Robert Miles Parker, founder of SOHO, is pessimistic

Last month Robert Miles Parker learned that his pen-and-ink drawing of Belmont Park’s rickty roller coaster was the centerpiece of a slick publicity sheet promoting the controversial Belmont Park in Mission Beach. Parker, artist, writer, daddy of San Diego’s historic preservation movement, was hissing mad. He loves the old Mission Beach Plunge Building that will be torn down by Belmont Park developer Graham MacHutchin and thinks “the last thing we need is a shopping center” at the beach. “He says he got my permission,” Parker fumed this week. “Well, he never asked me if he could use it in a flyer to promote something like a shopping center!’

But a wave of mellowness washed over the 47-year-old artist as he reminded himself that MacHutchin had purchased some of his artwork while opponents of the Belmont Park development never had. The economic ying calmed the emotional yang. And Parker just loves MacHutchin’s wife Nancy, a socialite and political fundraiser. “I like her strength,” he gushed. “She’s tough, effective, and gets what she wants. She’s very un-San Diego. And she’s just glorious to look at.” MacHutchin had also helped elect Roget Hedgecock, whose mayoral candidacy Parker supported, whose legacy he praises (“Roger did more in a positive way for San Diego than any politician, ever”) and who rewarded the lanky, flamboyant artist with a seat on the city’s Historic Site Board. “It was great being one of the sparkling people,” Parker recalled. And sparkle he did, once showing up for a site board meeting wearing “short, short, short cut-offs and a T-shirt advertising a collection of male nude drawings” then on display in the gallery of his Front Street home.

That home, city historic site number 100, served as the center of Parker’s universe for 20 years. He stumbled upon it in 1967 after returning to San Diego from “a year being a hippie in Southern Europe and the Middle East. It was a slum building, but with my hippie attitude, I could handle it.” Parker took a job teaching drawing in the city’s adult school to pay the 75-dollar rent, and he began shaping the house to fit his attitude. “There was a certain permissiveness,” he recalls. “It was okay to paint the breakfast room furniture orange, the walls yellow, and the trim magneta, because it worked.” The parlor was covered with wallpaper from the tearoom at Marston’s, once the premier downtown department store, and one bedroom was painted a steely gray blue. Parker transformed the dining room into an art gallery that showed everything from watercolors of comical drag queens to miniature boudoir scenes painted by General George S. Patton’s granddaughter, Melinda. There were parties, parties, and more parties. “This house was a real mix of people. Gays, straights, black, white, political, nonpolitical. There were hippies and fagots, three of everything. A classic American group.”

He recuperated there in 1978 following a nasty tumble off the Black’s Beach cliffs that shattered his jaw, knocked out his teeth, and broke his knee. (He later learned that the fainting spell that preceded his fall was caused by an abnormally slow heartbeat, which doctors corrected by implanting a heart pacemaker,” he says. “The wiring in the first one broke, which is very Miles Parker.”) Inspired by a visit to Gertrude Stein’s Paris home, Parker opened the living room to a series of Sunday literary “salons” in 1980. “It lasted a year, but then it just faded into people drinking and gossiping,” he recalls. The front rooms hosted book signing, parties, and receptions for political candidates from Tom Hayden to Lucy Killen and Tom BRadly, who attended 1984 book signing for L.A., Parker’s collection of sketches honoring that city’s architecture, published by Harcourt Brace.

More significantly, Parker founded the Heritage Organisation (SOHO) and helped savage some of San Diego’s architectural landmarks. That crusade began in 1968 when he walked past the Sherman-Gilbert House, then at Second Avenue and Fir Street. “The hippies who lived there were crying and weeping, and I knew them because they were models in my life drawing class,” Parker remembers. They told him of their landlord’s plan to demolish the mansion, so Parker hung a sign pleading “Save This House” and urging people to telephone him. “Much to my surprise, I got 50 phone calls.” With fellow preservationists Carol Lindemulder, Bea Evenson, and architect Homer Delawie, Parker rescued the Sherman-Gilbert Mansion, which was eventually moved to Heritage Park in Old Town. (Though Parker wanted the house and the other significant landmarks hat make up Heritage Park to stay on their original sites, he’s happy that “all those houses are alive and still chuckling in the afternoon sun.”) He’s been at the forefront of other significant saves, including Golden Hill’s Villa Montezuma and downtown’s Amtrak Depot. “I point my finger at something that needs to be saved and yell for people to save it,” he explains. “I was never much for doing the actual work, but I loved to claim the credit.”

Parker has also recorded hundreds of San Diego scenes for posterity in his distinctive drawing style, some of which he sold for as little as two dollars. He drove around the county from 1974 to 1977, drawing “buildings that I liked,” for his book Images of American Architecture, and for several years he contributed weekly sketches to the Sunday San Diego Union, though eh was booted by editor Gerald Warren after the paper published Parker’s drawing of Manhattan’s Herkimer House without realizing that he had scribbled the words “New York State Historical Officials are Fools” in the drawing’s background. (Parker was angry that caretakers of the house had attempted to stop him from drawing the landmark.)

What Parker calls his “museum to the people of San Diego” closes its doors Saturday with the “end of an era eviction party/garage sale,” to which Parker had invited 450 of his closest friends. His landlord plans to convert the property into a bed-and-breakfast hotel. To Parker, who lives most of the year in a tiny apartment on 83rd Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan, where he’s finishing a book on Upper West Side architecture, it looks like goodbye for good to San Diego.

Not that he’ll miss most of what he sees here. “It is an extremely second-rate visual city,” he snaps. Heading his list of local design disasters is the new bayfront convention center, which he calls, “a nothing of a building with sails on top.” Parker says he “warned city council members to make a great statement, to look at the Sydney (Australia opera center. Instead, they’ll probably put an artificial fisherman’s village on the roof and everyone will be happy.” That reference is to the Seaport Village shopping center, which Parker “despises.” He doesn’t think much more of downtown’s new high-rises, which “deny pedestrians in favor of parking ramps,” and he recalls how he mistook Escondido’s North County Faire shopping mall for an aircraft hangar.

What Parker admires is surprising: The convention center’s neighboring twin Inter-Continental hotels (“I like their shape; they make a statement”) and the the “absolutely wonderful” Horton Plaza enter, whose “outdoor/indoor feeling doesn’t deny the atmosphere, the rain and sun, like most hermetically sealed shopping malls.” But he criticizes the center for “denyin the rest of downtown” and contributing to the “continued downward motion of the Gaslamp Quarter, which is deader and uglier than eer before.”

Parker is equally pessimistic about San Diego’s commitment to saving the old. It was news of a proposed change that prompted him to attend SOHO’s February board meeting, and he knew something was wrong as soon as he entered the room. “There was no jug of wine on the table, no boisterous laugher, no chairman saying, ‘Can we please get down to business,’” Parker instead faced a group of “middle-aged, gray-haired women” who were discussing the possible redesign of SOHO’s logo, which shows Parker’s original drawing of the Sherman-Gilbert House encircled with the words “Save Our Heritage Organisation” in Victorian script lettering. “They want to update it,” says an outraged Parker. So he launched into a spirited defense of SOHO’s 20-year-old letterhead. “I told them, ‘You must always keep that logo. You were formed to save things, not to change things. Your job is documented in the constitution, and there is no way you can do this.’ But you know,” says Parker with a resigned smile, “I think they’re going to change it.”