Miramar by the Sea, Part I

This is yet another report on one of the structures built at the Ventura County Fair this year.

The Miramar Hotel is really an off-line set of structures, but there was, for quite a while, a close tie with the railroad. The Hotel began in 1889 when Josiah and Emmeline Doulton built a cottage for visitors to their Ocean View Farm, a 20 acre ocean front property in Montecito, CA. A guest suggested they call the place Miramar which is Spanish for Ocean View. Mrs Doulton liked the name and it stuck. By 1892, the Southern Pacific Railroad which had only arrived along the Coast 5 years previously, erected a passenger shelter on the property. The fare from the Miramar to Santa Barbara was 10 cents! A reconstuction of that passenger shelter still stands at the hotel site.














Additional structures were built on the property. During this period, nearby Las Fuentes Ranch owned by the Crocker-Sperry group, sold lemons under the Miramar label among other labels bearing local locations including Summerland and Montecito. Here is a print of the Miramar label.














The property struggled during the depression and was eventually sold to Paul Gawzner on Nobember 3, 1939. Mr Gawzner added an additional 150 rooms in hotel-style buildings and cottages. He also added an auditorium and brought in two railroad cars. One was a Santa Fe lunch counter dining car which was converted to a snack bar right along the tracks. The second was a Union Pacific car, National Embassy.

It became a family destination with a beautiful beach and reasonable rates until 1998 when Gawzner sold it to Ian Schrager. Schrager closed the hotel in 2000 for restoration/redevelopment and then went bankrupt. The property was sold to Ty Warner in 2005 and then to Rick Caruso in 2007. Development plans have been approved but thus far no progress has been made. Here are some photos of some of the deteriorating cottages.

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I have a space in a turnback loop that needs filling and so I hope to put in some cottages, the passenger shelter, the two rail cars, along with tennis courts and gardens to be reminiscent of the Miramar in the latter part of the twentieth century. It will not be a scale replica.

I looked for some small simple structures that might be good stand ins for the cottages at the Miramar. The best I came up with were the Maxwell Avenue Cottage from Rix Products. Here is a Rix photo of the completed kit.












Here is a poor photo of a very simple cottage at the Miramar.

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The problem with the kit is that it has brick foundations and brick porch walls and supports. There were no brick structures at the Miramar. Also the roof and the window and door trim needed to be painted that Miramar Blue color. So I modified the Rix kit but only slightly. I used some Squadron putty to smooth/eliminate the brick foundation. I painted the door and window trim blue. I painted the roof blue.

There were no brick porches at the Miramar so I fabricated a porch from styrene. The photo I have of a porch shows lattice around the edge.

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I tried to figure out what to use for the lattice. I decided to wander around the fair to look for lattice to measure and then figure out how to proceed. I walked around for about 15 minutes and found some at the Agriculture Building. When I returned to Bob's booth, I started laughing because right next to us was a wall of lattice. Sometimes I am not very observant! At the other end of the building we were in, the Gold Coast Modular Railroad Club (http://www.gcmrc.com/) had a layout operating. One of the operators, Darrell Prestridge, had come by several times. He came by as I was trying to figure out what to use for lattice and thought he might have something. He went back to the layout and rummaged through several boxes and came up with some netting. He squished it to "flatten" the lattice. I painted it white and cut it to fit the porch. It worked out well - Thank You Darrell. Here is the semi-finished model in a photoshopped photo.

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Here are several of the "Cottages" temporarily sitting in location where the Miramar will be on the railroad.

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You might notice that the sign is sitting on some larger track. Yes, I was bitten by the G-gauge bug, but I am refraining from building a layout but merely assisting others in exchange of running some of my meager equipment on their layouts. I did break down and lay some larger scale track in the front yard, but only about 6 to 10 inches. The scale is 12" to the foot. I think it is 133 pound rail.

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There is still much to be done including tennis courts, maybe the 2 story motel type structure, the passenger shelter, the gardens, and, of course, the two railroad cars.

When they started demolishing the hotel, the two cars were moved. The Santa Fe Lunch Counter car was moved to Bakersfield where it now operates as Burger Depot at 6801 White Lane. The Pullman car, National Embassy was moved to the Fillmore and Western Railroad in Fillmore, CA and is owned by the Santa Clara River Valley Railroad Historical Society. You can read about it at their website http://www.scrvrhs.com/. Look under their equipment.

I will post again on the Miramar when I make more progress.