HomeMy WebLinkAboutItem 5d - Request to include property at 350 High Street in the City's Inventory of Historic Resources as The Tiny Mart Item 5d
Department: Community Development
Cost Center: 4003
For Agenda of: 8/24/2021
Placement: Consent
Estimated Time: N/A
FROM: Michael Codron, Community Development Director
Prepared By: Walter Oetzell, Assistant Planner
SUBJECT: A REQUEST TO INCLUDE THE PROPERTY AT 350 HIGH STREET IN
THE CITY’S INVENTORY OF HISTORIC RESOURCES AS A MASTER
LIST RESOURCE AS ‘THE TINY MART’
RECOMMENDATION
As recommended by the Cultural Heritage Committee, adopt a Resolution entitled, “A
Resolution of the City Council of the City of San Luis Obispo, California, adding the
property located at 350 High Street to the Master List of Historic Resources as ‘The Tiny
Mart’ (HIST 0208 2021).”
DISCUSSION
Background
The owners of the property at 350 High Street have requested that the property be
designated as a Master List Resource and included in the City’s Inventory of Historic
Resources as the “Tiny Mart.” The property is not within any Historic District and is not
currently included in the Inventory.
Previous Advisory Body Action
On June 28, 2021, the Cultural Heritage Committee considered this request and found
that the property meets eligibility criteria for historical listing to a degree that qualifies it
for designation as a Master List Resource and recommended that the City Council
designate the property as such in the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources.
Site and Setting
The property is on the northeast corner of High and Carmel Streets, within a residential
area characterized by single family dwellings. The property was developed with a s mall
commercial building, commissioned by Herman Hinzy Page and built by George W.
Skiles, an active local architect, in 1926, for use as a neighborhood grocery store, along
with a residential cottage next door (now 368 High; see Application, pg. 14). The
commercial building and property at 350 High Street is the subject of this application and
listing request. The applicants have provided an evaluation of the property and its
eligibility for historic listing (Attachment B), prepared by James Papp, PhD, a local
historian and architectural historian.
Page 35 of 271
Item 5d
Building Architecture
As described in the
applicant’s Evaluation
(Attachment B), the small
commercial building on the
site is a late example of
Western False Front
Vernacular style of late
19th- and early 20th
Centuries, “an extension of
standard urban architecture
into unfamiliar settings,
structural types, and
materials” (Evaluation,
pg. 9). It displays a
characteristic square-parapet false front and is sheathed in “novelty siding” (siding of a
pattern that allows it to lie flat on a wall surface) as its primary material. The applicant’s
Evaluation identifies several significant features of the building and property (see § 4,
Architectural Significance of Tiny Mart):
“Tandem” relationship to adjacent residential cottage (at 368 High);
“Obtuse-angle footprint” where Spanish-era and “American grid” street layouts
meet;
Hand-painted “Eskimo Pie” mural from 1952 (subsequently restored by local
artists);
A relationship (“as the center of a Mini Development”) with seven dwellings on
the block, all by the same local owner-builder, George W. Skiles;
The City’s Historic Context Statement describes the representative forms and styles of
early 20th Century Commercial Development, including Commercial Vernacular styles.
The specific architectural and historical characteristics of the building are more fully
discussed in the applicant’s Evaluation (Attachment B).
Frank W. and Alberta Bell
The applicant’s Evaluation describes the subsequent proprietors of grocery stores at the
site, up to the acquisition of the store by Frank and Alberta Bell in 1966, who are closely
associated with the property. The Bells had worked and lived on farms in Central Texas
and came to San Luis Obispo after 1951, during the period described as the Great
Migration, between 1910 and 1970, out of the rural South to other more urban areas (see
Attachment B, § 5 for discussion of this historical context, nationally and locally). As more
fully described in the Application, the Bell’s ownership of their business premises, their
distinction as the first Black grocery owners in the City, and the survival of the premises
as a representation of a Great Migration -era Black business give them and the property
historical significance (Attachment B, pg. 34).
Figure 1: 350 High ("Tiny Mart")
Page 36 of 271
Item 5d
Eskimo Pie Mural
In 1952 a mural was hand-painted on the
Carmel Street side of the Tiny Mart by the
Golden State Creamery, advertising
“Eskimo Pie,” which the company
distributed locally, and this rare surviving
example of Americana from the period was
uncovered (on removal of asbestos siding)
by the current owners in 1979 and
subsequently restored (Attachment B,
pg. 11). The Evaluation describes the
context and controversies surrounding the
portrayal of an indigenous person in the
advertisement (from pg. 16) and discusses
the value of its preservation as a complex
landmark in local racial history and the history of racism (pg. 28). With respect to the
preservation of the mural, the Cultural Heritage Committee noted the mural as an element
of the property’s historical integrity deserving preservation, without explicit reference to
the mural in their recommendation. The view of City staff on this issue is that as an
element of the building’s integrity, it should remain intact in-situ. Were modification to be
considered in future, the mural should be preserved, for example, by covering it, or similar
treatment, in a manner that doesn’t damage or destroy the mural itself.
Evaluation of Eligibility
To be eligible for listing as an historic or cultural resource, the resource must exhibit a
high level of historic integrity, be at least 50 years old, and meet one or more of the
eligibility criteria described in § 14.01.070 of the Historic Preservation Ordinance (see
Attachment C). As provided in § 14.01.050 of the Ordinance, the most unique and
important resources and properties in terms of age, architectural or historical significance,
rarity, or association with important persons or events in the City’s past may be
designated as “Master List Resources.”
Architectural Criteria
As described in the applicant’s Evaluation, the commercial building exhibits characteristic
features of Commercial Vernacular architecture from the early 20th Century, consistent
with listing criteria for “Style” and for “Design”:
“… embodying as a Western False Front corner store the distinctive
characteristics of a type of construction evaluated as a measure of current
rarity and vernacular influences that represent a particular social milieu and
period of the community” (pg. 1)
Figure 2: Eskimo Pie Mural
Page 37 of 271
Item 5d
The property and building retain their character defining features including: the “novelty
siding”; the “obtuse-angle” footprint resulting from the unusual shape of the property; the
Western False Front shop façade; the multi-paned plate glass shop front window shaded
by a fabric awning; small louvered ventilation windows flanking the shop window; and the
hand-painted advertising sign (Attachment B, pg. 36).
Historic Criteria
Based on the significance of Frank W. and Alberta Bell as the first Black grocery owners
the applicant’s Evaluation concludes that the property qualifies for Master List designation
by its association with persons significant to the community and who made early
contributions to the community (pg. 1), as described by listing criteria for
“History – Person.”
Integrity
To demonstrate satisfaction of listing criteria for “Integrity,” the applicant’s Evaluation
notes the retention of the original footprint and character-defining elements of the building,
and absence of significant modification. Apart from minor window additions (to the south -
and southwest-facing walls) and addition of COR-TEN steel accents to window frames
and corner boards (considered reversible and not detrimental to communication of the
building’s historical significance), the property and building exhibit a high degree of
integrity (Attachment B, pp. 36-37).
Conclusion
The information submitted by the applicant, documenting the architectural character and
integrity of the Tiny Mart, and describing the people associated with the property, provide d
a basis for the Cultural Heritage Committee to find that the property satisfies Architectural
Criteria for Style and Design (§§ 14.01.070 (A) (1) & (2)), Historic Criteria for “History-
Person” (§ 14.01.070 (B) (2)), and Criteria for Integrity (§§ 14.01.070 (C) (1) & (2)), and
that its architectural character and association with Frank W. and Alberta Bell qualify the
property for designation as a Master List Historic Resource:
“Tiny Mart is eligible for the Master List for its architectural representation
of a social milieu and period, [and] association with historically significant
pioneer African American business owners… (Attachment B, pg. 39)
Policy Context
The recommended action on this item is supported by historical preservation policies set
out in § 3.0 of the Conservation and Open Space Element of the City’s General Plan, and
with procedures and standards for listing of historic resources set out in the City’ s Historic
Preservation Ordinance §§ 14.01.060 & 14.01.070.
Page 38 of 271
Item 5d
Public Engagement
Public notice of this hearing has been provided to owners and occupants of property near
the subject site, and published in a widely circulated local newspaper, and hearing
agendas for this meeting have been posted at City Hall, consistent with adopted
notification procedures. Public notice was also previously provided for the Cultural
Heritage Committee meeting of June 28, 2021.
ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW
This project is categorically exempt from the provisions of the California Environmental
Quality Act (CEQA). Inclusion of the subject properties on the City’s Inventory of Historic
Resources does not have the potential for causing a significant effect on the environment,
and so is covered by the general rule described in § 15061 (b) (3) of the CEQA Guidelines.
FISCAL IMPACT
Budgeted: No Budget Year: 2021
Funding Identified: No
Fiscal Analysis:
Funding
Sources
Total Budget
Available
Current
Funding
Request
Remaining
Balance
Annual
Ongoing
Cost
General Fund N/A $ $ $
State
Federal
Fees
Other:
Total $ $0 $ $0
Adding the Property to the Master List of Historic Resources will have no fiscal impacts.
Historic designation of the Property itself has no bearing on City fiscal resources. As a
Master List Resource, however, the Property would be eligible for historic preservation
incentives under the “Mills Act.” A subsequent request to enter into a “Mills Act Contract”
with the City would be considered under a separate application. A separate fiscal analysis
would be reviewed by the City Council should the property proposed be added to the Mills
Act list of properties.
Page 39 of 271
Item 5d
ALTERNATIVES
1. Decline to designate the property as a Master List Resource in the Inventory of
Historic Resources. This decision would be based on finding that the Property is not
considered to be sufficiently unique or important, or found to satisfy Evaluation Criteria
for listing to a degree warranting such designation.
2. Continue consideration of the request for additional information or discussion.
ATTACHMENTS
A – Draft Resolution adding 350 High Street to Master List Of Historic Resources
B – Applicant’s Evaluation of Eligibility for Listing (James Papp, PhD)
C – Evaluation Criteria for 350 High Street
Page 40 of 271
R ______
RESOLUTION NO. _____ (2021 SERIES)
A RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF SAN LUIS
OBISPO, CALIFORNIA, ADDING THE PROPERTY LOCATED AT
350 HIGH STREET TO THE MASTER LIST OF HISTORIC RESOURCES
AS “THE TINY MART” (HIST-0208-2021)
WHEREAS, the applicants, Alex Gough, Anne Gough, and Anne Gaebe, filed an
application on March 12, 2021, for review of the inclusion of the property at 350 High
Street on the City’s Master List of Historic Resources; and
WHEREAS, the Cultural Heritage Committee of the City of San Luis Obispo
conducted a public hearing via teleconference from the City of San Luis Obispo, California
on June 28, 2021 and recommended that the City Council add the property at 350 High
Street to the Master List of Historic Resources; and
WHEREAS, the City Council of the City of San Luis Obispo conducted a public
hearing on August 24, 2021 for the purpose of considering the request to add the property
to the Inventory of Historic Resources; and
WHEREAS, notices of said public hearings were made at the time and in the
manner required by law; and
WHEREAS, the City Council has duly considered all evidence, including the record
of the Cultural Heritage Committee hearing and recommendation, testimony of the
applicant and interested parties, and the evaluation and recommendation presented by
staff.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Council of the City of San Luis
Obispo as follows:
SECTION 1. Findings. Based upon all the evidence, the City Council makes the
following findings:
a) The subject property is eligible for inclusion in the City’s Inventory of Historic
Resources as a Master List Resource because the commercial building on
the property satisfies at least one of the evaluation criteria for historic
resource listing described in § 14.01.070 of the City’s Historic Preservation
Ordinance (HPO), exhibits a high degree of historic integrity, and is more
than 50 years old.
