February 16, 2016 – An exciting project that aims to convert the historic Cooper-Molera adobe complex into a vibrant corner of downtown Monterey signed up its first tenant today. Events by Classic will operate the events portion of the new shared use site— hosting weddings, receptions and other special events in the enormous redwood barn at the back of the property.
Operators of a restaurant to be located in the Spear Warehouse and a bakery-café in the Díaz Market building have yet to be named.
Developer Doug Wiele of Foothill Partners, who has been planning the complex for six years, was in Monterey today meeting with officials from the Washington DC-based National Trust for Historic Preservation to advance the two-acre project.
Foothill is investing $6.5 million to restore the buildings, work that includes bringing the barn up to code, rebuilding the bathrooms, refurbishing the historic garden and adding a 700 sq ft kitchen for the restaurant.
Under terms of the agreement, the actual Cooper-Molera house will remain a history museum. The popular Los Niños classes—a hands-on history program for third and fourth grade students—will continue and the gardens will be opened to the public at no charge.
“I have a real passion for this project, it’s a labor of love,” says Wiele. “For how beautiful and historic the property is, few people have ever been inside.”
“It used to have businesses and horse stables and shouldn’t be sealed off behind velvet ropes,” he maintains. “Opening the gates will return it to the fabric of downtown.”
Foothill, which also restored and developed the mission-style Peets Coffee and Trader Joe’s next door to the adobe complex, will supervise a couple of months of archeological work this spring and hopes to break ground in June or July.
Frances Molera left the adobe complex to the National Trust in 1973, but without an endowment to support it. The National Parks service stepped up to run it in the 1980s and now finds itself short of the funds needed to keep it up.
The shared-use concept is new to the National Trust and the Cooper-Molera adobe is one of the first places in the country to test it. “This is their poster child,” says Wiele. “We are re-introducing commercial uses in order to put a fiscal foundation under their historic preservation.”
After getting the National Trust onboard, Wiele spent two years working on the project with the local Historic Preservation Committee and won final city approval in 2015. “You have to be patient and you have to be long-suffering and you have to be deliberate,” he says.
Read more about Monterey’s historic adobes, in John Cox’s article The Future of the Past in the winter issue of EMB. Click here…
About the author
Deborah Luhrman is publisher and editor of Edible Monterey Bay. A lifelong journalist, she has reported from around the globe, but now prefers covering our flourishing local food scene and growing her own vegetables in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
