There were two Santa Rosas in the early 1970s but unfortunately, the Press Democrat opted to only write about one of them.
The newspaper loved to showcase news about their reborn city. Ever since the 1906 earthquake, editors had touted Santa Rosa as a true (but unappreciated!) Bay Area metropolis which would someday bloom into greatness. Now work was wrapping up on the urban renewal projects directly south and east of Courthouse Square. Contractor vans and pickups still crowded parking spots but the tall office buildings with banks on the ground floor showed how much progress had been made in the 1960s. Our city hall complex, with its elaborate water feature in the courtyard and unadorned concrete walls so pure white you had to squint in bright sun, boldly said this was as modern a city as could be found anywhere. Why, if you didn't know any better it would be easy to imagine all this wonderfulness was in Topeka or Schenectady or any of a hundred other cities.
What the PD avoided writing about was the west side of downtown. Everything between B street and the highway was slated to be demolished, as detailed in the previous chapter. And starting in 1972, the wrecking crews came in and began to wreck.
Other cities had likewise dismantled whole sections of their downtown in the name of urban renewal, particularly Los Angeles (see sidebar). Newspapers in those cities ran articles describing what would be slipping away. Human interest stories of elderly residents who had lived in the area for years and were afraid what would happen to them; shopkeepers worried about losing their livelihood.
Not so the PD. Except for a single story about George and Tillie Cross, who had operated a breakfast and lunch counter on lower Fifth St. since 1929, little in the local paper personalized the upcoming demolition of so much of our community. There was no downside at all to throwing away about a third of the downtown in their editorial eyes.
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
Labels: 1971, 1972, development, downtown, SantaRosaPlaza, URA
During the first days of 1970, the Press Democrat asked several of Santa Rosa's movers 'n' shakers what changes they thought would come about in the new decade. The city manager believed the population would grow by 40 percent (it actually increased by two-thirds). The assistant city manager imagined they probably would get a computer and use it for payroll and other accounting tasks. And the city planning director predicted by 1980 they were going to wipe away an older section of the downtown core.
Say what?!?
It had been barely three months since the Oct. 1969 quake hit Santa Rosa, causing moderate damage. Building inspector Ray Baker had said about 17 commercial buildings and 28 homes around town were in such bad shape they needed to be demolished, but most property owners were scrambling to arrange repairs. The city had just started talks with federal officials about designating the area west of B Street an urban renewal zone to pay for improvements, but nothing had been said about plans to "wipe away" that part of downtown. (Those developments were covered in the previous chapter, "MONEY FIRST, PLANS LATER.")
Planning Director Ken Blackman continued: "By 1980, redevelopment will be viewed as a continuing effort by all major cities to combat deterioration and blight." Ah, the "B Word" - the incantation that turned historic homes, neighborhoods and districts into cash dispensers. To quote myself from an earlier article:
| ...[In the 1960s] the nation was gripped by a collective madness called “urban renewal”. Anything new would be better than anything old simply because. There was also free federal money available as long as the magic words were spoken: “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, underdeveloped (read: undertaxed), subject to flooding or otherwise terribly blighted. File your blight report and don’t forget to include the address where Washington can send the money. |
Santa Rosa had already received $8 million for redevelopment east and south of Courthouse Square - the bank buildings and government offices still in use today. Now the city was asking for a new tranche of redevelopment money, that earlier project began to be called Phase I, with the west of B St. area dubbed Phase II. There was also mention made of potential Phase III, IV and V later.
Thus the day came to pass when Santa Rosa's mall-destined future was cast in stone: March 10, 1970. That's when the City Council unanimously passed ordinance 1439, which declared "...the area is a blighted area and that it is detrimental and a menace to the safety, health, and welfare of the inhabitants and users thereof..."
It allowed for the city agency to condemn buildings and force the owners to sell the property via eminent domain. It stated that a program would aid those living in the area move to somewhere else "not generally less desirable." It promised "due consideration" would be given to providing new parks and recreational facilities "with special consideration for the health, safety, and welfare of children residing in the general vicinity."
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