Page 41 of 271
Resolution No. _____ (2021 Series) Page 2
R ______
b) The commercial building on the subject property satisfies Architectural
Criteria for Style and Design (§§ 14.01.070 (A) (1) & (2)), Historic Criteria
for “History-Person” (§14.01.070 (B) (2)), and Criteria for Integrity
(§§ 14.01.070 (C) (1) & (2)) to a degree that qualifies the property for
designation as a Master List Historic Resource. It conveys a purity of style,
exhibits attractiveness through detailing and craftsmanship, and exhibits
many characteristic features of Western False Front Vernacular style of late
19th- and early 20th Centuries in a manner that expresses interesting
details with notable attractiveness. The building occupies its original site
and retains its characteristic design and materials. The property is
associated with Frank and Alberta Bell, who are considered to be the first
Black grocery owners in the City, and the survival of the premises as a
representation of a Great Migration-era Black business.
SECTION 2. Environmental Determination. The project is categorically exempt
from the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Inclusion of the
subject property on the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources does not have the potential
for causing a significant effect on the environment, and so is covere d by the general rule
described in § 15061 (b) (3) of the CEQA Guidelines.
Page 42 of 271
Resolution No. _____ (2021 Series) Page 3
R ______
SECTION 3. Action. The City Council of the City of San Luis Obispo does hereby
include the property located at 350 High Street in the Master List of Historic Resources
as “The Tiny Mart.”
Upon motion of Council Member ___________________, seconded by Council
Member _______________________, and on the following roll call vote:
AYES:
NOES:
ABSENT:
The foregoing resolution was adopted this ____ day of ____________ 2021.
________________________________
Mayor Heidi Harmon
ATTEST:
____________________________________
Teresa Purrington
City Clerk
APPROVED AS TO FORM:
_____________________________________
J. Christine Dietrick
City Attorney
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and affixed the official seal of the
City of San Luis Obispo, California, on ______________________.
________________________________
Teresa Purrington
City Clerk
Page 43 of 271
Page 44 of 271
1
Master List Application • Tiny Mart, 350 High Street • A Landmark of Black History
1. Summary of Eligibility 1
2. Timeline 3
3. Historic Context: The Corner Grocery 6
4. Architectural Significance of Tiny Mart 9
5. Historic Context: The Great Migration of African Americans 29
6. Historic Significance of Tiny Mart: Frank W. and Alberta Bell 34
7. Period of Significance and Integrity 36
8. Conclusion 39
1. Summary of Eligibility
1926 Tiny Mart—one of San Luis Obispo’s few surviving pre-World War II corner
groceries, first Black-owned grocery, first Black-owned business with Black-owned
premises, and last surviving Black-owned business from the era of the Great Migration—is
eligible for the Master List
under architectural criteria: embodying as a Western False Front corner store “the
distinctive characteristics of a type … of construction … evaluated as a measure of …
current rarity [and] … vernacular … influences that represent a particular social milieu and
period of the community” (14.01.070.A.1.b–c.)
under historic criteria: owned and operated from 1966 through the 1979 by Frank Willie
Bell and Alberta Vera Bell, “significant to the community as … person[s] who made early …
contributions to the community” (14.01.070.B.1.b.)
The huge popularity among a young and diverse clientele of the High Street Market and
Deli—current and long-time occupant of the Tiny Mart building—serves as an
Page 45 of 271
2
extraordinary opportunity for Tiny Mart to communicate part of the complex history of
racism and the fight against racism in San Luis Obispo to a new and receptive audience.
James Papp, PhD, Historian and Architectural Historian
Submitted 12 March 2021
on behalf of Alex and Anne Gough and Anne Gaebe, property owners
Alberta Vera Bell and Frank Willie Bell, circa 1960s. Farmers in Waco, Texas in the 1930s and
’40s, dispossessed of their farm in 1951, they took part in the Great Migration of African
Americans from the South to the North, Midwest, and West and became pioneering
businesspeople in San Luis Obispo.
Page 46 of 271
3
2. Tiny Mart Timeline
1866 George W. Skiles, contractor of the corner grocery at 420 (now 350) High
Street and adjoining cottage at 428 (now 368), is born in West Virginia. His
family later moves to Illinois (US Census, state birth and death records,
passim).
1867 Herman Hinzy Page, original commissioner of the grocery building and
adjoining cottage, is born in Iowa, the son of a grocer and dry goods
merchant.
1891 Joaquin Mashado Craveiro, fourth owner of the grocery with his son, is born
in the Azores (1917 Draft Registration).
1900, 1910 Skiles is working as a stonecutter and monument merchant in Illinois.
1903 Otto Burton, third owner of the grocery, is born in Missouri.
1904 Frank Willie Bell, who with his wife Alberta becomes the seventh owner of
the grocery in 1966, is born in Texas.
1907 Alberta Vera London is born in Texas, second of five children of Abe London
and Annie Lowe London, both laborers on a cotton farm in Falls County,
Texas, in 1920 and general farmers there in 1930. Her Texas-born
grandparents, George and Matilda Buyer London (1850–1914), and Texas-
born Lowe grandparents, were born in Texas’s slavery era and presumably
as slaves.
1908 George Skiles’ sister marries Charles Eserio Foxen of a prominent Anglo-
Californio family, owners of a department store in San Luis Obispo. George
moves to San Luis Obispo in the 1910s, initially carrying on his profession as
a stone carver and then becoming a contractor in the early 1920s (San Luis
Obispo Building Permits File, Cal Poly Special Collections, passim).
1917 Joaquin Joseph Craveiro, fourth owner of the grocery with his father, is born
in California.
1926 Dec. 2 George W. and Edith Skiles transfer ownership of the corner lot at Carmel
and High Streets (part lot 4, block 52) to Herman Hinzy and Lola Melvina
Page (County Land Records, passim).
Dec. 10 Herman Page applies for a permit to build a $1,100 store building with
“concrete floor, Pabco roof, and novelty siding” at the corner of Carmel and
High Street and $1,800 house next door with “concrete foundation, Pabco
roof, and novelty siding.” George Skiles is the contractor.
1930 Frank Willie Bell, 25, is a farmer and renter in McLennan County, Texas,
living with his younger brother Walter, farm laborer. Alberta London, 21, is
living with her father, mother, and siblings, her father a farmer and renter in
neighboring Falls County.
1931 Mabel A. Whitehouse purchases the Pages’ grocery and adjoining cottage.
Page 47 of 271
4
1933 Mabel and William Whitehouse sell the grocery to Missouri-born Otto H.
Burton but not (according to County Land Records) the cottage. However, the
Burtons are living there in the 1938–42 city directories and list themselves
as the owners in the 1940 US Census.
1938—42 Burton’s Cash Grocery is listed at 420 High Street in surviving city directories
(passim).
1938–45 Frank and Alberta Bell’s children Annie Louise (1938), Frank Lofton (1939),
Lillian Fay (1940), Ralph Long (1943), and Alvin Loznall Bell (1945) are born
in McLennan and Falls Counties, Texas.
1940 Frank Bell is a farm operator and renter in McLennan County, Texas, living
with Alberta and their two elder children, Annie Louise and Frank Lofton, in
the same house as five years previous.
1943 Otto and Ada Burton divorce. Otto deeds the cottage to Ada in April, Mabel
Whitehouse deeds the cottage to Ada in May, and Ada deeds the grocery to
Otto in June.
1944 Ada Burton sells the cottage to Frank and Frankie Weddell.
1947 Otto Burton sells the grocery to the Joaquin Craveiros, Sr. and Jr. Joaquin, Jr.,
back from military service, and his wife Eleanor (Elnora) run the grocery and
live next door.
Francisca and Joaquin Craveiro, Sr. flanking
waitress Jackie and Evangeline Craveiro.
Eleanor and Joaquin Craveiro, Jr. Photos from
War Comes to the Middle Kingdom.
Circa 1950 The Sister’s Inn, Annabelle’s Cafe, and Wilbur’s Club on the 100 and 200
block of Higuera Street form a hub of Black-owned businesses in what was—
till 1942 and Japanese American internment—San Luis Obispo’s Japantown.
1950–60 Joaquin’s Grocery is listed at 420 High Street in the city directory.
1951 Frank and Alberta Bell’s farm on the Brazos River is condemned to build a
power plant.
Circa 1952 The Eskimo Pie sign is painted on the west side of the grocery building ([?]).
1950 Joaquin, Jr. and Eleanor Craveiro are still living in the cottage next door to the
grocery, apparently renting from the Weddells.
Page 48 of 271
5
1951 Frank and Alberta Bell’s farm in McLennan County becomes one of several
Black-owned farms condemned by a White condemnation panel in order to
build a Texas Light and Power plant. One of the joint owners of a neighboring
farm, Viola Harrison Barrett, has already moved to San Luis Obispo.
1952 Frank and Frankie Weddell transfer the grocery cottage to Elizabeth Weddell.
1953– Other tenants than the Craveiros occupy the cottage.
1955 The Craveiros sell the grocery to Juvenal and Wilhelmina da Silva. Because of
an extant Silva’s Grocery on Broad Street, it continues to be listed as
Joaquin’s Grocery until circa 1961, when it becomes Silva’s Market.
1964 Nov. 3 The Da Silvas sell the grocery to Cecil and Florence German.
Mid 1960s The Sister’s Inn becomes the last of the Black hub businesses in San Luis
Obispo to close, Wilbur’s Club having closed soon after it opened and
Annabelle Warren having closed Annabelle’ Café in the mid 1950s to open
Club Morocco south of town.
1966 The Germans sell the grocery to Frank and Alberta Bell, who obtain loans for
its purchase from the Bank of America and Security First National Bank. The
Bells operate it as Tiny Mart.
1979 The Bells sell Tiny Mart to Alex and Anne Gough and Daniel Hall and Anne
Gaebe, the first owners who do not operate it themselves. Soon after, the
Goughs and Halls remove asbestos shingle from the building to discover the
original “novelty” siding and 1940s Eskimo Pie sign intact.
1980s Byron and Luis Westbrook operate the premises as Westbrook Hi Street
Market and Deli through the decade
1990s– Bruce Watson takes over High Street Market and Deli in the early 1990s.
Later it is run by Brian and Abbey Lucas, subsequent legendary operators of
Sebastian’s in San Simeon and Café in Cambria. Mia Russi and later Randy
“Doobie” Coates, children of the late Randy Coates of BlackHorse, have run it
to the present.
