San Luis Obispo is a great place for a lot of reasons, but one reason that I wasn’t fully aware of was the great history behind the area and local places that we pass by and take for granted today.
How do I know this? Because the History Center of San Luis Obispo County offers three great podcast walking tours of the city. You can download them for free and make a day of sauntering around SLO listening and discovering some really fascinating history. They also show some great old photographs and historical documents too.
The podcasts are available on iTunes and on the History Center’s website. There’s one about the Historic Downtown area, one on the Historic Railroad District and one called “The Darker Side of San Luis Obispo.”
The first podcast was released in late 2010, and the next two the following summer. History Center chief administrative officer Erin Newman said the Center worked with two local companies and was given a $13,000 grant from the city for the project.
The tours were “an incredible amount of work” according to Newman, and to help with accuracy, the Center got assistance from local historians.
They wanted the tours to be as factual as possible and qualify the information, she said — it helps visitors know that sometimes history is just what people write down and “there is no such thing as being able to pin down a perfect, perfect fact.”
Making the podcasts also involved using newer technology, Newman said, which appeals to the younger generation and isn’t common among history organizations.
“Part of this was to attract tourists certainly … but I think for us locally it was also sort of to encourage the people who live here and walk downtown every single day and don’t know anything about the buildings that they’re walking by, to give them an opportunity to do that,” Newman said.
Since I’m such a history nerd, I knew I had to experience these for myself. And there were so many places on these tours that I know or walk by all the time and don’t realize they have been around for so long or were such a significant part of the city.
On the Historic Downtown walking tour, I found out that the really tall building on the corner of Monterey and Morro streets used to be the Anderson Hotel, built in 1923. It’s the tallest building ever built in the city and was visited by celebrities such as Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin. And there used to be another theater downtown called the Obispo Theatre where the shopping center on Court Street is — it was destroyed in a fire in 1975.
The tour of the Historic Railroad District tour had some pretty interesting spots too. Newman said the arrival of the railroad was “arguably one of the most important events in this county’s history.” There’s as much history in this area as there is downtown but it doesn’t get as much attention from tourists, and the History Center wants to encourage people to visit, she said.
On Santa Barbara Street, there’s the Tribune-Republic building, the oldest wooden commercial building in SLO, built in 1873. It housed the SLO Tribune, which at that time was known as The Daily Republic. Down the street is The Establishment, one of the city’s oldest hotels which at one point in the 1950s was home to author Jack Kerouac. I love that you can just go out and visit these buildings — it’s still great to hear about historic sites that used to be here, but it’s especially cool when you can still go see them.
The walking tour about the darker side of SLO was definitely the most interesting for me personally — and Newman said it’s the most popular one. Author Dan Buettner came to the History Center to do research about SLO for his 2010 book “Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way,” according to Newman, and they knew that the city was going to be included as one of the happiest places on Earth. The buzz about it was happening at the same time the tour creators were realizing a podcast about the “seedy history” of SLO should be made, she said — it was “great timing” for them and a “chance to have a little fun.”
Get this – apparently there was a significant amount of prostitution in SLO in the late 1800s and well into the 1900s, despite a city ordinance outlawing it. And there used to be a tree between the mission and the building that’s now the History Center called “The Hanging Tree,” where criminals were hung in public in the mid-1800s. Newman said the most ironic thing the creators discovered in making this tour is the areas of the city that used to be centers of prostitution and drug use are now sites for city and county office buildings.
These tours give a deeper understanding of the local history that people might not know about, Newman said, and added that in their busy daily lives, people can miss the significance. The tour about downtown SLO is about ninety minutes, Newman said, but they made the next two shorter, about 45 to 50 minutes long. Overall people have been “so wildly enthusiastic about it,” Newman said.
This is a great way to get out and learn more about the city we love, and I’m sure you’d find something out that would interest or surprise you. I know I did.