Et in Arcadia ego

The book signing for Sacramento's Southside Park at the Avid Reader is this Sunday, and unlike the ones I did at Barnes & Noble, this one will be a little different: instead of just signing books, Paul Trudeau (who helped a great deal with the book) suggested that we invite the people I interviewed (and some who contributed photos) to come join us at the signing. The idea, I suppose, is to make it more of a neighborhood event than just a book signing, and to hear from more people than just me.

The signing is this Sunday, October 28, 1:00 PM at The Avid Reader on Broadway and 16th (the old Tower Books.)

Railyards, reality and rhetoric

I posted this over on the Heckasac blog (http://heckasac.blogspot.com/) today, regarding development at the railyards:
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I'm of two minds on this. When it comes to the railyards, "leave things the way they are" really isn't an option: leaving the buildings alone just means they will fall down or burn down. They need to be restored.

The thing that concerns me is opposition to a proposed National Register historic district designation for the Railyards and environs. Despite the fears of development fans like Marcos Breton, a National Register designation does not mean that the site has to be left as-is, nor does it mean that only faux-antique buildings can be built there, nor does it mean that building signage has to have an Old West font.

In fact, there are NO federal restrictions on what property owners can do with a National Register property. From their website (http://www.nps.gov/nr/owners.htm):

"Under Federal law, private property owners can do anything they wish with their National Register-listed property, provided that no Federal license, permit, or funding is involved.
Owners have no obligation to open their properties to the public, to restore them, or even to maintain them, if they choose not to do so."

So, why create a National Register district?

Because such a district is eligible for MILLIONS in federal funds, grants, matching funds, and other monies available for restoration of historic buildings that are ONLY available to that sort of district. Once such funds are accepted, of course, you can't just knock over the buildings anymore, but if the whole point (and according to Thomas Enterprises, it is) is to open the Shops buildings to the public, restore and preserve them, then National Register listing is a way to bring in some of that desperately needed money everyone keeps going on about.
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So, I went to a presentation at City Hall about the upcoming Railroad Technology Museum. There were a lot of Railroad Museum supporters present, and most of the presentation talked about how the RTM is intended as a technology museum, while the current CSRM is a history museum, and what that means in terms of how the museum is laid out. The RTM was originally specified as part of the Railroad Musuem plan back in 1981, but due to budget cuts it was deferred for decades. A plan was developed for a Museum of Railroad Technology on Front and R Street, current site of the Docks project, and State Parks owns a plot of land in that area that was intended for this plan. At the time, the Shops were still in use by Southern Pacific, although they allowed CSRM to store equipment on spare track and restoration work to be done in the old Unit Shop. All this changed in the 1990s when Union Pacific bought Southern Pacific, and decided to close the Shops for good. The idea for an RTM in the Shops was then born. The city of Sacramento, hoping to spur redevelopment along Front Street (in a project now known as the Docks Project,) formally asked that the MORT be moved to the Shops area.

The RTM plan is designed around two of the seven Shops buildings, the Boiler Shop and the Erecting Shop, and based on this plan, a transfer table (costing about $500,000 in materials, with all volunteer labor) was installed between the two buildings in 2003 to move cars and locomotives between the shop buildings' bays. A letter of intent was included with the sale of the property from UP to Thomas Enterprises, specifying that those two buildings were to be transferred to State Parks for the RTM. Since the sale went through, Thomas Enterprises has decided that the letter of intent doesn't apply, and are now claiming that they want the Erecting Shop, the larger, more intact, and more historic of the two buildings.

Without the Erecting Shop, the museum won't happen and they'll have to switch back to the 1980s plan site on Front and R Street.

Anyhow, plenty of people came out to speak in support, and even more emailed. At the end of public comment Mayor Fargo held up a stack of paper about the size of a ream, indicating emails supporting the RTM from the public, and then another stack of maybe a dozen sheets, indicating emails opposing the RTM.

The truth of the matter is that the Thomas Enterprises redevelopment of the railyards is profoundly important to the execution and success of the RTM. The RTM will become a fantastic anchor tenant, giving Sacramento a cultural destination equal to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Combined with the planned arts center, Yee Fow museum, science museum in the old PG&E building, and the other museums already downtown, we would have a serious critical mass of cultural/historical destinations. Thomas Enterprises' plan to build retail, restaurants, nightlife, etcetera, in the remaining Shops buildings, plus new construction throughout the rest of the Railyards area, give the RTM city context and nearby amenities for museum visitors. And, personally, I'm just fine with development in the remaining Railyards to a density that Thomas sees fit: they have already planned a transition zone that effectively is identical to a Sacramento historic preservation district in regulatory intensity, with height limits.

