Tuesday, March 17, 2009

A look inside 14th & R Street from the Preservation Roundtable







This past Saturday's "Preservation Roundtable," a quarterly gathering of those interested in historic preservation, infill, development, local history and urban forestry, met at the "Shady Lady" saloon, the corner unit at 14th and R. The building is a former bakery, located on Sacramento's R Street industrial corridor.

The top photo is from inside the "Shady Lady," a restaurant/bar with a definite old school feel: lots of dark wood, what I would describe as "bordello wallpaper," high-backed booths, and a wonderful metal & wood ceiling treatment. They plan to hang a lot of photos of bars from Sacramento's past: I pointed them at a couple of collections where I found a lot of great images of Sacramento taprooms at SAMCC.

The other two businesses that will go in the ground floor are Magpie Catering, who provided amazingly tasty baked goods for the Roundtable, and "Burgers & Brew," the same folks who own the business of the same name in Davis, as well as Crepeville.

Upstairs are twelve residential lofts, ranging between about 500 and 1100 feet. These are actual loft lofts, not apartment buildings or close-set single family homes billed as "lofts." All have polished concrete floors. Due to their proximity to Empire Events Center and light rail tracks, they all have very good soundproofing and dual-pane windows.

The Roundtable meeting was very lively, including a long and sometimes grumpy discussion of the proposed deregulation of the Planning Commission and Design Commission (that would combine them into one board, with more projects going to staff level.) Roundtables are interesting events for the information they provide, but often then opportunity to get inside of neat historic buildings, especially ones on the brink of a new life, is more fun than the meeting.

2 comments:

Gretchen said...

I like the juxtaposition of the old and new in this project!

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry I missed it but by the look of the phots there was a good turnout.