The long-awaited Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center is a project that dates to 2005. That inaugural impulse two decades ago was itself based on ideas that had begun germinating some thirty years before. All those decades of thinking and planning were seen as actually coming to long-awaited fruition when construction began in 2018. […]
Santa Barbara has drawn photographers to its sunny climate, beautiful landscape, and charming architecture for over 150 years. Starting in the early 1870s with its first resident photographers, E. J. Hayward and Henry Muzzall, at least 11 photographers had set up shop by 1900. They documented the Mission and the adobes and the views from […]
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Montecito’s Trish Davis is being featured in my column for her contributions to preserve the history of Montecito. Davis was recommended to me by the Montecito Fire Protection District Fire Chief David Neels in response to my community request for Montecito women to be featured in my news column for Women’s History Month.Neels stated in […]
No popping champagne corks announced the arrival of the new year in 1925. Prohibition still ruled the land. Nevertheless, Santa Barbarans could look back with pride to 1924 along with enthusiasm and hope toward 1925. The Morning Press headline blared, “Santa Barbara Greets the New Year with Noise and Church Services.” The dance floors were […]
Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942) became America’s first female news photographer when The Buffalo Inquirer and Courier of New York hired her as a staff photographer in 1902. The road to a career in photography, however, began in 1888 when she won a camera for selling magazine subscriptions. At the time, she was living with her […]
Last Sunday’s opening of the new Michael Towbes Library Plaza was everything the Journal’s Jeff Wing predicted it would be in a recent edition of the weekly MJ. It was indeed a mezzo shout of happy civic hollering as a Pandora’s box of color and sound reverberated on the sun splashed block party on Anapamu […]
Back in 1924, when Edward A. Johnson celebrated the opening of his spectacular Granada Theatre, he arranged for a program that highlighted the flexibility of the new venue. In addition to one of the first-ever 3-D movies, cartoons, a ballet performance, and the world premiere of Mae Murray’s Mademoiselle Midnight, he hired Antonio P. Sarli […]
This political season is sufficiently fraught that your fraidy-cat columnist is going to steer well clear of the melee and write about something we can all agree on. I’m talking of course about the inarguable virtues of Communism. Ha Ha Ha. Kidding. As has been lightly touched upon in endless cocktail party conversations (and more […]
Old Spanish Days Fiesta is rooted in the dozens of short-lived attempts to establish an annual festival in Santa Barbara, starting, perhaps, with the 1886 Mission Centennial celebration. In 1924, the fiesta that was created to celebrate the opening of the new Lobero Theatre succeeded spectacularly. This year marks its 100th year anniversary. Months of […]
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By 1880, Montecito’s Hot Springs were so ancient that the Morning Press felt compelled to write their history. The hot springs, the article said, had been used by the Chumash since time immemorial. After the coming of the Europeans, the springs, though belonging first to the Pueblo and then to the City of Santa Barbara, […]
Though the ancients relied on oral tradition to pass along the history and culture of their societies, today a community’s history exists in written forms. Civic, personal, and business records provide accurate facts about past events and issues. Often, however, news articles are the best starting point for uncovering the past. In fact, newspapers are […]
In December 1922, Edward A. Johnson, president of the California Theater Company that owned most of the movie houses in Santa Barbara, announced plans to build a theater and eight-story office building on State Street. Despite touches of Spanish design, many felt the tall rectangular structure did not suit Santa Barbara’s emerging Mediterranean style. Nevertheless, […]
In celebrating Black History Month, this week we honor America’s First Black Woman novelist, Hannah Bond, whose self-styled pen name was Hannah Crafts. Her novel, written in the 1850s, is titled The Bondwoman’s Narrative. It remained an unpublished manuscript until 2001, when it was purchased at an auction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. from the […]
In July 1909, much to the alarm of the Santa Barbara populace, the Morning Press announced that the venerable Covarrubias Adobe was to be razed and replaced by a modern apartment building. Without notice, Nicolas Covarrubias had sold it out from under his aging siblings, Camillo and Amelia. The first they heard of the sale […]
