In the spring of 1972 a couple of notable men came to Santa Rosa. Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz moved here from Sebastopol and Los Angeles developer Ernest Hahn entered "exclusive negotiations" with the city to build a downtown shopping center.
One fellow inspired powerful men to believe they could pull off an economic miracle for their town. The other invented a kid who tried to delude people into believing in magic pumpkins.
Since there are already plenty of webpages devoted to Peanuts, let's just keep talking about the mall that many feel wrecked Santa Rosa.
This chapter is about public opposition to constructing the mall, particularly the "Save the Cal" campaign to preserve the town's great Art Deco moviehouse on B street. (Here's also a reminder that this is part of a broader series on Santa Rosa redevelopment: "YESTERDAY IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER," which includes an index covering everything on the topic going back to the 1960s.)
Two years passed before there was any citizen pushback to building the mall. That may be surprising but as discussed earlier, there could be many reasons why people weren't upset at first about a third of the downtown core being wiped out (and about to be sold to a developer for a fraction of its market value). Some probably thought a big shopping mall would be a good thing - after all, that's what the Press Democrat and all the city leaders kept saying. Some probably didn't understand the scope of what was going to be built; Hahn's architects hadn't shown anyone drawings or models of what it might look like. And some were probably wary because Hugh Codding and his lawyer were loudly opposing the project with its giveaway land deal, and Hugh was never more of a polarizing figure than during those years.
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
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