Ask Lookout: Why is there a ‘door to nowhere’ above Front Street?

One of Santa Cruz’s oddities is a honey-colored Queen Anne-style home on Beach Hill with what locals refer to as the “door to nowhere.” 

Looking up from the intersection of Front Street and Pacific Avenue, the striking green door at the rear of 924 Third St., also known as Golden Gate Villa, is visible against the golden exterior of the house. The door is not even a step off the edge of a cliff, with no visible barrier and no way to prevent someone from tumbling down the retaining wall directly onto the street below. 

At first glance, the door has no obvious purpose. But Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History archives specialist Jessie Durant told Lookout that the door belonged to the property’s barn, specifically the back of the carriage house, to allow horse waste to be shoveled through the door and down the cliff, to be hauled away.  

Sue Dormanen, who lived in the house from 1989 to 1997 and chronicled the villa’s history in an article for the Santa Cruz Public Library, said the carriage house has remained practically untouched since 1891, when the home was originally built.

“The noteworthy feature of the carriage house was a large turntable built in the floor, which is still there, so that you could drive a horse carriage into the barn, then turn it around so it was ready to drive out without backing up,” she wrote in an email to Lookout. 

From the inside of the carriage house, the door looks a lot like an old barn door, with spoke wheels that are miniature counterparts to the carriage wheels of the past. The interior side of the door is painted the same forest green as it is from the outside, a stark contrast to the rustic inside of the carriage house.

With its spiraling turrets, majestic stained glass and epic grandiosity, Golden Gate Villa was an extravagant and momentous achievement when it was first built for mining entrepreneur Frank McLaughlin by architect Thomas J. Welsh, who also designed the Holy Cross Catholic Church on Mission Hill. 

The house and its unusual door have remained a focal point of the Santa Cruz area for years, even as the property passed through many hands after the death of the McLaughlin family in 1907 by murder-suicide. 

From the 1940s through the ‘50s, the home was open to the public as the Palais Monte Carlo when the California Heritage Council first recognized the house in 1971. The National Registry of Historic Places later recognized the house in 1975. The house continued to trade hands among millionaires before Patricia Sambuck Wilder bought the property in 1975. Wilder restored the house and the Blake Hammond Manor in Ben Lomond, making Golden Gate Villa into residential apartments. She kept her residence on the first floor, renting the second and third floors until her death in 2014.

The current homeowner, Marcy Rode, bought the house in 2022. 

“I’m drawn to older homes, and we have renovated a couple in Santa Cruz previously,” Rode wrote in an email to Lookout. “This one is truly striking, holds a lot of significance in Santa Cruz history and was crying out for help.”

According to Rode, from the inside of the barn, the “door to nowhere” is slightly underwhelming — it’s in the windowless basement of the carriage house. She believes that immediately above the basement “were horse stalls and that the manure was somehow dropped down a level and then out the door to nowhere to be hauled away,” she wrote, adding that she doesn’t have any documentation to back up this theory.

The door to nowhere could be opened by sliding it along a rail. “Then, the horse apples could be shoveled out the door and would drop down to a wagon below. Or the ground, I don’t know for certain,” Dirk Coldewey wrote in an email. Coldewey was among a group of investors to buy the Golden Gate Villa at a bank sale after Wilder’s death. The group later sold the home to Rode.    

 “The ‘door’ was never meant as an exit,” said Dormanen. 

Over the years, the barn’s second level has been modernized and slightly renovated to become a secondary space or guest apartment, but this has not affected the “door to nowhere.” 

Rode said she plans to keep the door as is, adding that since the house is on the National Register of Historic Places, alterations to the outside, including the “door to nowhere,” are prohibited. So locals can rest easily knowing the door will remain a local quirk. 

People frequently stop by and ask about the property and if it’s publicly accessible, she said. Rode says she plans to turn the house into a bed and breakfast and open it to the public.

She’s still working with the city to approve those changes. Rode said she has faced resistance from city planners to her vision of a bed and breakfast, given that the house was previously used as a multi-unit rental — despite no documentation of it being changed from a single-family residence. 

In an email to Lookout, Santa Cruz City Senior Planner Ryan Bane said the house is currently permitted for multifamily residential use. The property’s owner requested an application form in 2023 to convert the home into a bed and breakfast but never submitted the application, he said. (Rode did not respond to Lookout when asked if she had submitted the application.)

Santa Cruz City Senior Planner Timothy Maier said over email that current and former owners of the home have contacted the city over the years asking about potentially turning the property into a bed and breakfast. City staff told homeowners that changing a rental property into a B&B requires multiple permits. The owner also has to provide replacement housing and relocation assistance for any low- or moderate-income tenants who are displaced by turning an apartment building into a B&B.

“To say we are disappointed is putting it mildly,” Rode said.  

Despite the drama involving the house today and the intrigue surrounding its unusual door, it was the home’s original owner — the McLaughlin family — who were the true mystery for Santa Cruzans in the past. 

