In Part II of this video presentation sponsored by the Petaluma Historical Museum and the Sonoma County Library, historian John Sheehy explores how a diverse community of Irish, Black, and German merchants in the 19th century made Petaluma’s Main Street such a bustling melting pot.
Real Main Street Video Presentation, Part I
Part I of this video presentation series explores Petaluma’s early Jewish, Chinese, and Swiss Italian communities.
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.
A snapshot history of the Lan Mart Building at 35 Petaluma Blvd. North
For its first half century, half of this building served as a livery stable. The fieldstone wall from its original 1856 construction is still visible along the building’s interior hallway.
Built by S.G. McCollugh, the two-story Rough & Ready Stone Stable served guests at the adjacent Union Hotel to the north, where the Masonic Lodge sits today. An open stable yard extended from the back of the building all the way to Kentucky Street.[1]
In 1865, John Pfau, a German horse breeder, purchased the livery, and in 1876 incorporated it into a new building he constructed on its south side. He christened it the Centennial Building in honor of America’s 100th birthday.[2]
For the next half century, the Centennial Building, which sat in the middle of early Petaluma’s Chinatown, served as a social and commercial hub for German immigrants.
On the first level beside his livery, Pfau created two storefronts. The first was occupied by Centennial Headquarters, his high-class drinking establishment for ladies and gentlemen, offering classical and operatic music performances.
In 1883, it was renamed the Eureka Saloon after Pfau’s champion stallion, and stayed in operation until Prohibition shut it down in 1920.[3] The other storefront featured the wine store of German immigrant Henry Dortmund, who established one of Petaluma’s first wineries near the end of Keokuk Street in Cherry Valley.[4
The front half of the Centennial Building’s second floor, the front half, where Old Chicago Pizza restaurant has pleased local taste buds for the past 45 years, was occupied by professional offices. The back half of the floor was divided into a meeting hall used as a lodge by the local fraternal chapter of German Druids—occupied today by a yoga studio—and 11 windowless rooms lit by skylights.
Pfau leased the rooms to Heinrich Matthies, a fellow German who operated both the Union Hotel and the New York Hotel, a boarding house on the south side of the Centennial Building, advertised them as “Deutsches Gasthaus.”[5]
In 1876, Matthies remodeled and upgraded the New York, renaming it the Cosmopolitan Hotel. He added a hallway to connect the rooms on the Centennial’s second floor to the hotel. Based on hearsay, these rooms were said to have served as a backdoor bordello for hotel guests.[6]
Pfau doubled the size of the livery yard behind the Centennial Building extending to Kentucky Street, adding a carriage and wagon house. That came in handy on Saturdays, when as many as 1,000 farmers and ranchers drove their wagons into town to do their trading—this at a time when Petaluma’s population stood at only 3,300.[7]
In 1884, Pfau sold the Centennial Building to two young Germans, Christian and Jeppe Lauritzen, who opened a meat market on the first floor beside the Eureka Saloon. Ten years later, the Lauritzens sold the building to German hardware merchant Ludwig Gross. Renaming it the Gross Building, he rented out the storefront beside the Eureka to Herman and Josef Schoeningh, operators of a dry goods store called The Ark, for almost two decades.[8]
Beginning in 1902, Druids Hall on the second floor became headquarters of a German mutual relief society called Hermann Sons. In 1930, they moved into their lodge on Western Avenue. The hall also hosted meetings of the Dania Society, the Swedish Lodge, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. From 1940 to 1960, it served as the Moose Lodge.[9]
After Gross’ death in 1908, his wife Hattie assumed ownership of the building. In 1911, she closed the livery—a victim to the increasing adoption of automobiles—and remodeled the building, redesigning the front in a Mission Revival style.[10]
In 1928, she hired Petaluma architect Brainerd Jones to design a new building for what had been the livery’s back lot facing Kentucky Street. From 1934 to 1967, that building was occupied by Ascherman’s Grocery, which, during the 1930s, extended its market across to the Gross Building on Main Street.[11]
In 1972, Victor and Marisa DeCarli, who owned both Gross Buildings, combined them into a boutique shopping center of shops and restaurants based on San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. Renamed the Lan Mart—a play on “landmark,” it kicked off a revitalization and restoration of Petaluma’s historic downtown buildings.[12]
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Ad for the Dutch Horse Doctor at the Petaluma Livery Stable (McCullough’s livery), Sonoma County Journal, December 19, 1856; Ad for Rough & Ready Livery, Sonoma County Journal, August 7, 1857; Ad for McLaughlin’s purchase of livery, Sonoma County Journal, September 17, 1858.
