ROAD TO THE MALL: MONEY FIRST, PLANS LATER

July 19, 2022November 6, 2022 Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

It was a victory lap more than just a ceremony with windy speeches. Some 700 gathered for the June 7, 1969 building dedication of the new city hall/civic center; Santa Rosa was on the “threshold of an era,” cheered the Press Democrat. And that was true. The city government complex was the keystone of a project which brought drastic changes to downtown, more so than anything that had happened since the 1906 earthquake.

About a quarter of the downtown core was new construction east and south of Courthouse Sq. – mostly tall office buildings associated with big banks, government offices and parking garages/lots. There were no new shops or restaurants; the only retail business in that area was the White House Department Store, relocated from two blocks away. The city designed for living was starting to look more like the city designed for providing office space for a brigade of bureaucrats, bank tellers and accountants.

The ceremony was also somewhat of a wrap party. For more than a decade Santa Rosa had been daydreaming about a complete makeover of the downtown area; architects had produced designs – some lovable and some laughable, but all destined for the wastebasket. Aside from the state and federal buildings which were yet to be built in this redevelopment zone, there were no big construction projects on the horizon for Santa Rosa. (Here’s a short recap of what happened over those ten years.)

The day after the ceremony, the Congress for Community Progress held its annual meeting. The Congress was an ad hoc coalition of local social clubs, downtown business interests and city manager/directors; it was formed by the Chamber of Commerce and (no surprise) their suggestions rubber-stamped what the Chamber wanted. At the top of the wishlist that year was a convention center, probably at the current location of Westamerica Bank on Santa Rosa Ave. They also urged a major hotel/motel be built near Railroad Square, which could become a “tourist-oriented ‘old town.'” But these ideas were whiffs of smoke; the coalition had no clout to make anything happen.

And then came the October 1 earthquakes. I suppose there must be an alternate universe where city leaders could have screwed up worse – but it’s hard to imagine.

Assessing the damage was an obvious first priority; was a building damaged – and if so, could it be repaired? And did “repair” mean it must be brought up to modern code standards? This started a heated debate; structural engineer Richard Keith told the PD, “if we use the code as it is today, we’d probably destroy most of downtown.” (Details are hashed over in the following chapter.) By the end of the month Santa Rosa’s chief building official, Ray Baker, declared seventeen commercial buildings must be demolished, plus 28 homes – although he would change those numbers later.

The City Council declared an interim emergency that created its own set of problems. A rule was issued requiring all permits for making repairs to get underway between November 5 and 19 – an arbitrary and absurd two week window which surely had every contractor within miles dancing for joy.

Had your building been red-tagged, there was no appeal (at least, I found none mentioned in the PD). Demolition was your responsibility but if you couldn’t afford it, the city would hire a contractor to tear it down – and place a lien on the property for the cost.

But the most urgent post-quake SNAFU was that no one in the city had given any thought about what should be done with the estimated 30,000 cubic yards of rubble created by all that demolition. Contractors were dumping loads illegally near the airport, where Farmers Lane passed Santa Rosa Creek and at the city wastewater plant. Constantly burning piles of mixed construction materials led to complaints of air pollution (and given that the stuff was from older buildings, the soil must now be laden with asbestos). The city passed an emergency ordinance exempting owners of dump sites from zoning regs – but requiring them to get a special permit.

Reading this, Gentle Reader is forgiven for concluding the city was being run by incompetent boobs and nitwits (and far be it from me to ever dispute G.R.’s infallibility). But there was another factor in play: When these bad decisions were being made, city hall had a sharp focus on using the earthquake damage to seek millions of dollars from the government – in what would become the largest single payday in Santa Rosa history to that date. On the same day homeowners and landlords were blindsided by that two-week repair deadline, the mayor and planning director were in Washington D.C. playing Let’s Make a Deal.

