postmaster—a position first held by Keller’s 21-year old son Garret—his house also became the local post office.[i]
A strong advocate of public education, in 1856 Dr. Brown was elected president of the board of the Bowers School, the town’s only public school. Four years later, he led the campaign to replace the dilapidated schoolhouse at Fifth and B streets in 1860 with the B Street or “Brick School,” which occupied the site until 1911, when it was replaced by Lincoln Elementary (today converted into an office complex).[ii]
A co-founder of the Sonoma County Republican Party, Brown ran for State Superintendent of Public Schools on the Republican ticket in 1860, but lost. He died two years later of a sudden heart attack. The children of the Brick School made enough 10 cent donations to purchase a tombstone for his grave, upon which they had inscribed “The children’s friend.”[iii]
Following Brown’s death, his home and office—declared a “Petaluma landmark” by the local newspaper—were moved to an unknown part of town. The lot was purchased in 1866 by George L. Purdy, a blacksmith from Valley Ford, who erected the New York Hotel on the site. Three stories high with 46 rooms, the first floor was occupied by two storefronts, initially for a grocery and a shoe store.[iv]
The hotel sat in the middle of Chinatown, adjacent to Chinese dwellings and businesses. Its point of distinction was as the hotel closest to the railroad depot at Second and B streets, which served the Petaluma & Haystack Landing Railroad. The line extended two-and-a-half miles south to the steamboat dock of Haystack Landing.
Unfortunately for Purdy, just prior to the opening of his hotel, the locomotive’s boiler blew up while the train was sitting at the depot, killing four people. It was replaced with a horse-drawn train car.[v]
After three years of struggling to make ends meet, Purdy sold the hotel. It turned over a couple of times before it was purchased in 1873 by Heinrich Matthies, the owner of the Union Hotel at the nearby corner of Main Street and Western Avenue (site of today’s Masonic Lodge), which he advertised as the “Deutsches Gasthaus” (German guest house).
In 1876 Matthies remodeled and upgraded the New York hotel, renaming it the Cosmopolitan. On the Kentucky Street side, across from where City Hall would be built in 1886, he constructed a cottage for his family to live in.[vi] He also leased 11 rooms in the upper story of the new Centennial Building next door (today’s Lan Mart building), inserting a hallway to provide passage between the two buildings.
According to local lore, those 11 rooms served as a discrete brothel for hotel guests.[vii] If true, it would have most likely been in the late 1870s and 1880s, as the hallway between the two buildings was eliminated by the early 1890s.[viii]
After Matthies’ death in 1883, the Cosmopolitan became a workingman’s boarding house.
In 1919, Matthies’ son Henry, a San Francisco-based contractor, tore down the dilapidated hotel and erected a modern single story commercial building with two storefronts in its place.
One storefront was occupied by Alyne’s, a women’s apparel shop operated by Alyne Thomas, the daughter of local grocery merchant Achille Kahn. The other was occupied by F.W. Woolworth’s department store. After Woolworth’s moved to the new Phoenix Building on Main Street in 1929, they were replaced by a discount shop called Bolton’s 5 cents to $1.00 Store.[ix]
In 1934, the Matthies family sold the building to Americo Gervasoni of the Gervasoni Finance Company, which owned a number of properties around town.[x] In May 1952, with the two storefronts occupied by Guy’s Furniture Store and the Petaluma Paint Store, a fire of unknown origin broke out behind the paint store, burning down the building. The brick frontage was later demolish. [xi]
The lot sat vacant for almost a decade, until it was leased by the Chamber of Commerce for merchant parking, as a means of opening up more street parking for shoppers.[xii]
In 1973, the parking lot was famously featured in a scene in the film “American Graffiti.” A teenager covertly attaches a cable to the rear axle of a police car parked in the lot watching for speeders on the boulevard. The teen then speeds by in a car with his friends, prompting the police to pull out of the lot in pursuit, only to have the axle and rear tires of their car ripped off by the cable.”[xiii]
This landmark location remains a private parking lot today.
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FOOTNOTES:
[i] Ad for Dr. S.W. Brown, Hartford Courant, December 23, 1833; “Whig State Convention,” Hartford Courant, January 16, 1842; “The Guillotine in Motion!” Hartford Courant, February 2, 1843; “Physician Charges in Petaluma,” Sonoma County Journal, December 1, 1855; “The Indigent Sick,” Sonoma County Journal, November 18, 1859 ;“Sudden Death,” Sonoma County Journal, January 31, 1862; “An Old Landmark,” Petaluma Argus, August 16, 1866; “Appointments of U.S. Postmaster, 1832-1971, National Archives; ancestry.com lists Brown as assuming Petaluma postmaster’s position on December 14, 1853.
[ii] “School Notice,” Sonoma County Journal, January 26, 1856; “Laying the Cornerstone” Sonoma County Journal, August 12, 1859; “Our Public School House,” Sonoma County Journal, February 24, 1860.
[iii] Republican County Convention,” Sonoma County Journal, August 22, 1856; Political, ”Sonoma County Journal, August 10, 1860; “Sudden Death,” Sonoma County Journal, January 31, 1862; “Name Then,” Petaluma Argus, August 22, 1867; “G.F. Parker, Former Petaluma resident, Compiles History of B Street School,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 10, 1937.
[iv] “Dissolution of Copartnership,” Petaluma Argus, January 5, 1864; Frightful Explosion,” Petaluma Argus, August 30, 1866; “New York Hotel,” Petaluma Argus, November 8, 1866; Ad for Sullivan’s New York Hotel, Petaluma Argus, June 17, 1869; “Changing Hands,” Petaluma Argus, April 16, 1870; “Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Argus, February 7, 1873; Ad for New York and Union hotels, Petaluma Argus, October 1873; Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (University of Wisconsin, 1880) p. 239.
[v] “Frightful Explosion,” Petaluma Argus, August 30, 1866.
[vi] “Improvements,” Petaluma Argus, May 12, 1876; “Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, August 18, 1876;
[vii] “Improvements,” Petaluma Argus, May 12, 1876.
[viii] The hallway between the two buildings is featured in both the 1883 and 1885 Sanborn maps, but not in the 1894 Sanborn map.
[ix] “Henry Matthies,” Petaluma Argus, September 29, 1883; “New Building and Two New Stories,” Petaluma Courier, June 28, 1919; “Get Notice to Vacate,” Petaluma Argus, June 30, 1919; The Woolworth Store Opening,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 30, 1929.
[x] “Gervasoni Finance Co. to Buy Matthies Building,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 23, 1934.
[xi] “Fire Destroys Two Stores in Petaluma,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 19, 1952.
[xii] “Chamber Parking Lease Due Today,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 28, 1961.
[xiii] “Movie Crews Film Scenes in Downtown Area,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 29, 1972; “Re-enacting ‘American Graffiti at 4:30 in the Morning,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 15, 2008.