SLO Council has outlawed disagreement. What would Ken Schwartz say?

From the moment I arrived in San Luis, I realized there was something special about this town. I’d driven through many times on the 101 but never stopped: Gas was too expensive, and I’d didn’t feel the need to see the Madonna Inn.

How wrong I was! Not about the gas but about the town.

I call it San Luis Eclectic, and it’s a glorious textbook in architectural history. It makes us a jewel of the Central Coast.

The late Ken Schwartz, arriving from architecture school at USC to teach at Cal Poly in 1952, realized that. Every year he took his Poly students to tour the history of cutting-edge architecture in LA, but every Sunday he and Martha and the kids explored the architecture and landscapes of San Luis Obispo, ending up at Fosters Freeze.

In 1969 he argued San Luis Obispo was a half-way stop but deserved to be a tourist mecca for our city and its scenery.

Ken gets more credit for Mission Plaza than he deserves, but he gets much less credit for the transformation of the rest of San Luis: undergrounding oil tanks and electrical wires, getting rid of billboards, restoring and reusing gorgeous old buildings, and putting together a robust advisory body system so people in the community are encouraged to have input on preserving the past and designing the future.

This is how it happened, as Ken tells it, in a chapter of his memoir. Fred Waters, the newly elected undertaker mayor of San Luis and representative of the business interests that controlled the city, called Ken out of the blue.

“I was staggered. I had never met the mayor. … He could tell he had surprised me, so he quickly said, ‘The folks at City Hall tell me you have appeared before the Planning Commission and former City Council protesting some rezones. I thought if you have better ideas on land use zoning, you might welcome the opportunity to serve on the commission.’

… I finally asked if I could have a couple of days to consider his offer. ‘Sure, but just remember, if you don’t like things the way they are, you have to put up or shut up.’”

Ken put up. Within three years he was chair of the commission, remaining so for the next five years and leading the city into its first General Plan, promoting sign regulations, Mission Plaza, architectural review and a number of other measures that made him disliked among developers.

They got the City Council to get rid of him in 1967. In 1968, when he saw the council trying to shut up students with a Mission Plaza plan, he decided to run for mayor.

The good folks of SLO don’t like to see independent voices silenced by the powers that be. The powers that be became the powers that were when Ken beat the incumbent and served five terms, bringing a visual renaissance to the city and a blossoming of community input.

A couple of months ago I also offended a developer, whose team came to the Cultural Heritage Committee, which I chair, to remove from landmark protection a wing of one of the most important buildings in town. That would be the castle-style Johnson Block at the corner of Higuera and Chorro, which was sold out of the Johnson family a mere two years ago and is already on the chopping block.

I pointed out the flaws in the application. The CHC voted against it. Now the developer wants not only the Johnson Block on the chopping block, but my head there, too. The council, which has become like a dismal religious cult whose central tenet is priggishness, is eager to oblige.

It turns out the council had passed a policy for advisory committees that says, “The public meeting should not be used to express anger or disagreement.” Guilty as charged. So like a good cult, I was called into a meeting in a windowless room and asked by Councilmember Andy Pease to fall on my sword. But I said I was doing my job under SLO’s Historic Preservation Ordinance and the California Environmental Quality Act, and the council would have to do theirs and fire me. They’ve scheduled my removal for their Tuesday hearing — with appropriate irony right after Independence Day.

We’re back in the pre-Schwartz days of unquestioned and unstoppable developer interests. But you have to put up or shut up, and I’m not going to shut up.

James Papp is co-owner of Historicities LLC and, as of now, is chair of the city of San Luis Obispo’s Cultural Heritage Committee. He writes an occasional column for The Tribune.