"Composite Core Area Plan Taken From Downtown Study Report". Press Democrat, June 6, 1969 — “Composite Core Area Plan Taken From Downtown Study Report”. Press Democrat, June 6, 1969

Prior to the 1969 earthquakes, Santa Rosa’s poobahs had mused about doing something with the area between B Street and the highway, but there were no real plans to redevelop it similar to the way a chunk of the downtown core had been just turned into a financial and governmental district. At the earlier Congress meeting, Trent Harrington said time was running out, and the city should take “good close look at further renewal while an agency still exists that can handle the federal details.”

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WHO’S YOUR SUGAR DADDY?

Great sums of money sloshed through Santa Rosa in the 1960s and most of it flowed out of HUD (Dept. of Housing and Urban Development) and its predecessor, the Federal Housing Administration. Between 1960 and 1967, Santa Rosa received approx. $8 million in federal grants and loans. There undoubtedly are surviving reports on how much the URA took in specifically from them in those years but concentrating on HUD/FHA alone risks missing the bigger picture. Those dollars were commingled with other sources as the agency saw fit. As explained earlier, for example, Santa Rosa Creek was piped underground using a federal grant made to the county intended for flood control projects as well as a portion that came from the URA.

Monies from the URA also went into a city fund that spent today’s equivalent of nearly $100 million over six years. Santa Rosa’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP) began Jan. 1963 and by Feb. 1969 had spent $11.5M. Money came from the URA, a set of 1965 muni bonds, half of the city sales tax, certain developer’s fees and a portion of the gas tax revenue. It paid for street improvements, city hall construction, a fire station and park development.

The agency he referred to was the Urban Renewal Agency (URA) where Harrington was former director – again, skim the recap if the agency is unfamiliar to you. In its heyday earlier in the 1960s, millions were shuffled through the URA, most of it from the government. Harrington had recently stepped down to take a top job with developer Henry Trione’s company and as he implied, the agency’s future was uncertain. All the redevelopment deals were wrapped up; its main task now was waiting for construction on the state and federal buildings to begin.

Now Mayor Jack Ryersen and Planning Director Kenneth Blackman were in Washington to meet with top HUD officials. Their hopes were that the department would bless a second – and more ambitious – redevelopment project in Santa Rosa and approve it with haste, given the need to recover from quake damage. The city’s first application for urban renewal money had taken almost two years to get the green light.

The feds’ immediate reaction was the area was too large and needed to line up with the boundaries of the previous project. Ryersen and Blackman proposed 35½ acres, from Fifth Street to Sonoma Ave. (the Chamber of Commerce wanted it to extend down to Juilliard Park) but HUD cut it off at First Street. Once back home, Blackman heard from the San Francisco HUD office. Enough with the razzle-dazzle, they said – how did the city propose to redevelop the land? And where were the studies?

There were no studies, which would have taken months or years to create. The city had vague architectural site plans shown above and below that envisioned most of the area as a parking lot with a community/convention center (and oddly specific, a coffee shop). But aside from the URA’s obvious desire to crank up the federal money machine again, there were legitimate reasons why the city needed quick approval.

Santa Rosa was soon to face a Catch-22 in the HUD rules; cities with populations under 50,000 were expected to pay one-fourth of the total development costs, while cities over 50k paid one-third – a difference that could have added close to a million dollars to our part of the bill. At the time of the 1969 quake, Santa Rosa’s population stood at 48,450 (the official 1970 census count would be 50,006).

The other reason was because of the stupid two-week window on repair or demolition permits. Under that artificial deadline, major demolition work was expected to start by the end of November and there was still no solution as to what to do with the rubble. The city engineer begged anyone with a possible dump site (“big and small”) to contact the Public Works department. There was also blowback to the requirement that homeowners pay for their house to be torn down or face a lien on the property; now the city would handle the bill.

Except for ongoing citizen complaints about illegal dumping, little was written about earthquake recovery plans over the next few months. The HUD application process went smoothly; Santa Rosa was allowed to file it as an amendment to the original project, which meant that whatever monies were left over could be used. There was a hearing in March, 1970 for the City Council to officially approve the funding request and there were no meaningful public comments.

