Volume 88, Number 4 - California Historical Society

This is the cultural memory enshrined in San
Diego’s folk annals and traditions. Bandini is
remembered, as one writer recently put it, as a
“legendary renaissance Californio” who entertained
“legions of notables.” 97 His home in Old
Town likewise has become fused with the memory
of him as a don whose life embodied the
traditions of Old Spain. Even the building itself,
despite multiple uses, alterations, and changes in
name, is registered on the California State Historical
Landmarks as the Casa de Bandini. 98
Postscript: California State Park’s
Restoration, 2007–2010
In April 2010, California State Parks completed a
three-year, $6.5 million rehabilitation and restoration
of the historic landmark, returning it to its
appearance as the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Roughly
80 percent of the original fabric and features
have been preserved or accurately reconstructed,
including the hotel’s redwood clapboard siding,
turned wooden columns and baluster railings,
wood-shingled hip roof, chimneys, tongue-andgroove
wainscoting and flooring, and doors, door
fenestrations, windows, and trim. In addition,
much of the adobe brick, remnants of whitewashed
walls, most of the original cobblestone
footprint, and hand-hewn lintels dating to Bandini’s
time were preserved.
This was an unprecedented historic restoration,
arguably the most important one currently in the
state. Few other buildings rival its scale or size,
blending of adobe and wood-framing construction,
association with significant people and
events, and retention of historic fabric. 99
The building is important for another, perhaps
more compelling reason: It allows us the opportunity
to ask how we should interpret it and those
connected to it. As an adobe mason who worked
on the building, I am still haunted by what I
saw and felt. I remember seeing a fragment of a
smooth, white-plaster medallion buried in debris,
patches of fading lime paint and plaster on interior
walls, and always the long red-brown adobe
bricks with their deep X-grooved, Mission-era
scratch marks. They are part of a living tradition,
but whose tradition We will never know
the answer. Those workers—Indian, Californio,
Mexican, immigrant, or American; men, women,
or children—are gone, missing from our cultural
memory, but their legacy survives in their toil, in
what they left behind. 100
Victor A. Walsh is a historian and adobe conservator
with the San Diego Coast District of California State Parks.
He earned a Ph.D. in American history, with a focus on
nineteenth-century ethnicity and race, from the University of
Pittsburgh in 1984 and taught as a lecturer at San Francisco
State University, the University of San Francisco, and College
of San Mateo. In 1991, he won the Carlton C. Qualey Award
for his article on Irish drinking customs (published in the
Journal of American Ethnic History), followed in 2004 by the
Institute of History Preservation Award for his article on the
Casa de Estudillo of Old Town San Diego (published in The
Journal of San Diego History). In 2008, he published an article
in California History on Torrey Pines State Reserve, another
one of his parks.
California History • volume 88 number 4 2011