I was having a lovely lunch with a friend at one of your great restaurants on Lighthouse Avenue when I happened to notice a rather unique building across the street. It looked older, but then again it had a modern feel to it. The sign on the front of it read” The Holman Building”. Can you tell me more about it?

That is a great question about a most interesting building and I would be glad to provide more information on it.

The Holman Building was constructed and owned by W.R. Holman and was designed to be a department store and first constructed in1926 with a basement, mezzanine with one floor above. In 1931, an additional floor along with an elevator was added together with a restaurant on the roof.

This is from a newspaper article from December 15^th, 1931 and describes the new fourth floor “The result is a display which has no like in the country. There are 24,000 square feet of this furniture floor and there are ten departments – radios, unfinished furniture, wallpaper, stoves, linoleum, beds, baby furniture, rugs, lamps and furniture.” I can just imagine how the citizens of Pacific Grove must have felt back in those days to walk down the street and view such an amazing variety of items to browse through. It must have felt like going through a modern mall in today’s world.

From another article in 1935: “Holman’s: probably no-where else in the world is a store of its scope to be found in a community with as small a population as Pacific Grove. Its floor space is the largest between San Francisco and Los Angeles.”

Holman’s continued  to serve Pacific Grove until it was acquired by the Fords Department Store chain in 1985. Fords continued to operate it until 1993 when it was purchased by developers to turn into a mixed use building. This began the lengthy process of converting this once grand department store into a building with 27 residential units and the 4 commercial spaces that you see today.