Page 49 of 271
6
3. Historic Context: The Corner Grocery
Suburbanization created the phenomenon of the corner grocery; food shopping had
previously been concentrated in street markets, town centers, or urban business districts.
The phrase appeared as early as 1809 in New York newspapers, as the city expanded
northwards. It appeared in a letter complaining that the watchman was drinking at a
corner grocery between 11 pm and midnight (so they seem always to have been operated
as convenience stores) and thus was unable to assist someone being mugged on Chatham
Street (so New York hasn’t changed).1
Roughly a century later, the corner grocery would begin to get a run for its money.
The Supermarket In 1917 the Lexington, Kentucky Piggly Wiggly allowed people to
select their own groceries from open shelves and check them out at the front, two decades
after Andrew Carnegie had introduced a similar concept for libraries. In groceries it
reduced staffing costs and made impulse buying easier. Unlike Carnegie, Piggly Wiggly
patented the concept—which didn’t stop it from proliferating among other vendors or from
being combined with equally economic concepts like cash and carry (replacing the expense
of customer credit) and grocery carts and parking lots (encouraging shoppers to purchase
more than they could carry).
America already had chain groceries: in 1863 a New York tea and coffee wholesaler added
retail outlets as the Great American Tea Company—later the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea
Company and then A&P—and by 1875 was in sixteen American cities. By the early 1920s
the term “super-market” had entered popular usage, and technological economies joined
economies of scale to create supermarket chains as we now know them. The rise of cars
and explosion of corporate consumer products would spell the decline of the small, local,
personal, and convenient corner grocery and of this means of rising from the working class.
Pre-World War II Groceries in San Luis Obispo Major grocers were concentrated
downtown. The 1939 city directory includes the oldest local names: A. Sauer and Company
(from the mid nineteenth century) and D. Muzio (from the early twentieth), both on the
800 block of Monterey, as well as J. J. Andre’s San Luis Grocery and the White House (also
from the early twentieth century) on the 700 and 800 blocks of Higuera. Their extant
buildings are all in the Downtown Historic District; Sauer’s and Muzio’s are Master Listed,
the San Luis Grocery and White House buildings unlisted.
The first Japanese grocery, Tom Kurokawa’s, had opened in Chinatown during World War I
(its building now demolished). By the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese grocery/produce stores
were clustered in Japantown on the 100 block of Higuera between South Street and
Madonna Road (then French) and had become destinations for the best produce citywide.
(Their buildings have also all been demolished.)
The new chain supermarkets had arrived downtown by 1939: People’s Cash Store, A&P,
CHB, and Safeway on the 600, 800, and 900 blocks of Higuera, the Pioneer Market on the
800 block of Marsh. There were also a few specialty stores, like a Natural Food Products on
Chorro between Higuera and Marsh.
1. A Lover of Order, “Communication,” American Citizen, 26 Sep. 1809.
Page 50 of 271
7
Safeway, 967 Higuera Street, during World War II, now a parking lot between Union Bank
and Bluemercury. History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
This left, in the 1939 directory, the thirteen corner markets. Six of these have since been
demolished: Cook’s Grocery at Santa Rosa and Murray, Santa Rosa Market at Santa Rosa
and Mill, Mallory’s Grocery at Pismo and Beach, A. R. Smith Grocery at Broad and
Mitchell, Sun Grocery (Watanabe’s) at Higuera and South, and Wilson’s Grocery at Broad
and Sandercock.
Seven have survived in some form: the Spanish Revival Cobb’s Fremont Grocery (now
split into apartments) at Peach and Morro, false front Del Monte Grocery (now the Del
Monte Café) at Santa Barbara and Upham, Streamline Moderne Broad Street Market
(most recently Manuel’s Liquor, now vacant) at Broad and Branch, false front Cozy Corner
Grocery (now Sidewalk Market and Deli) at Osos and Pismo, false front Ragsdale Grocery
(now Gus’s Grocery) at Osos and Leff, the Pueblo Revival Vic’s Grocery (now Giant Grinder
Deli) at Broad and Upham, and false front Tiny Mart (in 1939 Burton’s Cash Grocery) at
Carmel and High. The Ellsworth Market (now Lincoln Market and Deli) was built later, in
the mid to late 1940s. Despite their names, most of the shops now labeled “market and
deli” function primarily as delis in their limited space (High Street Market and Deli with as
many as eight cooks in its tiny kitchen).
Page 51 of 271
8
Cobb’s Fremont Grocery,
1927
Ragsdale Grocery, ca. 1920s?
Del Monte Grocery, 1922
Vic’s Grocery, 1927
Cozy Corner Grocery, 1921
Ellsworth’s Market, ca.
1942–50
Manuel’s (Broad Street Market) as painted by Cynthia Meyer.
Landmarking Status Of the corner groceries surviving from 1939, none has been
Master Listed, and only one (Del Monte) Contributing Listed—despite architectural
distinction, significance, integrity, rarity, and threatened status.
Page 52 of 271
9
4. Architectural Significance of Tiny Mart
False Front Vernacular The Western False Front
style exerts a fascination over devotees of the frontier but
was merely an extension of standard urban architecture
into unfamiliar settings, structural types, and materials.
European and East Coast row buildings were constructed
contiguously of brick or stone with squared off parapets
and drained to the rear with flat roofs, rather than on their
neighbors with peaked ones. The sparseness of Western
towns, the common use of peaked roofs, and facades of
wood create a dissonance for the modern viewer, but
contemporaries seemed to have assumed that this is how
town buildings were supposed to look, particularly within
the prevailing Italianate and Eastlake styles of the era, and
perceived nothing inherently “false” about the fronts.
“False front” in brick, German
Village, Columbus, Ohio
San Luis Obispo’s Chinatown, circa 1900: the flat-roofed, Eastlake style Ah Louis Store in brick
with its square-facaded, peaked-roof, and box frame (single-wall load-bearing) neighbors.
History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
In San Luis Obispo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the aesthetic stayed
the same and the materials, structures, and density transitioned to actual masonry and
brickwork with flat roofs and without gaps between. After the Great Chicago Fire and a
number of devastating fires of its own, San Luis Obispo instituted a Fireproof Building
Page 53 of 271
10
District, and wooden business buildings moved to more sparsely inhabit the outskirts of
town, either literally (the Tribune-Republic and Call Buildings being transported to Santa
Barbara Avenue near the new Southern Pacific depot) or figuratively (the old Call Building,
when it was burnt to the ground two years after its move, was replaced by a new free-
standing, peaked roof, wood frame building with a name—Chicago Hotel—and Italianate
facade both suggestive of urban sophistication). The square facade was handy for signage
but seems to have been rarely so used.
The Del Monte Grocery (1922) and Tiny Mart (1926), as corner buildings, could hardly
have been accused of trying to create a false impression with their fronts. With wood walls,
peaked roofs, and standing in isolation, they are splendid late exemplars of the style,
telegraphing their urbanness.
The Chicago Hotel in 1904 as the Park View (Triangle Park, or El Triangulo, across the street
having been San Luis Obispo’s sole park at the time) and as The Establishment today. The faux
stonework in the wood siding presumably dates from the 1917 expansion. By 1953, when Jack
Kerouac lived and wrote there, it was the Colonial Hotel and a railroad workers’ flop.
Tandem Buildings The
Tiny Mart is unusual but not
unique for having been
commissioned with a next-
door cottage for its first
proprietors, Herman and
Lola Page. Perhaps it served
as an inspiration for Vic’s
Grocery, built by A. J.
Victorino in brick the
following year, with a frame
and stucco house next door.
The cottage’s original siding that matched the store (and
neighboring Skiles cottages) persists only on the pediment.
Page 54 of 271
11
Pueblo Revival: A. J. Victorino House in stucco and Vic’s
Grocery in brick. Neither building is currently listed.
Grocery proprietors
continued to occupy Tiny
Mart’s next-door cottage into
the early 1950s. Through
that time, neighbors could
(and did) interrupt the
occupants for emergencies at
all hours: the reason its
young owners Joaquin and
Eleanor Craveiro decided to
become the first owners to
live elsewhere. (The cottage,
since the 1940s owned
separately, now has new
siding and fenestration and is
not part of this application.)
Unique Footprint on a Spanish-American Corner High Street is the first street at the
southern end of town to have been laid out on the American compass grid. It meets Carmel,
which was laid out on the Spanish-era grid that pointed streets in the direction of the
prevailing wind (from the ocean through the Chorro Valley). Hence Tiny Mart’s footprint,
running directly along the sidewalk, is unique among San Luis Obispo’s surviving corner
stores for its obtuse angle. The old Transfer and Stage Warehouse, a Western false front
building of corrugated iron at Upham and High Streets, appears to be the only building to
share a similar obtuse-angle footprint, with the old Simon Levi Co. grocery wholesaler
flatiron building across the street.
Eskimo Pie Mural Another aspect that makes the Tiny Mart particularly rare, possibly
unique, is its hand-painted mural advertisement for Eskimo Pies, a rare surviving form of
Americana and the only one of its kind of this subject documented to exist. The mural was
painted directly on the wall circa 1952, in the midst of a postwar advertising campaign that
featured, for the first time for the company, an Eskimo boy with features, coloring, and folk
clothing accurately depicted rather than caricatured or Europeanized. It was painted over
two days by two artists hired by the Golden State Creamery and covered three layers of RC
Cola advertisements.2
For roughly a quarter of a century, the painting was covered with asbestos siding. After the
building was purchased by its current owners in 1979 and the asbestos siding removed, the
mural was discovered and subsequently restored in 1989, 2002, and 2008 by prominent
local artists Mark Landstrom, Gini Griffin (then Allen), and Robert Maja.
Tiny Mart As the Center of a Mini Development Finally, Tiny Mart is the centerpiece
of something that contributes to the San Luis Obispo’s character-defining eclecticism: the
mini development or suburban cluster by one builder-architect. George W. Skiles, stone
engraver turned builder, constructed not only the grocery and adjoining cottage for the
2. David Middlecamp, “The Story Behind the Eskimo Pie Sign at High Street Deli,” Tribune,
16 Nov. 2017.
Page 55 of 271
12
Pages, he built the next cottage to the east on his own property, the cottage next to that for
his younger daughter, the next cottage but one on Carmel for a client, the next on his own
property, and moved the two cottages next to that on Islay from other locations. The
quality of the architecture and craftsmanship does not match W. J. Smith, John Chapek, or E.
D. Bray buildings, but it embodies a local architectural phenomenon.
Skiles-built buldings marked with red dots. Google Map aerial 3D.\
Similar view in 1951 aerial. History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
Closer view of six Skiles buildings, Tiny Mart in center, and two buildings moved by Skiles,
upper left.
Page 56 of 271
13
Social Milieu and Period of the Community The little grocery at the corner of
Carmel and High Streets represented a step into ownership and self-determination
(sometimes only temporary) by a series of hardscrabble immigrants to California, a version
of the American Dream that has largely disappeared to corporatization. Its owners were
several former farmers, former oil field worker, former bellhop and trucker, future trucker,
WPA laborer, and army sergeant; Easterners, Southerners, Midwesterners, Westerners, and
immigrants from Portugal’s islands. Only one, Herman Hinzy Page, who commissioned the
building, appears to have been born into the business, as his father was a dry goods
merchant and grocer, though US Censuses show Herman having done a number of jobs,
none of them, before he commissioned the store, related to groceries.