Then finally in July, word came from Washington: HUD had approved $5.57 million for “emergency rehabilitation.” Blackman announced the city would immediately begin hiring contract workers to start appraisals, title work and preliminary engineering. Santa Rosa was congratulated for having achieved in eight months what usually took 3-4 years.

But still, there was no progress on deciding what would be done with the area. “Proposed for the new area are a hotel-motel complex, service facility, coffee shop, a department store or two, other retail space and a community center,” as the Press Democrat had mentioned after the public hearing.

Uncredited and undated drawing of "what the new renewal area may be turned into." Note more than half the area between the highway an B Street is parking and that Fourth Street is eliminated. Press Democrat, March 2, 1970 — Uncredited and undated drawing of “what the new renewal area may be turned into.” Note more than half the area between the highway an B Street is parking and that Fourth Street is eliminated. Press Democrat, March 2, 1970

NEXT: THAT WHICH WE LOST

THE QUAKE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

April 7, 2020April 7, 2020 Jeff Elliott 2 Comments

Imagine (or remember): It was near the end of that day in 1969 and you were winding down, watching TV and planning to stay up late – a Johnny Carson anniversary show was coming up and everybody would be talking about it the next day. You were deciding between the 10 o’clock news on channel two, Hawaii Five-O or that new NBC series by the former Press Democrat reporter.

Then too much happened all at once.

“And then came the jolt and the furious shake, lasting for seconds but seeming like minutes. Everyone could feel it but many couldn’t see it: the lights were the first to go,” said Dick Torkelson’s article in the Press Democrat the next day.

Earthquake! A bad one. Sharp flashes of light from outside flooded the dark room as if the house was struck by lightning, only there was no sound at all. Omygod, had Santa Rosa been hit by an atomic bomb?

“Books and dishes cascaded down,” Torkelson continued. “Shouts filled households as parents groped in darkness for their children. Residential streets filled instantly, everyone wondering if there would be more.”

Such were the first few terrifying moments of the Santa Rosa Earthquake of October 1, 1969. Earthquakes, actually, as another one followed about eighty minutes later and was just about as violent (see sidebar).

No one was killed and while many buildings were damaged, none fell down. Now more than a half-century later, it’s only remembered for the unusual double shake. But that event changed Santa Rosa’s future dramatically, as it became the driving justification for the city to later bulldoze 30 acres of downtown in order to build the shopping mall – the worst mistake in the long list of planning mistakes made by the City of Roses. How this tragedy unfolded will be told in upcoming parts of this ongoing series, “Yesterday is Just Around the Corner.”

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1969 QUAKE FACT SHEET

The October 1, 1969 Santa Rosa Earthquake had a mainshock at 9:56 PM (Richter magnitude 5.6) followed by a large aftershock at 11:20 PM (M 5.5), each lasting about twenty seconds. The following day there were two aftershocks, the worst at 5:27 AM (M 4.2). There were two aftershocks on October 6, the worst being M 3.75.

The epicenter was in the Fulton/Mark West area, which is on the Rodgers Creek Fault Zone. There was no damage in Petaluma or Napa County.

Rodgers Creek Fault Zone in yellow (Larger image)

There were no deaths, but the Press Democrat reported there were six related injuries and eight were treated for heart attacks.

The Bay Area Television Archive offers a ten minute news report from KPIX which includes a portion of a press conference by Police Chief Melvin “Dutch” Flohr, images of downtown and residential damage and the cleanup at the Fourth street Safeway (currently Grocery Outlet). There is also another short segment from KPIX filmed the following day showing further views of repairs and cleanup efforts.

Dick Torkelson felt the quake at his home near Hearn Avenue and jumped into his car. “Traffic along Santa Rosa Ave. became wild, up to 70 miles per hour wild.” He saw the light flashes in the sky over downtown and expected to find a massive gas explosion had set the city aflame.

