The Stone House: Icon of Santa Rosa's history

Our Sonoma Highway landmark is beginning a new life. One more time.

In this rebirth it will become the new home of Athena House, a substance abuse treatment center for women. Athena House's parent organization is the California Human Development Corporation, a nonprofit with a long history of good works in the community.

CHDC's purchase and refit of The Stone House is made possible (as they like to say on PBS) by a pair of $85,000 grants, one from donors to the Community Foundation and the other from the Henry Trione Foundation (another star in the crown of this man who has given so much).

This news comes with questions - not about the use, but about the building itself. There are "new" people who pass it every day who don't know its history and, there are those who once knew, maybe, but the years have passed and the stories have been forgotten.

So it's OK to say that if the walls could talk, what stories they would tell.

early stories have a distinctly Italian accent.

An immigrant stone mason from Tuscany built the original building in 1909, put out a sign that said "Rincon Hotel, M. Galeazzi prop." and rented rooms (meals included) to the single men who had come to work in the stone quarries in the hills above the Sonoma, Petaluma and Rincon valleys that constituted a booming business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There were other boarding houses that catered to these new Americans - four of them clustered around the railroad depot at the foot of Santa Rosa's Fourth Street, others were near the train stations at Melitta, Annadel and Kenwood. But Massimo Galeazzi's Rincon Hotel (and tavern and grocery store) was the largest - seldom, if ever, without at least 25 boarders. These were young men, recent arrivals, saving their money to bring their wives and sweethearts and get a little plot of land where they could farm and grow grapes.

Many were from the Massa-Carrara region of Tuscany where generations had learned the quarrying craft in the marble pits that had been worked even before Michelangelo came to choose the right block for his "David."

Quarrying and cutting stone for paving blocks to sell for San Francisco's and Oakland's streets seemed the logical start for them in their new home.

his hotel from the basalt blocks they quarried. (We insist on calling the stone basalt, despite cautions from geologists that it is actually a stone known as gray trachyte.)

The first floor was the hotel dining room, tavern and grocery store. The second floor, originally, was wood. But fire destroyed that in 1912 and "M. Galeazzi, prop." built a new second floor of stone, with an archway leading into a courtyard, marked with his trademark white stone and the date, 1912.

While his wife fed the blockmakers, Galeazzi was teamed with three other Tuscan masons - Peter Maroni, Natale Forni and Angelo Sodini - to construct the many distinctive stone buildings that have survived earthquakes and the passage of time to become our historic landmarks.

These include Santa Rosa's railroad depot, St. Rose Church, the Railway Express building (now A'Roma Roasters), La Rose Hotel, the Western Hotel (The Flying Goat and many more businesses), the Hop Kiln Winery near Healdsburg and the ruins of Jack London's magnificent Wolf House, which was destroyed by fire before it was occupied.

the beginning for the building that came to be known as The Stone House.

By the 1920s the quarries had grown quiet. The automobile brought the end, their delicate suspension systems unable to take the bumpy ride over the hard stones.

The early Italian immigrants had settled in. The new arrivals were finding their first jobs at the Del Monte Cannery along the railroad tracks.

And Prohibition was the law of the land, a 14-year adventure that some would suggest opened new avenues to revenue for tavern owners.

We cannot paint Massimo Galeazzi with the lawbreaker's brush, although deputies raided The Stone House and the sheriff described it as a "well-known resort" (resort being the buzzword of the times for speakeasy).

What raiding deputies and federal agents found when they raided the place, according to a Press Democrat story in May of 1923, were customers "of the social elite of Santa Rosa."

But no liquor.

The sheriff suggested it had been poured down the sink as the lawmen arrived.

Knowing how things went around here in those years, it seems more likely that they knew the law was on its way long before the raid took place.

So nobody went to jail and it is entirely possible that business-as-usual continued.

Then, in 1929, Galeazzi leased the building for five years to a Dr. J.G. Shepard who had developed a new technique for treating tuberculosis. Into the 1930s, the building served as a sanitarium.

Then came the 1940s and Mary and Frank Buffi. The Buffis came from a successful tavern in Healdsburg to open a restaurant, keeping the name Stone House. In the World War II years and beyond, the restaurant disappeared, the bar business boomed, and the name was changed to The Tropics.

Massimo Galeazzi died in 1957, just before his old hotel became the last watering hole for the legendary Clayt Williams who had sold his creekside tavern at Fourth and Farmers Lane, where cowboys rode their horses to the bar and patrons shot water rats out the rear windows to see who bought the next round.

came years that still get talked about when old-timers gather to remember sowing their wild oats.

New lessees brought '60s music and '60s attitudes, and young women - first known as "go-go dancers," later taking advantage of the "new morality" to go topless - with or without a snake.

The new name, in those years, was The Peppermint Lounge. But everyone over 30 (who couldn't be trusted, of course) still knew it as The Stone House.

Retired Santa Rosa Police Commander Rod Sverko sets the scene for us with a memory of a theft call when he was a young patrolman in the 1960s.

"When I entered," Sverko said, "the first thing I saw was the snake in a container near the front door. Then to my amazement, I saw nude female dancers on the bar. I remember how embarrassed I was to have to go into the bar to take a report. It was a long time ago."

to sit empty for a long time after that - with a brief resurrection for a restaurant owned by a trio of well-known barkeeps. Bobby Mezzanato, Hank Lacabanne and Frank Giannini kept the Stone House name but the business was short-lived and from 1972 to 1982 the landmark sat empty and forlorn, through a succession of owners.

Then began the next wild ride. In 1982, Sid Shah, the moving force behind Centennial Savings, bought the building and, with his Dutch partner Niek Sandmann, spent more than $1 million restoring and redecorating for a lavish office headquarters.

When it was completed in '84, there were benefit tours of the building for charity and visitors came out gasping at the elegance - the fine polished wood trim, the expensive gold fixtures. There were tales of French chefs on the payroll and other corporate wonders.

Then Centennial fell apart. And if you don't know that whole story, you could look it up in a fine book called "Inside Job" by Steve Pizzo and former PD reporter Mary Fricker. It is a cautionary tale that doesn't get retold often enough.

Centennial, in its last-gasp years, sold the building at a loss and, in 1990 it became a real estate office. In 1993 (are you still with me?), there was a proposal by a new owner named James Grill to convert it to medical offices and a surgery center. If that ever opened, I missed it.

The Stonehouse Inn, a B&B, was the last incarnation. In 2003 it was purchased by Beverley and Tommy Kennedy and partner Patrick O'Donnell who reconfigured the fancy interior and planned for expansion into cottages.

But the Kennedys divorced and the inn closed and, again, Galeazzi's stone building stood empty.

Chris Page of the CHDC said they found it as if the last guest had just walked out. They wouldn't have been surprised, he said, "to find mints on the pillows .

.

. or milk in the refrigerator." So, another metamorphosis is under way.Athena House, now serving 28 women in rented quarters in the junior college neighborhood, will accommodate 40 by December, when - with good weather and good luck - there will be life in the old hotel.

So, another metamorphosis is under way.

Athena House, now serving 28 women in rented quarters in the junior college neighborhood, will accommodate 40 by December, when - with good weather and good luck - there will be life in the old hotel.