Landmark Chronicles:

First Quarter - 2009

The Beckman House – 1620 Grand Avenue:  Since 1887 the four-story house at 1620 Grand Avenue has been home to such interesting tenants as a movie queen of the silent era, a college sorority, and any number of prominent citizens.  The mansion - the highest above sea level to rate the designation of a mansion in Santa Barbara - was built by Elizabeth Lamb Beckman, an Englishwoman.  Above is a rare photograph taken in 1898 of the property as it then looked.

Elizabeth Lamb was the widow of a solicitor (attorney) from Norwich, England, who died when the youngest of her three children was a babe in arms.  She moved to Duluth, Minn., where she married a wealthy retired man, E. M. Beckman, in the mid-1880s.  At that time Santa Barbara was the "in" place for wealthy retirees from the middle west to spend the winter months.  The Beckmans immediately fell in love with Santa Barbara, then a sleepy little hamlet of 5,000 people, and in 1886 decided to reside here permanently.

1887 was the year the first railroad reached Santa Barbara, the year State Street was paved from the wharf to Victoria Street.  Walter N. Hawley of San Francisco was replacing Col. W. W. Hollister as the community's leading citizen,  Hollister having died the previous summer.  In addition to purchasing Hollister's Arlington Hotel, Hawley began developing "Hawley Heights" on Mission Ridge overlooking the city, known today as the Riviera.

At that time the only buggy road on the hillside was Grand Avenue.  There was one lone house at what is now No. 1740 (where the late Thomas M. Storke was born in 1876), otherwise the Riviera ridge was a boulder-littered, almost treeless expanse.  Old maps show that in 1877 Grand Avenue started at what is now the corner of Micheltorena and Quarantina Streets near St. Francis Hospital, then the site of a Catholic cemetery.  Grand Avenue made a hairpin turn up the hill, approximately where California Street is today, and ran westward to the vicinity of Pedregosa Street, which at that time dead-ended at Laguna Street.  Here Grand Avenue made another U-turn and, approximately following the route of Alameda Padre Serra, ran eastward before dipping down off the hill to connect with upper Voluntario Street.

Anywhere along this primitive buggy road loop the Channel views were spectacular.  On a one-acre lot at 1620 Grand Avenue, the Beckmans erected their Victorian castle.  Mrs. Sheridan recalls as a child how she used to marvel at the magnificent cabinetry, wood paneling and ornate marble fireplaces which filled the mansion.

Like most pretentious homes of the wealthy, the Beckman mansion had a huge carriage house in the rear, with stables and a roomy hay-loft, as visible in the picture to the right.  The Beckman carriage house has been remodeled into an attractive two-story home at 1615 Loma Street, a road which did not exist when the mansion was built on Grand Avenue.

When the movie industry came to Santa Barbara around 1910, one of the most glamorous actresses of her era, Mary Miles Minter, who also lived briefly at 1606 Grand Ave., acquired the Beckman mansion. It was Miss Minter who stripped off all the Victorian siding, the bay windows, the lovely tower, the finials and ridge pole decorations and other Victorian trimmings, and converted it into the appearance it shows today.  Miss Minter left Santa Barbara when the Flying A company moved to Hollywood around 1918.  The mansion on the hillside, which by then was beginning to fill with smaller homes, was empty for a few years.  In 1921 a rancher, E.L. Patterson, bought it and lived there until about 1927.  From then on a series of tenants occupied the once elegant mansion, including the Pi Beta sorority in the 1950s, its many rooms and baths made it ideal for such a purpose.  Most recently the property sold as a single family residence in June of 2006 for $2,850,000.  Most of the fireplaces are still intact, but the beautiful woodwork for which the mansion was noted has been remodeled or painted over.  The stone wall fronting Grand Avenue, built by Italian artisans from the old country, is still there.  Were Mrs. Beckman sits in her shiny carriage in the 1898 photograph, a flat-roofed, street level two-story garage now stands.  The views from the mansion’s many windows are still among the most magnificent the Riviera offers.