Santa Rosa was wild with joy. Every store and business downtown closed immediately as people flooded into the streets, some shouting, some crying, some laughing; to an outsider it would have looked like everyone in town had suddenly gone barking mad. Nothing like that had ever occurred before and probably will never happen again. So once they invent a time machine, rush down to the atavachron station and buy a ticket for Tuesday, Aug. 14, 1945 at 3:10 in the afternoon. It was V-J Day.
"Almost before the radio and newspaper flashes had been recorded, automobile horns added their din to the sirens' wail and hundreds of cars raced around the courthouse and up and down business streets - serpentine [party streamers] appeared from nowhere and wastebaskets were emptied from second and third-story windows," reported the Press Democrat. "Exuberant youngsters raided the paper balers at the rear of The Press Democrat office, hurled the contents into the street and scattered paper ribbons from rooftops...Streets were littered with paper that backed up into the gutters and overflowed onto the courthouse lawn." There was so much paper in the streets that it looked like the town was hit by a freak snowstorm.
"Fire trucks, flag-bedecked, raced through downtown streets, followed by countless cars, motorcycles, bicycles and shouting pedestrians," the PD noted. Anyone in a vehicle with a horn leaned on it. "Once in a while you see a perfectly sane-appearing person driving by, not honking the horn on his car, and he looks sort of silly," someone told the paper. Probably every kid with a stash of firecrackers - banned by the government since 1943 - gathered on the courthouse steps and earnestly went to work trying to maim themselves.
"Weeping women, many of them wives or mothers of servicemen in the Pacific, stood in doorways and offered their thanks to God...Tears streamed down their cheeks as they mingled with the milling throngs - grief-stricken by their own losses and thankful, along with the rest, that the lives of other sons have been spared." The toll had been terrible; 82 Santa Rosa had been killed in the war with another 19 missing. Another 200 from the county were also dead.
The priest from St. Rose and several ministers tried to organize a thanksgiving ceremony in front of the courthouse but the crowd wasn't in the mood: "the din of auto horns, sirens, backfires and firecrackers exploding in the streets drowned out the voices of the clergymen," the PD noted. Giving up, Father Raters returned to his car and tried to leave, only to find himself trapped in the traffic jam. "The St. Rose pastor made the best of things, honking the horn of his car with the rest ot the hundreds that jammed Fourth street," according to the PD.
The Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce had published a set of rules about what was supposed to happen once the announcement came (see "THE DAY BEFORE THE GREATEST DAY"), including a decree that the bars, along with all other businesses, were supposed to immediately close. One entrepreneurial barkeep apparently "forgot" about that and kept his doors open. A reporter from the PD found "the lone exception was swamped with servicemen and civilians until Police Chief Melvin Flohr and other officers 'cracked down' at 5:30 o'clock."
After that, out came the bottles purchased during the "peace jitters" of the previous four days. There were "numberless house parties where friends gathered to jointly celebrate the greatest day in the history of the United States and the world."
Another part of the best-laid plans was a parade, but the Chamber and Parade Marshal decided to put it off until the next day, after efforts failed "to form a parade from the aimless mass of motorcars."
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
The wait was unbearable. Few probably slept although it was nice August weather, with cool fog after dark. Had it happened overnight? Tune in KSRO at 6:15 for the first morning newscast. Grab the Press Democrat on the doorstep and study it. Every word of news in it. You have to know everything about the situation. TODAY is the day. Okay, it will happen tomorrow, for sure. No need to set the clock. You'll be awake long before 6:15. It will be THE day.
For five days in August, 1945, Santa Rosa was as wound up as a 6 year-old eating spoonfuls of sugar on Christmas Eve.
Friday, August 10, was the day after the U.S. dropped the second atomic bomb on Japan, destroying much of the city of Nagasaki. Truman warned Japanese civilians to flee industrial cities to save their lives from further atomic destruction. The Soviets declared war on Japan. Japan announced it would broadcast "news of vital importance to everyone" on Sunday night, which everyone presumed would be a surrender, marking the end of WWII.
The Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce laid out the rules: When the fire sirens go off, all bars were to close and to stay closed for the rest of the day. Ditto for retail stores: "...stores will close immediately if official end-of-the-war announcement is received during business hours. In this event - receipt of word while stores are open - they will close not only for the balance of the day, but also for the entire following day provided the following day is a business day. If the word is received in the early morning, before the usual time of opening, they will remain closed all day..." There will be a victory parade, although "...There will be no Sunday parade, however, in event the word is received on that day, or late Saturday..." They apparently spent the entire day in meetings to make sure we knew how to have fun properly.
Santa Rosa was having a bad case of the "peace jitters," as the Press Democrat called it. There was little news on Saturday - Washington was keeping negotiations hush-hush, but it was reported Japan wanted conditional terms of surrender. Not much on Sunday, either. The PD ran a letter to the editor decrying parking meters.
Everyone was waiting for the Sunday night message from Japan. And at the expected time, radio announcers interrupted the regular programming to announce "Japan accepts surrender terms of the Allies." The PD reported what happened next:
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
The V-E Day celebrations in Sonoma County didn't have much have much bang to them, but that's okay - we were saving our juices for the wild hell-raising that would come three months later when Japan surrendered.