In addition, the corner grocery served as a way for women to enter the workforce: not only
wives but daughters. Otto Burton’s daughter was listed in the city director as clerk at
Burton’s Cash Grocery from the age of sixteen.
The grocery’s historic significance is based on its seventh set of owners and first African
American ones, Frank and Alberta Bell, who owned it between 1966 and 1979 and
operated it as Tiny Mart. But its architectural significance comes from reflecting its social
milieu and period, and it’s instructive to find out who its builder and owners were.
The Builder George W. Skiles was born in 1866 in Jackson County, West Virginia to
Mary Skiles and her husband Joseph, a farmer. From what can be ascertained from the US
Census, Joseph Skiles was from Ohio, and the family subsequently moved to Illinois, where
George’s younger sister Cynthia Mae was born in 1884.
George Skiles’ first wife Cora May was born in Michigan, their elder daughter Faye born in
1889 in Nebraska and younger daughter Bernice in 1891 in Illinois. In 1900 George Skiles
was working as a stonecutter in Mount Sterling, Illinois; in 1910 as a monument merchant
in Monmouth in the same state. But George’s parents and sister Cynthia had moved to
California, where Cynthia met Charles Eserio Foxen in his family’s department store in San
Luis and married him in 1908.
Charles Foxen was the grandson of William Benjamin (later Guillermo Domino) Foxen, who
acquired Rancho Tinaquaic—present-day Foxen Canyon in Santa Barbara County—in 1842
from its original grantee, Victor Linares, who then became majordomo of the Mission San
Luis Obispo and acquired the Ranch Cañada de los Osos. Charles’ father John married
Leonora Villa, daughter of ranchero Francisco Villa.
In 1915 Charles Foxen commissioned an elegant $1,400 John Chapek bungalow at 958
Pismo Street. In 1929 Charles and Cynthia commissioned an $8,000 James Jepson Spanish
Revival house at Johnson and Higuera that was so grand it later became a mortuary (it’s
now an office building). In 1918 Cynthia built the Foxen Apartments at Osos and Pismo
(another Chapek commission). Her brother George moved to San Luis sometime in the
teens, remarried, carried on his trade as a stone carver into the early 1920s, and then
became a builder of modest projects.
George Skiles did a combination of jobs for himself, relatives, and others, with surviving
permits issued 1921–1931. They were mostly simple frame buildings with minimal
articulation, unlike the contemporary late Craftsman and early Minimal Traditional revival
buildings of higher-end rivals like Maino, Smith, Chapek, Jepson, and Bray.
Page 57 of 271
14
Nonetheless, Skiles left his mark on the city. According to the San Luis Obispo Building
Permits File at Cal Poly Special Collections, he built the three cottages to the east of the
Page Grocery, now 368, 374, and 378 High Street, in 1926 and 1927, for H. H. Page, himself,
and his daughter Faye. 374 and 378 are narrow rectangular houses with passing references
to American Craftsman (low-pitched roofs and somewhat skinny elephant leg columns
holding up a minimum of porch).
Skiles also built the cottages one and two lots north of the grocery at 1610 Carmel (German
Cottage style with Craftsman elements) and 431 Islay (no style in particular), in 1926 and
1931, for Mr. and Mrs. W. C. Martin and himself. The next two houses on Islay, 443 and 451,
Skiles and his second wife Edith had moved to the location in 1925.
George Skiles died in 1935, four years after his last recorded permit.
The Pages Herman Hinzy Page was born in Iowa in 1867, the son of a dry goods
merchant and grocer. By the 1900 census, he and wife Lola Melvina, nine years younger
and also from Iowa, were farming in Kansas. By 1905, when their younger son was born,
they were in California, and the 1910 census had Herman working as a plumber in Arroyo
Grande. By 1920 he was a pumper at the Casmalia oil fields in Santa Barbara County.
Herman Page—apparently knowing the business well enough to know a neighborhood
grocer had to be on call for emergencies—commissioned the store and next-door cottage
from contractor George Skiles in 1926, when Page was almost sixty, at $1,800 for the
residence and $1,100 for the store. There is no indication in county land records of a
mortgage, so they seem to have had cash in hand for almost $3,000 of construction, as well
as outfitting and stocking the store and purchasing the land from their contractor.
The Whitehouses After five years, and at the beginning of the Great Depression, the
Pages sold the grocery and cottage to Mabel A. Whitehouse and her husband George A.
Whitehouse. They owned the business for two years and don’t appear to have lived in the
area previously or stayed subsequently. Indeed it is not definitively clear who they were or
where they were from.
The Burtons In 1933 Otto and Ada Burton bought the grocery from the Whitehouses
and possibly the cottage next door; they certainly lived in the cottage, and when they
divorced in 1943, Otto took the grocery and Ada the cottage, which she sold in 1944.
Otto Burton was born in Missouri to parents from Indiana, his father farming a rented farm
in a township, Austin, that no longer exists. By age seventeen, according to the 1920 census,
Otto was living with his parents, elder brother, and younger sister in the America Hotel in
Visalia, working as a bellhop while his mother worked as a chambermaid, his father as a
farmer, and his brother as a laborer for a transfer business. The two brothers stayed in
California, while the rest of the family appears to have returned to Missouri, where Otto’s
younger sister married. By 1930 both brothers were married, Jesse working as a railroad
fireman and living in San Jose, Otto as a trucker in Visalia, married to Ada Welks of a
longtime Visalia ranching family.
Otto and Ada’s business was Burton’s Cash Grocery—a wise choice for the 1930s. When J. J.
Andre, who owned a grocery store on the 700 block of Higuera, died in 1939, “there were
Page 58 of 271
15
over $35,000 owed to him on his books. … Most of the money was never paid.”3 Japantown
produce grocer Yoroku Watanabe declared bankruptcy in early 1933—with assets greatly
exceeding debits but “mostly in bills collectible”—shortly before the Burtons went into the
grocery business.4
Otto Burton stayed in the business till 1947; by 1942, his sixteen-year-old daughter,
according to the city directory, was working as his clerk. By 1950, according to the city
directory, none of the Burtons, at least under that name, was still in San Luis.
The Craveiros Azorean immigrant Joaquin Craveiro and his California-born son
Joaquin, Jr. bought the store in 1947 and renamed it Joaquin’s Grocery. Sgt. Craveiro, back
from 1941–45 Army service, and his wife Eleanor (Elnora) Ormonde Craveiro ran Joaquin’s
Grocery and lived next door, renting from Frank and Frankie Weddell, who’d bought the
cottage from Ada Burton.
Joaquin, Sr. had come from the Azores around the age of twenty, with experience in
whaling, and settled in the San Joaquin Valley to learn dairy and farming.5 Eventually
Francisca joined him, they married, purchased a dairy in Hanford, and raised a family.
Subsequently they farmed near Visalia, but after a farming accident, they moved to San Luis
Obispo, where they took over the Golden West Restaurant on the 600 block of Higuera
from fellow Azorean Mary Serpa in the late 1930s.6
Joaquin, Jr. and Eleanor got tired of being disturbed at all hours and moved away from the
grocery’s next-door cottage. They also commissioned the Eskimo Pie sign, based on the
company’s contemporary advertising. After the Craveiros sold the market to the Da Silvas,
they stayed in San Luis, and Joaquin worked the rest of his career for the school district.
The Da Silvas Juvenal and Wilhelmina da Silva were living in Cambridge,
Massachusetts in 1940, Juvenal sewing for the Works Progress Administration—having,
according to immigration records, been a laborer in the textile mill town of Lowell,
Massachusetts as early as 1920. Juvenal was from the Portuguese island of Madeira,
Wilhelmina also from Portugal, and presumably they acquired the grocery from the
Craveiros through the same ethnic network as the Craveiros used to take over the Golden
West Restaurant from the Serpas. Juvenal would have been about fifty-six, Wilhelmina
about forty-eight when they bought the grocery—not far off the ages of the Pages—and
they lived three blocks away at 720 Upham Street.
The Da Silvas ran the grocery for nine years. For the first few of these they continued to call
it Joaquin’s Grocery, since—there being so many Portuguese in town, and dozens of them
Silvas—a Manuel Silva happened to be running the old Smith Grocery at Mitchell and Broad
as Silva’s Grocery. Once the Vieiras took over Silva’s Grocery and renamed it the South
3. Peter Andre, Memoirs of a Small Town Boy, p. 10.
4. “Bankruptcy List Is Augmented by 17 New Petitions,” Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News,
16 Feb. 1933.
5. Evangeline Kirk, “‘Sit Down Over There,’ He Would Say Sternly,” in War Comes to the
Middle Kingdom, Stan Harth, Liz Krieger, and Dan Krieger, eds. (San Luis Obispo: EZ Nature
Books, 1991), p. 65.
6. “Joaquin Joseph Craveiro,” obituary, Tribune, 1 Oct. 2011.
Page 59 of 271
16
Broad Street Market, Joaquin’s Grocery became Silva’s. In 1964 the Da Silvas sold their
grocery to the Germans and retired to their house in San Luis.
The Germans Cecil and Florence German owned the grocery for only two years before
selling to the Bells and, like the Whitehouses, did not come from San Luis Obispo or remain
here, moving to Yucaipa, where Cecil worked as a truck driver until retirement.
The Bells Frank and Alberta Bell took over Tiny Mart at about the same age that
Juvenal and Wilhelmina Da Silva retired from it—and ran the grocery for thirteen more
years, till Frank was in his mid and Alberta in her early seventies. The Bells were farmers in
Central Texas till their farm and those of neighboring black farmers was condemned by an
all-White condemnation panel for construction of a power plant in 1951. One member of a
neighboring farming family had made it to San Luis Obispo; Frank Bell seems to have
worked some years as a janitor in San Luis—for the county government, a hospital, and a
bowling alley—before buying the grocery. The Bells purchased the grocery from a rural
route address outside San Luis, continued to live there for the next five years, then lived on
and retired to 498 Mitchell Drive.
The corner grocery business did not require too much education, expertise, capital, or risk.
It required long hours but not the backbreaking labor and safety hazards of a farm or an oil
field and could ease owners into retirement. Most important, it provided the combination
of independence and status otherwise unavailable to the factory worker, trucker, or janitor.
Tiny Mart’s Eskimo Pie Mural: Historic Popular Art and Current Sensibilities The
Eskimo Pie sign was painted on the side of the building freehand by two artists hired by
Golden State Creamery, the Northern California ice cream manufacturer licensed to
produce and distribute Eskimo Pies in this region, in the early 1950s, while the Craveiros
owned the grocery. Based on Eskimo Pie’s contemporary advertising, it was claimed, after a
2007 restoration, to be one of only two such murals known to have survived, though I can
find no evidence of another (Middlecamp, op. cit). Covered by asbestos siding not long after
it was painted, it was rediscovered in the early 1980s, when Alex and Annie Gough and Dan
and Anne Gaebe Hall bought and restored the building.