Instead he found the downtown lit by only a half moon and men with flashlights. “The streets on Fourth and Fifth and Mendocino were black, almost eerie. And broken glass covered the sidewalk; you crackled as you walked.” When the big plate glass display windows in the clothing stores shattered their mannequins tumbled into street; practically every newspaper that covered the story would feature a photo of their disturbingly dismembered torsos.

Electricity was restored within 15 minutes but already there were a hundred cops pouring into the area, setting up barricades as merchants arrived to board up windows. There were fears of looting, but it was later determined that the only theft was $500 worth of cameras which were in the window of a shop on Fourth and some clothes from the Montgomery Ward’s on Mendocino.

By midnight, Bay Area newspaper reporters and TV crews were swarming over the town (supposedly it was rumored in New York City that Santa Rosa had been completely destroyed). Columnist Gaye LeBaron was contacted at home by a broadcaster at the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles who wanted to know about conditions in town. She looked out her window and told them her street was wet because a water pipe had broken and a crew was working on repairs. She later learned it was reported “water was gushing high in the air from broken water mains.” LeBaron also wrote later that some of the local papers weren’t much better: “The main story in one of the San Francisco papers on the quake sounded as though the news team got as far as the Miramar [a cocktail lounge at Third and Exchange] collapsed wall, found the bar open, bellied up to the plank, and never looked farther.”

(Let me interrupt with a word of appreciation for Press Democrat News Editor Dick Torkelson and Managing Editor Art Volkerts. As the quakes struck late at night, readers would have understood if there were only cursory details in the next morning’s paper. Instead, the staff managed to publish five pages of photos and solid reporting. Although the PD of that era infamously allowed editorial bias to slant its news coverage of city and county issues, this was heroic journalism and showed that in its bones the Press Democrat was actually a fine – even great – newspaper.)

There were only two fires that night, which was incredibly lucky because there were wind gusts. Don’s Park Auto Super across from the Junior College was partially burned and there was a chemical fire in a Memorial Hospital laboratory after the second quake. Let’s take a moment to remember that the hospital sits directly on the Rodgers Creek Fault, which is overdue for a quake that is expected to cause a major disaster.

And, of course, there were the oddball stories:

The Village Exchange Club was at The Hilltopper restaurant watching a film about nuclear attack when the quake struck. A member told Gaye LeBaron they ought to show it again, “only this time we’ll listen instead of drinking.”

The hit movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was making its Santa Rosa debut that night, and the Coddingtown theater cleared out “in about three seconds flat” when the power went off and the shaking began. The showing resumed at 10:30 (seriously?) with about twenty hardcore cinephiles in the audience. The PD did not report what everyone did when the second quake struck about an hour later.

89 year old George Van Buskirk was trapped between floors in the elevator at the Occidental hotel. Asked what he did in there all night, he replied, “What could I do? I slept.” Firemen were able to rescue him about 10 o’clock the next morning. “There was a regular army of TV boys here when I got out – all pretty nice boys, too. I was sure ready for breakfast by then.”

As midnight approached on that cool autumn night, many Santa Rosa families were found camped out on their lawns and not because their house was damaged. Many were likely fearful that those earlier shakes were only the prelude to a catastrophic earthquake as severe as magnitude 9, which would either flatten much of the state or dunk it into the Pacific.^* They feared that because the press had spent much of March and April scaring the willies out of everyone with doomsday talk.

(RIGHT: The Zumwalt used car dealership got into the act with April, 1969 ads: “Before we slip into the ocean…buy your get-away car!”)

