I See by the Papers...

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