The mural was restored by local artists Mark Landstrom and Gini Griffin in 1989 and again
by Dominican artist Robert Maja in 2007. It was reproduced in the San Luis Obispo
Children’s Museum in 2004 by photographer and Cal Poly faculty member Brian Lawler
and featured in the 2012 San Luis Obispo Public Art Master Plan (pp. 38–39), a 2012 SLO
Life article on Maja, and a “Photos from the Vault” column in the Tribune in 2017, where
artist Landstrom described it as “a neighborhood icon.”
Eskimo Pie Controversies These controversies include the term Eskimo itself; the
cultural appropriation of an indigenous people as a commercial brand name; the portrayal
of such people in promotional material; and the destruction, defacement, or covering up of
the resultant art that some people may find offensive.
The word Eskimo Eskimo is thought to derive through Spanish and French from
ayas̆kimew—"person who laces a snowshoe”—an Innu/Montagnais word. The Innu are a
neighboring non-Inuit Canadian First Nations people, and it is a not uncommon
phenomenon for the European name for an indigenous group to be provided by the
neighboring indigenous group arrived at first, for instance, Comanche, from the Ute
Page 60 of 271
17
Mark Landstrom and Gini Griffin restoring the Tiny Mart mural in 1989 (Wayne Nicholls,
Tribune) and the mural today. The face has since been altered to diverge from the original,
which resembled the advertising campaign. The effect is slightly reminiscent of the Ecce
Homo restoration by volunteer restorer Cecilia Giménez at Borja, Spain in 2012.
Page 61 of 271
18
kimantshi, “enemy.” Such names are not necessarily considered offensive; Apaches publicly
and officially refer to themselves as Apaches, from a Spanish word probably of Zuni origin.
“Eskimo” was first applied to the Mi’kmaq (another non-Inuit First Nations people) and
later to Russian Yupighyt; Alaskan Yupik, Cup’ig, and Iñupiat; Canadian Inuit; and
Greenland Kalaallit.
Since 1977, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in Canada has called for the use of Inuk/Inuit
in place of Eskimo/Eskimos for circumpolar native peoples. This designation has been
rejected, however, by non-Inuits, e.g., those in Greenland, who refer to themselves as
Greenlanders or Kalaallit; in Alaska, Yupik or Yup’ik, Cup’ig, and Iñupiat; and in Russia,
Yupighyt.
There is currently no word that encompasses all of these peoples other than Eskimo, which
is considered offensive by some circumpolar native peoples (particularly in Canada),
normal and inoffensive by others (particularly in Alaska), and of lesser preference by many
to their self-designated terms (Inuit, “people”; Iñupiat, “original person”; Yupik, “real
person”; Yupighyt “true people”). Eskimo remains widely used in technical and scholarly
contexts, without a current substitute when referring to the totality of circumpolar native
peoples.
Eskimo Pie In 2020, after ninety-nine years, the Eskimo Pie brand was retired,
replaced by its owner, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, with Edy’s Pie. It is hard to exaggerate the
impact of the Eskimo Pie in American popular culture over that near-century.
Eskimo Pies were introduced under that name in the Midwest in November 1921 and by
the end of December were claimed (possibly exaggeratedly) to be selling at the clip of a
million a day (though 1922 figures do suggest half a million a day).
Eskimo Pies went into national distribution in January 1922, licensed to local and regional
ice cream makers. An REO Speed Wagon rushed an Eskimo Pie through a blizzard from
Chicago to the White House for President Harding’s Thanksgiving Dinner in 1922, making a
record run of 801 miles in 27 hours and 48 minutes.7
Eskimo Pies were sold in Japanese American internment camps; their sales jumped to GIs
in World War II.8 Bob Hope joked about Eskimo Pies, Walter Winchell dished on them, Dale
Carnegie sermonized on them, and mobster Frank Costello claimed to have manufactured
them (the company responding with “a frigid corporate statement”).9 S. J. Perelman wrote
7. “Wonderful Run of REO Speed Wagon,” Patriot Ledger, 5 Dec. 1922.
8. “Canteen Cowboy Sez,” Manzanar Free Press, 29 July 1942;“Briefly,” Poston Chronicle, 21
Nov. 1944; Maurtia Baldock, Guide to the Eskimo Pie Corporation Records, Smithsonian,
National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center, 1998, p. 2.
9. Bob Hope, “Bob Hope,” Chicago Sun-Times, 11 Mar. 1948; Walter Winchell, “Leslie Caron
Works Alone,” Boston Record-American, 21 Dec. 1961; Dale Carnegie, “Dale Carnegie,”
Sadalia Democrat Sun, 11 Feb. 1940; “Eskimo Pie Corp. Gives Costello Cold Shoulder,” Daily
Herald 25 Mar. 1951; Don Dornbrook, “‘Westward Ha!’ with Perelman Wit Unfurled,”
Milwaukee Journal, 8 August 1948; “Sharing an Eskimo Pie at a Paris theater …,” Boston
Daily Record, 13 May 1955; “MacMillan Plans to Carry Eskimo and Eskimo Pie,” New
Orleans States, 26 June 1925.
Page 62 of 271
19
about French patricians eating them, Grace Kelly was photographed sharing one with her
latest love interest in Paris, and the American explorer Donald Baxter MacMillan carried
them to the Inuit of Baffin and Ellesmere Islands. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of
American History holds the Eskimo Pie Corporation’s records. Eskimo Pies’ success became
a byword for fads but also part of the myth of American ingenuity and the belief anyone
could succeed with a good idea and determination.10
Various origin stories have circulated, but in a 1922 version purporting to be in the words
of inventor Christian Kent Nelson and now generally accepted, in his late twenties he was
teaching high school math during the day and running an ice cream shop at night in tiny
Onawa, Iowa, looking for a product that would keep him going during the winter.11 In late
1920 or early 1921, seeing a boy with only a nickel unable to choose between ice cream
and a chocolate bar, he came up with the idea of a chocolate-covered ice cream bar. After
asking a traveling candy salesman how chocolate was diluted for coatings at a low
temperature, he experiment with covering ice cream blocks with cocoa butter–softened
chocolate, tried the result out on Onawans with great success that summer (as I-Scream
bars), and patented the result in October 1921. He partnered with a fellow Iowan, Russell
Stover, manager of a chocolate factory, who suggested the name Eskimo Pie and who in
early literature often got the credit for inventing them, their company being named after
Stover.
The little boy with the nickel would have been out of luck, at any rate, since Eskimo Pies
initially cost a dime. Stover sold out early (with legal fees for defending the patent and
copyright eating away at the profits), and with his wife he started the candy company that
still bears his name. Christian Nelson also sold out but soon got bored and came back to
work for the Eskimo Pie Corporation under its new owners, US Foil (later Reynolds), who
made its packaging, until his retirement in 1961—a retirement significant enough, four
decades after the pie appeared on the scene, to be covered nationally, including by Walter
Winchell. Winchell squeezed him between Leslie Caron and Alvin Ailey and posited,
“Richer, it is suspected, than the gov’t.”
Cultural Appropriation in Branding An unsourced story of the Eskimo Pie’s branding
is that Stover’s sister went to the Omaha Public Library to look up words evocative of
cold.12 There was certainly no early consistent effort to tie the product to actual Eskimos,
and when images of Eskimos were used, they were unstable, reacting to contemporary
aesthetics and such events as the release of the documentary Nanook of the North.
As well, both the technology and branding were licensed to local ice cream manufacturers,
who seem to have paid for and designed many of their own advertisements, while other
ads used nationally-available images and layouts with space for local manufacturer names.
There were also some national ads without local manufacturers attached.
10. “Former Fads That Once We Followed,” Riverside Daily Press, 18 Jan. 1923; “Eskimo Pie
Inventor, Deaf to Jeers, Makes Fortune,” Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, 4 Feb. 1922.
11. “Eskimo Pie inventor Receives $2,000 Daily,” Stamford Advocate, 21 July 1922.
12. The earliest mention I can find of this is on the Nebraska State Historical Society’s
Website, Apr. 2003 (“Made in Nebraska: Food and Beverages”).
Page 63 of 271
20
1921 The original packaging featured a midnight sun, some version of which has been
used almost to the present. The 1921 advertisements explained what the product was
without any illustrations.
1922 At the nationwide launch at the beginning of 1922, there were a number of
different national and nationally-branded local campaigns. One of these latter was a brief
January campaign featuring a caricature of an Eskimo man with the legend, “‘Iggly Gook,’
Meaning, ‘I Ain’t Mad at Nobody’” and appearing in newspapers in Knoxville and
Chattanooga, Tennessee; Duluth, Minnesota; and Los Angeles, California, with the LA one
accompanied by caricatures of Dutch girls in the pointed and winged folk bonnets of
Volendam, the branding for National Ice Cream (despite its name, a local firm). A different
image of an Eskimo with the legend “Ugglee—Goo—Gee Meaning ‘Ain’t Eskimo Pie Grand?’”
appeared in a Wilks-Barre, Pennsylvania paper also in January 1922.
The nonsense words seem to have been tied to an effort to make Eskimo Pies mysterious
again as they were being introduced nationally; such was the message being given to
journalists. At any rate, this brief campaign was the extent of advertising related to Eskimos
in the months surrounding the launch of the brand. Other ads from the early part of the
year evoked iciness or showed pictures of the product itself, the midnight sun trademark,
or White people enjoying Eskimo Pies.
Dominance of White images in Eskimo Pie advertising, 1920s–1960s
Wichita Beacon, 1922
San Diego Union, 1927
Right: Dallas Morning News,
1956
Page 64 of 271
21
Milwaukee Journal, 1962 and
San Diego Union, 1956
Nanook of the North and the Eskimo Boy in Advertising Things changed in June of
1922, when Robert J. Flaherty’s groundbreaking documentary Nanook of the North became
a hit. In October and November, Abbotts, a Philadelphia ice cream chain, featured an
Eskimo boy in its ads, though after an initial appearance he was Europeanized. Brown’s
Velvet Ice Cream of New Orleans portrayed somewhat Kewpie-like Eskimo toddlers in its
ads, though the Eskimo Pie company’s own ads focused on a White girl in a short skirt and
Mary Janes in front of an igloo.
Page 65 of 271
22
Decatur Herald, 1 Jan. 1922
Constructivist-style ads
(compare the work of László
Moholy-Nagy) from the Fort
Wayne News Sentinel and
Evansville Courier and
Press, 26 Jan. 1922
Part of the short-lived
January 1922 campaign with
a caricatured but not
Europeanized Eskimo in a
onesie with Dutch girls in
Volendam bonnets below,
Los Angeles Times, 10 Jan.
1922
Wilks-Barre Times-Leader,
27 Jan. 1921, with a
language-eating pun. The
White people enjoying
Eskimo Pies are far more
characteristic of
contemporary ad
illustrations for the product.
