Woolworth’s building in San Bernardino seems to have survived fire

Lynn Merrill was eating lunch on a bench outside San Bernardino City Hall on a warm Monday last month when a fire engine raced by. With alarm, Merrill saw a plume of smoke rising only two blocks away.

“I hope it’s not the Woolworth building,” Merrill, the city’s director of public works, thought as he hurried across Court Street Square on foot.

On the southwest corner of Fourth and E streets, smoke and flames were pouring from the structure’s roof and second-story windows.

It was the Woolworth building.

Merrill snapped photos on his phone as 15 engines and three trucks fought the blaze on Feb. 9, then watched from the opposite corner.

“I stood over there,” he recalled last Wednesday outside the old Woolworth’s, “and almost cried, thinking we’d lost another San Bernardino building.”

The roof collapsed, as did the second story. From the rooftop deck of the adjacent parking structure, you can see down to the building’s first floor, where charred rubble has stacked up. More than two weeks later, the smell of smoke lingered.

The building is a shell, but the walls are intact, the original interior trusses continuing to hold them in place. With the building seemingly posing no danger, caution tape was removed from the sidewalk, allowing pedestrians to pass freely.

The Woolworth building, like Elton John, is still standing.

“They don’t build them like this anymore,” Merrill said with a chuckle. “All these trusses and walls are solid concrete.”

The defiant civic motto San Bernardino Strong may apply to the Woolworth building too.

Can it be saved? Should it be saved? What would that cost? Those are questions for another day.

A big fire in a historic, city-owned building, long vacant, is a sad state of affairs. San Bernardino, population 222,000, is the poorest city of its size in California.

“It’s been an ongoing effort to try to keep people out of there,” Merrill admitted. “This has been one of the more popular places for people to find refuge.”

Tilden-Coil Constructors of Riverside toured the building in January to look at how it might be renovated. Also explored was how to “armor” any opening with steel plating in the meantime. That’s been done at the nearby Harris’ building, another vacant, city-owned classic.

“We were looking at (doing) that when the fire broke out,” Merrill said.

Established as a Mormon colony in 1851, San Bernardino’s stock of historic buildings is surprisingly modest. In the 1960s and ’70s, at the height of urban renewal, the city had few qualms about wiping blocks clean of old buildings to make way for a modern downtown.

Among the major buildings that were demolished: the 1904 Carnegie Library (in 1957), the 1909 Katz building (in 1969), the 1923 Municipal Auditorium (in 1979), the 1927 California Hotel (in 1985) and the 1925 Platt Building (in 1993).

While any city can lament the loss of architectural gems that were deemed old and in the way, San Bernardino apparently had a particular zeal for demolition. That was recounted in a 1988 Sun story by Cassie MacDuff about the city’s remaining stock of vintage structures.

“There’s not much left to preserve,” Jim Penman, then the city attorney, told MacDuff.

“San Bernardino kind of prides itself on being different,” a former city planner, Ron Running, said in the same 1988 story. “When I was active in the Chamber of Commerce, they thought, ‘Riverside can have its old downtown. San Bernardino will have a brand new downtown.’”

This underscores the importance of the buildings that remain. One of them is the former Woolworth’s.

Built in the Streamline Moderne style, this Woolworth’s replaced a smaller store at 520 Third St. that had been in business since 1912. Woolworth’s, for any latecomers, was a pioneering New York-based national retailer founded in 1879.

Four times larger than the previous store, the new Woolworth’s opened Nov. 13, 1941. The store boasted 150 feet of frontage on Fourth and 100 feet on E.

The Sun described it as an “attractive modernistic building” and “one of the finest units of the merchandising chain in California.” Employing 95, the store had two stories plus a full basement with a kitchen to serve the main floor’s lunch and soda fountain via dumbwaiters.

That counter must have been a sight to behold. “100-Foot Fountain Installed” was the Sun headline over a photo of a row of stools stretching into the distance.

Woolworth’s remained dominant for decades. A 1960s postcard image of downtown San Bernardino looks south along E Street from Woolworth’s. In the Huntington Library’s archives is a circa 1961 photo of dozens of shoppers crossing the intersection on foot, a relic of Main Street America.

Malls with acres of parking soon lured shoppers away from downtowns. San Bernardino’s Inland Center Mall opened in 1966. In 1972 came Central City Mall, erected in the heart of downtown — after, naturally, several square blocks had been razed.

Woolworth’s opened a store in the mall on Oct. 9, 1972. For a few years, both stores operated.

The original store closed Jan. 31, 1977, despite a 49-year lease that had another 16 years to run. Most customers had shifted to the mall store. That store lasted until January 1994. The entire Woolworth chain expired in 1997, eclipsed by Target and Walmart.

The Fourth and E building went through a variety of uses after 1977, including as offices for San Bernardino County government departments. City Hall took possession in 2006. It’s unclear when the building was last occupied.

A structural assessment is underway, and proposals are being sought for clearing out the debris and for, if necessary, demolition.

As we stood on the corner, Merrill pointed up at the line of palm trees along E Street. The palms had caught fire too. While the trunks are scorched, the trees survived. At the top, some fronds are brown. Others are green.

Said Merrill with delight: “You can see from the crowns, we have new fronds coming out of the center.”

Perhaps the Woolworth’s building can renew itself too.

brIEfly

On Wednesday morning at Alice’s Restaurant in San Bernardino, a server was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an Amazon-style review: “People: One star. The worst. Would not recommend.” Her sense of humor gets five stars.

David Allen writes three-star columns Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.