The two projects need each other. Historic preservation and economic development work TOGETHER, not at odds, and Sacramento can be a beacon for this principle. This is a site which is significant not just to Sacramento history, but to American history, from many, many perspectives (from the Pacific railroad to the Pullman strike to immigrant and cultural and womens' and labor and social history) and it can still be part of our future without giving up its roots in our past.

This is now way longer than a blog post has any right to be. But more needs to be said.

Sic transit gloria

My spot on "Insight" was moved to Friday, October 12 instead of yesterday: here's the link for anyone who might be interested in hearing me pontificate about Southside Park.
http://www.capradio.org/programs/insight/default.aspx?showdate=10/12/2007

Riding the bus and light rail is still pretty fun. I haven't gotten caught in the rain yet. After hearing some other folks' less positive experiences from riding public transit, I wonder how much my past experience on transit affects how I view it now.

As I mentioned a while back, I didn't have a car in high school, or in college. For me, getting around on my own outside walking/biking radius meant taking the bus. The first time I did this a lot was when I was 14-15 years old, taking summer classes at Sac State. For me, the bus represented escape and independence, and being able to daydream and read and stare out the window while I enjoyed that island of reverie. The same bus took me downtown to visit my aunt (who lived in midtown and inspired me to move down here) and let me explore a place that was far unlike Citrus Heights. On the return trip, I could pore over whatever weird swag (typically comic books or records, or used SF novel from one of downtown's many used bookstores) I had picked up on my brief transit-based adventure. So that association with freedom is still there.

Cars, on the other hand, don't give me that feeling. It's work. Other drivers piss me off almost immediately. I may rankle at some other bus rider's behaviors, but somehow it's less infuriating than the people who don't use turn signals while they cut me off, burn through red lights, talk on their cell phone, eat pizza, have bumper stickers I don't agree with, etcetera. People on the bus are encountered at the human scale, and the tendency is to treat other people like humans. When you're driving, you're dealing with other cars, not with people, and interacting with machines is necessarily less civil than with people.

For many people that's a bad thing. I suppose I am fortunate in that I guess I look kind of intimidating, or have some subconscious "I could kill you at any time" vibe, because nobody ever messes with me on the bus. I hear fearful tales of the threatening glares of gangster thugs and the unwanted advances of the homeless all the time, but somehow they're not on my car. I suppose I'm a little more used to interacting with street folks than most, and I imagine that can be unnerving if you're not used to it.

So while the cynical part of myself still awaits that moment when my transit honeymoon ends, the 14 year old part of me that really dug the freedom and independence of taking the bus gets to have his good time, and maybe enjoy a comic book.

A brief transitarian pause

For the past month or so I have been inspired by a few different sources to drive my car less, and either walk or take public transit more.

The background: I live in midtown and work downtown. Both work and home are within two blocks of light rail and bus routes, and about a half-hour walk from each other. Since I moved there I have walked a lot more in the evenings and days off, but aside from a couple of days when my car was in the shop I still drove to work. The main reason I drive to work is because I use the car as part of my job sometimes, running errands and transporting people.

The inspiration: The writings of RT Rider provided some encouragement in the efforts of someone who lived a lot farther from work than I do to take public transit. The argument to decouple cars as a requirement for transportation, while leaving them as an option, was encouraging. The other inspiration was my first day as a graduate student at Sacramento State, wending my way around the parking lot.

Y'see, parking at Sac State is $5 a day now. A semester permit costs $108. But if you have a current semester sticker, you can ride bus and light rail for free. And, in my experience, you get wetter walking in the rain from your car through the parking lot to the CSUS campus than you do walking from the bus drop-off point.

So I figured, with the free ride incentive, I'd give it a try.

The practice: In the interest of leaving my options open, I have spent the last few weeks trying a variety of transit modes. Typically, there are three basic scenarios for transportation:
#1 is on school days. I have my choice of walking or taking light rail to work, but from work it's an easy shot to CSUS via buses 30, 31 or others. Home is either bus or light rail--I find bus is a little easier and doesn't require a transfer.
#2 is on non-school days. That's a maximum choice kind of day: Walking, bus, or light rail? Possibly my favorite is the half & half: walk to L Street and catch the next bus that comes by. It's a good middle ground between exercise and speed.
#3 is the car. I still need to drive in on days when I will need it for work--typically one or two days a week. If something comes up on a day when I didn't drive in, I can hop on the light rail and be back with my car in 20 minutes.