Theatrical poster, Nanook of
the North, June 1922
First Eskimo Pie boy,
Philadelphia Inquirer, 11
Oct. 1922
Page 66 of 271
23
The Abbotts Eskimo Pie boy
Europeanized, Philadelphia
Inquirer, 24 Nov. 1922. In
contrast, the costume is
rendered more accurately,
with fur-outward outer
parka and outer trousers,
mitts, and outer boots
Chicago Daily News, 22 Nov.
1922, with a mix of Eskimo
and European iconography
This late 1923 ad copy could
be mistaken as a clarion call
for racial and cultural
endurance, and the style is
Soviet Realism. The ad copy
is also, uniquely, in the first
person of circumpolar native
peoples, addressed to
everyone else. Washington,
DC Evening Star, 9 Nov.
1923.
Glamorized Eskimo, with
accurate clothing and non-
European features, though
looking suspiciously like
Anna May Wong. (Wong was
growing famous at the time
but was not yet a breakout
star). Columbus Dispatch, 19
Nov. 1923.
In 1926 two Eskimo boys,
Enoch and Enitaksak, visited
Ohio and gave talks and
press interviews, including
discussions of their clothes
and language—full circle
from the caricature and
nonsense language of the
January 1922 ads.
Page 67 of 271
24
Last appearance of an
Eskimo boy in an Eskimo
Pie ad for, apparently,
twenty years. Schenectady
Daily Gazette, 3 Dec. 1927.
Although they disappeared
from advertising in the
1930s , Eskimo caryatides
held up Eskimo Pie’s
innovative dry ice coolers,
which made the product
available in corner stores
without freezers, from the
late 1920s to at least the
1950s
Eskimo Pie as urban
sophistication, though with
a somewhat Dadaist
combination of images. It
includes reference to the
Eskimo Pie Time radio
show. Milwaukee Journal, 1
Oct. 1929.
Description of the start of
the winter trapping season,
Violet, Louisiana, W. G.
Wiegand, “Down the
Spillway,” New Orleans Item,
14 Nov. 1937
Sheet music for Dale
Wimbrow’s 1941 O! My,
Eskimo Pie shows Whites in
Eskimo Clothing.
The Eskimo boy introduced
in 1947, the model for the
Tiny Mart sign. His costume
is more articulated, showing
avitat (Inuit)/akurun
(Yupik) mosaic trim of black
and white caribou skin on
parka and boots, though the
laces on the chest (below)
appear to be an invention.
Page 68 of 271
25
He also has darker skin and
more characteristically
Eskimo hair and features
than previous portrayals.
Golden State ad, San
Francisco Chronicle, 18 Aug.
1947
“The star of our show”: stills
from theatrical commercial,
circa 1950 (Youtube).
Eskimo boy with polar bear
and penguin, unknown
source, probably sign, circa
1950.
The doll-like portrayal from
1958 on is reminiscent of
Disney designer Mary Blair’s
designs for It’s A Small
World (below), although the
ride postdated it, fabricated
by Walt Disney for the 1964
New York World’s Fair
UNICEF Pavilion. Audio-
animatronicist Blaine Gibson
designed the shape of each
face to be identical, with
distinctions in skin, eye, and
hair color.
Page 69 of 271
26
By the mid 1960s the Eskimo
Pie boy was indeed a doll for
a White girl: Cleveland Plain
Dealer, 13 May 1965. The
Eskimo boy was retired
shortly after, though he
recurred in packaging as late
as the 2010s (below) with
doll-like face and white skin
coloring.
White’s Department Store
ad, Boston Herald, 13 Nov.
1942
Manzanar Relocation Camp:
Manzanar Free Press, 29 July
1942
Poston Relocation Camp:
Poston Chronicle, 21 Nov.
1944
Al Hirschfeld caricature of a
French Legion of Honor
reciptient, S. J. Perelman’s
Westward Ha!, 1948
Page 70 of 271
27
Eskimo images continued in 1923. One of the more interesting ones was of a dramatic
Socialist Realist Eskimo boy leaping forward with the legend “We Are Still Here.” In
contrast, in the same month of November (Eskimo pies in some markets were only sold
during the winter) was a glamor Eskimo who looked like Anna May Wong. As Nanook of the
North receded, interest seems to have dwindled, and after 1923 only one Eskimo appears
in advertising, a boy in some advertising in the New York–New Jersey area.
1920s–1950s: Caryatides After selling out in 1924, Christian Nelson had returned to
the company and among other innovations introduced Eskimo Pie dry ice coolers for stores
without freezers. In a design that seems to have persisted from the late 1920s to at least the
early 1950s, these were held up by adult male Eskimo caryatides. These presumably were
the reference for the girls’ hooded “‘Eskimo Pie’ suit” advertised by a Boston department
store in 1942, as otherwise Eskimo pie merchandizing in the 1930s had turned to radio
(jingles [“Oh, My, Eskimo Pie”] and Eskimo Pie Time, a folk song show), as well as wrapper
promotions—with no graphics. Except the sculptures holding up the coolers, images of
Eskimos seem to have disappeared. There was also little if any advertising during World
War II.
1947: The Return of the Eskimo Boy The postwar era introduced a new campaign
around an Eskimo boy, and now he was a boy of Eskimo features and skin tone and largely
authentic folk clothing: neither caricatured nor Europeanized. He also made it into film in
color movie theater promotions. The campaign lasted in earnest about five or six years,
though his image turned up as late as 1957. This is the image in Tiny Mart’s Eskimo Pie
mural, painted by the artists from Golden State Creamery. His costume in the ads showed
mosaic trim of black and white caribou skin on his parka and outer boots, though the laces
on the chest (below) appear to be an invention
The Eskimo boy disappeared for a few years and then came back in a more stylized and
doll-like form (proto-Disney) in 1958. By this time the company was trying to convince
people to buy multi-packs from supermarkets to take home by their new cars to their new
freezers for boom babies, rather than individual pies from corner groceries. Happy White
families increasingly made their way into advertisements. But the Eskimo boy was still
turning up as late as the 2010s.
Destruction, Defacement, or Covering Up Historic Art In cultural heritage
preservation, there are ten recognized agents of deterioration:
1. Physical Force
2. Theft and Vandalism
3. Fire
4. Water
5. Pests
6. Pollutants
7. Light
8. Temperature
9. Humidity
10. Dissociation
Page 71 of 271
28
To that could be added an eleventh: Censorship. Tiny Mart, which survived other agents of
deterioration to suffer from dissociation from its Black history, also includes a period
mural that a few people have suggested destroying or covering up.
The mural’s branding is indeed racial advertising and an example of commercial cultural
appropriation. The imagery of the 1947–1953 campaign was not, however, demeaningly
racist. The Eskimo boy was not subservient but exotic. He even provided some cultural
diversity to the overwhelmingly White dominance of advertising and some authenticity
compared to the subsequent Disney-like homogenization and anodynization of world
cultures (e.g., It’s a Small World, which originally functioned as a World’s Fair UNICEF
pavilion). Eskimo Pie was a distorted lens through which to see circumpolar native
peoples—but at least the lens existed as an alternative to invisibility. When a photograph of
American servicemen playing softball with an Eskimo boy appeared in numerous papers
during World War II, the somewhat irrelevant heading was “Eskimo Pie.” But without the
brand and association, would the photograph have run at all?
There have been recent and unresolved controversies regarding the proposed destruction
or covering up of public art that portrays earlier White views of non-Whites. At George
Washington High School in San Francisco, a 1936 Works Progress Administration mural by
Communist artist Victor Arnautoff, an anti-racist critic of government and history, was
slated for destruction or concealment—for its depictions of African American slavery and
violence against Native Americans—by a unanimous vote of San Francisco’s school board.
This decision created a huge and unresolved local and national controversy, including
being supported by some and opposed by others in the Black and American Indian
communities, with locals and prominent cultural leaders on both sides. Among those who
opposed destruction were Black Panthers who had organized and executed the painting of
murals in response to Arnautoff’s murals in the late 1960s and early 1970s.13
Tiny Mart’s Eskimo Pie mural, as a historic artwork, has attracted great affection over the
decades and some controversy of late, as San Luis Obispans address—or fail to address—
more substantial issues of systemic racism and inequality. Clearly cultural appropriation in
art and commerce is objectionable though probably will never be completely avoided
unless all races and cultures descend into solipsism. Censorship, though, tends to smack of
paternalism and virtue-signaling, and censorship of the past risks obliterating a detailed
and accurate understanding of history and thus the ability to move substantially forward.
Master Listing Tiny Mart will preserve for multiple interpretations a complex landmark in
San Luis Obispo’s racial history and history of racism, and the Eskimo Pie mural is part of
that full story. More important, Master Listing will foreground the struggle of Frank and
Alberta Bell to find an independent and respected place as Black business owners in a
postwar California that systemically shunted Blacks into inferior jobs and refused them the
means to achieve better housing or economic success.
13. Ben Davis, “This Artist Painted the Black Radical Response to the George Washington
Slaveholder Murals. Here’s Why He Stands Against Destroying Them,” Artnet News, 10 July
2019.
Page 72 of 271
29
5. Historic Context: The Great Migration of African Americans
The borders of the Great Migration are the US Censuses of 1910 (after which the drop in
the Southern Black population began) and 1970 (after which the Southern Black
population stabilized, though there was still movement in the rest of the country, e.g., to
California). The Great Migration was both a geographical movement (from the South to the
North, Midwest, and West) and social movement (from rural to urban areas). At the
beginning, more than 90% of African Americans lived in the South; by 1970, about half.
The Bell family would become part of that exodus from Southern agriculture to Western
urban commerce, and Tiny Mart would become a significant landmark of Black business
ownership in San Luis Obispo—ownership, in a small way, of the means of production and
a symbol of the beginning of acceptance of Blacks into America’s financial system.
Black Demographics of California and San Luis Obispo County and City African
Americans were a small proportion of the population of American California in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and did not trend upward till the Great Migration
from the South. The Black proportion of the population of California was, in
1850 1.0% of 92,597 people
1860 1.0% of 379,994
1870 0.8% of 560,247
1880 0.7% of 864,694
1890 0.9% of 1,213,398
1900 0.7% of 1,485,053
1910 0.9% of 2,377,549
Compare the Chinese, who had risen to 9% of California’s population by 1860 (resulting in
Congress passing Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882).
In remote San Luis Obispo, the figures were even lower. In the 1850 US Census, San Luis
Obispo County listed one Black person (George Frisbie, a 22-year-old cook from New York
State) of 336 people enumerated, or 0.3%. The 1860 census listed 7 out of 1,782, or 0.4%.14
(The 1860 census also had a category for Mulattoes, but at this time in San Luis Obispo
County the category was used for Indians, not Blacks—except possibly for one Portuguese-
born cook.)
Between 1880 and 1890 the number of Blacks in San Luis Obispo County increased from
under 30 to over 450 and from 0.3% to 2.8%, presumably because of Southern Pacific
construction; as a result of partial destruction of the 1890 census it is impossible to know.15
14. Transcription of 1850 census by Susan C. Parks, 2002; of 1860 census by Rhonda Jones,
1999.
15. Joshua Michael Harmon, “But Not In Vain”: The Civil Rights Movement in San Luis Obispo,
California, 1947–1969, master’s thesis, Department of History, California Polytechnic
University, San Luis Obispo, 2009, p. 13.
