My grandfather and his brother bought the brick building at Haley and Milpas Street, and this photo shows how the parapet on top was knocked off during the earthquake of 1925. It was one of the tallest and most vulnerable buildings on Milpas at the time. Most of the others were wood-frame structures or homes, which didn’t get much damage from the earthquake.
My grandfather, Sven Ahlman, and his brother, Kenneth, came from Sweden in the early 1900s to Ellis Island, settling in New York, where my father and his brother were born. Around 1920 they came to Santa Barbara on the urging of Kenneth, who had traveled here first.
The Milpas Street building was constructed in 1919, and our family bought it from the owner and converted to the Ahlman Brothers Grocery around 1922. My dad, Gustave, and my uncle, Francis, were 10 and 12 years old when the quake struck. They and their parents brought things out of the store to be sold in the parking lot. I have to think it was a big mess inside and that they had to be careful that stuff didn’t topple over again.
They must have recovered pretty quickly because by mid-July and in October they were advertising “sales you don’t want to miss.”
My great-uncle Kenneth stayed in real estate, buying the Savoy Hotel on State Street in 1929. His wife, Eilen, managed the Barbara Worth Hotel a few blocks up. A family story that was one of my favorites was when all the clocks in the hotel stopped at 9:15 one morning. They were wind-up clocks, so we all thought it was someone’s idea of a joke. Nobody ever had the answer.
