The American Hotel’s bird-spattered remains are historic–but too small to make money

PHOTO by ZACK PIANKO

Across the alley from the new Lennar condos and across Broadway from the historic Middough Brothers-Insurance Exchange Building is an even older building in much worse shape: the former American Hotel property at 221 E. Broadway—where some say there once lived a cult.

Lennar people use its strategically located parking lot as a staging area, so the moment I appear, SL Residential Project Superintendent Bob Boyle asks me what I want.

I tell him I’m looking at the hotel—which is vacant and now owned by the city’s Redevelopment Agency—and Boyle says immediately: “Do you want to buy it?” Yes. I do—but maybe not today.

“It’s actually a very small footprint,” says developer Dan Peterson, who resurrected the Insurance Exchange Building across the street—and you know what they say about the size of a man’s footprint. “I’m sure if it were in a little bit better shape, somebody would have done something with it. But it’s so small that the amount of money to retrofit it would not be worth it.”

That’s most of the problem. “It’s the oldest building around here,” Boyle adds. “I had a guy wanting to buy the fire escape.” And that’s the rest of the problem—its age and its condition.

A block away on Long Beach Boulevard is Acres of Books, a landmark business in a partially historic building that may be sold and partially demolished. It works, very much so; Acres of Books is one of the world’s great bookstores.

But its building, a former market/used car lot/dance hall, dates to 1924. The American Hotel building, which was built in 1905, is also a city historic landmark, according to city officials—and it’s the oldest commercial building left in downtown Long Beach. The oldest. And it’s vacant, and falling apart.

“The folks at Lennar, one of their cement trucks backed up onto the sidewalk and collapsed the sidewalk,” says Director of Planning and Building Craig Beck. A city investigation revealed that the hotel basement actually continues under the sidewalk—which shouldn’t have collapsed the sidewalk—and that some of the joists between the first floor and the basement are rotten. The joists are what hold up the building—that and, possibly, decades of talk about the century-old rituals held in rooms off its graceful foyer.

“I heard there was a cult operating out of there,” Beck says. “The Electric Kissing something or other.” Well, not exactly—unless you consider those pesky Presbyterians a cult, too.

“We call it the American Hotel only because that was the last business there—but it was the Psychic Temple of the Holy Kiss [before that],” says Long Beach resident Maureen Neeley, named 2007’s Preservationist of the Year by Long Beach Heritage. “Around the turn of the century, alternative religions were really big, and Reverend William Rosecrans Price came out here—I guess he came out here in 1904. He started this religion of the Holy Kiss.” And he had this building erected, as a monument to . . . holy kissing, apparently.

Too bad real estate developers can’t work on reputation alone—but they can’t.  “These are rough numbers, but just to make that building back to what it was, you’re looking at about $10.5 million,” Beck says.That’s a lot of money for a building that probably won’t pay for itself.

“At one point, I looked into converting it to artists’ lofts and you could only do about 14 of them,” Beck says. “The economic costs to make it into artists’ lofts just didn’t pencil.”

So what’s the solution? A while back, the city got a $3 million Metropolitan Transportation Authority grant to pay for a parking lot next door to the American Hotel, on a vacant lot at the southwest corner of Long Beach Boulevard and Broadway.

City officials managed to move that money around to pay for another project—the rather nondescript parking structure on Third Street between Long Beach Boulevard and Pine Avenue, which they intend to augment by another one or two levels.

Thusly freed, somehow, to tackle the vacant lot and the American Hotel together, city folk hope to save part of the structure—chiefly its Romanesque facade, with huge arched windows and great polished brickwork—and build something bigger on the whole piece of land.

“Absolutely,” Beck says. “We would use that land and integrate it into the plan.”

Now all they need is to square it with the historic preservationists, and find someone to build it—preferably before the American Hotel winds up in Bob Boyle’s lap. “The mortar’s crystallizing,” Boyle says—meaning that the stuff that holds the bricks together is turning back into sand. “I’m waiting for an earthquake, and it to fall on my [construction] trailer.”

Tags: American Hotel, Lennar, Long Beach, psychic temple of the holy kiss, redevelopment