San Jose's Montgomery Hotel: An Expensive Souvenir
- Morris Newman
- Feb 1, 2000
- 4 min read
The preservation of the Montgomery Hotel in the City of San Jose could be likened to a brick rescued from a burning house by its owners. By itself, the brick would have little or no value. As a souvenir of a vanished house, however, the brick becomes a treasured relic. That analogy might help outsiders understand the rationale behind the extraordinary labor and expense that the San Jose Redevelopment Agency has devoted to saving what is, by all accounts, a handsome but rather ordinary building. The 88-year-old Beaux Art Neoclassical building must be moved to make room for the expansion of the Fairmount Hotel. To prevent the demolition of the Montgomery, the city has decided to spend nearly $19 million, and possibly more, for the feat of moving the 130-foot-long building about 200 feet to the south. Moving structures, of course, is a time-honored method of preservation, from the statuary of Abu Simbal in Egypt to the Cape Hatteras Light House in North Carolina. Even so, moving the Montgomery is a big engineering and financial maneuver. During January, engineers removed portions of the foundation, and, in their stead, inserted squat, rubber-wheeled machines. On January 26 (we are writing this before the fact) the remaining walls were to be removed by a set of simultaneous explosions, and the entire building rolled, like some enormous lunar landing craft, to its new home. This technology has been used several times before to move buildings, but is more commonly used for moving drilling rigs, according to Sharon Jones, a project manager with the redevelopment agency. The agency will spend a total $18.7 million to move the old hotel, remove asbestos from the building, and prepare the site for construction of the Fairmount addition. The project is unorthodox by most standards of redevelopment. No developer has stepped forward to take over the building. Although the city would like the historic 143-room Montgomery to reopen one day as a luxury hostelry, critics claim that the move will make that difficult. And the previous mayor, Susan Hammer, seemed content to reduce the building to rubble. Why, then, is the Montgomery being saved? In our view, the redevelopment agency is trying to undo the damage done by urban renewal 30 years ago. Citing the above analogy, the Montgomery could be likened to the brick souvenir of the burned up house � only, in this case, it is downtown San Jose that is being remembered. Much of that downtown was destroyed during the 1960s and '70s in the name of urban renewal. Since that time, historic preservation has become a hot issue in San Jose. The redevelopment agency, which has rebuilt the downtown almost on its own, has treated the small number of surviving buildings from the original downtown as if they were masterworks of Frank Lloyd Wright. And current Mayor Ron Gonzales promised in his electoral campaign to save the Montgomery, among several other buildings. Unsurprisingly, some local observers, including the San Jose Mercury News, have questioned the value of moving the Montgomery. "Will historical preservation be San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales' black hole?" asked the headline of an August 29 editorial. The article alleged that the Montgomery move would entail more money than previously publicized. According to the newspaper, the city would lose 230 parking spaces as a result of the move, which will cost local taxpayers $4.6 million to replace (assuming $20,000 per parking stall). Further, the newspaper editorial claims that the official cost of the move does not include the full cost of restoring the Montgomery, and reports that local preservationists were concerned about the move's affect on tile and moldings. And, on its new site the old hotel's lack a basement for storage, mechanical equipment and kitchens "will make its first floor very cramped indeed," according to the Mercury News. In a sense, the Montgomery move is a problem of the redevelopment's own making. Fairmount officials told me that the expansion of the luxury hotel, one of the largest downtown, was the agency's brainchild. To be sure, the agency is eager to create more hotel rooms to support the downtown convention center. (The agency is contributing $14 million toward the new construction.) Undoubtedly, the 260 hotel rooms promised in the new Fairmount wing are an asset to the meeting-and-convention trade, although the hotel is far from the only game in town; the city recently approved two new downtown hotels. That might lead some observers to conclude that market forces would have provided the hotel rooms needed for the convention center, and that the Montgomery could have stayed put and saved taxpayers $33 million. (That conclusion, however, probably does not take into account any subsidies that the agency might contribute to other hotel projects.) In this column, we sometimes have explored the conflict between two worthwhile agendas. Here, the conflicting agendas are "getting the best bang" for your redevelopment dollar, and saving historic downtown fabric. In some cities, a building of the quality of the Montgomery might disappear into a cloud of smoke, with few tears shed. And some observers might have to think long and hard about spending money to save an ordinary building that could be spent, hypothetically, on a comparable new building that would be architecturally distinguished and perhaps add more to the city than the old hotel. So, did San Jose do the right thing? After a long pause, I would say yes. True, the money spent to move the old hotel and subsidize the new one might have been spent on an all-new building, but downtown San Jose already has a number of fine new structures and needs all the historic buildings it can get. The Montgomery is part of a happy, if ironic trend in American urbanism, in which we are now scrambling to rebuild the streets and the buildings that we so casually destroyed just a few years ago. In a sense, the cost of saving the Montgomery is only a small part of the price we continue to pay for undoing urban renewal.
