Petaluma music store restoration uncovers long-hidden curiosities

On a recent afternoon, as a tiny handful of customers tested out guitars and posed probing questions about the durability of various amplifiers, Chris, a manager at Tall Toad Music, pointed to a poster-sized, black-and-white photograph displayed high on the wall behind the counter.

“That,” said Chris, who prefers to give only his first name, “is a picture of the inside of the store in 1900.”

The historical dry goods store once occupied the main level of the building that was originally constructed - and is still owned by - the Petaluma Masonic Lodge. Its cornerstone laid in 1881, the finished building was dedicated in 1882, and is best recognized as the site of Petaluma’s iconic clock tower. Tall Toad owner Charlie Cowle took over the space in the mid-1980s, moving the music store from its original location in the Old Petaluma Mill, right across the street.

“The thing is, I’ve been looking at that picture for years, thinking, ‘You know, that’s what this place used to look like,”’ said Chris. “There is such a great, old, Victorian, New York borough feel to certain parts of Petaluma. Wouldn’t it be cool to have the inside of the store match outside that vibe of Petaluma?’”

Chris started suggesting a full restoration of the store’s floors, convinced that something interesting lay waiting under that old carpet. But the time it would take to close the store and do the work never seemed financially feasible.

Then COVID-19 ground downtown Petaluma to a halt.

Last March, when the State of California rolled out its first COVID-19 shelter-at-home order — along with what became a 10-week mandatory shutdown of all nonessential businesses — Petaluma’s venerable Tall Toad Music elected to put the lengthy timeout to good use, quickly replacing the sounds of strumming guitars and ukuleles with the pounding of hammers and the wail of electric saws.

Over the next several weeks, layer after layer of ancient flooring, long hidden beneath a stratum of faded gray carpet, was painstakingly excavated. Beneath it all lay a number of mysterious, age-old curiosities, as well as the historic building’s original floorboards, an antique assemblage of 1880 old-growth spruce.

“It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, redoing the floor,“ Chris said.

The first step was to clear the space of racks, furniture and other impediments, a project that took the better part of a week.

“Every guitar had to go somewhere,” Chris remarked. “All of these boxes had to go in the back, to get the floor completely empty. Then it took us a month to get the carpet, and the layers of particle board and sub-flooring up. Every time we pulled some of it up, it would just crack out.”

Eventually, the building’s original spruce flooring was uncovered. It was, understandably, a bit worse for wear, but still beautiful and with obvious potential to shine again.

The floorboards weren’t all they discovered.

“We found a secret door in the floor,” said Chris, clearly grinning behind his mask.

We’ll get back to that secret door in a moment.

One of the most striking results of last spring’s renovation is the addition of a long strip of newer walnut, starting near the front door and leading toward the counter. It was designed to resemble a large guitar fretboard, complete with metallic inlays to make the connection more clear.

“One of the gentlemen who works here, Dave, when he saw the raw wood, he said, ‘Hey, it looks like a fretboard,’” Chris explaied. “So we decided, ‘We’re a guitar shop. Let’s just make a fretboard out of it.’”

In the middle of the fretboard is a striking, inlayed image of a musical toad.

A tall toad, obviously.

“A local luminary, Larry Robinson, who builds a lot of guitars, he put the toad in,” added Chris. “He drew the frog and carved it in, and then filled it with anodized aluminum. It’s pretty nice, and people really like it.”

While engaged in the weeks-long renovation, Chris admits that the team became slightly obsessed with figuring out the reasons behind the many curious things they were discovering. To hear him describe it, it sounds like a form of architectural archaeology.

Chris stepped over to a space where a clear, square-shaped installation of fresh wood stands out from the aged and polished wood around it.

“Here’s one of the weird things we discovered,” he said. “When we uncovered this area, the original spruce was sagging about an inch, really just pushed down. My theory is that this is where the safe used to be in the dry goods store.”

Once again gesturing to the picture above the counter, Chris pointed out an indication of where a wall used to bisect the room, suggesting the possible safe would have been in the back room of the store.

“Given how the floorboards were bowing down, it’s obvious that something very heavy, about that size, sat here for a really long time. So I’m thinking a safe,” Chris said, before pivoting. “Anyway, the wood was warped, so we had to replace it.”

Additional uncovered mysteries include a large number of burn marks on the wood near the back instrument repair shop, plus an array of nail holes arranged in circular patterns, and some cast iron pillars hidden for decades inside makeshift wooden encasements.

“Based on the photo, this is where the smoker sat,” Chris continued, stepping to where dozens of tiny black marks festoon the floor. “There are burns everywhere. We could have sanded deeper to get rid of the burns, but we like ’em.”

Stepping over to a spot near the north wall of the store, Chris called attention to a series of discolored nail holes in the floor, arranged in circular patterns.

“We kept finding these weird circles of nail holes,” he said. “We made all kinds of jokes, going, ‘What the hell were they doing? Was someone practicing how to nail?’ And then we looked at the picture again. This is where the dry goods store’s stools were. There was a row of stools right here — so we figured out they had nailed the stools to the floor.”

Apparently, the owners of the original establishment did not like their stools to be moved. As for the iron pillars, Chris walked over to the nearest pole, tapping it hard enough to elicit a rich ringing sound. There is another pillar like it about 10 feet away.

“These were completely hidden behind the box structure,” he says, nodding at one of the same structures still in place by the counter.

Chris says he noticed the iron pillars in the photo, and determined they’d been covered up, much like the original floorboards.

“We cut a little hole in one of the box things, to see what was in there,” he recalled, “and when we saw these, we took the whole wooden structure down to just expose these really cool pillars, all made of decorative cast iron.”

Finally, Chris led the way over to a spot near the front corner of the store, gesturing toward an obvious trap door and explaining how the crew found one of the most eye-opening discoveries of the entire project.

It is a simple square of wooden planks with ancient hinges and a newly installed latch.

“We got here and and looked down and went, ‘Uh ... there’s a door in the floor,’” Chris said. “Listen, I’m a sci-fi fan. So I’m immediately thinking, ‘Where does this go to? Is this a passage to a different dimension? Are there monsters down there?’”

So, where does the door go?

“Nowhere,” Chris admitted with a shrug, unable to show what lies beneath because of heavy wooden rack now parked over one end of the door. “There is one old step down, and then just ... drywall,” he described it. “The basement was basically sealed off from here.”

Unfortunately, there were no hidden documents or pirate treasure maps either.

Just some old, square-headed, iron nails.

“Honest-to-god, made by hand, old-fashioned square nails,” Chris said. “But no, no passage to another dimension. But hey, it’s still a secret door in the floor. And if nothing else, that’s a great talking point.”