Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 67

Ihommces real estate acArisona pailo Star TUCSON, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1973 PAGE ONE SECTION Ousting Off The Of Hotel lit II i di. 'J4L 'M When Josephine Dunne, who was the first to purchase the land on which the Roskruge Hotel and office complex now stands, bought it in 1874, she paid the Village of Tucson $50. In 1879, having gone to live in Salt take City, she sold it for $500. To Hugh Farley. Fred Ronstadf acquired it sometime later.

In 1902 he sold it to Kirk L. Hart. Hart sold it to O. C. Parker in 1904 for $8,000.

Parker sold if to H. J. Clifford of El Paso and H. A. Morgan of Willcox for an undisclosed sum, but in 1917, Morgan bought out Clifford's half for $11,000.

It was Morgan, a mason, who sold it to the Scottish Rite Masons for $45,000. On March 3, 1925, the Scottish Rife Cathedral Assn. dissolved into the Scottish Rife Holding Co. The Cathedral Assn. sold the holding company the whole Roskrugf complex.

They charged $152,300 for which they get cash and $92,300 in capital stock. Last year on Sept. 15 the Scottish Rife holdiig exercising a landholder's right, sold the Roskruge complex to Edward and Caroline Jacobs. Although Jacobs won't tell what the purchase price was, he says that his total investment in it to date, including bringing it up to fire standards, is $175,000. I v.

win wMniiriMiwM History ByJ.C. MARTIN Star Staff Writer Believe me, the history of the Ros-kruge Hotel is not an open book. Some of the Roskruge's history is locked in the vault of the Scottish Rite Masonic Cathedral. Some lies buried in the volumes of newspapers that have been put together in the recording of 50 years of Tucson's history. Some reposes in the memories of living men and women, one of whom is Ros-kruge manager and primary employe Fernando Zepeda.

Zepeda went to work at the hotel in 1930 for the Roskruge's first manager, Guy Griffin. While the Roskruge was never flashy, there was one thing Griffin was a stickler on: uniformed bellboys. He kept them around-the-clock, one day and one night. Zepeda was the day bellhop. An Irish newspaper reporter, who couldn't get any closer to saying Zepeda than "Zipper," hung that nickname on him, "and to this day," says Zepeda, "a lot of people don't know my real first name.

Even my kids call me Zipper." Zepeda stuck with the Roskruge during the 1930s. There were some lean times after Griffin died and his brother Carl took over. Still, the job earned Zepeda enough money to buy a brand new $950 Chrysler coupe, a glorious relationship with the good things of this life he hasn't forgotten. After Zepeda got back from World War II, he ran a bar out on Speedway, then he unt into the civil service. Retiring from that, the Zepedas traveled to Panama, Europe, Mexico.

In 1968, the day he and his wife got home from Mexico, Zepeda answered the telephone and took a job, working back at the Roskruge this time as manager. It was like coming home to look after an old friend. Zepeda can stand in the Roskruge's small, plain lobby and tell you when all the furniture was bought 1939. He saw it new. He can recite the names of the managers.

He knows the geography of every hall and room. While aware that the Roskruge may have seen better days though never really cushy ones Zepeda is steadfast in recounting its strong points. Even in 1924, which seems to have been the year of its opening, there was some plumbing in each of the Roskruge's 53 rooms, at least a wash stand and a toilet. The Roskruge was intended to be a small, medium-priced hotel, transient rather than resident, with preference given to Masons. Zepeda acknowledges that the Roskruge has shaved its rates down pretty low sometimes in the scramble for customers, but it's never sold cots by the night there aren't any dormitory rooms.

(Although there are some pretty big ones that can accommodate large families.) For patrons in the rooms without showers or tubs, a public bath with four showers and two tubs is situated just a short way down the hall from the second floor Scott Street terrace. The terrace itself, empty today, Zepeda remembers as decorated with potted plants and dotted with rockers. On pleasant evenings, the Roskruge's guests could sit on the terrace and watch the Scott Street traffic. They could also get a fair idea of what was happening on Congress and Broadway. As to these guests, while not undistinguished, few if any have been what you could call "world-famous." The hotel was enormously convenient for persons in town on federal business in 1924 all of Tucson's federal business was conducted across Scott Street, in what was called then, and now, "the post office building." Federal jurors, who were called up from all over southern Arizona and paid the minimal stipend of $3 a day, could usually get together, Zepeda recalls, and share a room with the Roskruge's blessing.

