Go, Greyhound, and leave 18th Street to us
If you’ve spent any significant time, at work or at play, on Bakersfield’s true main street, 18th, you have seen them: solitary souls, faces of grit and exhaustion, towing battered, wheeled suitcases piled high with backpacks and shopping bags and worried Chihuahuas in tiny cages.
They are the Greyhound passengers forced to forgo transitional transportation-for-hire and hoof nine blocks to the regional bus transfer station, or 18 blocks to the Amtrak station, or perhaps even farther to a destination somewhere in the city. Because the 13-hour ride from Yuma wasn’t draining enough already.
Thirty years ago, as they passed the Padre Hotel two blocks east of the bus station, they might encounter Milton “Spartacus” Miller, who might hand them a glass of cool tap water, size them up for one of the crisp, used suit coats he somehow always had at the ready, and tell them one of his own adventures — perhaps involving a Greyhound bus.
And though Spartacus might carry on longer than they might like, they would be reassured because he was,
at his core, one of them.
The trek from station to station is just a little crueler for those travelers now that Spartacus is no longer the embodiment of the Padre Hotel. The boutique hotel has been renovated into the jewel of downtown Bakersfield — and that is in most every way a good thing.
The haggard Greyhound customer must now travel up a street that, were he to walk far enough, holds every hope for a reenergized downtown the city can now or might soon boast. Besides that ebullient hotel-bar, he would pass boutiques, bars and cafes, one after another, in buildings that, in Spartacus’ later years, might have been sewing machine repair shops or just plain empty.
But now, we have news. Everybody-wins news. Or as close to everybody-wins news as we can get here.
The Greyhound bus station at 18th and F streets, built in 1958, is closing. The 21,000 square foot building has been sold for $1.27 million.
The new owners, Church Plaza LLC, say they will knock down the bus station and build in its place a four-story apartment complex of one- and two-bedroom units.
Greyhound is likely to become a co-tenant of the city-owned Amtrak station at Truxtun Avenue near S Street.
The transaction makes sense in two ways:
One, it creates the first and only real intermodal center for human freight in the city. Co-locating Greyhound with Amtrak is eminently logical, and the Golden Empire Transit transfer center, though still several blocks distant, is a short bus ride away.
Two, the proposed apartment building gives another boost to the ongoing effort to strengthen downtown’s residential component. Sage Equities’ 17th Street Townhomes has proved successful enough for the company to move ahead with The Cue, a proposed “luxury market-rate housing” development a short distance to the east. South Mill Creek Village, south of Truxtun, is a hot ticket as well. But there’s a need for much, much more.
Ward 2 Councilman Andrae Gonzales says Greyhound’s move should help energize a section of the city that’s already certain to get additional buzz from Bitwise, a workshare and technology company directly across 18th Street from the Padre. Bitwise, under construction now inside the gutted shell of the old Turk’s Kern Copy, is expected to open next year.
“You want that 24-hour downtown where things are happening at all hours of the day,” Gonzales said. “Not just during the daytime where people are in their offices and coming to work. But also in the evenings and the weekends. You want that energy. You want people roaming the streets. You want people visiting, patronizing the restaurants and bars and cafes and going to the art galleries.”
The Bakersfield city manager’s office had been interested in moving the bus station for at least two years and had been in communication with Greyhound’s corporate office in Dallas. But Church Plaza LLC — which acquired the property in July — never consulted with the city on the purchase, according to company officer Darius Mojibi, who’s working on the project with his father, Majid Mojibi, president of San Joaquin Refining Co.
Greyhound has until the end of the year to move, with extensions possible if needed, Mojibi said. Construction on the apartment building could begin as early as this spring.
Greyhound probably won’t need a lot of space at the Amtrak station — maybe a single staffed window, maybe just a digital kiosk. Greyhound employees told me in March 2018 they used only 30 percent of the old building. On Friday, it looked like they needed even less than that, with two employees on low-stress duty and a single traveler waiting inside the terminal for the 3:30 bus to L.A.
In another era, the Bakersfield Greyhound station was appropriately situated. Amid office machine stores, bicycle shops and pay-by-the week hotels, it fit in as well as anything else. Now, two blocks from downtown’s entertainment hub of restaurants, bars and galleries, it’s out of place.
Spartacus might say that downtown boosters’ long-standing desire to move Greyhound and its less affluent clientele out of the 18th Street corridor, paving the way for more downtown gentrification, smacks of classism. Well, that was Spartacus. He was a lovable guy, but Greyhound’s move is about placing businesses and their customers in locations that make the most sense for those businesses and their customers.