Tehachapi Festival: Street Food and Streamline Moderne

Tehachapi, California is a city of about 13,000 people at the southern tip of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, between the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. It’s primarily a farming town, and that includes a significant number of fruit orchards, a major crop there.

The town got a major boost when the Santa Fe Railroad line opened in 1876, with a depot for passenger and freight traffic. The depot closed in 1971, but a restoration stands on the original site, and is a railroad museum. Conditions prevented me from photographing the exterior, but here I am in the former freight room with a museum docent.

We went to Tehachapi to see the town’s annual Apple Festival, celebrating one of the area’s most important products. The affair was a classic small town Autumn festival.

Street festivals can be a mixed blessing for towns. They draw visitors in the thousands —  sometimes tens of thousands. Typically only a small portion of the visitors go into local shops; they can’t even see them, obscured by festival booths on the street.

Local restaurants and gas stations may do well enough, but clothing, hardware and other stores don’t get much of a bump.

Here’s Tehachapi’s location, about a 2-1/2 hour drive north of Los Angeles (on a good day).

We were a bit disappointed in the festival, although it was interesting. Only a handful of local fruit growers had a presence, and we’d expected to find tons of apples, fresh from the orchard. The Apple Festival was primarily crafts displays, local organization information booths and typical fair food, not apples.

Why, yes. That’s a hot dog surrounded by a spiral-cut potato and grilled — or maybe deep-fried — accompanied by split hot dogs grilled to look like little octopi. No, that cholesterol disaster is NOT mine. I was happy to simply shoot pictures.

Several times during the day, the town’s railroad heritage showed up in the form of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train rolling through the crossing at the end of Green Street.

We did get a look at Tehachapi beyond the festival scene. The town has a telltale pattern: numerous gaps where buildings obviously once stood, and the architecture even in the oldest parts of town lacks any period style continuity. That’s a hallmark of towns that’ve suffered a disaster of some sort. I think of Roseburg, Oregon, where 30 blocks of the town were leveled or damaged when an explosives truck blew up there in 1959. Hundreds of towns show similar results from flood or fire that destroyed buildings on a large scale. Some were replaced in newer styles inconsistent with the earlier architecture, while others were never rebuilt, particularly if the disaster occurred after a town’s prime growth had occurred.

Tehachapi’s disaster was a 7.5 magnitude earthquake in 1952 that wrecked a considerable portion of town. The walking tour available from the Tehachapi Museum lists several locations as the “former site of” historic structures.

Fortunately, many buildings survived, including three interesting examples of Streamline Moderne architecture from the 1930s. Their cast concrete structures withstood the temblor that shook down many brick and frame buildings. Since I’ve mentioned the museum, I’ll start there.

There’s a southwestern Pueblo-style flair to the 1932 building, which was built as the town’s library.

The interior still shows the configuration it owes to its origin as a library, although it’s difficult to discern details amidst the exhibits that fill the floor space and line the walls. The collection is relatively small but spans a considerable amount of time and a variety of historical themes. There’s a gallery dedicated to the Kawaiisu tribe of Native Americans who occupied the area before European settlers arrived. Worth a look when you’re there. 310 S. Green St.

A contemporary building, from 1932, is the BeeKay Theatre.

Originally a movie house, the building had a checkered history after it stopped showing films in the late 1970s. Then building burned in 1997, leaving the concrete shell, although revealing the Art Deco styling that had been covered for at least a few decades. The city and its community theater group sponsored an ambitious reconstruction, including the recreation of the original marquee and what had been Tehachapi’s first neon sign. It now seats 120 instead of the original 312, and hosts the community theater productions. The interior was apparently never ornate, but is compact and comfortable. Even moderately skilled actors could make themselves heard, unamplified. 108 S. Green St.

We strolled one block west of Green to Curry Street, which shows the wide, unoccupied spaces attributable to the quake. One remaining structure catches the eye immediately.

Thanks to the local Heritage League’s plaque outside, I learned it was also constructed in the early 1930s by the local International Order of Odd Fellows. That recess above the door would certainly once have announced “I.O.O.F.,” a familiar name in towns across America.

I have no other details than that the building’s durability has earned it an impressive list of tenants, including labor hall, dance hall, movie theater, church hall and hotel, to mention only a few. It’s now a shelter operated by a local philanthropy, and I didn’t get a look inside. 112 S. Curry St.

Obviously, Tehachapi was growing in the early ’30s, despite the Depression. It’s interesting that of the three structures above, only the Museum building might have been built with WPA funds. The other two were privately funded. That’s no mean accomplishment in an era when farms were being foreclosed and farming communities suffered as severely as the rest of the nation. Perhaps Tehachapi’s ranchers and farmers did a little better than the norm.

I enjoyed my brief visit to Tehachapi, and look forward to seeing more of the town when the festival isn’t booming. I still need a photo of that depot.

High resolution versions of most photographs in this post, and select images from other Under Western Skies posts are available on Shutterstock.com. Click on the linked photos, or CLICK HERE to view the Underawesternsky photo portfolio.

© Brad Nixon 2018. Special thanks to the friendly, informative conversations with our docent at the Tehachapi Depot Museum, the volunteers of the Tehachapi Heritage League at the Tehachapi Museum and members of the Tehachapi Community Theatre who showed us their fine old playhouse. Map © Google with my emendations.