For a week before the official V-E Day on May 8, 1945, two stories dominated the news: The United Nations Conference on International Organization AKA "World Peace Conference," which had just started in San Francisco. (Fun fact: In Nov. 1946, the 1,640 acre Sobre Vista estate near Glen Ellen was among the sites considered as a possible location for building the UN. And you think traffic on Highway 12 is sometimes bad now...)
The other big news at the top of the front pages concerned the fall of the Nazis and when V-E Day would be officially declared. Joe Stalin had proclaimed the war over on May Day. Eisenhower had said on May 4 that Germans were "thoroughly whipped." So why the wait? In newsrooms across the country, there was much squirming in editorial chairs. "Don't blame your newspaper and its press services for not telling you in this edition that 'It's all over in Europe,'" griped the Press Democrat. "Evidently there are good and valid reasons why the responsible military leaders of the Allies, and their governments who depend upon their judgments do not give out that final, fateful symbol 'V-E DAY.'"
Then early on Monday, May 7, the wire services broke the news that the war in Europe would be declared over at 9AM Eastern War Time the next day, as Truman, Churchill and Stalin would make simultaneous radio announcements.
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.
Riiinnng! Hello? Why, it's aunt Ginny in Peoria! How are you, au- What's that you say? We're a bunch of naked perverts undermining the war effort?
There were probably lots of calls from angry aunties on that morning of July 6, 1944, as an AP wire story hit the pages of newspapers nationwide: "At least 200 members of a vast nudist retreat in the Valley of the Moon were called on the office of price administration carpet today to explain how they reached the place on 'A' ration gasoline, some from as far away as Oregon and southern California."
Even without the nudity angle, this would still have been a major story at the time. Gasoline rationing during WWII was a hot-button issue; nobody liked it but cheating was viewed as awfully selfish and unpatriotic. For fuel efficiency and preservation of rubber tires, the national speedlimit was 35 MPH and anyone caught going faster not only got a fine but their name in the paper - and repeat violators could lose their gas coupons for the duration of the war, however long that might be. For some of these people to be driving hundreds of miles to visit Sonoma county strongly implied they were tapping into the black market.
Headline editors were surprisingly restrained (Kingsport Tenn. Times: "Nudists Must Give OPA The Bare Facts") with the most sensationalistic being our own Press Democrat: "Professional Men, Housewives Found Flitting About Hilltop Elysium From All Over State". While the San Francisco Examiner printed a fuzzy photo of naked people on a volleyball court, the PD also published the most salacious account:
| ...Surprise arrival of the agents at first sent an array of 'nudies' of all ages, sizes and descriptions scurrying for cover, disappearing into the array of cabins or into the bushes. But before it was over the nudists apparently said 'what the heck' or its equivalent and returned to their games of volley ball, croquet, swimming, and dancing to a boogie-woogie piano...As one young lass, standing unabashed with her curves, moaned: "Heavens! My husband doesn't know I've been using our car to come here. What will he say?" |
That "Hilltop Elysium" was the Sun-O-Ma nudist colony, which is currently on the market for $11.3M and redubbed the "Castle Road Estate," in the hills above the Bartholomew Park Estate Vineyards - and therein lies the nut of our tale.
Those vineyards are the remnants of Agoston Haraszthy’s historic Buena Vista winery. Stories about what became of the ranch after he was (supposedly) eaten by alligators have appeared here twice before: Kate Johnson built a 40-room "castle" in 1885 (see "THE MAKING OF A CRAZY CAT LADY") which the state purchased to create the California Industrial Farm for Women (see "THE DELINQUENT WOMEN OF SONOMA"). After the castle burned down in 1923 there were several proposals made for the state to build some sort of new institution, but aside from the infirmary building becoming an unofficial annex of the nearby Sonoma State Home at Eldridge, the grand estate - which was once often compared to Golden Gate Park - went to rack and ruin for a decade. Then arrived the nudist's nemesis, Frank Bartholomew.
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
Another landmark of old Santa Rosa is slated for demolition, so anyone wanting to say farewell shouldn't dawdle. Newcomers to town during, say, the last forty years, probably don't know about it; native Santa Rosans who are Baby Boomers (or older) were probably born in it. That place is the old General Hospital at the corner of A and 7th streets, and it still looks almost exactly as it did about a century ago, when it was built in 1922.
It was just the sort of hospital you'd expect to find here during the town's Shadow of a Doubt years, before and after WWII. The general practitioner doctors patched up farmers gored by bulls and reckless drivers who wrecked their autos on the Redwood Highway. They removed oodles of appendixes and tons of tonsils. So many casts were made for broken arms and legs they probably used enough plaster of paris to plaster every ceiling in Paris.
The tale of Santa Rosa General Hospital neatly breaks down into three acts but before raising that curtain, a few words about why it's being demolished: That entire block - Morgan to A street, 6th to 7th street - is to be torn down in stages in order to build the Caritas Village Project. The hospital is scheduled to be razed in early 2022 and replaced by one of two large affordable housing apartment buildings and a third large building on the block will be a family and homeless support center. The three buildings have a unified design and are quite attractive; they will surely be an asset to Santa Rosa for decades to come. But there are two really important reasons why the city should not allow them to be built at that location.
