Oasis offers fertile ground for downtown visionaries

Public Record, The, Nov 23, 2004 by Kleinschmidt, Janice

Steve Lyle refers to it as "the gem behind Robann's" jewelry store on the west side of Palm Canyon Drive in Patin Springs.

The gem is a 40-foot tower that people seldom notice, despite a plaque in the sidewalk pointing it out, that almost all downtown buildings are only one or two stories and that hourly chiming emanates from the tower.

Steve and Sue Lyle and Lee and Diane Brandenburg plan to restore the historic Oasis Tower to its former glory. It will still be situated behind Robann's, but if the Lyles and Brandenburgs have their way, it will become an attraction.

Lyle, a real estate broker cum developer and investor, has housed his Lyle Commercial offices for 10 the adjacent Oasis Building, built by E. Stewart Williams in 1952. "I always dreamed of owning this building, of having some piece of ownership," he says. Nine months ago, the Lyles and Brandenburgs bought the buildings that surround and include structures built by Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. from 1923 to 1925. Through the purchase, they obtained Wright's drawings.

"We started [planning] the day escrow closed," Lyle says. They invited the Historic Site Preservation Board, Palm Springs Modem Committee, Palm Springs Planning Commission, the downtown development center "and other interested parties" to tour the property and offer ideas what to do with what was originally the Oasis Hotel.

"We created an idea board," Lyle says. They generated a lot of ideas, but it was a tour by Palm Springs City Councilman and architect Chris Mills that resulted in a direction. Mills had long thought the property could be converted to a restaurant. "As soon as Chris said that, the light went on in my head: 'That's it! That's a use that will share the property with the most people,"' Lyle recalls thinking.

"I wish the idea was mine. I always thought we'd just expand the commercial part," says Brandenburg, a San Jose-based developer who has a second home in Palm Springs and is building housing projects here in conjunction with Palm Springs Modern Homes. He has numerous architectural books showing photographs of the early Oasis Hotel and believes opening the passageway takes best advantage of the architecture.

Operated by Palm Springs pioneer Pearl McCallum McManus, the 20-room Oasis Hotel served the carriage trade with small rooms that shared a bathroom. But it also attracted celebrities, including Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Shirley Temple and John Wayne. Its most frequent wellknown guest was Loretta Young, whose favorite room was adjacent to the tower. At some point, the tower became known as the Loretta Young Tower.

Lyle wants to play up the celebrity connection in the future restaurant and has even suggested using the name Loretta's Hideaway for at least the upper level. He's looking for an operator with two concepts, such as the Kaiser Group's twolevel Chop House and The Deck on the east side of Palm Canyon Drive, Or it could have one celebrity-related theme. In either event, the idea is to offer continental, cosmopolitan cuisine that befits the 1940s era when Palm Springs hosted the daring and the darlings of Hollywood's elite crowd.

Architect David Christian - who designed the Chop House/The Deck, The Falls Prime Steakhouse and several other Palm Springs restaurants - has been retained for what is his first historic rehabilitation project.

"When I do a restaurant, I tell myself a story," Christian begins. "In this case. it was that they built a facility in 1923 and it was successful from the time they opened. ... Then in the 1940s when a lot of Hollywood was coming out here.

What if they had taken those two front sections of hotel rooms and converted them to have an upscale restaurant downstairs and a hang-out bar upstairs and that became the place to be?" Christian says he will take his design cue from that imaginary place to bring the era to life. "it is the feel of doing a movie set," he says.

"My intention from the start was to tiptoe around the best parts of the building and try to fit everything else in as innocuously as possible," the architect continues. Noting "nice elements" incorporated by Wright, he says, "I feel a certain amount of responsibility to be careful with this, because we are going to change it. But you don't want to kill the character of when it was first built."

The Lyles and Brandenburgs have obtained conceptual approval from the Historic Site Preservation Committee and permission to proceed with "exploratory demolition" to "get to the bones" of the structure. That work should begin within a week. Then, Christian says, he and the owners will prepare presentations for the city's architectural review committee and planning commission.

Lyle has had the building surveyed to determine what parts are original. Wright employed a slip-form technique considered advanced at the time: Concrete is poured into a form and, after it sets up, the form is raised and the next layer poured until the full height of the wall is achieved. Exterior walls are 18 inches thick and interior walls are 12 inches thick. These elements are noted in the Historic Preservation Board's 1985 recommendation to the city council to designate the Oasis Hotel a historic site (the council signed such a resolution on Feb. 6, 1985).