‘Rustic Night’ Fundraiser Comes Amid Calls for Clubhouse Renovations

By MATTHEW MEYER | Reporter

The Rustic Canyon Recreation Center will host its annual “Rustic Night” event this weekend, raising funds for a beloved community center that Canyon residents and local leaders agree needs expansive improvements.

“Rustic Hula Night,” scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 23, will offer an evening of food, drinks and cocktail attire to those Palisadians who purchase a ticket online (laparksfoundation.org).

The profits will benefit ongoing park projects, and if the most recent Santa Monica Canyon Civic Association meeting is any indication, renovating the park’s Clubhouse will remain a top priority.

The storied building—which was built as a social refuge in the canyon for a whimsical group called the “Uplifters Club” in the 1920s—has infrastructural issues galore, including a leaky roof and dubious electrical grid.

“This building is dangerous,” one Association member said bluntly last week.

Park Director Paige Barnes, whose presentation on park issues spurred the discussion, said she was all too familiar with the electrical challenges.

“If we plug a fan in the office … computers shut down,” she shared.

A first step toward addressing the electrical issues, board members agreed, would be to schedule a consultation with an electrician who could walk the building and issue an assessment.

Barnes said she would get started on that right away.

But any major projects will require major funding.

Last January, the Palisadian-Post highlighted the Rustic Canyon Park Advisory Board’s efforts to beautify and restore parts of the Clubhouse.

Member Veslemoey Zwart helped lead the charge on projects that included restoring the wooden gymnasium floor and revamping the French doors and windows that line the building’s historic courtyard.

Zwart is a key organizer for this weekend’s Rustic Night event.

Park supporters hope that her and her colleagues’ more readily apparent beautification projects of the past few years will now inspire donors to contribute to the serious structural worries that are hiding out of sight.

“It’s a wonderful building … that means a lot to the community. It’s a historical building, it’s a peace-of-mind park, and we want to guard it and make sure it lasts another 100 years,” Zwart told the Post.

And this weekend’s event will be critical to that effort:

“Rustic Night has sort of become the ‘locomotive’ to the ‘little train that could.’”