PALACE HOTEL: ART IN THE OTIS
With two years of college completed, one year at Bradford College in Massachusetts studying art and one year at Sonoma State in general studies, Catherine Woskow was living at Cave Creek Ranch on the ridge between Potter and Redwood Valley and heard Pat Kuleto was looking for artists.
It was summer, 1979. The Palace Bar & Grill had opened in August, 1978; the Back Door in July, 1979 and the hotel would be open in September.
Woskow heard about the news from a friend who was painting decorative flower designs on the metal furniture in the bedrooms.
Eager for work, she contacted Mimi Mccarthy, Pat's assistant, and made an appointment. After sitting down with Pat and showing him her portfolio, he told her what he had in mind.
“Then he sat back, like he liked to do, and smoked some grass — to get ideas.”
He brought her to the elevator, the old classic Otis — something they were very proud of— and asked her to start on the interior, with a Native theme.
Woskow found Bob and Lila Lee. “I told Bob what I was looking for and he was so kind and generous with his time, so happy that someone would be using his work.”
After many hours of perusing his photos, they came up with the ones she would use for her source material.
Initially, the elevator was not working, stuck on the main floor, and she was subject to a lot of distraction from the other workers — chatting, commenting — some of whom were a bit rough in demeanor.
“I couldn't focus, couldn't work because of their comments.”
Then the Otis repairman showed up, got the elevator working, and she took it up to the third floor, shut the metal gate and went to work, happily, with minimum distraction.
“The paintings inside the elevator are mixed media; rice paper was applied as a surface, then acrylic. I went with a brown monotone, working with one color in a variety of hues, because acrylic can look plasticky.”
The right side of the back panel depicts a Pomo woman with a basket and the left side a Pomo man with a drill. The side walls are decorated with Pomo baskets and on the bottom, a rim of basket weave, a border, connects all four panels.
She painted the great blue herons, native to the area, front and center on the outside of the elevator doors.
She also created a spectacular wall size map of Northern California on the second floor and included her little house in the mountains.
“Nobody knows about that map because it was one of the first things that left the Palace, perhaps sold, when that started happening. Everybody wanted it. The only reason the elevator stuff is still there is obvious but things were being taken right and left.”
She liked Kuleto, liked working there and liked the people around her.
With wages as low as they
were — for pretty much everyone — she went to Kuleto's office and knocked on his door.
“I had a very distinctive knock and he knew it was me. I said, `you know, Pat, I'm not making a lot of money and I know they make really good sandwiches at the Back Door. How about you buy me lunch…every day.' He balked at first but gave in.”
Then she created the big oval mural for the brick wall across from the bar in the Back Door. It was carved out of a 4' by 8' piece of plywood, a scene from her place in the mountains looking down on Ukiah.
That disappeared, as well, of course.
“So, at this point I had been going back and forth regularly from my place in the hills, 45 minutes each way, and I asked for my own space.”
He gave her a room for a studio, a dumpy, unfinished room, all that she needed.
At the end of the day, the carpenters locked each floor and one evening, while she was working in her studio, she realized she was locked in.
“I went onto the thirdfloor fire escape and stood there but no one noticed; people never look up. Finally, I yelled and someone heard me and they came up and let me out.”
She would occasionally go to the Back Door to see such greats as Charlie Musselwhite and would stay the night in the hotel.
“It was a cool scene, like a little club in Boston, what with the brickwork and all.”
It was Ralph Penta who told her not to stay overnight when it was raining.
“Ralph was a good guy; if you needed something, you'd just ask him and he'd get it done.”
He warned her that on rainy nights the big planter boxes on the roof garden would fill with water and there was a good chance the roof would collapse.
“No one believed that the building could hold.”
Finished with her projects at the Palace, with the fall coming on, Woskow flew to the Netherlands to continue her studies in art.