Page 73 of 271
30
But by 1910, the 72 Blacks and 5 Mulattoes recorded by the census in San Luis Obispo
County comprised, again, only 0.4% of the population.16
During the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South—and federal
suppression of Chinese and Japanese immigration and later internment or internal exile of
Japanese—the Black proportion of California’s population grew gradually—then after
World War II dramatically:
1920 1.1%
1930 1.4%
1940 1.8%
1950 4.4%
1960 5.6%
1970 7.0%
1980 7.7%
Its peak was 1980. Then the percentage of the Latino population doubled and of the Asian
population tripled, leaving the Black population with still growing numbers but declining
percentages:
1990 7.4%
2000 6.4%
2010 6.2%
San Luis Obispo County continued to lag behind statewide figures. The postwar influx
brought the Black population up to only 0.7%—though that was from 0.1% in 1940
(Harmon, op. cit., p. 14). By 1990 the Black population of the county was at 2.2%, by 2000
had declined to 1.9%, and by 2010 risen to 2.1%. The City of San Luis Obispo, in contrast,
went from 1.9% to 1.3% to 1.2% for its Black population in 1990–2010. The county’s Black
population has increasingly concentrated in unincorporated areas, Paso Robles, and
Atascadero, which last was founded as a Whites only town17
Black Residents and Businesses in the City of San Luis Obispo Of the twenty-six
African Americans living in San Luis Obispo County in 1940, three were residents of the
Pacific Hotel in San Luis Obispo’s Japantown, on the 100 block of Higuera, as numerous
other neighborhoods were covenanted against both Blacks and Asians (e.g., Fixlini, Mount
Pleasanton Square, Anholm, and Monterey Heights). Those three were Joe Hubert Hall, a
porter at the stage lines; Russell Massengale, a janitor at the nearby highway building; and
Minnie Allen, a widow; born, respectively, in Oklahoma, California, and Indiana. Five years
previously, Hall and Massengale were both living in San Luis, Allen in Los Angeles, but none
of them are listed in the 1938, 1939, or 1942 city directories (those still surviving from the
period), part of the difficulty of documenting minority communities.
San Luis Obispo’s Japanese Americans were interned in 1942. By the 1950 directory (the
next one surviving), the former Japantown had become largely Black and Mexican-born in
16. “Table 29. General Statistics of the Negro Population of the United States, by Counties:
1910,” Bulletin 129: Negroes in the United States, Twelfth Decennial US Census.
17. City of San Luis Obispo Housing Element, April 2010, Table A-5; SLOCOG Regional Profile,
“Population,” 2004, Table 2-6.
Page 74 of 271
31
its residents, Black in its businesses, and these new Black residents and business owners
were predominantly from the South. Small business for Blacks as for Japanese Americans
was way to move up despite persistent racial discrimination. Four documented Black-
owned businesses circa 1950 were Wilbur’s Club and Annabelle’s Café on Higuera’s 100
block, The Sister’s Inn on the 200 block, and Club Morocco south of town.
The Sister’s Inn, in the building previously
occupied by Kingo Inao’s OK Café at 208
Higuera, was co-owned by Annabelle
Warren and Texan Alice Harris. In 1948
Warren sold her half share to Harris for
$300, and in the 1950 San Luis Obispo city
directory, Warren was shown owning
Annabelle’s Café, at the site (190 Higuera)
where Frank Urabe had opened a chop suey
restaurant in 1931. Annabelle’s Café later
moved to a different site on the block.
Sister’s Inn Collection, Cal Poly Special
Collections and Archives.
The Sister’s Inn, late 1950s, with Alice
Harris’s house at 195 Brook Street just visible
rear left. Sister’s Inn Collection, Cal Poly
Special Collections and Archives.
Then by the mid 1950s Warren closed her
cafe and opened the interracial Club
Morrocco on the Old Highway south of
town, with a mixture of live and recorded
music. According to a chattel mortgage for
the Club Morocco’s contents that Warren
took out in 1957 from Cecil Evans, her
former landlord at both of her Annabelle’s
Café sites, the club was the real property of
Camden Hathway, the well respected but
louche brother of the well respected and
somewhat corrupt Sheriff Murray Hathway.
Club Morocco—which had a countywide
reputation for musical entertainment and
fracases and shootings—looms large in
local memory, and it operated into at least
the late 1960s.
Wilbur Owens, who had moved with his family from Texas, ran the short-lived Wilbur’s
Club at the Pacific Hotel, which had reverted to its original name of the Clover Hotel. The
1950 city directory shows him running a restaurant in the hotel, and in June 1950 he
purchased a beer and wine license for the club from Hope and Larry’s Café in Templeton.
But fourteen months later, in August 1951, he sold the license to Alice Harris and James
Bowers for the Sister’s Inn. After that Owens appears to have gone back to his day job as a
janitor.
Alice Harris’s Sister’s Inn continued into the mid 1960s. Then the building was vacant until
becoming the Fiesta Inn by 1967.
Page 75 of 271
32
The period of Black-owned restaurants and entertainment establishments anchoring the
former Japantown was over. Black residents stayed in the immediate neighborhood, but by
the mid 1950s mainstream White businesses had moved in to replace Black-owned
businesses that had carried the cultural capital of the community.
Alice Harris and Wilbur Owens both bought residential property in the former Japantown,
behind where their businesses were or had been, respectively at 195 Brook Street
(formerly Eto Street) in 1952 for $4,000 and 183 Brook Street in 1954 for $3,750. Neither
purchase involved a bank loan: the money was paid over time to Harry J. Dubin, attorney
for Tameji Eto, who had subdivided the Nippon Tract in 1931. There is no documentation
that Harris, Owens, or Annabelle Warren ever owned their own business premises.
Both Owens and Warren took out periodic chattel mortgages from the Mercantile
Acceptance Company on the furniture and equipment of their businesses and on their
personal furniture, Warren on one occasion from Cecil Evans, who had been granted power
of attorney and joint tenancy in the lot that contained most of Japantown’s businesses by
Yoshiko Tsutsumi in the run-up to internment. He was generally regarded in the postwar
period as owning the property, but he may have been still acting for his client.
The repetition of the same items in multiple 12- or 14-month mortgages suggests these
were cases not of buying furnishings on the installment plan but of taking out small loans
for business purposes at ruinous rates—from the Mercantile Acceptance Company—of 2%
to 2.5% per month. (Evans charged Warren only 5% per year for his chattel mortgage to
her.)
Prevention of African
Americans from accessing
real estate bank loans or
reasonably priced credit has
a long history, extending
from early FHA refusal to
insure mortgages in or near
Black neighborhoods or
underwrite integrated
housing projects in the mid
twentieth century to steering
minorities to high-interest
loans in the housing bubble
of the early twenty-first.
Reliance on non-bank
lenders was also the case in
San Luis and contributed to
the cost and risk of being a
Black business owner and
the postwar struggle of Black
businesses.
Higuera Street looking west toward the Wineman Hotel in
the distance from the corner of Court Street, with the sign
for the Mercantile Acceptance Company in the foreground.
History Center of San Luis Obispo County.
Page 76 of 271
33
When Wilbur’s Club closed, Wilbur Owens had to fall back on working as a janitor. Had he
been able to access White credit and banking, would Owens have been able to stay in
business? It was in this historic context, not long after the closure of The Sister’s Inn, that
Frank and Alberta Bell purchased the grocery at the corner of Carmel and High Streets in
1966. And for that, in an apparent historic first, they received two bank loans.
Page 77 of 271
34
6. Historic Significance of Tiny Mart: Frank W. and Alberta Bell
The overriding problem with historic preservation in minority histories is whether any
physical legacy exists at all, given that minority neighborhoods often are (a) owned by
other people and (b) targets for urban renewal. San Luis Obispo’s first Black neighborhood
was, earlier, it’s first Japanese neighborhood. The Japanese were initially legally prevented
from owning the land. Shortly after they acquired it, they were interned. Other minorities
moved in, but the new occupants were largely denied the mechanisms for ownership, such
as bank mortgages.
Hence what was once Japantown and later a vibrant African American business hub is now
a soulless strip mall, Jiffy Lube, and parking lot. The houses on the street behind it, where
the business owners lived, has been targeted for demolition by the City Council and
Community Development Department, this being White San Luis’s notion of developing
community. That any Black business has survived from the Great Migration period is
somewhat astounding and in the case of Tiny Mart is due to the fact that it was in a White
neighborhood and the owner of the business was given the means to buy the property.
Why this should have been so is unclear. Frank and Alberta Bell acquired the grocery store
at the corner of Carmel and High Streets in 1966, two years before the Fair Housing Act,
and at any rate, it wasn’t a house but a business. But where Black businesswomen and
businessmen fifteen and twenty years before could only access high-interest chattel
mortgages for businesses whose premises they didn’t own, the Bells, who had been
sharecroppers in Texas, received a $2,800 loan from Bank of America and another from
Security First National. This is, in essence, the story of the dog that did not bark—or the
banks that did not balk.
As a result, the Bells became the first Black grocery owners in San Luis Obispo, the first
Black owners of a business whose premises they also owned, and the owners of the last
Great Migration–era Black business whose premises have survived: distinctions that give
the Bells and their property historic significance. As expressed by National Register
criteria, they are not merely persons who are members of “an identifiable profession, class,
or social or ethnic group” but persons who have “gained importance within his or her
profession or group” through two firsts and one last. It would be good to remember the
Great Migration era of San Luis Obispo’s Black business community through the cluster of
The Sister’s Inn, Annabelle’s Café, and Wilbur’s Club, but the Tiny Mart is all that survives.
Frank and Alberta Bell took over Tiny Mart at about the same age that Juvenal and
Wilhelmina Da Silva retired from running it—and the Bells ran the grocery for thirteen
more years, till Frank was in his mid and Alberta in her early seventies. They were the first
of its seven owners to run it well past retirement age, and this in itself suggests the
disparity in White and Black economic circumstances.
From Waco to San Luis Obispo How did the Great Migration bring the Bells to San
Luis Obispo, when they had lived and worked their whole lives on farms in rural McLennan
and Falls Counties in Central Texas? In 1951 McLennan County condemned a tract of land
along the Brazos River where Texas Light and Power Company wanted to build a steam
electric plant. Among the 17 defendants were 13 members of the Harrison family (3 of
whom had moved to Philadelphia, Evanston, and Kansas City) and 2 members of the
Page 78 of 271
35
Barfield family—who from early censuses appear to have been among the rare Black
families to have owned their farmland—and Frank and Alberta Bell, who appear to have
bought their land since the 1940 census, when they were still renters.18
The all-White condemnation commission appointed by the White judge to appraise the
tract presumably awarded the Bells enough to relocate. But the salient fact was one
defendant, Viola Harrison Barrett, was listed as living in San Luis Obispo. Here was a
contact in the Great Migration, just like the Azoreans who had ended up in San Luis and
paved the way for others.