[2] Ad for Pfau’s purchase of livery, Petaluma Argus, April 13, 1865; Local Brevities,” Petaluma Argus, July 23, 1875; “Pfau’s Centennial Building,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1876.
[3] “Centennial Headquarters,” Petaluma Argus, July 14, 1876; Ad for Centennial Saloon and Music Hall,” Petaluma Courier, March 7, 1878; Ad for Eureka horse, Petaluma Courier, May 31, 1877; Ad, Petaluma Courier, March 24, 1880.
[4] “In Town,” Petaluma Argus, July 18, 1883; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, September 16, 1883; “County Notes,” Healdsburg Tribune, Enterprise and Scimitar, November 10, 1998; “Has Answered the Call,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 12, 1898.
[5] “Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Argus, February 7, 1873; “Improvements,” Petaluma Argus, May 12, 1876; “The Druids,” Petaluma Courier, December 22, 1880; “A House Warming,” Petaluma Courier, June 3, 1897; “Pizza Lovers Rejoice,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 1, 1976.
[6] Ad, Petaluma Argus, October 1873; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scotwall Associates, 1982), p. 143.
[7] “Pfau’s Centennial Building,” Petaluma Argus, March 3, 1876; “Saturday in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, April 2, 1884; U.S. Census, Petaluma, 1880.
[8] “Real Estate Transactions,” Petaluma Argus, February 8, 1884; Ad for Lauritzen Meat Market, Petaluma Argus, April 28, 1888; “Change of Base,” Petaluma Courier, May 11, 1894; “Brevities,” Petaluma Courier, May 2, 1899; “Remodeling Building,” Petaluma Courier, April 5, 1917.
[9] “Society Dania,” Petaluma Courier, April 11, 1899; “Briefs,” Petaluma Courier, February 20, 1902; “Hermann Sons Elected Officers,” Petaluma Courier, March 21, 1902; “Mayor Farrell Officiates at Corner Stone Laying of Hermann Sons’ Hall,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 8, 1930; “V.F.W. News, Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 15, 1938; “VFW To Dedicate New Club Rooms,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 5, 1945; “Moose Lodges Leases Gross Hall,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, October 1, 1940; “Members Prepare New Hall for Occupancy,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, June 30, 1860.
[10] “Death of L.L. Gross,” Petaluma Argus, April 18, 1908; “Centennial Stable Closes After Half Century,” Petaluma Argus, September 1, 1911; “Contract Awarded,” Petaluma Argus, September 5, 1911.
[11] A.M. Seeberg Awarded Contract for New Gross Bldg,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 3, 1928; “Elegant New Building has Been Completed and Accepted,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 26, 1928; “Brainerd Jones Was Architect,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, December 26, 1928; “Ascherman Grocery Store Moves Over Week-end,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, April 7, 1934; “Ascherman Grocery Will Move to Gross Building,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 27, 1934; Ad announcing Ascherman’s sale,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, March 7, 1967; “Market Closes,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 13, 1970.
[12] First Ad for shop in the Lan Mart building, Petaluma Argus-Courier, May 9, 1972; “Lan Mart Stores are Commercial Experiment,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 15, 1973; “Lan Mart Center Has Grand Opening,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, September 6, 1973.