That spring, newspapers and magazines were competing to run the scariest what-if stories about California’s imminent destruction, usually repeating warnings from psychics and fundamentalist clergy that we were on schedule to sink into the briny deep, probably around mid-April. Experts, including Dr. Charles Richter (I was deeply disappointed that his first name wasn’t “Magnitude”), predictably debunked the predictions but it didn’t stop the flood of such nonsense. SF Chronicle columnist Herb Caen was contacted by papers in New York and London to ask if we were prepping to meet our makers. “They don’t seem to believe me when I say we’re not doing anything about it.” Still, local media joined the party; channel 4 offered a special “The Next Great Shake” (“with the aid of special effects”) and the PD printed fear mongering UPI summaries of what others were saying, along with many letters to the editor from stressed-out subscribers.

When the sun came up the next morning everyone had a chance to walk around for look-see. It was bad, but it wasn’t bad bad.

Downtown store windows were mostly boarded up, although workers were already replacing some of the plate glass. The Rosenberg office building at the corner of Fourth and Mendocino had some collapsed ceilings and much fallen plaster. The Miramar at the corner of Exchange and Third was a mess, with the parapet fallen off and the fire escapes dangling precariously from the three-story building. The Roxy theater at Fifth and B also had broken fire escapes, and parts of the ceiling had fallen on the audience of the adult-only movie house (“Escorted Ladies Free”).

The residential disaster tour centered on looking for crumbled chimneys, of which there were many (Comstock House lost its southern one). Beaver street, which is very close to/directly over the fault line, was hard hit, with the foundation crumbling on an older house at the corner of College Ave. The plantation style “Beaver House” at #610, which was first built way back in 1850 by James A. Cockrill, Jr. was considered damaged beyond repair. (Photos below.)

Beyond that, much of the damage was to public spaces and repairable, though expensive. The JCPenny at Coddingtown flooded when their sprinkler system broke. Cracks were found in the support columns for the two year-old county social services building. The Veteran’s Memorial needed $40k in repairs and fixing the fairground grandstand cost $15k. The onramp to highway 12 overpass dropped a few inches, which can be seen in the videos.

And here is where our story shifts from being the tale of a forgettable earthquake into a tragedy about destroying a town’s core. In the critical week following, the City Council set Santa Rosa on a course that would end with the demolition of nearly half of downtown in order to build the shopping mall.

It began as the city building inspector condemned 14 buildings as completely unsafe. Besides five homes, there was the Fremont Elementary School, Roxy Theatre, the Miramar, the Red Derby and Til-2 cocktail lounges, Court Market, the Orthopedic Brace Shop, Western Union office and Santa Rosa Hotel. As far as I can tell, none of these structures were in the west of B street area which would be soon slated for destruction.

Far more significant was a mod to the building code passed in a special session of the City Council on October 9. There would be relaxed enforcement for a year as property owners decided whether damaged buildings could be brought up to modern code standards. After that, it “required closing any building open to the public which is not capable of safely supporting all loads caused by the forces of gravity as defined in the building code and which is hazardous to use,” as reported in the PD.

In a followup meeting Oct. 28 to decide an “interim emergency policy,” city leaders were told a committee of civil and structural engineers thought 21 downtown buildings should go. The city’s chief building official said 48 were damaged. But the issue really wasn’t which buildings should be repaired – it was whether the city would allow owners to make repairs at all instead of demolishing the place. Under the proposed guidelines, structural engineer Richard Keith pointed out, “If we use the code as it is today, we’d probably destroy most of downtown.”

His words proved prophetic.

^* The details of the doomsday prophecy came from the (unfortunately) popular 1968 apocalyptic novel, “The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California” by Curt Gentry, which predicted the M 9 earthquake would happen sometime the following year. Gentry was in turn following the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce, who made a sort-of prediction in 1936 that southern California and Nevada might fall into the sea. Long after his death, Cayce’s adherents supposedly narrowed the date to April 4 1969 at 3:13 PM. One of the wire service stories appearing in the PD added, “Some feel April 8 or April 15 will be the day of doom.”