Thirty years ago in 1990, Santa Rosa (finally) recognized that much of its unique character had been heedlessly demolished. To save what little was left of its heritage, a few of the old neighborhoods were designated as Preservation Districts, with "St. Rose" being one of the first. New construction has to conform to stylistic guidelines in order to fit in with the overall look. To now exempt an entire block from both letter and spirit of the law is a dangerous precedent which could be used by developers to build anything, anywhere. And since the Caritas Village plans were developed long after this Preservation District was formed, the project backers began with the assumption that they could get away with violating city law.
The other worrisome aspect is the three-story, 42k square-foot building intended to provide one-stop services to the county's homeless. It's a noble idea except the location is three blocks from Courthouse Square, which only ensures that our grown grandchildren will still be avoiding downtown because of its vagrant problems. Look, Santa Rosa has a history of making foolish and short-sighted planning decisions - I'm in the middle of writing a ten-part series just about the 1960s screwups leading up to the mega-mistake of approving the shopping mall - but surely city planners recognize it's not wise to build a magnet for the homeless so close to the city core. Final approval decisions on Caritas Village will be made in coming months (planning reviews start February 13, 2020) so let the City Council know what you think about the project.
In the spotlight for General Hospital's Act I was Henry S. Gutermute (1865-1958), a man who had his fingers in many pies. We first met him in 1905 when he had the Maze Department Store in Petaluma, on the corner where the Bank of America now stands. Fast forward to 1915 and he's now president of the Burke Corporation, the new owner of the Burke Sanitarium, which five years earlier had been the scene of Sonoma County's crime of the century. To scrape away the scandal and relaunch the sanitarium they threw a luxe dinner and dance for 400 movers and shakers. What the store and the sanitarium have in common is that Gutermute liked to heavily advertise - a practice he would continue with General Hospital, although it was unusual to find newspaper ads for actual hospitals.
Meanwhile, a large family home at 804 Fourth street, then two doors east of the county library, was being converted into a new hospital. (Compare that lost majestic home to the squat little bank bunker there now and reflect upon why it was necessary to establish the Preservation Districts.) Called the Lindsay-Thompson Hospital/Sanitarium it was similar to the Mary Jesse/Eliza Tanner Hospital, another residence turned small hospital that was a block away. Both included an operating room.
That incarnation lasted just a year before it was taken over by the Burke Corporation, meaning Gutermute and his partners. They incorporated the General Hospital Association and renamed the place "General Hospital." Presumably their business plan was to offer a package deal with surgery in Santa Rosa and recuperation at their health resort, as many newspaper items reported patients shuffling back and forth.
For the next four years little General Hospital hummed along, with nearly daily ads in the newspapers offering "MEDICAL SURGICAL OBSTETRICAL" services. (Fun fact: In 1916, the McDonald's and other local nabobs marched their kids over there to have their tonsils removed en masse as a preventative measure before the start of the school year.) Then came the eviction notice - the Devoto family wanted their home back in thirty days. Santa Rosa had a 1919 housing crunch because of all the soldiers returning from WWI.
Instead of renting another large house, Gutermute scrambled to construct a temporary hospital from scratch. A special session of the City Council was called to grant him permissions to build something on the corner of Seventh and A streets - and just six weeks later (!!) the new General Hospital was open for business in January, 1920.
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
It crashed through the treetops on the Vine Hill farm, and the only reason the bomb didn't kill the farmer milking a goat was because it got snagged in the branches. Had it exploded, he would have been the first war casualty on American soil since Pearl Harbor. It was January 4, 1945.
The farmer called the sheriff and soon deputies, FBI agents and Army ballistics experts from Hamilton Field were speeding to that West County goat farm. None of them knew what they were handling - they didn't even realize it was a live bomb, so they took it to the sheriff's office and put it on display in the lobby.
All they knew was that it probably had been dropped from a balloon. "Hundreds of residents of western Sonoma county had seen the mysterious balloon sweeping inland from the vicinity of Jenner, highlighted by rays of the setting sun," the Press Democrat later reported.
A couple of days earlier the PD had a front page story about the "mystery spheres" which had been found in Wyoming, Montana, Washington and Oregon. They were believed to be of Japanese origin, but the Army hadn't confirmed that; all that was known for sure was that they carried incendiary devices. That story repeated speculation that the balloons were carrying enemy soldiers, which was the working theory for a couple of weeks: "There was no actual evidence that the balloon had carried enemy saboteurs but that seemed the only logical explanation for its arrival. It trailed an elastic cable that had been cut, possibly indicating that it once was equipped with a cage capable of carrying a crew of perhaps four or five who, on arriving over the United States, cut themselves free and parachuted to earth in a small-sized 'invasion.'"
The same day the Vine Hill bomb landed, the Office of Censorship ordered a complete blackout of any balloon stories in newspapers and on radio. The curtain of silence remained in place until the war ended in August.
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
All Bernice wanted was a good night's sleep. She didn't mean to throw the town into an existential crisis. At least, I don't think so.
On July 2, 1951, she went to a City Council meeting. "I am complaining about roosters that wake us up," she said. "I think we should get rid of these birds."
It was a shocking proposal. The birds in question were chickens and Bernice Gardner lived in Petaluma, a town which had long shackled itself to the Leghorn and its skill at reliably cranking out lovely white eggs - which sometimes pop out fuzzy baby chicks, hence: Roosters.
