Catacombs at Mission Inn are stuff of Riverside legend
A catacomb is, by definition, an underground chamber used as a burial place. Some are centuries or even millennia old.
The most famous are in Rome. In Paris, one atmospheric entry sign reads, when translated into English: “Stop! This is the empire of Death.”
So when a docent at the Mission Inn, Riverside’s grand downtown hotel, told me lightly last month that among the most-asked questions by tourists is “can we go in the catacombs?” I chuckled, as did he.
I was amused because the No. 1 question from visitors is this: “Was the Mission Inn a real mission?” Come on, people. It’s always been a hotel. Built from 1902 to 1931, it’s not even the oldest building in Riverside. Probably a handful of Riversiders are old enough to remember when construction was still going on.
Thus, after quoting the question about catacombs, I wrote simply, “There are none.”
I return to this topic today to correct my admittedly hasty answer.
Because while the Mission Inn obviously doesn’t have catacombs in the traditional sense, it turns out the hotel did tout some of its basement walkways as catacombs.
“The Mission Inn may say that there are no catacombs,” reader Jack Regus tells me via email, “but that is what the area was called decades ago when tours of them were offered.” Upland reader Tammy Woodman provides more detail. Circa 1950, she was in the gift shop with her mother when they remarked on a sign pointing to “The Catacombs.” A clerk offered to show them. This was over the trepidation of the teenager.
“I thought ‘catacombs’ meant dead bodies and bones and stuff,” recalls Woodman, who knows her Funk & Wagnall’s.
She and her mother descended into the darkness. Her primary memory is of a room like a cell, set up “as you might see in a mission,” containing a bed with a straw mattress and a table with a bowl on it.
Where were these alleged catacombs? Besides underground, I mean.
The hotel’s second phase, built in 1910-11, is the Cloister Wing, the inn’s northeast section at Sixth and Orange streets. I was there in May to see a silent movie, “Blood and Sand,” hosted by the Friends of the Mission
Inn, in the wing’s Grand Parisian Ballroom.
“Some of the closed arches on the east side of the room,” notes the 1998 book “Historic Mission Inn,” “originally opened into the Cloister Walk, more popularly known as the Catacombs.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
“The original name for the subterranean tunnels at the Mission Inn was the Cloister Walk, because they originated in the Cloister Wing,” explains Steve Lech, the docent training coordinator for the Mission Inn Foundation and co-author of this newspaper’s Back in the Day columns.
The tunnels showed off small displays for some of Frank Miller’s “stuff,” as the hotelier impishly called his collections.
According to the book, these included paintings, sculptures, niches that held statues of Catholic saints, Native American basketry and textiles, and a small room housing “lifelike wax figures of Pope Pius X and his 13 attendants.”
Creepy.
The rooms “were designed to resemble the El Camino Real during Mission Days,” says Barbara Burns, an author and former docent training coordinator. “There were rooms dedicated to missions San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Carmel and San Francisco.”
Burns adds: “I can’t tell you how many guests have told me of their memories of exploring the catacombs over the years.”
By email, Lech tells me the tunnels must have reminded visitors of catacombs they’d seen in Europe and that the term caught on.
“You are correct, though — they are not real catacombs with dead bodies, etc.,” Lech writes. (I’ll consider that partial vindication.) “It was really a way for Miller to offer an on-site walkway for his guests.”
Riverside Community College’s Viewpoints newspaper featured the tunnels in 2007 in a story by the aptly named Michael Diggin. He wrote that concrete ceilings of some sections were textured to resemble wood panels and that light and sound from the streets could be perceived through the highest windows and grates.
The tunnels were closed in 1985, and the art objects relocated, after renovations to the Mission Inn were said to have made them unsafe to visit.
There were tours on special occasions after that. Photos from 2008 and ’09 tours accompany this column. But the tunnels are now blocked off. “The fire department has declared them off-limits to the public,” Burns, who led that tour, tells me. “There’s only one way in or out.”
And the tunnels, despite popular fascination, don’t stray off the property, according to Burns and Lech. Some folks have far-fetched ideas that a tunnel runs from the hotel to the top of Mount Rubidoux and to other distant points like the courthouse and UC Riverside. It’s as if Riverside were developed by moles.
So, for anyone who recalls touring the area known as the Catacombs, I apologize for my quick dismissal. But I decline to use the term myself without qualifying it.
For one thing, “catacombs” is an awfully medieval-sounding word for a complex built in the 20th century. And they don’t meet the dictionary definition: “any of a series of vaults or galleries in an underground burial place.”
In other words, if you want to know where the bodies are buried in Riverside, it ain’t the Mission Inn’s catacombs. Try Evergreen Cemetery.
Briefly
In Palm Springs, a statue of Frank Bogert on horseback stood outside City Hall since 1990. That is, until recent attention on the former mayor’s role in the displacement of hundreds of low-income residents in the 1960s led to calls for the statue’s removal. That was fought in court by Bogert supporters. Finally, on Wednesday, nearly two years of drama ended when the statue was hauled away in 35 minutes. For the immediate future, Bogert will sit astride his horse out of public view at the city maintenance yard.