Damage to the Beaver House at 610 Beaver street after the October, 1969 Santa Rosa Earthquake. (See photo of pre-earthquake house.) Image: Sonoma County Library

The Roxy Theater after the October, 1969 Santa Rosa Earthquake. Image: Sonoma County Library

WHO OWNED COURTHOUSE SQUARE?

March 22, 2020November 1, 2022 Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Santa Rosa has a history of making regrettable decisions, lord knows, and this series, “YESTERDAY IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER,” delves into just the cascading series of failures leading up to construction of the shopping mall, which was the ultimissimo mistake. But in our big book of blunders there’s one small chapter where the town didn’t pick the worst possible option – although it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

The project we were trying so hard to screwup was (once again) Courthouse Square, and this attempt started in 1966, the same year we tore down the courthouse. Immediately following that we stabbed a four-lane street through the middle and declared that the western sliver of what remained would now be called “Old Courthouse Square.” That part of the story was explored in the previous article, “TEARING APART ‘THE CITY DESIGNED FOR LIVING’“.

All of that had been done under the authority of Santa Rosa’s Urban Renewal Agency (URA), an unelected five member body which had broad powers for redeveloping all of downtown Santa Rosa, as also discussed in that article. As a first step that year the county had sold all of Courthouse Square (plus the county garage and jail) to the URA for $400k, but the county only expected to be paid half of that, considering the new street and west side of the Square as a donation. To raise the remaining $200k, the plan was that the city would sell the east side of the Square to a developer. “For Sale: 26,000 sq. Feet,” read the URA marketing blurb, with an asking price of $305k.

But a year passed with only a single bid: Eureka Federal Savings offered $260k (can’t have enough massive bank buildings squatting on prime downtown locations). Potential buyers found the city’s right to sell the property was…uncertain, to say the least.

This was hardly the first time questions about ownership of the Square were raised; you could say it was Sonoma County’s oldest parlor game, going back to just after the Civil War (see sidebar).

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THAT TROUBLESOME GIFT

The town was founded, as everyone knows, in 1854 by Barney Hoen & Co. and Julio Carrillo. They also donated a couple of acres for a central plaza, with the company providing the eastern half and Julio giving the western side. The notarized Oct. 23, 1854 dedication document stated “the public square…[is] donated to and for the use and benefit of Sonoma County forever…”

At that moment Carrillo was one of the wealthiest men in Sonoma county, but Fortuna did not smile upon him long. Around Christmas of 1867, Julio found himself unable to feed his family (12 kids!) because he didn’t have enough credit left with storekeepers to buy a meager sack of flour. “Stung to the quick, in the heat of his indignation he re-deeded half of the Plaza,” wrote historian Robert Thompson, attempting to sell it to three local men for $300, as told in “COURTHOUSE SQUARE FOR SALE, CHEAP.”

The first news about the “re-deed” appeared in the Santa Rosa paper shortly after New Year’s Day, 1868, when it was also discovered that the 1854 document was never recorded – an oversight which was immediately corrected, albeit 13 years late. Still, the men who claimed to now own some of the most valuable property in town persisted, building a shack on the plaza in the middle of the night (it was torn down the next day). They tried to do it again in 1870, but it was also knocked down immediately as the town council rushed through an ordinance explicitly making it illegal to put up a building in the plaza.

In the 1870s Santa Rosa acted like they owned the place, as the Common Council passed more ordinances about the plaza and made improvements: Gates must be kept closed (“Is it not astonishing that some people will be so careless as to leave the gates of our Plaza open after they have passed through, so that cows and other animals can get in?” – Sonoma Democrat, Feb. 26, 1870), liquor and cussing were banned and new benches were added along with a flagpole.

The next dust-up came in 1883, when county supervisors decided we needed a new courthouse – the one at the current location of Exchange Bank was a leaky, plaster-cracked mess. Santa Rosa insisted it should be built in the middle of the Plaza. Petaluma objected, and offered to built it in their town; Santa Rosa founders Hahman and Hoen objected, saying it had been gifted with the clear intent of it remaining a park; even District Attorney Thomas Geary opined “the county had no more right to put a building there than they had on the county road.” The squabble ended only when Santa Rosa sent the Supervisors a resolution “surrendering the possession of the plaza.” (For more, see “HOW COURTHOUSE SQUARE TORE SONOMA COUNTY APART.”)