Now, I'm no newcomer to transit use. I grew up in a household that was often one-car, and one of my strongest childhood memories was riding downtown with my mom in RT's old GMC fishbowl buses. When I was 14, I took summer classes for gifted kids at Sacramento State, and took the bus to CSUS--in many ways, taking the bus to the Sac State transit center is a trip down memory lane. When Light Rail opened in 1987, I used to skip school and take the bus & train downtown to hang out at Java City or shop at the record and comic shops.

After college I got around by bike and public transit: it takes a special kind of girl to date a guy who suggests taking the bus downtown for a date, but somehow I did it. I didn't even know how to drive until a bit before my 26th birthday, when I finally got a job that allowed me to afford a car, and also required me to drive it for work.

The intervening decade or so included unlearning a lot of transit habits. While I never stopped walking around midtown, taking the car to work was a job requirement. I'd still take transit for other trips, usually with the regularity of a "regular church-goer" who goes in every Christmas and Easter.

But this past month has been an opportunity to bring back some old transit habits. The nice weather this time of years certainly makes it easier, and the acid test will be how much I use transit when the weather is less friendly.

What this has to do with Sacramento History: One of the nicest things about walking or taking transit vs. driving is being able to focus on things besides traffic. Sacramento's grid pattern streets also allows many different walking paths, which means I can stroll by a different set of my favorite historic buildings each time I take the walk. On the bus, the slightly higher vantage point offers a look at some of the Queen Anne cottages hidden behind "retail blisters" along downtown streets, ones that are often missed at street level. And, of course, there's the opportunity for reading on the bus if I don't want to admire the view.

A bit of self-promotion

Today marks the official release date of my new book, Sacramento's Southside Park. It is part of the Arcadia Publishing "Images of America" series, like my earlier book Sacramento's Streetcars.

A link to Arcadia's page on the book

This book represents a very different approach from the streetcar book, and, in my mind, something of a different approach than most of the Images of America series done on Sacramento neighborhoods.

While I made much use of sources like SAMCC and the Sacramento Room for this book, most of the information was gathered in a series of oral history interviews with neighborhood residents. I interviewed people from many walks of life, but mainly working people: people who worked in canneries and vegetable distribution, clerks and florists, truckers and bartenders. I tried to represent as clearly as I know how the incredible ethnic diversity of Southside Park, including its Mexican, Japanese, Portuguese and Italian neighborhoods. Many of the photos came from family collections rather than archives, although there are plenty of historic archive photographs.

The interviews and personal photos helped make this book more of an exploration of the lives of people in the neighborhood, rather than simply a collection of photos of buildings and unidentified people. While writing the book, I got a great sense of the level of civic pride and community that is present in Southside, and hopefully some of that comes through in the book's text.

I will also be doing a series of signings:
Thursday, October 4, 6:30 PM at Barnes & Noble, 1725 Arden Way, Sacramento
Saturday, October 6, 1:00 PM at Barnes & Noble, 6111 Sunrise Blvd, Citrus Heights
Sunday, October 28, 1:00 PM at The Avid Reader on Broadway and 16th (old Tower Books)

Finally, I will be on the KXJZ Radio program INSIGHT next Wednesday, October 10, at 2:00 PM:

http://www.capradio.org/programs/insight/

Sacramento's Streetcar Suburbs, Part 5: Land Park

The line extending down on the lower left is the Land Park streetcar line. Originally, streetcar service on Tenth Street started in the horsecar era, primarily serving the Old City cemetery. It was maintained and expanded after electrification to serve a wide variety of needs.

This line featured several different things that encouraged transit visits. Across Riverside from the cemetery was a baseball field, originally known as Buffalo Park, built in 1911. Down Riverside, at the other end of the neighborhood, was the Riverside Baths, located approximately where the Sacramento Southern Railroad crosses Riverside Boulevard. That dropping off point also proved a convenient connection to William Land Park, established later. The Baths were an enclosed structure with both cold and heated pools, private bathing areas, and slides. The structure was later rebuilt as the Riverside Plunge and was destroyed to make way for Interstate 5.

The land in between the baseball field and the public baths, originally hop fields, became a new neighborhood of homes, originally known as Riverside (and at other times as Homeland) but now known as Land Park. Like other perimeter streetcar suburbs, the streetcar route (Riverside Boulevard) became the main commercial corridor, and the residential neighborhoods connected to this primary artery. Many of the older commercial structures along Riverside, as well as along Tenth Street, are artifacts of this period.



The construction of this neighborhood would later illustrate two of the weaknesses of streetcar networks as the 20th century progressed.

