1994-03-02 Santa Monica Outlook - "In the Path of Destruction" by Nick Madigan

“In the Path of Destruction”

 

by Nick Madigan

Photos by Bryan McLellan / Staff Photographer

 

In nearly 7 decades, the Topanga Ranch Motel has been threatened by floods and fires. But it still stands, often shelters those displaced by disasters, and now it is for sale.

Guests check in at the Topanga Ranch Motel, and sometimes don’t check out for years.

Screenwriter Rob Dunn sits in his motel room, which he treats as his temporary home and office while he’s separated from his wife. Dunn is working on a project for Touchstone Pictures.

Come rain, tremors or fire, some places are just plain lucky. On a windy patch of land between Pacific Coast Highway and a flood-prone creek, the Topanga Ranch Motel has survived the onslaught of the elements for almost 70 years. Time and again, water from the raging stream has lapped at the doorsteps of its white-and-red bungalows. Fire has sucked the life from trees inches away. When the earth moves, the old wood of the buildings creaks and sways, but stays put.

 

Four years ago, the motel and the rest of the 1,600-acre canyon property on which it sits — all of it owned by the Los Angeles Athletic Club — almost were sold for parkland. Asking price: $25 million. It survived even that.

 

Given its durability and location, the 34-unit motel often doubles as a temporary home for refugees of disaster. The four calamities that recently struck Los Angeles and Malibu — floods a year ago, fires in November, the Northridge earthquake in January and the mudslides of Feb. 7 — disgorged some of the suddenly homeless into the motel, filling it for nights on end even as the bungalows themselves were threatened.

 

When the rain returned early Thursday, the motel’s small staff looked ready to accept more evacuees. As it happened, the showers were lighter than anticipated and there was no rush for the check-in desk.

 

Despite its resilience, however, the quaint hostelry at the bottom of Topanga Canyon is one of a dying breed, a relic.

 

“The old motor motels — very few of ’em left,” said Charlie Sexton, 62-year-old night manager and handyman, as he sat in the small front office overlooking the highway. “In the old days you could drive anywhere, pull in, get out of your car and go into your room. On Route 66, they used to be the thing. But they’re all gone now. The big chains like Red Roof Inns and Best Western, they’ve taken over and rebuilt a lot of ’em. Every place is like an apartment building now.”

 

The motel, one of the few anywhere to retain its architectural form since it was built, has become crowded by its neighbors: There is the Topanga Ranch Liquor & Market, the Reel Inn restaurant, the Malibu Feed Bin, Japanese and Mexican restaurants and various other businesses and private homes.

In the ’20s, when the motel was built, some construction workers had cottages in the area. Photo courtesy of the Topanga Historical Society (Randy Young Collection).

Newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst once owned the oceanfront property that houses all of them. Shortly after World War I, workers building the first coastal highway — then named after President Theodore Roosevelt — lived in long wooden shacks along the beach. There were also cottages and huts, some used as changing rooms in the days when swimming in the ocean compelled more discretion than it does now.

 

Some of the workers’ shacks and beachgoers’ cottages later were moved to form the Topanga Ranch Motel. Guests years ago could walk a few yards to the rodeo grounds, which attracted hordes rich and poor from the growing area around Los Angeles; the bucking horses and Brahma bulls are long gone. In recent years, prospective buyers have looked at the roadside portion of the huge canyon property as a good place for a shopping mall.

 

“Always for Sale”

 

“It’s always for sale,” said Ray Craig, who has run the motel for 10 years as a lessee of the Los Angeles Athletic Club. “But you can’t develop it. You’ve got the creek, so there would have to be some sort of flood control, and the Coastal Commission would probably object because you’d be bringing in extra traffic. And everyone here is on septic tanks. So nothing’s been done. If we had sewers here, we’d be looking like Miami Beach.”

 

Since 1972, when the Athletic Club first explored the idea of selling the property, its many tenants there have been on month-to-month leases so that it will be easier to dispose of the land, Craig said. Club officials did not return a telephone call from this newspaper.

 

Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, said Thursday that the state agency remained interested in the land — which runs north from the highway for about 2 1/2 miles until it abuts Topanga State Park — and would buy it “if we could get it for the right price.”

 

The $25 million tag placed on the property was too much in 1990, when the two sides last spoke. Edmiston said he still sought to preserve the “spectacular” hills on either side of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. He acknowledged that the fate of the commercial and residential areas by the highway is “a sensitive issue,” but said he did not know what would happen to them should the conservancy succeed in buying the property.

 

In the predawn hours of Nov. 3, 1993, flames of the Old Topanga fire forced evacuation of residents and guests, though ultimately there was no damage. A guest, Robert Overby, took this photograph. Several other disasters have threatened the site over the years.

Many Acres Scorched

While the businesses and homes survived the November fires, hundreds of acres in the canyon were scorched.

 

“I thought this place would spontaneously combust,” Tim McNamara, an architect who has made his home in the motel for the past year, said of the flames that licked the property but failed to ignite it.

 

McNamara and other guests were evacuated to the beach on the other side of the highway, from where they watched the flames march down the seaward edge of Topanga Canyon. From the vantage point of the beach, the motel looked doomed.

 

“It looked like we lost the last row of buildings,” said Craig, the motel’s owner. “Then I got over here and found them still standing. I just couldn’t believe it.”

 

Firefighters from Fountain Valley had saved the place. When the battle was over, the guests — a screenwriter in search of quiet, a record producer cutting costs, a J. Paul Getty Museum security guard — returned to their cottages and rooms, brushing ash from the windowsills and doorjambs. For some of the guests — such as Aneta Siegal, who has lived at the motel for 40 years — losing the motel to fire would have meant losing everything.

 

Rare Outing

 

The night of the fire, Siegal, an elderly woman who keeps to herself in her ramshackle cottage, packed a bag and left for the first time in a decade, one of her neighbors said.

 

“I guess it’s had better days,” Sexton, the night manager, said of the motel. By better he meant more fun. In the ’60s, a bar called The Raft — on the spot now occupied by the Reel Inn restaurant next door — attracted mischievous leather-jacketed biker-actors such as Lee Marvin, Keenan Wynn and Neville Brand.

 

“They were cruder than crude,” Sexton recalled. “They were very loud and they drank a lot. Every so often they’d get thrown out. They’d rent a room here and stay the night if they couldn’t get home by themselves.”

 

More ominously, a short, skinny hippie named Charles Manson used to gas up his brown school bus at the Phillips 66 gas station Sexton used to own. Manson later gained infamy by leading a band of drug- dazed companions into actress Sharon Tate’s home and slaughtering her and four other people.

 

“We knew he was a strange character, but we were surprised about the murders,” Sexton said. “He behaved when he was around us.”

One motel resident, a record producer who declined to be identified or photographed, has a truck that looks as if it may be as big as his cottage.

Vince Ewasko, 38, is among the residents at Topanga Ranch Motel. He said the wind reminds him of his native home in the East.

 

To Vince Ewasko, a 38-year-old messenger who lives at the motel full-time, the folklore of the place and its propensity toward disaster are irrelevant.

 

“The thing that keeps me here is the wind,” Ewasko, who moved from New Jersey to California in 1978, said as a breeze whistled through the canyon. Besides, he said, the old motel seems immune to danger.

“Everything happens around us — it just doesn’t seem to touch us,” he said. “It’s amazing.”