But at the time the Petaluma Argus began sewing doubt that the plaza might not be owned by the city OR the county – everything about the title to the plaza land was unclear. What did “use and benefit of Sonoma County” mean legally? Apparently Julio was truthful in saying there was no deed or other paperwork.

After that the issue lay dormant until 1953, when the Planning Commission produced a review of possible new sites for the courthouse. The County Taxpayers’ Association shot back with a 25-page critique which included this point: “It is reliably reported…should it be used for other than a Courthouse or a park, the title will revert to the heir of the donor”. In his writeup on the group’s response, PD reporter Fred Fletcher commented, “this has been rumored in the Courthouse for years.”

The URA certainly knew about the problems. A few years earlier while they were hashing out ideas about where to put the new city hall/civic center, a site selection committee was appointed with Judge Hilliard Comstock as chairman. When they were considering the Square he looked into the title issue and reported that although the county felt it owned the Square because of its long use, the descendants of Julio Carrillo et. al. might have a case to demand it back if it were now sold as private property.

“Help us clear the title,” URA member O. E. Christensen asked mayor Hugh Codding in a June, 1967 meeting. “We can go from there. We can advertise the property, but not consummate the title. Untie our hands then we can move.” Codding offered to help. In the meantime they seeded the east side with grass, since development was a year or two away. Later Skylark Nursery loaned sixteen magnolia and cedar trees in containers to dress up the place a bit. The very next day they were blown over by high winds and rolled out into the street.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the new four-lane road our new, dinky, “Old Courthouse Square” was dedicated with fanfare. Mayor Codding predicted the citizenry would become “more aware and more proud of this historic center of the city of Santa Rosa” as a result. Supervisor Robert Rath commented they were “revering back to perhaps what was in the mind of Mr. Carrillo when the property was dedicated to public use in 1853” (wrong year, and nope). Some descendants of Julio Carrillo were present at the dedication and wrote a letter to the PD that they were “surprised how the actual facts could be so conveniently omitted.”

Around then, talk began about the east side of the square. Maybe it was because the thousand or so people at that September dedication looked across the street at the vacant lot and wondered why that couldn’t be a public park, too. Gaye LeBaron had an item in her social column commenting that people around town were musing about putting a statue of Burbank over there, or bocce ball courts, or something else. “It isn’t so much what the people want, it’s what they don’t want,” she wrote. “And lots of them don’t want a building on that square.”

Battle lines were being drawn. On the side wanting a big honking bank was the URA, the Downtown Development Association and the Press Democrat. The PD probably did not win many converts by reproducing the URA’s site plan shown below. Not only did it show the proposed building’s footprint would dwarf all retail spaces downtown, but the illustration’s caption pointed out there would still be plenty of open space around (shown here in black). In an editorial, the PD went so far as to suggest the town already had too many parks and bits of greenery: “Between Fremont Park, Juilliard Park, the existing park on the westerly side of Old Courthouse Square, and the landscaping scheduled within the urban redevelopment area, Downtown Santa Rosa already may have received more than its fair share of the city funds available for places for people to enjoy, and for children to play.”

URA site plan of downtown Santa Rosa as it appeared in the Press Democrat, December 17, 1967

The Press Democrat wandered further into the weeds with an editorial claiming it would cost the city $800,000 to make it a park. (Estimating $450k in lost tax revenue + $350k to buy it from the county and create a concrete-paved plaza like the westerly side of the Square.) Mayor Codding called the guesstimate ridiculous and the editorial “an insult to my intelligence.” Codding, who was the most vocal advocate for preserving it as a park, had also asked the Board of Supervisors to consider donating the land.