During the initial period of streetcar expansion, car lines are typically installed through potential high-traffic areas. As cities grow geographically, they extend their own borders. As seen in earlier examples, streetcars are a common mechanism for encouraging development in new areas. This creates two potential problems: traffic density and proximity to the rail line.

In order for a streetcar to run at a profit, it must have sufficient customers. This is less of a problem in a dense central city area with high population, but the density of suburbs dropped gradually as the 20th century progressed. Residential areas like midtown and Oak Park might have 12-20 dwellings per acre in parts dominated by single-family homes and duplexes on 40x80 lots, or go potentially much higher if two and three story apartment buildings were constructed. In neighborhoods like Land Park, single-family homes on large lots were the rule, with only scattered apartments. The result was a density more like 4-8 units per acre, which means fewer transit customers per mile of track, and thus lower potential revenues.

The second problem of proximity occurs in any growing transit system. As a city expands, streetcar lines extend from the center like spokes from a wheel. As distance from the center increases, so does the distance between the spokes. The only way to solve this problem is to build more spokes or add intersecting transit lines to fill in the gaps, which was expensive and typically beyond most streetcar companies' fiscal abilities.

The Sacramento map above shows the lines extending from the central city: the areas adjacent to streetcar lines were most attractive and commanded the highest prices. Thus, the lots in between were cheaper. Up until the early 20th century, these areas would have remained remote, but the introduction of the automobile created a way to make these areas useful. Potentially, a cheaper plot of land far from public transit meant that the owner could far more easily afford a car. This solved two problems at once. It also meant that residents on the outer edge of transit proximity would see their neighbors with cars, riding to work in comfort while they trudged to the streetcar line, and often bought cars of their own--resulting in fewer transit riders. Over time, even the ones who lived closer to Riverside purchased the cars that they saw their neighbors enjoying.

Streetcar companies, including PG&E, tried to fill in the gaps using buses, starting in 1929, to serve areas where streetcars did not yet run. However, streetcar business began a decline in that decade, and within ten years, the Land Park streetcar line was replaced by a bus route.

Sacramento's Streetcar Suburbs, Part 4: East Sacramento and Elmhurst

The above map, from about 1900, shows the Sacramento Electric, Gas & Railway Company system in Sacramento. Most of the streetcar lines stuck fairly close to the central city's grid, but there were several satellite lines that diverged from the main line.

The original line was the old Highland Park Railway line, which traveled through Highland Park (now part of Curtis Park) and Oak Park. This line was extended when the State Fairgrounds moved to Stockton and Broadway: the State Fair streetcar line can be seen in the lower right corner of the map.

The line on the upper right was an extension of the J Street line, extending into newly developing neighborhoods in East Sacramento. At this time, the area was not yet part of the city of Sacramento, but still in the unincorporated county. This area, originally farmland, was subdivided into tract homes by Wright & Kimbrough. The line started at the Southern Pacific station at Second and H and traveled all the way through the business district on J Street, through midtown, and out into the new suburbs. The line turned south on 46th Street and ran all the way through the East Lawn Cemetery.

A word on cemeteries: Cemeteries were an important streetcar destination. Even during the horsecar era, a car line ran to the Old City Cemetery at Tenth and Y Street, and the original J Street line was convenient for the old New Helvetia cemetery at 31st and J. The Highland Park line ran down Twenty-first Street past the Catholic cemetery behind Christian Brothers school on 21st south of Y. Some streetcar and interurban lines, like the Pacific Electric, actually had special "funeral cars" like the PE's Descano with open spaces for a coffin, but so far as I can tell no such equivalent existed in Sacramento. Streetcars could be chartered to carry groups of mourners to cemeteries.

Eventually, the J Street line was renamed the "E-L" line, and later the #3 line. It was extended south down 46th Street, south across the Southern Pacific mainline at 46th and R, and did a brief "dog leg" on T Street, coming to a terminus at 48th and V Streets. This extension served two purposes: it provided streetcar service to the back entrance to the State Fairgrounds, and it also served the new suburb of Elmhurst. There were plans to construct a streetcar line to connect the E-L line to the terminus of the T Street line at 28th and T. The line was registered with the state as the "Elmhurst Railway" and in 1910 a ground-breaking ceremony in Elmhurst was held, but for some reason (and believe me, I'd love to know why) the line was never constructed. The large parkway down the center of T Street, from about 39th Street to 48th, was probably originally intended as the right-of-way for the streetcar line that was never built.

Next time: The Land Park streetcar line.