MEMORIES OF THE PALACE
I was in my late 20's when I moved from Chicago to Mendocino County. I came to the area looking for land while living in my station wagon. I went back and forth from sleeping on the beach in the Mendocino headlands to camping at Lake Mendocino.
One night, I had enough of sleeping in the wagon. I was cold and soaked to the bone and in need of some creature comforts, like a clean bed and a shower so I checked into Ukiah's Palace Hotel. The Palace was long past its heyday of the early 20th century, but the seven dollars it cost to stay there was within my budget.
By the 1970s it was already run down, dark and neglected but still open. The disheveled
desk clerk handed me a key to a room on the second floor. He told me the shared bathroom
at the end of the hall had no shower, but he would be happy to come and stay with me if
I would like his company. He smelled of alcohol and other distinctive smells, so he knew that I would refuse his offer.
My next memory of the Palace was a few years later, when I had to leave my land and find a job at the health-food store around the corner. A renovation of the Palace was taking place. Now it was an OK place to be for lunch or dinner or happy hour.
The Black Bart Saloon was positioned on the north side of the Palace, directly facing my tiny Uptown apartment. A mountain neighbor and officer of the law would stand on the sidewalk and call into my open window and invite me for a drink. With standing room only in the place, I would last for one glass of wine.
I remember that the second and third floor was reserved for former patients of the Talmage State Hospital after it was closed during the Regan Governorship. The manager of the Palace, I think his name was Vince, received the patients' SSI checks in lieu of room and board, such as it was. Locals called it street theater when these residents roamed the town.
One very cold day, a fire broke out on the upper floors of the hotel. The fragile third-floor residents had been evacuated to the streets, in their pajamas and light blankets, while the people dining in the restaurant were being served food and drink as if nothing was amiss.
I moved to the Mendocino mountains for a few more years and when I returned, in 1980, I moved into a house on the West Side and got a job at the Palace.
Another incarnation of the Palace had taken place while I had been living in the hills. This was deemed the renaissance of the Palace.
The second and third floor rooms were lovely suites now, outfitted with fine embossed wallpaper, Tiffany lamps on the bedside tables, luxurious linens on the new mattresses. Each room had a luxury bathroom of its own.
Palace offices were also on the second floor. My title was Banquet Director and office manager. I was also in charge of booking bands for the Back Door, a long narrow room full of young folk listening to the music from blasting speakers that would drive you out of the room.
Every night at 5, along with other staff, I would drop down the steps from our second-floor offices to the bar. For a drink or two. It was the meeting place for working alcoholics, mostly lawyers and judges. Young adults gathered for drinks and conversation and the possibility of partnering up for drunken sex afterwards.
Important weight-bearing walls had been removed to make the grand dining area and bar flow into one another around a fireplace that was not weight-bearing.
I often sat with Joe, the comptroller, who would point out that the bartender had just pocketed money that was supposed to go into the cash register for the drinks purchased by someone at the bar. Joe mentioned that there were too many “hands in the till” and not enough controls in place.
Rose was the daughter or granddaughter of Frank Sandelin, the man who owned the Palace in the early 1900's. Rose, a lovely elderly woman who lived in the Palace permanently and ate all her meals in the restaurant, had many stories to tell and would repeat them every time we talked.
Samantha, the chef, was a dear friend of mine and we worked wonderfully well together. When I booked a catering gig at a local winery, during lunch hour, I went along to help with the heavy lifting and serving. We had lots of success with these catering gigs, and it always involved wine tasting. I distinctly remember not being able to type very well when I returned to my office after such a lunch.
My last memory was of the gigantic robbery of the Palace. In the late evenings, Ed, the owner at the time, would load mattresses, Tiffany lamps and the like into pickup trucks and haul them off into the night.
He stripped the walls bare and sold the bar, the mirrored back bar, the tables, and chairs, the grand piano and all the furniture, everything that wasn't screwed down and some things that were, leaving an eyesore in the middle of town — a set of four adjoining buildings filling a large block of memories.