"We must consider the poultry business," Councilman Walter Brown said, adding helpfully "all roosters crow." Perhaps he was wondering if Mrs. Gardner didn't understand she was complaining about chickens. In Petaluma.
The acting City Manager pointed out there was no prohibition on keeping animals within city limits and presented a thumbnail history of an earlier tussle over the issue that limited the animal kingdom to dogs and cats. This was useful, as it gave the Council members a moment to recover from shock and gather their political wits about them.
Councilman Norwood suggested they could write an anti-noise ordinance. A zoning ordinance might be the thing, Councilman Shoemaker thought. Norwood added that they could make it a nuisance ordinance. "We would do something about a howling dog. It's the same thing, only a different noise."
City attorney Brooks offered his two cents, although I'll bet he billed the city at a considerably higher rate. He said the Council could write a general ordinance or a specific rooster ordinance - but if roosters were being kept with malicious intent, a special specific ordinance could be enacted. With that said, the council voted to hold the item over for the next meeting.
Note there was no thought of restricting - much less banishing - chickens within city limits.
Bernice and husband Ralph, both in their early sixties, lived in the 600 block of Baker street, a Westside neighborhood off of Bodega Ave. where many homes have big backyards and plenty of room for a hen house. She told the Council, "at 5AM it's anything but trivial. There are two across the street from my house, and another large on nearby which crows every five seconds. I have called the neighbors at 5AM to complain but nothing has been done about it."
She seemed to make a valid point but at the next Council meeting, a woman named Clara Perry said she represented the neighbors and they had something to say - and not about chickens, but about Bernice. This was an eccentric thing to complain about, Clara charged, and surely the Council had more serious matters to consider. The record does not reveal whether she was, or was not, in possession of a rooster.
Again punting on a decision, the Council decided Bernice should next visit the Planning Commission. She also needed to file a complaint with the police signed by six other persons. It's likely they now believed she was an isolated crank - although there was always a risk the rooster fight could turn into a replay of 1948.
That was the year of the petition against "fowls and livestock within the city limits" (Bernice was one of the three ringleaders in that effort). Petaluma was no longer a rural community the petitioners argued, and animals were both a nuisance and health risk, specifically "chicken raising in residential areas [is] an insurmountable source of rat nuisance." About 300 signed the petition and a draft ordinance was hammered together. At the first Council meeting of 1949 the room was packed with protesters and a counter-petition with 900 signatures was presented. Their lawyer made a 15-point argument against the ordinance; #7 was that seized animals would be denied due process. The Argus-Courier headline the next day was, "Livestock Ordinance Beaten Down by Opposition Barrage."
Alas for Bernice, her 1951 appearance before the Planning Commission didn't go so well, either. Commissioners were only willing to discuss future considerations on the "subject of nuisances." Nor could she muster even six people to sign her noise complaint. All the city had received was a single letter which condemned all "roosters, hens, flies, rats and odors" within the city. It was anonymously signed, "A Petaluma Citizen."
Petalumans, it seems, were a remarkably tolerant bunch when it came to barnyard noises; a quick search of mid-century newspapers turns up surprisingly few police blotter items. In 1952 a woman on I street called the police over her neighbor's cow, who "mooed all night and was still making a noise the next day." A couple of times the Argus-Courier joked that rooster complaints were resolved via a dinner table. In fact, there's only one other occasion that can be found where a resident thought roostering was serious enough to merit the government's attention.
The year was 1945, and a woman complained to the City Council that roosters were waking her up each morning at 4:30. At the next Council meeting five of her neighbors showed up to defend the right to crow. "Mostly all the speakers felt the situation could be amicably corrected by the neighborhood itself," the A-C reported. Note the article implied at least one of them thought the matter couldn't be settled peaceably.
So here's the obl. Believe-it-or-Not! reveal: The warring neighborhood in 1945 was Baker street, same as in 1951. One of the neighbors fighting the complaint in 1945 was again Clara Perry, who lived three door away from the woman who was so bothered by the crowing. The woman who said she couldn't sleep in 1945 was again Bernice Gardner. And Bernice - who apparently couldn't stand to be around chickens even though she was living in the most chicken-y town in America - had spent about twenty years of her early married life on chicken ranches in Vallejo and Cotati. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say.
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
Breaking news: People tend to have very strong opinions about parking meters. Also, this surprise: Those opinions are never favorable.
Yet Santa Rosa still has them, making it among the very few places in Sonoma county where the elusive meters can be spotted in the wild along with their related species, parking garages that charge money. And the reason we have them is because this is the city that time forgot - in Santa Rosa, it is always 1946.
This is the second in a series exploring the missed opportunities and regrettable decisions that have shaped Santa Rosa since World War II. Part one ("THE SANTA ROSA THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN") saw voters narrowly reject a chance to develop part of the downtown core into a Civic Center, which would have kept it the county's hub during the postwar boom years and after.
