It was a small thing, done privately not to draw attention and happened every morning just before Rosenberg's Department Store opened its Fourth street doors. Clerks paused their fussing with the stock; floor managers stopped setting up cash drawers; accountants in the offices upstairs stopped accounting and janitors let their mops rest in the buckets. Those who were sitting down, stood. A crackly 78 RPM record played over the store's PA system and they all sang the "Star-Spangled Banner" along with it. They were honoring Malcolm Walt, a member of the family both literally and figurative - he was the nephew of owner Fred Rosenberg and had been a coworker before enlisting in the Navy Reserve (Malcolm was then serving in Honolulu, a fraught place to be in December, 1941). They were also honoring all the other Malcolm Walts who were in uniform, some of whom were starting to be named in the local newspapers as missing or presumed dead.
In the week after Pearl Harbor, Santa Rosa stumbled down an unmarked path. We didn't know how to respond to an air raid alert (which were always false alarms) and we couldn't even settle on what an air raid alert should sound like. It was unclear who was making critical decisions; was it the sheriff, police chief, district attorney or a civil defense committee (which came in city, county, Bay Area and federal flavors) - or the Army? These topics were visited in "CITY OF WAR AND ROSES."
During that second week of wartime Santa Rosa tapped its long list of citizens who had signed up as civil defense volunteers, creating a network of 1,000 air raid wardens and assistants to patrol their block during blackouts. (When there was no volunteer for a block, mail carriers were asked to make recommendations.) A pair of students used thumbtacks to mark where the lived on a huge map of the city.
The indefatigable women's clubs held a summit at the Saturday Afternoon Club to plan what each of the 50+ groups in town would do for the war effort. As many women belonged to more than one club, it would be quite a commitment for some, particularly as there was other charity work underway; 200 women were already fanning out through the neighborhoods to raise $18,000 as Santa Rosa's share of the Red Cross war fund campaign.
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
Blackout! In the week after Pearl Harbor, Santa Rosa was hit with “future shock” as the war descended upon us. The blackouts drew everyone’s fevered attention; they made it apparent our lives had changed for the worse – and would likely stay unsettled for a long, long time.
Later they discovered there never were enemy bombers - the reports were all false alarms issued by the Army or hysteric rumors, such as the story of a dogfight with a dive bomber over San Francisco Bay.1 Yet the fear was real and personal; it was the enemy reaching into your home, threatening the very lives of you and yours.
Problem was, there was no "How to Blackout" manual - so when the first two air raid alerts happened on the night of Dec. 8-9, no one knew what to do. There were no blackouts anywhere in the county for the first alert although during the later one Santa Rosa and Petaluma managed to at least turn out streetlights. (Full story found in the previous article.)
Directions from the Office of Civilian Defense appeared in newspapers nationwide on December 9th but were less than helpful: "Put out lights. Stay away from windows."
Considering the urgency of the matter - had there really been bombers, that is - you'd expect authorities and/or the press would have offered guidance on how to follow the rules besides sitting in a pitch-black hallway or windowless room for hours (just imagine what hell that would be for families with little kids).
By the end of the week commercial options were available; the paint store began selling "heavy blackout paper" at 6¢ a sq. yard. Lumber dealers were suggesting plywood ("after the emergency is over, panels can be salvaged and used for cutouts, furniture. built-ins, even wall-coverings"). Pedersen's Furniture would install blackout window shades and the linoleum store advertised blinds made out of linoleum. Civil defense insisted neither blinds or shades were adequate - windows had to be covered with dark cloth or all lights must be doused. The City Council backed that up by passing an ordinance making light leaks punishable by a fine up to $250 or 90 days. Police were also allowed to walk into any building to click off a light.
All well and good, but there was one other teensy problem that first week of the war: Santa Rosa had no air raid signal.
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
Sonoma County was at war, and it came as quite a surprise. Not the part about fighting between the U.S. and Japan; anyone who made a passing glance at a newspaper front page in early December 1941 knew the odds of war were almost certain. What shocked us here was to suddenly discover we were probably on the front lines. War was something that happens far away in another country - never in the street in front of your home.
In the first hours after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor our Sonoma County nerves were frayed. Was Japan about to likewise target the West Coast? Civil defense plans were hurried into action with calming remarks from authorities that the situation was in hand. Less reassuring was discovering their top priority concerned getting ready for mass casualties. (For more on Dec. 7 1941 see the previous article, "EYEWITNESS TO INFAMY.")
The next day (December 8) saw frantic mobilization. Hundreds volunteered to guard public utilities from sabotage, direct traffic during an emergency or serve on rescue squads, while 96 men were sworn in as members of the armed Home Guard. Volunteer firemen were ordered to stay on 24 hour alert. In Santa Rosa it was a day like we had never seen before or since: Downtown must have resembled a hive of bees, with all those men rushing in and out of the courthouse, housewives with shopping lists to prepare for wartime food shortages and everyone on the street sharing their worries and any news about relatives/friends in Hawaii.
And then come nightfall, the Army made everything worse.
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 story of Santa Rosa during the opening days of WWII begins with Roy Vitousek: The first American eyewitness to the start of the war. He was from Santa Rosa and Healdsburg - just more proof a local Believe-it-or-Not! footnote will turn up for nearly any chapter of our nation's history. Sonoma County: Come for the wine and the redwoods, stick around for our mile-high stack of intriguing backstories.
It was not long after sunrise when Roy took to the air in his private plane. Taking a quick spin was a Sunday morning ritual for him and his teenage son; there was no reason to believe December 7, 1941 would be any different than all the times before.
After flying for about an hour they headed back to their home base, the John Rodgers Airport (now the Kalaeloa Airport) a few miles southwest of Pearl Harbor. Another small plane was also preparing to land, so they looped around to make another approach. Roy's son, 17 year-old Martin described what happened next:
| We zoomed up again and circled around the entrance to Pearl Harbor before making another landing attempt. Suddenly we were in the thick of it. The enemy pilots machine-gunned our plane and I could see their heads in the cockpit and the Rising Sun insignia on their wings very plainly. I guess you'll have to say I was scared and mad as hell. |
Their little high-wing Aeronca was now smack in the middle of the initial assault wave on Pearl Harbor. He saw two enemy planes shot down above them and thought another hit the water, although Martin wasn't sure if it wasn't dive bombing. "All in all, we were in the air for ten minutes throughout the first attack before we were able to land."
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
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.
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
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.
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| 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? |