SOHO’s Founder — Robert Miles Parker

Artist Robert Miles Parker has been a leading architectural author and preservationist for more than three decades. Born in Virginia, Miles grew up in San Diego in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when it was still known as a sleepy border town. Spending the ‘60s as a teacher and art therapist, he moved into a large Victorian on Front Street (today the Mumford-Parker House) that soon became a hangout for creative types. Miles began to pen and ink old houses — drawings that would make him famous. 

In 1969, Miles passed the crumbling Gilbert House. Sad that this beautiful structure was not likely to survive, he posted a sign “Save Me” and a phone number. In response to the many calls — everyone from society ladies to hippies, Miles founded Save Our Heritage Organisation (SOHO), one of America’s oldest preservationist groups.

As SOHO’s first president, Miles worked to save poorly maintained buildings from SD’s history, such as Villa Montezuma, the Sante Fe Station, and many in the Gaslamp Quarter including the Horton Hotel, where a suite is named in his honor. In the early’70s, a few historic structures were moved to Old Town’s Heritage Park. The Gilbert House was the first to relocate.

A few years later Miles began to travel. Supported by his collectors, he drove a mini-van wherever the highways took him and stopped to draw whatever caught his eye. These artistic works, many published in his weekly San Diego Union column, gained him national attention, including two interviews on “The Today Show” with Barbara Walters. They became his first book, Images of American Architecture.

When Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1984, Miles brought together his many drawings from that area in new book L.A. A few years later he relocated to New York to continue drawing and be closer to his 22-year partner, who was a professor at Princeton. Miles began a series there, which have appeared in many publications, including San Diego Magazine, Sacramento Magazine and the New York Times. Currently, he is completing a book dedicated to celebrating the architecture of Broadway.

 

 

 

Miles sketching Hillcrest’s Fifth Avenue in the early ’80s