Shootout on Pine Street

Fightin’ words heat up the battle to save Paso’s historic Pine Street Saloon

BY DANIEL BLACKBURN

The relentless press of progress finally burst through the old wooden doors of her Paso Robles Pine Street Saloon, and proprietor Pat French admits she was taken by surprise.

Call it growth, expansion, urban sprawl, or a plague upon the land. It’s what happens when people move willy-nilly around the country on the slightest whim and settle anywhere they can afford. It excites planners, retailers, and real estate peddlers; it depresses environmentalists and other aficionados of the status quo.

Whatever it’s called, it always happened outside, on the street, elsewhere, while French and her customers huddled in their air-conditioned saloon cocoon and tsk-tsked about newcomers tampering with their geared-down Western town.

Then, one windy January day earlier this year, change arrived, and it left French, 70, breathless.

"This building, which I’ve leased for the past 31 years, was all of a sudden for sale," recalled French last week. "The owner said he’d sell to me, and I had an offer ready. The next thing I know, that developer had bought both the building I’m in and the one next door."

"That developer" is Richard Woodland, owner of four shopping centers in this county.

Without warning, French was looking at the end of her livelihood, coinciding with the end of her lease in February of next year.

Woodland has aspirations of converting an entire block along Pine Street–the block housing French’s historic bistro–into a flashy, classy jazz nightclub. With this project, Woodland hopes to cash in on the reconstruction of downtown Paso Robles as it is resurrected into a trendy, upscale area catering to a crowd much different from the down-home folks frequenting the Pine Street Saloon. Woodland also would cater to his own taste for jazz, honed during years of traveling the Deep South.

Woodland recently sold a lucrative duck farm in Southern California that his wife owned for three decades. He’s president of National Cold Storage in Los Angeles. He owns Woodland Plaza and Woodland Plaza II in Paso Robles, and Cypress Plaza in Morro Bay and Foothill Square in San Luis Obispo. Woodland is planning construction of Woodland III, near the other two. He has a NASCAR race shop near Charlotte, N.C., winegrape acreage in San Luis Obispo County, and he recently purchased Busi’s, another Pine Street institution in Paso Robles. A featured item at Busi’s: duck sausage.

Woodland bought the two Pine Street buildings for a reported $550,000 from Bartolo "Barley" Estrada, and then turned his attention to acquiring the remaining pair of Pine Street buildings.

As drawn by an architect, Woodland’s plans included using as much of the block as possible for his new musical enterprise. He had cash in his pocket from the sale of the duck farm, and he was eager to move forward.

In another time, another place, this might have been a simple tale of big business gobbling up the little guy, heavy money prevailing over people of more modest means.

But there were a few surprises in store for Woodland, too.

The owners of one of his desired buildings, currently occupied by North County Lighting, said they had no plans to sell to the developer. Woodland then concentrated on purchasing the remaining structure, the historic Estrada Building, constructed in 1887 and now owned by Maria Estrada.

The only problem with Woodland’s plan at this point was that Estrada had already agreed to lease her building to her old friend next door, Pat French, so that Paso Robles’ last remaining old saloon, where Jesse James and his brothers once hung out, could survive.

So while local Realtor Tommy Taylor began waving large purchase offers in front of Estrada, she said, Woodland’s engineers "discovered" that Estrada’s building extended four feet into the Pine Street Saloon building now owned by Woodland.

He’d "really hate to see this matter end up in court," Estrada said Woodland told her, while Taylor raised the offer to "whatever you want for the building." It was a thinly veiled threat she did not appreciate, said Estrada, surmising that Woodland figured his legal power was greater than hers.

"I knew that he didn’t want to honor the agreement I made with Pat [French]," said Estrada. "That bothered me a lot."

The pressure applied by the developer quickly increased, said Ron French, who is planning the physical move of his mother’s saloon to its new location next door.

"Every time I looked up," he said, "there was Taylor with a new offer, trying to get Maria to renege on the lease agreement. ‘The sky’s the limit,’ Taylor would say."

The situation created a nightmare of planning for Ron French.

"Every time I’d get a subcontractor scheduled, we’d have some kind of a permit problem. I could have been moved by June, the bar could have taken advantage of summer sales, and everyone would be happy. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened."

"Mr. Woodland is a man used to getting what he wants, just because he’s rich," said Estrada in a recent interview. "Well, he doesn’t get what he wants this time." She had, after all, given her word to her good friends, the Frenches.

"I’ve known Ron and Pat for 30-plus years," said Estrada. "They have no other place to go to put their bar. I wanted to help them out, and here we are, with a big mess."

At that time, said Estrada, she had not yet met Woodland.

"I kept hearing he’s such a nice guy," she said. "If he’s so nice, why is he giving so many problems to Ron?"

The alleged four-foot easement intrusion–which city planners believe "might" be only two feet–remains an issue, said Estrada. She believes Woodland may be using this as a wedge to complicate the move of Pine Street Saloon into her building.