Looking back on all the other times the city took a wrong turn, one name keeps popping up: Hugh Bishop Codding. When first planning this series I even considered naming it "How Hugh Codding Destroyed Downtown," but that's unfair - our city government and elected officials did the job on their own, advised by a parade of out-of-town "experts." Yes, old Hugh monkeywrenched the town with lawsuits and sometimes jujitsued the city or county into doing something stupid, but mostly he took strategic advantage of their missteps. And sometimes he didn't win; for example, there was his odd and long-running quest to convince the city of Santa Rosa to move out of the city.*
No, Codding's not to blame alone; with remarkable consistency, when challenged to make a momentous decision our trusted civic leaders boldly rose to the occasion and (in my humble opinion) made the worst possible choices. The courthouse was torn down and a street plowed through courthouse square; Santa Rosa Creek was buried in a culvert; prime downtown acreage was bulldozed with most of it turned over to private developers; a shopping mall was constructed which immediately became the Great Wall of B street.
That record of stumbling mistakes began in July, 1944, while Codding was still a Seabee building quonset huts in the Pacific. That month the Chamber of Commerce held a luncheon to discuss the "parking bugbear" with a public meeting following a few weeks later. There the city manager announced he had contacted 200 colleagues in other cities; almost all said parking meters were swell. The Press Democrat thought the general attitude by the end of the meeting was that "they are at least worth a trial."
Letters began pouring into the PD disagreeing with that. While there were a couple of correspondents who made somewhat reasoned arguments, most teetered on the edge of crackpottery. A few samples:
"Where is our freedom? What are our men fighting for? Now comes it the parking meter..." (Mrs. A. K. Larson). "Parking meters have to be placed on the sidewalks. Our sidewalks are already too narrow. You put a row of posts on the walks in addition to the present stacks of bicycles and there won't be much room for pedestrians" ("A Taxpayer"). "If parking meters are installed here, we would have buildings going up outside the city limits after the war and the city assessor would have to reduce the taxes on the buildings downtown as there will be many vacancies" (Alfred E. Poulsen). "I believe this to be illegal. Property owners own and pay taxes to the middle of the street" (E.J.F.). "Why charge the motorist all the time? Look up all the hidden taxes he pays. Why not charge pedestrians for standing on the sidewalks? It is just as fair" (Sgt. A. R. Milligan). Bonus crankdom: The letter following Sergeant Milligan's in that edition advocated that once WWII was over, we should sterilize all German males for the next twenty years to ensure "any children born in Germany would have to be at least half civilized."
The city installed 510 parking meters in early 1945 and although the city printed helpful directions on how to use them, on the first day of operation "numerous persons inserted coins 'just to watch them work' but in many cases failed to turn the handle far enough to set the ticking device in operation." When the first monies were collected three days later, the take included four slugs even though the graphic in the PD showed a little window on the meter claiming "SLUGS will show here." Yeah, no.
 |
| Press Democrat, February 11, 1945 |
A nasty squabble immediately arose between the county and city over parking spaces. Santa Rosa had installed a row of meters on the east and west of the courthouse and the county was threatening legal action unless there was free parking for designated vehicles. As neither side was blinking, the county proposed it would turn the south lawn of the courthouse into a government parking lot, requiring chopping down two mature Peruvian pine trees - which were the last survivors from the pre-1906 earthquake courthouse plaza. The PD reported on the backlash: "The number and vehemence of telephone calls coming to this office since announcement of the parking plan indicate that the removal of those trees for the purpose set forth will meet with a storm of protest, like which our county officials have never before heard." The city caved, but it was a stupid fight to pick; what did they expect? Jurors and judges would dash outside every two hours to move their cars?
Then as Mrs. Larson poetically wrote, now comes it the crisis: the year 1946.
Thousands of soldiers and sailors were returning home to Santa Rosa where they were promised free education and cheap mortgages by the GI Bill - but found jobs scarce and nowhere to live. The housing situation was probably worse than it's been since the 2017 fires; a special census taken that February found only 74 vacant houses or apartments in all of Santa Rosa, including places leased/sold but not yet occupied and units where residents happened to be out of town. The Press Democrat's "Wanted to Rent" classifieds were always long, packed with veterans pleading for somewhere with a roof. Sometimes a finder's fee was offered, including nylons.
With all those additional people on the downtown streets, the traffic situation became nigh impossible. The meters and rigorous enforcement of time limits became essential to avoid gridlock. Yet at a city council meeting the outgoing mayor conceded something had to be done besides writing lots of parking tickets ("I don't like these wholesale citations") and that the parking meters "have not accomplished everything wanted." From the March 6th PD:
| The mayor explained that it is "not the fault of the meters" that the parking meters have not completely solved the parking problem, but is due to the "great influx of people into Santa Rosa." He explained that traffic has become so great that "there just isn't room for them" in parking space now provided. |
Besides sounding a bit like a Stockholm syndrome hostage to the Miller Meter Company, the mayor urged the council to acquire empty lots close to downtown for off-street parking - which would mean buying more meters, of course. (There was at least one all-day parking lot at B street and Healdsburg ave, and it was never mentioned whether the 10¢ required to park there was fed into a meter, handed to an attendant or was a purchased tag.)
To pay for the lots and other civic improvements (including "electric stop-and-go signal equipment for key intersections"), the city council used bond money and authorized Santa Rosa's first sales tax, to predictable taxpayer howls. Although the tax was only one percent, there were calls for a complete boycott of the downtown as a kind of "Boston Tea Party" protest.