If there were little to call spectacular about the Roskruge, it has also managed to avoid scandal. Once in the 1930s, however, the wife of a prominent Tucsonan carried on a love affair there with a member of the police force. She waited for him while he made his rounds and then, in the early morning hours, their affair ran its course on the second floor of the Roskruge Hotel. Zepeda, from his 1930s years, says this he doesn't remember. He shakes his head regretfully.

"It's like chili con came without the tortillas." But one thing the Roskruge has always had, which few hotels large or small can claim: a legend. It's brief. Not all who tell it are agreed on the details. While many people other than Masons know it, it harks back to the Roskruge's Masonic connections. According to the legend, the Roskruge (and, in more generous versions, the land it sits on) was a gift to the Tucson Scottish Rite Masons no one is ever quite able to remember who gave it.

The only stipulation was that it never leave their possession. the June 9, 1923, entry in a tattered minute book, shows the Cathedral Assn. paying $45,000 to a Willcox rancher, and a Mason, H. A. Morgan.

This was for the land, two lots and a sliver of ground making up the northeast corner of Broadway and Scott, and everything standing on it. (Today that's the hotel, Wuerschmidt Optometrists, Playboy's Barbershop and Pierre Rally Jewelers.) The 1924 Tucson City Directory lists Blain's Welding Works on the corner. Very probably it was in that building where, in 1896, Fred Ronstadt built his blacksmith shop, and onto a wall, in high good spirits, nailed a sign reading "Broadway." (The street was then known as "Camp," but Camp Lowell moved away and Ronstadt's joke won out.) Gorm Loftfield, now retired from the Pima County Assessor's office, and a Mason, seems to recall the land was bought, not only because it was a good piece of business property but "to help a Mason out," although Loftfield can't remember who that was. The Cathedral Assn. also borrowed $25,000 at 7 per cent from the widow of Epes Randolph, another prominent Mason, to make the payment.

On July 11, 1924, an entry in the minute book of the Scottish Rite Cathedral When the Masons sold the Roskruge last year to Edward and Caroline Jacobs, the legend surfaced, along with a good deal of whispered confusion. William Dunipace, prominent Mason and lawyer, has heard that "we acquired the hotel by gift." Some say the donor was Roskruge himself. But Roskruge, while prominent, was not a wealthy man and though childless, when he died in 1928, his wife survived him. As to the condition attached to the "gift," says Dunipace briskly, "that ran out a few years ago." In law, according to Dunipace, there's a "rule against perpetuity." It's defined as "two lives in being, plus 21 years." Well, it's nice to have your own legend. It would be folly to think the facts could do much more than slow it up.

But in point of fact, the Roskruge Hotel had its beginnings in the Scottish Rite Cathedral an incorporated body which handled business affairs for the Scottish Rite Masons. As a matter of record, the Masons bought the land. They built the hotel. They paid for every dime of it. The Cathedral Assn.

directors were Harry Arizona Drachman, Levi H. Manning, Peter Howell and Gordon Sawyer. The original transaction, set down as my mm Assn. indicates that the Masons were prepared to spend another $35,000 on the "construction of a hotel building." Whether they actually spent that much or not is never clear. Oscar Davis, longtime Tucson real estate man, and a Mason, remembers that the contractor on the Roskruge Hotel job was S.

E. Gregory. "One of the best at the time," Davis recalls, "and, of course, he had to be a Mason." According to Davis, there wasn't an architect and the backers "enlarged their plans as they went along," until a portion of the building got up to three floors. On Sept. 24, 1924, an unidentified newspaper source reported "Guy Griffin yesterday signed a 10-year lease with the Scottish Rite Masons for occupancy of their new $135,000 combination hotel-business block just completed at the northeast corner of Broadway and Scott, the hotel to be called the Roskruge as an honor to George James Roskruge, pioneer father of Masonry in Arizona." Gorm Loftfield thinks the hotel must have opened shortly after that to accommodate the annual Masonic fall reunion.

Whatever else there is to know about the little hotel, Masonic secretary George Gustafson sees only one real mystery unsolved. No one's complaining, says Gustafson, "but we don't really know how it got named after Roskruge." 1' Gtosin err- V- You'll probably never see homes like these at prices like these again. We have just a few left in Broadway East and Harrison Hills. They were priced before everything went sky high, and that makes them super values. (We even have a few model homes left, with all the Come out now, during our Grand Closing.

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