What a Shock! How the 1952 Earthquake Reshaped Downtown Tehachapi | News

It was 4:52 a.m. on July 21, 1952, when Tehachapi residents were awakened by a 45-second, 7.5-magnitude earthquake. The quake killed 11 people, eight children and three adults, injured many more, and left about 70 percent of the buildings in the downtown business district destroyed or so badly damaged that they had to be demolished.

Violet Hamilton (now Tibergin) was the telephone operator on duty at the telephone office, which was located in the banquet room area of ​​today's Kelsey's Restaurant. She heard a roar, then felt a vibration, which caused the switchboard to shake back and forth and heard a louder noise as water rushed down the street from the collapsed railroad water tower on the block east of Green Street.

The old telephone system was destroyed, but within four months it was replaced by the Pacific Telephone Company when they built a $125,000 communication system in a small building where the expanded telephone building stands today at the corner of Curry and F Streets.

When the Southern Pacific Railroad reached the Tehachapi Valley in 1876, companies built wooden structures along Railroad Street (now Tehachapi Avenue), giving the appearance of a typical Western frontier town. During the late 1880s and early 1900s, some of these wooden structures were destroyed by fires and replaced with unreinforced brick buildings, which collapsed when the devastating earthquake struck. Some buildings built during the 1930s survived the earthquake, such as the City Hall and an annex that was the original City Hall, the BeeKay Theater, and the Tehachapi Museum and The Family Life Pregnancy Center. Some buildings survived the earthquake but needed repair.

A year after the earthquake, new modern architecture appeared in downtown Tehachapi with the construction of reinforced concrete buildings. Businessmen Vaughn Squires, Lou Kansten, Frank Baumgart, and Al Lang built new buildings on both sides of Greene Street and F Street, and a new Masonic Temple was built by the Mojave Company. Only a few businesses needed to repair damaged buildings, such as the Gus Cotrolis store and the buildings on West J Street.

The Tehachapi Valley Hospital was a total loss; however, no lives were lost there, as all patients were safely transported. The story goes that a nurse had just taken the babies from the nursery to their mothers when the earthquake struck and would have been killed by a falling wall had she been in the nursery. The two-story building, a former boarding house, was purchased by Drs. Harold and Madge Schlottauer in March 1934.

After the earthquake, construction began on a new medical building on the same site as the old hospital where outpatient care was provided only and a house two doors east was used as a hospital until they opened a hospital in Mojave which was used until the new Tehachapi Valley Hospital was built on the same site as the old hospital on E Street. Groundbreaking was held on May 16, 1956 and the first patients were admitted on April 8, 1957. The Schlothauers continued to operate their private medical practice and hospital, employing other physicians to work for them until the late 1960s. On January 1, 1969, the Tehachapi Valley Hospital District purchased the 28-bed facility.

A year after the earthquake, the face of downtown Tehachapi had changed. As one Tehachapi resident put it: “The old hotels were gone, replaced by motels and inns, restaurants by guest houses, and separate dry goods stores, meat markets and pharmacies by supermarkets and drug stores. Not only was the familiar structure gone, but so was the old slow pace of life.”

Yes, an era has come to an end and downtown Tehachapi has a new look.

Those killed were: Blanche Quintana, 36, and four of her nine children: Nicholas, 16, Gloria, 13, Joseph, 11, and Robert, 5; the children of Louis Martin, the owner of the furniture store where they lived in the back, Mary Ann, 12, Lucille, 10, and Linda, 4; a friend, Marilyn Taylor, 13, who was staying with the Martins; Walter Nolen, 55, who was spending the night in a hotel; Florence Ann Fillmore, 16, of Los Angeles, who was visiting her sister in Bright Valley and was sleeping in a small brick building that collapsed.

Del Troy lives in Tehachapi and is known as a community historian.

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