The Press Democrat's letter section saw writers interchangeably angry between the sales tax and the parking meters, to wit: "I (Someone I know) will never shop again in Santa Rosa because I'm mad about a parking ticket (I already pay too many taxes)." But where else were they to go? Spend all that time and gas - now up to 21¢ a gallon! - driving to Petaluma for groceries or all the way to San Francisco for a fashionable hat?
Hello, Hugh Codding.
The very first real article in the Press Democrat about Montgomery Village appeared on April 30, 1950 and included this quote from Codding: "People do not like the inconvenience of looking for parking space, priming the parking meter and then walking several blocks between stores. Montgomery Village abolishes that inconvenience - all within one block of 750-car parking." It had been a long time since Santa Rosa had heard such sweet and sensible words.
That appeared before the shopping center fully opened, and later ads would feature its other major draws: Montgomery Village was just outside city limits so there was no municipal sales tax and it had diagonal parking.
To understand why diagonal parking was such a Very Big Deal, slip into a Dacron jacket and travel with me back to 1950. Cars and pickups are classy but clunky - as large as boats and heavy as little tanks. And because they don't have power steering (not available on any car until 1951) they require the muscles of Popeye to turn the steering wheel if the tires aren't in motion.
Santa Rosa insisted upon parallel parking only, even though downtown merchants had been protesting it for many years. A petition for diagonal parking was presented to city council in 1940, headed by some of the top storekeepers: Lee Hardisty, Leonard Deffner, Donald Carithers and Irving Klein. Deffner, owner of the big Pershing Market between 4th and 5th streets, told the council that customers of nearby businesses were using his grocery store parking lot rather than parallel park on the street (and this is before the meters, remember). Nothing doing, said Santa Rosa - our streets are so narrow that anyone double parked would cause a traffic jam if diagonal was used. Apparently stiff fines for double parking weren't a consideration. The city clung so hard to parallelism that in 1964 they made every third space no-parking so it would be faster to nose or back in to a spot, thus making the parking shortage 33 percent worse. Dumb decisions like that made Codding look like a genius by comparison.
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| Montgomery Village ad, February 6, 1955 |
While Montgomery Village was thriving, Santa Rosa seemed to go out of its way to make downtown parking ever more annoying.
In 1951 (840 meters now installed) they made a deal with a company to put frames on the meter poles which could display printed ads. Local merchants hated it, didn't advertise and the company damaged many of the meters somehow. Two years later the city incurred more public wrath by switching parking lot meters to take dimes only, thus forcing drivers to overpay if their errands took less than two hours. Overtime parking fines doubled, then doubled again.
Other Sonoma county towns followed Santa Rosa's lead in the 1950s and installed parking meters, then later removed them under pressure from the business community. Healdsburg uprooted its meters in 1964 and the sales tax increase more than replaced lost meter income. Twenty years later Petaluma stopped meter enforcement and their Downtown Merchants Association saw business improve.
Yet Santa Rosa's confidence in the meters remained unshakable, even while the city continues to tinker with them; a decade ago they tore the meters off most posts because consultants insisted ticket kiosks were ever more efficient and the public really wouldn't mind hiking from a parking spot to a kiosk and then back again. This year (2018) the city extended metered parking to 8PM while also implementing a zone system, which is able to increase the cost of parking in busy areas during the busiest times - which was done because experts told the city that trick works really well in tourist towns like San Diego.
But still the ungrateful public keeps complaining and today the resentment over paid parking in Santa Rosa is louder and more frequent than ever before - although that may be because the forum has shifted from newsprint to social media, where everything is amplified and unedited.
What's interesting is how attitudes have not budged a whit between 1946 and now. People still say they no longer go downtown because they (or someone they know) was unfairly dinged with an expensive parking ticket. Businesses still say they don't have enough customers because of the hassle of parking. And Santa Rosa still says there's nothing wrong with the status quo - whatever it happens to be at that moment.
| * There are no shortages of Hugh Codding anecdotes, but here's a story I've not read elsewhere: While Santa Rosa was mulling over where to build the new city hall in 1950, Codding offered space at Montgomery Village - although it was then outside of city limits. According to the Press Democrat: "'I thought myself it was fantastic until I got to thinking about it,' he told the astounded [planning] commissioners." Then as the city still hadn't decided in 1963, he offered free land near Coddingtown in the unincorporated area. The city council didn't snap up the deal so a week later he came back with an offer of another place, also on county land near his shopping center. And when they still didn't bite, he tried to broker a deal to make city hall part of the new county administration center. Did he really believe he could get Santa Rosa to move the city buildings out of the city? |
Fresh back from service in WWII, architect "Cal" Caulkins had a vision: He would fix Santa Rosa. He wasn't the first to try it - nor the last.
The downtown that Caulkins wanted to fix in 1945 was essentially what still exists now, sans our monstrous mall. It was also mostly the same as it was in August, 1853, when a surveyor named Shakely laid out a grid of a few streets centered around a small plaza. And that's the problem: Once we scrape away all the built-up crust, the layout of Santa Rosa was - and still is - a mid-19th century village. The town motto should be changed from “The City Designed For Living” to "The City Designed For Living...in 1853."
