Glen Tavern Hotel

About this property

The Glen Tavern Inn is a hotel located in Santa Paula, Ventura County, California. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and is an official City of Santa Paula and Ventura County Landmark. It is in the Santa Clara River Valley, approximately 12 miles (19 km) inland from the Pacific Ocean. The hotel was built in 1911 when Santa Paula was growing and prospering as an oil town and was headquarters to Union Oil. The Tudor-Craftsman hotel was designed by famed architects Burns and Hunt and funded by a consortium of twenty-five wealthy townsmen each of whom wanted one thousand dollars for its construction. It was erected directly opposite the train depot to provide accommodations to the many newcomers lured to the area by the burgeoning oil and citrus industries, and to provide a gathering place for Santa Paula's growing high society circles. Beginning in the 1910s, Hollywood discovered the valley hamlet of Santa Paula. Its ruggedly picturesque vistas and hills – improbably close to the sprawl of Los Angeles - provided a setting for numerous Westerns. Many Universal film professions either stayed at the hotel or ate in the restaurant during these early years. The hotel also hosted William Jennings Bryan and famous pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski. In later years, western stars like Randolph Scott visited the hotel while on location. Because of its popularity, the hotel struggled to house visitors to Santa Paula. After city leaders sold the hotel in 1919, the Glen Tavern's new owner, Charles Estep, converted the hotel's unused attic space into a third floor for guests, completing the conversion around 1920. Eventually, as oil money and old Hollywood moved on, Santa Paula settled down into a quieter constancy of agriculture and small-town life Americana. In June 1943, during World War II, the U.S. Federal Public Housing Authority leased the property from Estep. The government then converted the hotel into a woman's dormitory for employees working at nearby Port Hueneme. In 1946, the lease ended and the Glen Tavern once again functioned as a hotel. By the 1960s, the train depot became defunct, and likewise, economic development bypassed the town. For the next half-century the hotel endured a marginal existence, alternating owners and uses many times as it slowly sank into flophouse decrepitude until it was eventually rescued by developers with intentions of restoring its original grandeur. From 2005 through 2007, the Glen Tavern Inn was extensively renovated by the Jennett Investment Group. Mid-renovation, in April 2006, the hotel sustained a fire. Fortunately, firefighters were able to douse the blaze in time to save the landmark from major harm, and the burned portion was rebuilt.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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