Frank McLaughlin — a rugged man of the people with extravagant taste — was known for his engineering, investing and mining expeditions in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California, where he gained and lost much of his fortune. 

McLaughlin’s famous friends made the Golden Gate Villa even more extraordinary. The home boasted a long list of visitors, including Theodore Roosevelt — who provided the African elephant hide that was used as wallpaper before the 1989 earthquake damaged the plaster — and Thomas Edison, who is thought to have provided the original electrical wiring.

McLaughlin was first introduced to California in the 1860s as a civil engineer when the Union Pacific railway was constructed.  

He was brought to California the second time by Edison, who commissioned McLaughlin to search for platinum for filament deposits, thought to be plentiful in Californian riverbeds. Edison needed platinum to develop and market his new invention, the incandescent light bulb — bringing McLaughlin to the Feather River in the Sacramento Valley and Butte County.

While in California, McLaughlin got gold fever and shifted the search to that precious metal.   

In 1890, McLaughlin planned his biggest and perhaps most financially devastating project: to build a wall to reroute the middle fork of the Feather River above what is today the Lake Oroville reservoir. The plan was to expose the small pieces of gold in the sand beneath the river. 

McLaughlin traveled to London to finance the endeavor. After making a very well-received impression, he was given $200,000 (roughly equivalent to $7 million today).

The project in Oroville began in 1892. In 1894, Edison provided electrical lighting so workers could work day and night without pause — making this the first mining project with electrified lighting. 

The 7,000-foot-long dam was finally completed four years later in 1896.

“The whole town of Oroville gathered to watch as the great river was diverted, laying the river bed bare for gold-picking,” according to a 1967 Santa Cruz Sentinel article. However, McLaughlin found barely any gold; instead, workers found mostly discarded mining equipment in the riverbed.

The residents of Oroville, reportedly amused that McLaughlin was left disgraced, had suspected the project would likely be a bust, as miners had already stripped most of the gold from the riverbed during the 1849 gold rush. The 49ers had also succeeded in rerouting the river years prior, leaving it void of the gold McLaughlin had been searching for. 

Reports detail that McLaughlin — infuriated — dynamited the wall he had built, leaving it in ruins. The ruins of McLaughlin’s wall are now under 100 feet of water after the Thermalito dam’s completion and the formation of Lake Oroville in 1967. 

This was a big loss for the project’s British investors, who went as far as to have Queen Victoria send detectives from Scotland Yard to California to investigate the failed project, where they were threatened into retreat by McLaughlin.

The British investors’ anger grew when they discovered that McLaughlin had not suffered as greatly from the loss. Rather than investing in the project, McLaughlin allegedly used some of the money to pay himself. 

McLaughlin first visited Santa Cruz during the summers during the Oroville project and moved here permanently in 1889, when he commissioned the construction of the villa. 

In 1892, McLaughlin, his wife, Margaret, and his stepdaughter, Agnes, moved into the Golden Gate Villa. Throughout the Oroville project, Margaret and Agnes often traveled to Santa Cruz to escape the heat of the Sacramento Valley. 

Tragedy first struck the family on Nov. 16, 1905, when Margaret, McLaughlin’s wife, died from chronic liver troubles and an unnamed illness that had caused her to become bedridden for six weeks. 

But the true tragedy came on the second anniversary of Margaret’s death. 

Agnes attended Holy Cross church that morning, Nov. 16, 1907, and when she returned to the villa, she retired to her room for a nap. 

While she slept, McLaughlin walked up to his stepdaughter’s room and shot Agnes in the head.

After killing his daughter, he called a friend and, according to a Sentinel article published that day, said, “Come up at once. I have just killed Agnes, and I am going to take poison.” McLaughlin then drank a cyanide cocktail, killing himself. He was 58.  

In a letter he wrote, McLaughlin said that he had been planning the murder-suicide every day for eight years. 

He left letters to friends and employees detailing different reasons for the tragedy. Most provided only vague details for the crime.“I am up against it,” he wrote in one, as recounted in a Sentinel article. He was more explicit in others, noting a project failure in southwest Texas at the Big Bend River. 

However, why he took Agnes with him is subject to slightly more speculation. 

In her article on the family, Dormanen said, “It cannot be known if he harbored a guilty passion for his stepdaughter or simply could not bear to be left alone and aging in the Villa he had created for the pleasures of society.” 

McLaughlin was reported to have written, “She’s going with me because I love her so,” referring to Agnes, and writing in his will that “to leave my darling child helpless and penniless would be unnatural, and so I take her with me.” 

According to a Sentinel article from that month, Agnes was estimated to be in her 30s at the time of her death, and had remained unmarried despite many engagements, including with a former mayor of San Jose.

A final testament to her stepfather’s love or obsession remains in the house today: a stained-glass window of Agnes with her arm outreached. 

The McLaughlin family, including wife Margaret, was laid to rest in Newark, New Jersey, at the church where McLaughlin and his wife had married. That has left the house on Beach Hill, with the door to nowhere, the sole monument to the family’s tragic end.

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