Family Recalls Glory Days of Rose Building

When it opened in 1948, the pink building was probably the largest women’s department store between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In about two weeks, the old Art Deco building will be razed--along with all the buildings on the north side of the 500 block of Main Street, from the corner of Chestnut and Main streets down to the beige sprawl of what was formerly the Sav-Mor--to make way for a $6.5-million 10-screen movie theater and retail complex.

On Monday, in a small ceremony in front of the Jack Rose building downtown, Mayor Jack Tingstrom presented a 400-pound front-entryway tile to 11 members of the Rose family as a keepsake.

“He was a guy that was very much interested in the community,” said son Ronald Rose, telling Tingstrom that his father would have supported the theater project if he were alive. “He would have done what was best to make the community better.”

Indeed, Rose said his father was so committed to helping local merchants that members of his family were forbidden to shop at national chain stores like Sears and JC Penney.

“This was it,” said Tingstrom, who was 13 when the Jack Rose store opened. “This was the scale to set things by. This was the corner to get on.”

According to the Oct. 14, 1948, edition of the Ventura Star Free Press, 8,000 people flocked through the door of the upscale women’s department store on opening day. In one faded photograph, well-dressed women crowd around fancy mahogany-and-glass counters of perfume.

But the fortress-like building of concrete and steel does not satisfy current merchandising requirements, Rose said.

Rose said he does not know what his family will do with the slab, which is emblazoned with yellow letters that read “Jack Rose,” but he imagines that his sons will use it for a barbecue table.

Construction of the downtown theater is scheduled to begin in mid-September, according to a city report. The theater should roll its first reels by the summer of 1998.