Three Building Centenaries: Security Building, Ike Box, Crystal Gardens

Some of the lesser buildings downtown are celebrating 100th anniversaries this year, two of them even this week. I'm not sure there's any great significance to squeeze from them, they're just very ordinary buildings, so here are some scattered notes.

Hughes Building today aka "Security Building,"
(Legacy Real Estate)

The building today known as the "Security Building" was first known as the Hughes Building. On its second floor the New Salem Hotel opened the first week in December of 1924. It was on the site of a cluster of wood-framed buildings representing a later phase for our "Chinatown" and represents some level of displacement and gentrification. Additionally, in 1924 it was adjacent to the Oregon Electric Depot, whose tracks ran up High Street at this time. But it was a little late to take full advantage of the proximity to rail!

December 9th, 1924

Frank Bligh owned the hotel, and his father T. G. Bligh had died a month earlier in a crash near Grand Ronde on the way back from the coast, where Bligh was building a summer cottage. (Blighs highlighted in yellow on the clips.)

November 3rd, 1924

Bligh is associated with the Bligh Building on Court and Liberty, now the florists shop; the lot for another Bligh Building on State and High, from which Epilogue is leaving soon, and which son Frank completed; and the now lost Bligh Hotel and theater, which is today a parking lot next to the McGilchrist block.

Jarman House plan, Gaiety Hill (1929)

March 3rd and March 7th, 1929

The Hughes family was long in Salem, and at one time their house was central to the social life of Gaiety Hill. It stood where the Jarman house is today. The garden and grounds for the Jarman House was the first major (maybe the first altogether) commission won by Lord & Schryver.

April 25th, 1903

Lulu Hughes married A. N. Bush, and there is a close connection with the Bush family also. (See "The Ladies of Salem's Bush Family" in Historic Marion for more on Lulu.)

The home of the Ike Box, the former Rigdon Mortuary, is also celebrating its 100th.

December 2nd, 1924

Rigdon was a poet, and also complicated. See:

• "Responding to Centralia Riot, W. T. Rigdon Pens Poem urging Purge" (2019)
• "Undertaker Rigdon was Complicated and Celebrated a Reactionary Politics" (2022)
  

And though the swimming pool didn't open until the summer of 1925, the Klett Building, now mainly known as the former Crystal Gardens Ballroom, was completed.

April 12th, 1924

The swimming pool may have been a tank enclosure above ground rather than any excavated and tiled structure, and its removal was not noted. Otherwise it would be significant as a lost swimming pool downtown!

When he died Klett was identified as an "amusement operator." He had owned the Crystal Garden, 440 State (Fork-Forty etc.), and part of the Eldridge block, as well as some other places.

May 25th, 1948

The Eldridge block, now demolished for the Chemeketa Parkade, had been sold to him by Ben Maxwell, and Maxwell's property holdings downtown are essentially erased from his story. Neither the Oregon Encyclopedia nor the online Salem History now published by the Mill mention any downtown property. He was not only a journalist, then! He may have had significant passive income.

June 2nd, 1938

On the Eldridge block see also:

• "Greenbaums Early Bulwark Against Parking Lot Expansion and Demolition" (2014)
• "Fiasco of 1897 Legislature: Eldridge Block Den of Prostitution and Evil!" (2018)
  
• "Curbside Gas Pumps Downtown: Quackenbush Auto in the Eldridge Block" (2024) 

I did not track down information on the end of the natatorium. A history column at the SJ, "Crystal Garden was Salem’s dance hall for decades," claims it ended in 1929. That Duke Ellington performed there could be verified!

March 20th, 1952

Maybe another time we'll come back to see if there is anything interesting to say about how many times he might have performed in Salem and how Salemites received his music. It does not seem likely he would have stayed in any hotels or stayed longer than his performance.