A Frank W. Bell was hired by the County Board of Supervisors in 1959 as a janitor in the
Building Custodial Department.19 This is likely Frank Willie Bell. A Frank Bell is listed in
city directories as working as a janitor a various locations in San Luis during the 1950s,
living at a rural route box number. The Bells purchased Tiny Mart from a rural route
address outside San Luis, continued to live there for the next five years, then lived on and
retired to 498 Mitchell Drive. Once they purchased the Tiny Mart, both Frank and Alberta
were listed in the directory, and he was scrupulous about using his middle initial.
The Bells owned Tiny Mart for a generation and then retired, having left their impression
and memories on their contemporary Black and also White community for their
personability and graciousness. Their sons Frank and Ralph became became entrepreneurs
in San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria. In the half century since the Bells owned Tiny Mart, the
people who remember them have largely disappeared and may, if they were White, have
had little notion of the Bells’ struggle to get to San Luis Obispo and their groundbreaking
achievement in buying Tiny Mart and moving, at last, up the social and economic ladder.
Since 1980, California in general and San Luis Obispo in particular have become
decreasingly proportionately Black. It is crucial that we preserve the physical evidence of
the era when the Great Migration was dramatically changing California, preserve the
struggles and successes of those generations, so that future generations (which will
certainly be decreasingly White) will have a means to know and understand. The rationale
underlying historic preservation is that we tend to remember the stories of people by what
we see and to forget the stories of people whose physical evidence has been obliterated. If
one picture is worth a thousand words, one building, one site is worth ten thousand.
18. “Condemnation Panel Named,” Waco News-Tribune, 5 May 1951.
19. “Supervisors’ Proceedings, No. 46,” Arroyo Grande Valley Herald-Recorder, 6 Feb. 1959.
Page 79 of 271
36
7. Period of Significance and Integrity
Period of Significance The architectural period of significance for Tiny Mart stretches
from its construction in 1926 through its use primarily as a corner grocery until 1979. The
historical period for Tiny Mart covers its ownership by Frank and Alberta Bell, 1966–1979.
During the Bells’ period, it was covered with asbestos siding, which preserved the original
novelty siding and the hand painted Eskimo Pie sign. The bulk of the exterior materials and
workmanship represent the earlier period; the location, design, setting, feeling, and
association, both periods.
Integrity
Location Tiny Mart remains in its original location at the corner of Carmel and High
Streets.
Design Tiny Mart retains its character-defining features of
Obtuse angle of footprint and false front
Interior with wood ceiling, walls, and floor
• a footprint comprising three right and two obtuse angles to fit the corner formed by
Carmel Street, oriented to the wind-driven Spanish map, and High Street, oriented to the
later American compass map
• Western False Front shop facade
• multi-paned plate glass shop front window, not floor to ceiling, shaded by a fabric awning
• small louvered ventilation windows flanking the shop window
• hand-painted advertising sign
Windows were added to Tiny Mart’s short south-facing and southwest-facing walls
between 1951 and 1979 to provide light and ventilation. These additions occurred during
the period of significance.
Page 80 of 271
37
Tiny Mart in 1951 from the air and today from the ground. Shop front window is the same
length, windows were added to south and southwest facades but during period of significance.
The Eskimo Pie mural has not yet been painted in 1951. Reversible signage has been painted
on. Reversible ventilation equipment has been added to the roof.
Since the period of significance, COR-TEN steel accents have been added to exterior
window frames and corner boards but are reversible and do not appear to detract from the
structure’s ability to communicate its significance.
Reversible CORE-TEN accents on frames and
corner boards
Louvered ventilation windows
Setting The bungalow neighborhood surrounding Tiny Mart is little changed since the
grocery’s construction in 1926. Tiny Mart’s neighboring grocery-operator’s cottage still
Page 81 of 271
38
stands, as do the next two cottages also built by Skiles. The houses that Skiles built on or
moved to the block on Carmel and Islay are also standing and little altered, adding further
context to the grocery. The predominantly Craftsman and occasional Minimal Traditional
houses visible in all directions date from the grocery’s earliest period, including the
Foursquare Church complex on the triangle formed by High, Islay, and Carmel Streets as a
result of the meeting of the Spanish and American grids. Streets retain the same
configurations and width. Only a series of two-story apartments on Leff Street, replacing
previous two-story apartments, are recent visible though not particularly near additions.
Materials Tiny Mart retains its original “novelty siding” from 1926 and apparently its
original front windows, as well as window frames. Its Eskimo Pie sign has been restored on
three occasions with flaking paint replaced. Tiny Mart also retains its period wood slat
ceiling and other interior wood appointments, visible from the street.
Workmanship The workmanship, as the materials, are original.
Feeling Tiny Mart functions now as a deli but retains the combination of interior and
exterior physical features that evoke its historic purpose as a corner grocery. Customers
and passersby feel they are going back in time (an impression intensified by Doobie Coates’
collection of period advertising ephemera).
Association Though Frank and Alberta Bell operated the store when its novelty siding
and Eskimo Pie sign had been covered by asbestos, and though the name of the business
has changed, its Western False Front design with plate glass view to the tiny and cozy
interior, prominent and eccentrically-shaped Spanish-American corner configuration, and
low-built bungalow setting retain the association with the first Black grocery owners in San
Luis Obispo and era of the Great Migration.
Page 82 of 271
39
8. Conclusion
Tiny Mart is eligible for the Master List for its architectural representation of a social milieu
and period, association with historically significant pioneer African American business
owners, and high degree of integrity that communicates its significance. Tiny Mart slightly
rights the prejudice in historic preservation toward the substantial monuments of White
history. It is also a rare opportunity in San Luis Obispo’s historic preservation to highlight
local Black history to a new and receptive generation, where previous generations have
demolished and continue to threaten the few physical landmarks of our minority histories
by making them “non-conforming uses” to be “gradually phased out” in the name of profit
and progress.
Page 83 of 271
Page 84 of 271
12
Zoning, or remove the property from historic listing if the structure on the property no longer
meets eligibility criteria for listing, following the process for listing set forth herein.
14.01.070. Evaluation Criteria for Historic Resource Listing
When determining if a property should be designated as a listed Historic or Cultural Resource,
the CHC and City Council shall consider this ordinance and State Historic Preservation Office
(“SHPO”) standards. In order to be eligible for designation, the resource shall exhibit a high
level of historic integrity, be at least fifty (50) years old (less than 50 if it can be demonstrated
that enough time has passed to understand its historical importance) and satisfy at least one of the
following criteria:
A. Architectural Criteria: Embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, region, or
method of construction, or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values.
(1) Style: Describes the form of a building, such as size, structural shape and details
within that form (e.g. arrangement of windows and doors, ornamentation, etc.). Building
style will be evaluated as a measure of:
a. The relative purity of a traditional style;
b. Rarity of existence at any time in the locale; and/or current rarity although the
structure reflects a once popular style;
c. Traditional, vernacular and/or eclectic influences that represent a particular social
milieu and period of the community; and/or the uniqueness of hybrid styles and how
these styles are put together.
(2) Design: Describes the architectural concept of a structure and the quality of artistic
merit and craftsmanship of the individual parts. Reflects how well a particular style or
combination of styles are expressed through compatibility and detailing of elements.
Also, suggests degree to which the designer (e.g., carpenter-builder) accurately
interpreted and conveyed the style(s). Building design will be evaluated as a measure of:
a. Notable attractiveness with aesthetic appeal because of its artistic merit, details and
craftsmanship (even if not necessarily unique);
b. An expression of interesting details and eclecticism among carpenter-builders,
although the craftsmanship and artistic quality may not be superior.
(3) Architect: Describes the professional (an individual or firm) directly responsible for
the building design and plans of the structure. The architect will be evaluated as a
reference to:
Page 85 of 271
13
a. A notable architect (e.g., Wright, Morgan), including architects who made
significant contributions to the state or region, or an architect whose work influenced
development of the city, state or nation.
b. An architect who, in terms of craftsmanship, made significant contributions to San
Luis Obispo (e.g., Abrahams who, according to local sources, designed the house at
810 Osos - Frank Avila's father's home - built between 1927 – 30).
B. Historic Criteria
(1) History – Person: Associated with the lives of persons important to local, California,
or national history. Historic person will be evaluated as a measure of the degree to which
a person or group was:
a. Significant to the community as a public leader (e.g., mayor, congress member,
etc.) or for his or her fame and outstanding recognition - locally, regionally, or
nationally.
b. Significant to the community as a public servant or person who made early, unique,
or outstanding contributions to the community, important local affairs or institutions
(e.g., council members, educators, medical professionals, clergymen, railroad
officials).
(2) History – Event: Associated with events that have made a significant contribution to
the broad patterns of local or regional history or the cultural heritage of California or the
United States. Historic event will be evaluated as a measure of:
(i) A landmark, famous, or first-of-its-kind event for the city - regardless of whether
the impact of the event spread beyond the city.
(ii) A relatively unique, important or interesting contribution to the city (e.g., the Ah
Louis Store as the center for Chinese-American cultural activities in early San Luis
Obispo history).
(3) History-Context: Associated with and also a prime illustration of predominant
patterns of political, social, economic, cultural, medical, educational, governmental,
military, industrial, or religious history. Historic context will be evaluated as a measure
of the degree to which it reflects:
a. Early, first, or major patterns of local history, regardless of whether the historic
effects go beyond the city level, that are intimately connected with the building (e.g.,
County Museum).
b. Secondary patterns of local history, but closely associated with the building (e.g.,
Park Hotel).
Page 86 of 271
14
C. Integrity: Authenticity of an historical resource’s physical identity evidenced by the
survival of characteristics that existed during the resource’s period of significance. Integrity
will be evaluated by a measure of:
(1) Whether or not a structure occupies its original site and/or whether or not the
original foundation has been changed, if known.
(2) The degree to which the structure has maintained enough of its historic character
or appearance to be recognizable as an historic resource and to convey the reason(s)
for its significance.
(3) The degree to which the resource has retained its design, setting, materials,
workmanship, feeling and association.
14.01.080 Historic District Designation, Purpose and Application
A. Historic (H) District designation. All properties within historic districts shall be designated
by an “H” zoning. Properties zoned “H” shall be subject to the provisions and standards as
provided in Ordinance 17.54 (Zoning) of the Municipal Code.
B. Purposes of Historic Districts. The purposes of historic districts and H zone designation are
to:
(1) Implement cultural resource preservation policies of the General Plan, the
preservation provisions of adopted area plans, the Historic Preservation and
Archaeological Resource Preservation Program Guidelines, and
(2) Identify and preserve definable, unified geographical entities that possess a significant
concentration, linkage, or continuity of sites, buildings, structures, or objects united
historically or aesthetically by plan or physical development;
(3) Implement historic preservation provisions of adopted area and neighborhood
improvement plans;
(4) Enhance and preserve the setting of historic resources so that surrounding land uses
and structures do not detract from the historic or architectural integrity of designated
historic resources and districts; and
(5) Promote the public understanding and appreciation of historic resources.
C. Eligibility for incentives. Properties zoned as Historic Preservation (H) shall be eligible for
preservation incentive and benefit programs as established herein, in the Guidelines and other
local, state and federal programs.
Page 87 of 271
Page 88 of 271