Pandemic improvements come to Hearst Castle
California’s most famous mansion adapts to COVID-19
SAN SIMEON, Calif. — One recent morning, a dozen Barbary sheep started to shamble across the main road to Hearst Castle, then stopped in the middle.
And why not? They hadn’t seen a loaded tour bus on that road since March.
As California wages a seesaw battle against the coronavirus, the castle’s keepers confront the challenge of reopening a historic site that depends on bus transportation and has no air filtration system. Nobody is sure when California’s most famous mansion will reopen, including Dan Falat, superintendent of the California State Parks district that includes the castle.
The castle stands about 230 miles northwest of Los Angeles, halfway to San Francisco, a location that helped, until now, make it a prime tourist attraction for decades.
At its Roman Pool, where 1,800 tourists per day no longer pass by, the freshly scrubbed tiles have never looked bluer. In most of the compound’s 165 artifact-filled rooms, there’s less dust than usual — because, as curator Toby Selyem explained, there aren’t visitors shedding dead skin as they shuffle past.
The castle’s museum director, Mary Levkoff, retired in July with no successor named so far.
Another awkward detail about the castle: “We happen to be in the middle of our 100th anniversary right now,” said Falat, sounding like a groom whose bride has run off with the caterer. “We were actually getting ready to kick it off in April.”
But like millions of other homeowners who have been filling their pandemic days with long-postponed household projects, the team on the Hearst Castle hilltop has a long list of chores.
Workers are trying to revive and clone an ailing oak tree, to replace rusted iron with stainless steel wherever possible, to power-wash tiles, to pluck ash from pool filters.
They’re also trying to calculate how many COVID-era tourists can safely fit on a 54-seat bus — perhaps 13? maybe 27? — and how many can stand in the grand Assembly Room where publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst once rubbed shoulders with Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and Harpo Marx.
Others are building new web content, placing plexi
glass partitions at visitor center ticket windows and attacking projects that would be difficult or impossible with tourists underfoot.
The traditional museum challenge of balancing preservation and access is now a three-way endeavor: preservation versus access versus public health. (So
far, none of Hearst Castle’s more than 100 employees has been laid off, Falat said, and fewer than five have tested positive for the coronavirus.)
The castle is really a 127-acre compound of buildings dominated by Casa Grande, the principal residence, whose exterior resembles a cathedral
that’s been smuggled out of southern Europe. Clustered around it are three guest houses; two pools; extensive gardens; and tennis courts, all surrounded by the blond hills and stately oaks of the 80,000-acre Hearst Ranch, still owned by Hearst Corp.
The visitor center is just off the highway. In normal times, 16 tour buses roll up and down the steep, 7-mile road between the visitor center and the castle complex, with two departures every 10 minutes in peak hours.
Now the buses sit idle at the bottom of the hill while the sheep, which prefer the high country, cross the road at will.
The animals, a North African species known as an aoudad, are descended from early occupants of Hearst’s private zoo. The same goes for the zebra, elk and several other species that roam the ranch lands.
Since the pandemic,
“you definitely see them a little bit more now in the road,” Falat said. “They have a little bit more carte blanche.”
At the Roman Pool — the spectacularly tiled indoor space that is the last stop on most tours — workers have partially drained the water, pressure-washed areas that hadn’t been cleaned since the 1980s, replastered here and there, repaired glass mosaic tiles and set about replacing rusty iron railing with stainless steel sleeves.
The room’s eroded cork ceiling tiles still need repairing and resealing, a tricky job because the tennis courts are just above. But the blue room, dusted with gold leafing and empty of visitors, shimmers like a mirage.
Outside at the larger Neptune Pool, where marble statues are gathered like a weekend retreat of Greek and Roman gods, it’s been two years since workers finished a fouryear leak-sealing project. But the nearby Dolan wildfire in September sent so much ash into the air (and then into the pool water) that workers had to double or triple their scheduled cleanings of the filter system.
Getting the castle open again “really boils down to the movement of people,” Falat said.
As soon as state and county officials are satisfied that the pandemic is under control and new procedures are safe enough,
Falat said, he’ll swing open those gates and resume the centennial celebration.
Still, it’s possible some of the castle keepers will look back wistfully upon these days.
“It’s easier without people,” whispered museum technician
Nicole Caldwell, tongue in cheek. “I can make sassy comments while I’m cleaning the marble nudes.”