"If it’s been like that for 118 years, why say anything about it now?" she wondered. "Shouldn’t he have looked into that before he bought the building?"

Then there were mysterious delays in city permitting processes authorizing simple restroom alterations in the Estrada Building, necessitated by its new use.

Ron French said the months-long delay resulted in "absolutely no changes whatsoever in the plans I submitted." He and Estrada said they believed the influence of the developer was having an adverse impact on the progress of the new saloon’s permits.

Yet another hurdle came in the form of a city demand that a wheelchair access ramp be placed in the front of the building, rather than in the back as the French plans specified. Resistance from the local historical society eventually helped smooth that potential problem, again at the expense of time.

So Estrada decided to level the playing field, she said, to fight fire with a little napalm. For four decades, she has lived in a small apartment over the Estrada Building. As a resident of the block, therefore, she was asked her opinion when Woodland applied for an on-site liquor sales license for his jazz club. She gave it, in the form of a protest. She knows from experience that late-night club patrons can be very disruptive to a lady’s peace and quiet.

The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) brought Woodland’s application to a screeching halt pending a hearing on the merit of Estrada’s protest.

That stopped all the talk about the disputed 4-foot setback, at least for the time being, Estrada said. Ron French said he talked to a lawyer who told him the alleged boundary discrepancy would not be recognized in court, anyway, because so many years have passed and multiple building owners have been involved.

And when Woodland learned she had talked to a newspaper reporter, the developer withdrew his purchase offer, said Estrada.

"Now he says he’s not interested in buying," huffed Estrada. "Hah!"

Estrada chuckled. "I guess I’m holding things up for Mr. Woodland. So we’ll wait and see what happens. That’s all we can do."

Woodland declined comment, saying he wanted to work things out with Estrada and French.

And French moves forward with plans for shoving her business 20 feet to the south, at a time she thought she’d be planning her pending retirement.

"This all makes me very sad," said French recently as she poured a cold one for a customer. "I had no plans to move. This is really the last of the old-time neighborhood bars"–in a town that until just a few years ago boasted 10 downtown saloons.

French paused. "Ah, well," she said philosophically. "All this excitement keeps the blood pumping." Æ

News editor Daniel Blackburn can be reached at [email protected].

SIDEBAR:

The North County, it is a-changin’

There’s a stretch of Creston Road a mile or two east of Paso Robles where the deer are dying.

It is reflective of yet another dark side of progress, an unintended consequence of change.

These deer don’t go there with any such intention. Instinct inbred over generations lures them toward lush vineyards split by the country road.

More often than not, the animals feed on rose bushes lining the vineyards, and in previous days could easily hop the squat, barbed-wire fencing if an oncoming vehicle startled them.

Contemporary "deer fences" of the type being installed by new grape growers are 8 feet high, however, beyond the leaping capabilities of mere deer. Trapped in a miles-long wire mesh corridor, panicked animals dart back and forth across the road and, with alarming regularity, collide fatally with speeding vehicles.

"It’s a slaughter," said Bob Engel, who drives daily to his downtown Paso Robles office from his Creston ranch. "The deer don't have a chance."

West of Highway 101, tall deer fences line vineyards like those of Summerwood Winery along Arbor and Live Oak roads.

"Deer will always get hit by cars," said Randy Hicks, a neighbor of Summerwood’s who’s spent all of his 47 years In Paso Robles. "But with these deer fences, it’s tenfold." Hicks said he regularly sees dead deer, sometimes two at a time, by the sides of roads where high deer fences have been erected. An avid hunter, Hicks said the increase in animal deaths has nothing to do with greater numbers of deer.

"If anything, the population is down," he said, due to the expansion of residential and commercial into what was undeveloped territory.

The fences present an unexpected obstacle for deer. "Sometimes a deer will panic, run into the fence so violently it will break its neck. And the fences are taking hundreds of acres of habitat from these animals," said Hicks.

It won’t be long, he added, before "we start seeing more people getting injured by hitting deer that are only on the roads because of those fences."

The fences are relatively new on the Central Coast. Those who are building them are often newcomers, including corporate wineries, and the practice has become sharply controversial among the region’s five dozen vintners.

Scott Hawley, winemaker for Summerwood, doesn’t think his vineyard fences cause problems.

"Personally, I love seeing deer, but not eating our vines," he said. "I think our proximity to traffic helps keep the deer away. Our fence is only 5 or 6 feet high, and the gates are only 4 1/2 feet high."

Justin Smith, manager of his family’s James Berry Winery in Paso Robles, said his vineyard was one of the first to install the so-called deer fences 20 years ago.

"We did 6-foot fences, and those have always worked well," he said. "But the 8-foot fences do pose a real problem for the deer, and it’s a problem that didn’t exist a few years ago."

Smith said he and other vintners are trying to get the facilities with 8-foot fences to set the fences back from the road, or to construct "corridors" for escape.

"But right now, everyone thinks they need an eight-foot fence to protect their vineyards. It isn’t true," said Smith. Æ

By D.B.