I See by the Papers...

"This is why we can't have nice things" was a popular quip a few years ago; it's something to say after discovering something cherished has been trashed. Every time I step into the courtyard of Santa Rosa's city hall complex that's the phrase I mumble (okay, scream) because underneath this reinforced concrete monstrosity is the filled-in bed of Santa Rosa Creek.

(This article is the back half of the story which began in "HOW WE LOST SANTA ROSA CREEK…" and should be read first, as it explains why the creek was covered and traces the origins of the Urban Renewal Agency.)

Even in the URA's early days - while they were still pondering how much of Santa Rosa's historic downtown deserved to be wiped out - there was agreement there should be a "civic center" built somewhere within that area. The contrary voice in 1960 was developer Hugh Codding, who volunteered to donate "as much as you need" on Steele Lane, near where he was building his new shopping center.

Codding's quest to sell, lease, or give away land for a civic center is one of those epic tales about our town's wild and irrepressible developer. He first offered the city space in 1950 at Montgomery Village – although it was then outside of city limits. In the mid-1950s he offered another spot near his shopping center, this time at the corner of Fourth St. and Farmers Lane. Once Coddingtown was up and running he offered either of two Steele Lane sites in 1963 and when the City Council still didn’t bite, he tried to broker a deal for city hall to become part of the new county administration center (which would have put Santa Rosa's city offices on unincorporated county land). After this the Press Democrat editor wrote, "a city hall is not some toy on wheels, to be moved around from one outer boundary of a city to another where property developments happen to be going on." Undeterred, Codding once more pushed the Steele Lane location in 1964. The next year Hugh was back again, this time with site plans. But he was now a member of the Council, and the city attorney pronounced Santa Rosa could never consider any of his properties because it would be a conflict of interest. True to form, Hugh offered to resign on the spot - as long as they would accept his deal.

Although Codding remained the key player in the overall tragedy of Santa Rosa's urban renewal scheme, that's the extent of his involvement in this chapter on the city hall and what was to be built over the entombed creek. This time center stage belongs to one of his main adversaries: The Santa Rosa Burbank Center Redevelopment Company, which was formed in 1963 to "compete" for properties under the URA's control. ("Compete" is in ironic quotes because their bids won even though they paid nothing until the price was negotiated at a later date - a sweetheart deal that never failed to raise Codding's ire.) The locally-owned investment company was headed by five general partners, including Henry Trione as CEO/President. In the newspapers it was commonly called "the Burbank Center" or "the Burbank group," but since those names have other uses today they are referred to as simply SRBCRC here.

The SRBCRC hired a team of top-notch architects and redevelopment experts, launching with an ambitious $12 million proposal to redevelop the entire downtown area including Courthouse Square. It was already presumed that the courthouse would be demolished (there will be an upcoming article about that) and the square would be split in half by the new Santa Rosa Ave/Mendocino Ave connector.

Foremost among their celebrity consultants was architect John Savage Bolles who designed Candlestick Park, the spiky Birkenstock building in Novato beside Hwy 101 and most NorCal Macy's. Straddling the divided Courthouse Square he envisioned a 6-8 story "Civic Tower," later expanded to fifteen floors. The attorney for SRBCRC boasted it would be a "landmark...people will be able to see the tower from as far away as seven miles." The description in the PD said there would be parks on either side, including two lakes (!) and a constant-flow artificial creek.



The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott

Pity future historians; they will struggle to understand why we destroyed the things we loved most - and even paid for the pleasure. When the 1960s began, Santa Rosa had a lovely creek burbling through its downtown. Before the decade ended, the town's jewel became a flood control channel buried under a pile of reinforced concrete buildings which no one would ever call lovely.

In the history of many towns there's a chapter with an unhappy and wrong-headed tale such as this, and it's because the nation was gripped by a collective madness called "urban renewal" during that era. Anything new would be better than anything old simply because. There was also free federal money available as long as someone spoke the magic words: "urban blight." So cities across America declared large swathes of their communities were indeed filled with areas injurious to public welfare because of being unfit, unsafe, obsolete, deteriorating, not worth as much as it should be (read: undertaxed), subject to flooding or otherwise terribly blighted. File your blight report and don't forget the address where Washington can send the money.

(This is part two of the series, "Yesterday is Just Around the Corner," which examines how  Santa Rosa - a city which has always had swaggering ambitions - only has limited options for betterment today because of terrible 20th century planning decisions. part one showed the downtown core is cramped because we rejected proposals to expand its layout beyond the setting of the original 1853 village, and how highway 101 "sawed the town in half" against the advice of state engineers.)

Santa Rosa took its first redevelopment baby steps in 1958 when the City Council formed an Urban Renewal Agency (URA). Besides its five appointed members there was soon a full-time planner, an executive director hired from Merced and out-of-town consultants to study the issue (bet you didn't see that twist coming). Come September 1960 they discovered that Santa Rosa was indeed blighted, and in the amount of forty acres.

