I See by the Papers...

Let's play a game: Try to name a city more self-destructive than Santa Rosa.

We split the town in half (twice!) and hid the downtown creek from sight, although it was the natural feature beloved by all. We encouraged demolishing historic neighborhoods, plowing ahead with urban renewal even after that kind of planning was widely discredited. And if you wanna see someone's blood actually boil, take an older person down to Courthouse Square and ask them to point out the courthouse.

There's lots more. We needlessly widened many commercial and residential streets to better accomodate the Car Culture of the 1960s (this is the topic of the following article). One of those street projects was so outrageous it demands special attention because it involved the demolition of Luther Burbank's home. That happened just a few days before the annual Rose Festival - technically the Luther Burbank Rose Festival, of course - and where that year's theme was "Our American Heritage." Oh, the irony. Ironies.

The history of Burbank's lost house was told here earlier, so there's no need to rehash all the details. But briefly, it was built to his specifications in 1906 and remained his home until he died there twenty years later. The ground floor was almost entirely used as his office and on its front steps he was photographed with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and other luminaries. Once the home was built, he referred to the place we now call Luther Burbank Home & Gardens as the “Old Homestead,” or the “Experimental Farm.”

The seeds for its destruction were planted in 1960 when a New Jersey consulting firm hired by the city proposed connecting Sonoma Ave. to Ellis St. As with so many of Santa Rosa's urban renewal plans, there was no good reason given why this should be done.

Their design - which can be seen in a previous article - would have diverted Metanzas Creek into Santa Rosa Creek around E Street. The city could then reclaim the filled in lower part of Metanzas to create a new park or maybe "a civic center perhaps to include a new City Hall, Chamber of Commerce building, and state offices." Although we'll see there was a later squabble over the route of the Sonoma/Ellis connection, it was always going to cut through the property with Burbank's home.

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