By the start of 1968, every civic and service group in or near Santa Rosa was off the fence on the park question – even the Chamber of Commerce opposed development – and only the PD was surprised when the City Council voted to ask the Supervisors to donate it (Codding was absent that day, as ol’ Hugh was taking time off to shoot at bears in Alaska).

In the background during all this, the Quest for Title was slogging into its second year. Initially the county and city/URA were all meeting in efforts to settle it until the County Counsel decided to split off, so now there were two separate efforts to unravel that 115 year old knot.

(Sidenote: While doing this research the news cycle was paying much attention to a NASCAR pileup and playing in slow motion the last seconds before the crash over and over, and I thought, gee, how timely.)

The Supervisors were in a grand pickle. For two fiscal years now, their budget counted on receiving $198k for the east side of the Square. (Why $198k and not an even $200k was never explained, as far as I can tell.) That represented six percent of a year’s county tax revenue – a huge writeoff.

Over the course of that summer the Supes mulled and pondered what to do, relying upon the advice of County Counsel Richard Ramsey, although some of his suggestions – as reported in the PD – seemed unsound and aimed mainly at provoking Santa Rosa. He said the county “certainly is entitled to use the property for whatever it wants” and the Supervisors could take it over and sell it themselves. Or they could sue the city for the $198k and the title, while also assuring them there was “no question” the county could get a “marketable title” to the property. There was a closed session and another speckled with considerable bitter comments.

The Board of Supervisors decided to sue the city of Santa Rosa and its Urban Renewal Agency, demanding $800k + interest (about $6 million today). They arrived at that figure by claiming damages because the market value of the land was “substantially impaired” because the city “refuse[d] to cooperate in transferring title” (!) and had “permanently seized possession” of the Square, which had deprived the county of using its legal property. Oh, lawyers.

Efforts to negotiate a settlement went nowhere. Codding suggested the city deed everything back to the county, which would have mucked up the ownership issue further still (which I think was his intent). A Press Democrat editorial bemoaned that a drawn-out legal fight could leave the east side in limbo for years, neither the city or county maintaining it as the place deteriorated into the “Sonoma County Memorial Weed Patch.”

Our story finally winds up in 1970, with a Believe-it-or-not! twist you probably aren’t expecting. The lawsuit itself was settled fairly amicably; Santa Rosa paid the county $50,000 and gave them some land southwest of town which was outside of city limits. The agreement stated the city would have to pay $48k more if the east portion of the Square ever became something other than public use.

As for the question of title…

While the Supervisors were debating whether or not to sue in 1968, they split into two camps: One side simply wanted that $198k and said the city was in breach of contract. The other Supes’ position was that they would like to donate the land to Santa Rosa, but their hands were tied until the title was resolved. But all of them had apparently forgotten the county had previously quitclaimed the western side and roadway back in 1966 – an inconvenient fact which was brought up in the PD’s coverage. In other words, the county had already declared they were no longer claiming any form of ownership to two-thirds of the original plaza, only the remnant on the eastern side.

In the end, the county wanted money for something they couldn’t prove they legally had. Who knows what County Counsel Ramsey was thinking in promising the Supervisors he could obtain a “marketable title” in court, although at least one of his predecessors had also made the claim. Maybe Ramsey had dreams of prancing before Supreme Courts in Sacramento or Washington, making the case that Julio Carrillo and the others never meant to donate it to the people of Sonoma county but rather the county government (which practically didn’t yet exist in 1854).

Thus the one thing everyone expected to happen, didn’t – the title of the Plaza/Square was still unresolved as the county and city settled their spat in 1970. The troublesome ancient document was left to gather dust in the Recorder’s office as everyone backed away from it slowly.

Was this ever resolved in the fifty years since? Not as far as I can tell – it seems that it’s all just been forgotten, like one of the dangerous treasures buried deep in the Raiders of the Lost Ark’s warehouse.

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