Santa Rosa quickly began to outgrow its modest framework. The next year it became the county seat, which led to a courthouse, county jail and county records building packed around the village square - and even that centerpiece was lost in 1884 when the next courthouse was built in the middle of it. Santa Rosa's plaza hadn't been much to look at and there were ongoing problems of stray cows and pigs taking up residence, but at least it was a public open space. Now the village town didn't even have a park, and it would be 1931 before Santa Rosa had a true public-owned place (thanks to the donation of the nine acre Juilliard homestead).
Nor did Sonoma's county seat have a building where lots of people could assemble. The Athenaeum opera house was used until it fell down in the 1906 earthquake; afterwards large public meetings were held at the roller skating rink, a movie theater or at the armory. The Burbank auditorium at the junior college opened in 1940 and could seat 700, but that was pitiable compared to cities like San Jose, which had a civic auditorium that could hold 3,500.
Elected officials and town boosters sought piecemeal fixes, apparently never recognizing the problem was the town's underlying design. Another gripe concerned the narrow streets; immediately after the 1906 earthquake pulverized much of downtown, Press Democrat editor Ernest Finley pushed hard to widen all principal streets in the business district so they could accomodate electric trolley cars (only two blocks of Fourth street were modified).
Same with the park and auditorium issues; they knew a park with some amusements would draw Bay Area tourists and a large hall which could host conventions were both reliable money-makers. They spent nearly fifty years off and on trying to create a park but it always ended the same ways: The town couldn't afford the land, voters wouldn't pass a bond or there was too much heavy lifting involved.
The solution to both problems seemed at hand in early 1906 when architect William H. Willcox proposed creating a waterpark via a dam on Santa Rosa Creek, turning it into an urban lake. It would be the centerpiece of the town with a section for swimming and water sports, benches and lighted paths (très moderne!) on both banks and a kiosk jutting over the water for bands to entertain. He also had designed a convention-style auditorium that could seat 2,500, which made him the darling of Santa Rosa’s business elite; they had pledged almost the full amount to start construction - and then the earthquake hit. For more on both plans, see "SANTA ROSA’S FORGOTTEN FUTURE."
It would be almost forty years before someone came along and tried again, and that would be Cal Caulkins - who also tackled Santa Rosa's underlying problems head-on.
Cal Caulkins' career up to 1945 was introduced in the previous article, which explained some of the architectural styles he used and offered a walking tour of his typical work. If you haven't read that piece it's important to know he was Santa Rosa's top architect at this time and a well-respected civic leader; anything he proposed would be weighed quite seriously.
The public first saw his design in the August 19 edition of the Press Democrat. The accompanying article in the PD was headlined, "Master Plan Urged for City's Future." A second banner over the drawing announced, "A Postwar Vision - 'Face Lifting' for Santa Rosa."
Although the plan was entirely his, the germ of the idea came from Press Democrat editor Herbert J. Waters, who had published an unusual above-the-masthead editorial six months earlier. At the time there was much debate concerning the need to expand the county courthouse, with either an annex somewhere else or via adding a third floor "penthouse on stilts" to the existing building, estimated to cost a staggering $325,000 - with most of that going to reinforce the structure.
Waters was also peeved by an American Legion committee which had just asked the city to use Fremont Park as the site for their future war memorial building. Besides the loss of a scarce public park, he decried scattering new public buildings all over town just because there was land already owned by Santa Rosa. He called instead for a long range plan to create a civic center on the banks of Santa Rosa Creek. "With beautiful Juilliard Park and the famous Luther Burbank Gardens as approaches, such a civic center could be one of the most attractive in the country" - and remember that was in 1945, when the Redwood Highway went through downtown.
Although Waters' ideas were quite sketchy, Caulkins took that vision and expanded it greatly.
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| Cal Caulkins watercolor of proposed Santa Rosa Civic Center. PD, June 15, 1953 |
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| Key to Caulkins' proposed Santa Rosa Civic Center |
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| Cal Caulkins pen and ink drawing of proposed Santa Rosa Civic Center. PD, August 19, 1945 |
What he designed was simply brilliant. He produced both a pen and ink drawing of the plan that appeared in the PD and a large watercolor that he loaned out for display and used as a backdrop during his frequent speaking engagements that autumn.
What he was calling the "Memorial Civic Center" provided Santa Rosa new open space via a walkway to the point between the confluence of Matanzas and Santa Rosa Creeks. The undersize courthouse square was gone, replaced by a landscaped plaza stretching from Fourth street to First (although its shape might have tempted jalopy racers to think of the Circus Maximus).
Like Willcox he glorified the Creek, turning First street - long the junky part of downtown with scattered shacks, the grimier auto repair shops and farm equipment resellers - into a scenic drive as well as the main connector to the neglected working class southwest neighborhoods.
No question: This was the best of all possible Santa Rosas, and all that was needed to start the wheels moving would be for voters to pass a measly $100,000 bond.
What could possibly go wrong?
Seemingly everyone loved Caulkin's plan. It was endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Supervisors, labor unions, service clubs, veteran’s groups, women’s groups and politicians of all stripes. The Press Democrat ran a banner on the front page reading, “Santa Rosa’s Future is at Stake.” It looked like a done deal.
Some of the enthusiasm was surely part of the prevailing "can do" optimism that lifted the nation from the spring of 1945 onward, once it became clear we would win the war. Everyone was looking forward to making their own little corner of the world not only whole again, but better; in Sonoma county, a committee was formed to explore creating a "Redwood Peace Temple," which apparently was to be sort of a Bohemian Grove-ish annual summit for world leaders (albeit hopefully without those notables drunkenly pissing on trees).
