‘Rispin Mansion’ remains unnamed
CAPITOLA >> A study designed to determine if one of Capitola’s historic figures was racist or not proved inconclusive, leaving city leaders hanging on a key decision Thursday night.
In a discussion stretching nearly 16 minutes, the Capitola City Council voted unanimously Thursday night to sidestep naming an under-development Wharf Road community park surrounding the decaying historic “Rispin Mansion,” which has been city-owned since 1985.
Community energy around the discussion appeared to fizzle Thursday, with no public speakers stepping forward. Controversy in recent months has swirled around the mansion’s namesake, early 20th-century developer Henry Allen Rispin. In February, the council voted to submit a grant application to California State Parks to fund the park’s development plans, simultaneously ordering research into Rispin’s history, in response to public concerns. The Spanish colonial-style Rispin Mansion itself and 6.5 acres of surrounding land were listed as a district on the National Register of Historic Places on March 14, 1991, due to the property’s association with Rispin.
City Councilmember Kristin Petersen urged her peers to wait to take up the naming of the park until after pending park grounds and garden development, an estimated $825,000 project, was complete.
“Based on the staff report and what we just heard, it seems pretty clear to me that we are not in any rush to name this,” Petersen said. “There’s no urgency around it. We’re not required to name it all, ever. But at this point, I don’t see the necessity in determining if we will name or what we will name it at tonight’s meeting.”
Several council members endorsed the idea of letting community members, or even children, involved with naming the park.
“The one thing I want to address is what the concern was about Mr. Rispin,” said Mayor Yvette Brooks, who initially requested the Rispin investigation. “Today’s information does not show or prove in one way or another who Mr. Rispin was or what he believed in and it’s not up to me to make that call or be able to, just off of that information, assume anything about that individual. But what I do know is that there is most certainly some incredible people in our community today who I think we could name that park after.”
Historically racist policies
In a report Thursday by Capitola Museum curator and city historian Frank Perry, allegations of Rispin’s inclusion of “whites only” property deed covenants restricting who could purchase parcels in the 1920s were a particular focus. Those covenants now are legally unenforceable.
Perry’s report highlights looked at a Riverview Drive property deed, dated July 1926.
“On page 2 it says: ‘... said real property, or any portion thereof, shall not be sold, transferred, leased, rented or mortgaged to any person or persons other than of the Caucasian race, and no person or persons other than of the Caucasian race shall occupy or use or be permitted to occupy or use said property or any portion thereof, except as the servant of the occupant thereof; and that the sale, or delivery incidental to sale, of vinous malt or spiritous liquors shall not be made upon said property or any portion thereof,” Perry’s report states.
Assistant to the City Manager Larry Laurent initially suggested to the council that it need not name the park at all. He also told the council that Perry’s research turned up few documents conveying Rispin’s opinions, let alone on race. He added that racial covenants in deeds were, unfortunately, commonplace nationally during that era, not being ruled unconstitutional until 1948.
Perry provided the council with three potential scenarios: that Rispin himself included the racial covenants in the deeds; that a lending institution required that language and that Rispin agreed with it; or that a lending institution required that language and that Rispin disagreed with it but had no choice in the matter.
“Mr. Perry does not believe it is very likely that he wasn’t aware. He’s pretty sure that he was aware of it, (Rispin) being a businessman,” Laurent told the council. “The deeds at that time were not at the same level as the documents we go through, so he had most