The Establishment - San Luis Obispo

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The Establishment (colloquially called “The Stab”)¹⁰ is a community of 19 individuals who share an old hotel, which has been transformed into apartments, located in the Railroad District across from Gus’s Grocery and Triangle park.

The current Establishment building is at least the second building located on this site.

In 1895, M. T. Brazil purchased the old Call Building, which had been located at 894 Monterey Street.^{7, 8} He hired Forrester to move the building from Monterey Street to the Leff and Santa Barbara site. He renamed the building the “Chicago Hotel.”^{7, 8}Two years later, the building burned down in February 1897.^2,3(This was at least the second hotel Brazil lost to fire--in 1894 he was the proprietor of the Azores Hotel, which was lost to fire⁹)

Brazil built a new structure to replace the destroyed building in the summer of 1897, which he continued to name the Chicago Hotel.¹

In 1899 the hotel was taken charge of by G. N. Zumwalt, and in August 1899 he renamed the hotel as the Park View Hotel.^{4, 5}Over the next decades, the building would serve as a hotel and boarding house.

In the 1940s and 1950s the building was known as the Colonial Hotel.

In the 1960s the policy of only allowing Cal Poly Architecture students was dropped by owner Kurt Kupper and residency was now on the basis of "whoever needed it most."¹⁴
In 1977 it was purchased by Sara McEre, continuing the tradition of communal living that had occurred for at least ten years prior to her purchase.¹³

In Spring, 2022 it was put up for sale by its long-time owners.¹¹ A few months later, a small group including former “stabbies” made a successful offer to buy the property.¹² In 2023 the new owners petitioned the city Cultural Heritage Committee via California’s “Mills Act” to have the property registered a historic building.¹³

Residents

Jack Kerouac lived in the hotel in 1953⁶ while working for Southern Pacific Railroad for a couple of months, paying $6/week for his room.¹⁶ On a later visit, he remembered it as the “old Colonies Hotel of my brakeman days.”¹⁵

Addresses of the building

The address of the building was first listed as 103 Santa Barbara Ave., but by the 1970s the address is listed as 1703 Santa Barbara Avenue in the newspapers.