Nor did there seem to be concerns about how to pay for everything. It was promised there would be cost efficiencies in building the federal, state, county and city buildings so close together, with money coming from all four sources. Santa Rosa was already in queue to get $500k for a new post office, there was property tax money to fund war memorials all over the county (thanks to a temporary change in state law) and besides, everything did not need to be built at once; they could start with the war memorial and build the other stuff when the money came in. Pay as you go, postwar style.
To launch the project, Santa Rosa asked voters for a $100,000 bond to acquire the war memorial site. It was a crowded ballot for a non-election year, with seven bonds worth $845k plus four other items, but nothing was pushed harder for approval than the war memorial. In the weeks before the vote hardly a day went by without an item about it in the Press Democrat; we were told it was a good investment because it would attract conventions and the (expected) matching grants would make construction virtually free. A coalition of veteran's groups formed a joint committee to get the voters to the polls. And although December 4 ended up being a miserable day with a hard rain, half of all registered voters turned out.
It lost by 96 votes.
The PD was editorially silent about the defeat, but it was the #1 topic in letters to the editor for the rest of the month. A single writer cheered its failure; another person begged for someone to explain what happened - but mostly people slammed the American Legion for the bond losing.
Simply put, there was distrust about the Legion's involvement with the War Memorial project. This came up a few months before the vote, when County Supervisor Guidotti remarked, "...only recently a group of Santa Rosa legionnaires appeared before our board and their spokesmen, in effect, admitted that they only wanted a building for themselves and to [hell] with anybody else." Similarly, when the legionnaires proposed the Fremont Park site to the Santa Rosa city council, they proposed the city use its share of the tax money to build them a meeting hall along with granting a 99-year lease. They would not commit to allowing other veteran's groups to use the building and it was an open question whether they would even let the general public use it. Leaders from the VFW and the Disabled American Veterans were at the meeting to complain they were kept out of meetings about the Fremont Park proposal.
One letter writer was particularly incensed by the "apparent attitude of the Legion toward veterans of World War II," noting that the Legion in San Francisco had recently refused the American Veterans Committee (AVC) use of the war memorial there. (Now defunct, AVC was a progressive group focused on problems facing WWII vets, particularly homelessness.) The Legion claimed they denied access because AVC was not "pure" since merchant marines could join, but one might also wonder if that was a sneer at AVC for being racially integrated, while the American Legion had separate posts for white and black veterans.
Whether the legionnaires should be blamed for killing the Civic Center project is moot. Without that $100,000 there would be no war memorial downtown - and with that, the dream of a Santa Rosa Civic Center was dead. Its failure to pass left a county supervisor questioning if taxpayers wanted those war memorials at all. What happened next was covered here in "THE VETS WAR MEMORIAL WARS:" Soon after the county bought some land in the Ridgway neighborhood for the Santa Rosa auditorium, and when that didn't work out decided to build it across from the fairgrounds.
But Caulkins' Civic Center was not forgotten; for years, mentions kept popping up in PD letters-to-the-editor as well as in articles and columns mentioning downtown development. His drawing was displayed in a window of Rosenberg's Department Store in 1951. When in 1953 the county began making plans to build an administration center north of Santa Rosa city limits (at its present location), the Chamber of Commerce and others urged the supervisors to consider a scaled-down version of Caulkins' downtown design. Caulkins told a reporter he was "besieged" with calls afterwards and the PD ran an illustration of his color drawing alongside an article about it.
There were other attempts to fix Santa Rosa's design problems in 1960-1961, when the city's new Redevelopment Agency hired urban design experts from New Jersey. Some of their ideas were pretty good; they envisioned a pedestrian-friendly city with mini-parks, tree-lined boulevards and a greenway along both banks of a fully restored Santa Rosa Creek. Their objective was to improve traffic circulation so the public could drive as quickly as possible to a parking garage/lot and walk from there. In a nod to Caulkins' work, they proposed the combined county courthouse/jail in a park-like setting on the south side of Santa Rosa Creek.
To their credit, the NJ experts were concerned that Sebastopol avenue/road was cut off from the town and wanted a highway 12 exit for it; to their shame they first proposed eliminating courthouse square, then chose to cut through the center of it. But this is not the time to further discuss the 1960s urban renewal misfires - that will require another lengthy essay or three.
Nothing in the Waters-Caulkins layout survives, except for the removal of part of Second street. (For those like me who have always wondered if that section of the street disappeared in order to wipe out any trace of the old Chinatown, Herb Waters admitted as much in his 1945 editorial: "Our former 'Chinatown' in Second street comes as close to slums as anything we have in Santa Rosa, and its removal would certainly occasion little economic loss.")
But the Santa Rosa that exists today bears little resemblance to what any of those 1960s experts designed, either. Santa Rosa Creek was entombed in a box culvert, although that was the natural feature everyone wanted to highlight; what government buildings that are still downtown are a mishmosh of styles, most already badly dated. While beneath it all, the old grid of village streets from the 19th century still constricts us in the 21st. And sorry - we can't blame any of those bad decisions on the American Legion.