Meanwhile, there was another federal gravy train pulling into the station loaded with even more money, this time for flood control. Normally the Army Corps of Engineers does this kind of work but Sonoma Water (AKA the Sonoma County Water Agency, AKA the Sonoma County Flood Control and Water Conservation District) wrestled away most of the project along with its $11.8M budget - the equivalent to about $106,000,000 today.

Both urban renewal and flood control projects kept a low profile over the next few years. Reports were written, best plans were laid. Surveyors surveyed. The most exciting related event was the design proposal by the city's New Jersey consultants. A scale model of their reimagined downtown (“as modern and carefully engineered as the latest model of a star-probing rocket” – PD) circulated around several bank lobbies. Their 1960 layout is seen in the drawing below, with a county/city government center along both banks of a fully restored Santa Rosa Creek.



The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott

Anyone downtown on March 15 may have noticed an unusual dark bus slowly rolling along; inside were representatives from Santa Rosa and the Chamber of Commerce who were guiding a tour for about 70 Bay Area developers. Our visitors were promised that we would loosen rules and regs, defer or waive significant fees, all to max out every inch of buildable space near downtown as fast as possible. It makes for an awkward coincidence this was the same date that the soothsayer in Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar croaked out "beware the Ides of March," warning that bad things were about to happen.

An executive with the Bay Area Council told a reporter that the incentives Santa Rosa is offering developers are “unprecedented” for the Bay Area. “Everyone I know in the San Francisco and other Bay Area markets has internalized the trauma of wrestling with city departments,” said a rep from an international investment firm. “I sort of feel like I’m in Disneyland when I’m in Santa Rosa.”

Coverage of that significant event came from the San Jose Mercury News and was reprinted by the Press Democrat (apparently the PD's assignment editor thought their Pulitzer Prize-winning staff would be too busy preparing for the upcoming St. Paddy’s Day - those peppy "holiday tips" listicles don't write themselves).

As the reporter wasn't from here, she framed the story as if this was all being done because of the 2017 fires - but for the last five years, locals have heard about our "historic housing crisis" from every politician allowed near a microphone. It's so bad, we're told, that last year Santa Rosa and Sonoma County formed a "RED JPA" (that's a Renewal Enterprise District created as a Joint Powers Authority, for those who like to know what things mean) to push through as much housing construction as quickly as possible. In Santa Rosa, that translates to adding 7,000 more housing units to the downtown area by the year 2040 - a total of 30k countywide.




The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott

Come August it's Sonoma County Fair time in Santa Rosa; you can set your calendar by it. Even if you don't attend the Fair anymore it's one of those milestones that stubbornly refuse to be ignored, like Thanksgiving in November and Christmas in December. One morning the checkout line at the Cash & Carry was taking forever because the people ahead of me were mostly paying with crumpled one dollar bills. Then I noticed what was on their warehouse push carts: The cheapest cooking oil, bags of sugar heavier than a five year-old child, gallons of colorful fruit syrups. Ding! August. County Fair.

But it wasn't always in August, or in Santa Rosa, and the fairgrounds has a very spotty history of even being a fairgrounds. Nor was there something every year which could be called the Sonoma County Fair; draw a timeline between 1883 and today and randomly pick a year - about a third of the time you'll come up fairless.

This is a history of how the “Sonoma County Fair” evolved, but just like every evolutionary tree there was no clear, inevitable path from when it took root to where it is now; what we have today is just one branch that won out among several of its kin that didn’t happen to do as well. Some were organized by locals who created an association or society for that purpose; some were an official event of the state’s agricultural district for the North Bay. But even whether the fair was independent vs. government-sponsored doesn’t fully explain how things developed; at different times, what became the “Sonoma County Fair” has been both. The district fairs were mostly exhibits to promote local livestock and produce; the private fairs usually featured professional/semi-professional horse racing. And again, the “Sonoma County Fair” embraced both.

Rightly Petaluma's Sonoma-Marin Fair should probably have the County Fair monicker, as it has a longer record (starting in 1867) and has been held most consistently. Even older was was the San Pablo Bay District Fair, which began in 1859. It was held in both the town of Sonoma and Vallejo and morphed into what was called the first "county fair" in the newspapers - the ongoing "Sonoma-Napa Mechanical Fair," which drew Victorian nerds from all over the state (lots of wine drinking, too). That one will get an article here of its own, someday.

But while those other towns were earnestly trying to establish and maintain those annual festivals, in Santa Rosa there was tepid interest in fair-making, and what did exist proceeded in fits and starts for decades. What the City of Roses really wanted was to become the City of Races.





The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com. - Jeff Elliott