In 1946 the Chamber of Commerce had a contest to find a new slogan “best fitting Santa Rosa.” Out of 400+ entries the winner was Mrs. B. Taylor, who came up with “The City Designed for Living.” She was awarded $25 and it was money well spent; everybody loved the motto, which was added to the city’s stationery. It was often part of the Press Democrat’s masthead and stores worked it into their newspaper ads. The Chamber wanted to update it in 2007 and paid $80,000 to Tennessee experts who came up with “California Cornucopia” – a catchphrase so hideously vapid it inspired only an abundance of invective. Nor did it help that it came with a logo which looked like someone’s doodle on the back of a cocktail napkin.

Today’s Santa Rosa would be unrecognizable to Mrs. B. (sorry, no first name I can find EDIT 2024: Her name was Edith). Hers was a city where downtown was a destination – the place you usually were when not at home. It was where you picked up groceries, dropped off shoes for repair, visited the dentist, bought a new toaster, got a haircut or a perm. Mrs. B. saw the sidewalks filled with kids after school and if she was out late the stores beckoned evening shoppers with lighted windows. It was the world as seen in Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” – and who knows, maybe Mrs. B. can be spotted in the background of some scene in the movie.

Mrs. B. might find herself lost in Santa Rosa’s tiny downtown because so many landmarks are gone. What happened to the courthouse? Where are all those blocks of stores between B street and Railroad Square? How did they get rid of Santa Rosa Creek? There’s little she will recognize beyond a few scattered buildings.

The story of how all that happened is the theme of this series, “Yesterday is Just Around the Corner,” and the short explanation is that Santa Rosa was gripped by an epidemic of Redevelopment Fever in the 1960s and 1970s. Yes, some rich people became richer because of the deals and some of the doings should have probably seen the inside of a courtroom, but it was good intentions, not greed or corruption, that led to the dismantling of “The City Designed for Living.” And Santa Rosa was far from alone; communities all over the country were making similar stupid, irreversible decisions in those days.

This chapter is about the Urban Renewal Agency (URA), an unelected five member body with a full-time planner and an executive director (hired from Merced) which had broad powers to make deals for redeveloping all of downtown Santa Rosa. Formed by the city in 1958, they kicked it off a couple of years later by declaring forty acres of downtown so “blighted” that it needed to be demolished. Designating sections of your town blighted was a necessary first step before applying for free redevelopment money from the government.

The appointed members of the URA had diverse backgrounds that might have served them well on some less critical civic board or committee, but as far as I can tell none of them were educated about urban planning or architecture. Members in the early 1960s included the owner of a building supply company, a retired promotion director of a packing company, a personal injury lawyer, the manager of Sears and the VP of a savings & loan.

Before the mid-1960s the URA shuffled paper. They interviewed and hired a parade of out-of-town urban planning consultants to draw plans and build models, then made a sweetheart deal with a development group led by Henry Trione to draw more plans and build more models. They facilitated fantasy projects which had no actual schedules nor budgets; nothing planned during those years was ever built.

Things began to change in 1966, the year we tore down the courthouse in Courthouse Square. That demolition was nearly a decade in the making; the building was damaged in a 1957 earthquake – mostly cosmetic, not structural – and the Board of Supervisors mulled over the idea of building a courthouse at the new County Administration Center instead of downtown. After lots of due mulling (and a legally-questionable financing deal), the Sonoma County Hall of Justice joined the other county offices at the big campus outside of city limits, and on March 22, 1966, the Supervisors officially agreed to sell Courthouse Square to the city of Santa Rosa URA for $400,000.

While that deal was in the works, the URA was focused on what to do with Courthouse Square once it was in their hands. Courthouse Square wasn’t in the blight zone but was still central to the URA’s plans to remake downtown, and they began with the presumption that it was essential to punch a four-lane street through the middle of it, connecting Santa Rosa and Mendocino Avenues. Like almost all the URA’s other sweeping decisions, this was declared as a done deal with no public input – and if the Press Democrat ever wrote a critical word about the URA’s doings, I’ve yet to find it.

An early proposal was for all city offices to be stuffed in a “Civic Tower” up to 15 stories high and straddling both sides of the new street. The description in the PD said there would be parks on either side, including two lakes (!) and a constant-flow artificial creek. This plan was abandoned but the debate over where to build the new city hall became a marathon political squabble between the URA and developer/city councilman Hugh Codding, who wanted it near Coddingtown or the County Administration Center. Finally the none-of-the-above option was chosen, and the civic center would be built on top of the filled-in bed of Santa Rosa Creek (MORE).

With no worries over the placement of city hall and the courthouse being demolished, Courthouse Square was a blank slate in the spring of 1966 – albeit a blank slate that was going to have a four-lane road through the middle. This was the URA’s own development project, which in itself probably stretched the limit of the Agency’s charter. But the URA also began taking on powers that clearly belonged to city departments and/or the City Council, such as the closing of city streets.

The URA had decided that the old side streets, Hinton and Exchange Avenues, weren’t needed any longer and would be turned into sidewalks. The former Hahman pharmacy, next to the Empire Building and built in 1908, would be torn down to create a walkway to a planned parking garage that was going to be built at Third and B streets (the old drugstore wasn’t demolished until 2018).

J. Clarence Felciano, Santa Rosa’s go-to architect during the mid-century, was awarded the contract to design the new Square; he had a 10-point plan focused on making it a place welcoming to pedestrians and holding public assemblies. There would be multiple fountains and the bunya-bunya trees would be preserved (honk if you still miss them).

The URA’s plans for Courthouse Square were revealed at a public meeting on June 1 – a day fraught with symbolism, as just hours earlier everyone downtown would have heard the wrecking ball destroying the magnificent stained glass skylight in the courthouse. In the audience were members of the Planning Commission, city planning staff and downtown business stakeholders who were hearing some of the details for the first time. And this was no dog-and-pony show of some architect’s proposal; the URA was expecting to sign construction contracts within a few weeks.

The meeting did not go well.

The arrogance displayed by members of the URA was astonishing. Planning Commissioner Ernest Thomas said the URA was “trying to move the plans too fast” and the Planning and Parks Department hadn’t been consulted – that the URA expected the Commissioners and others to “come down here and make comment and give approval in one evening.” He asked for the Planning Department to have a chance to study the plan.

“The overall plans of Urban Renewal has always been to connect the two streets through the Courthouse Square.” URA Chairman Michael Panas told the Commissioner.

URA member O. E. Christensen piled on, according to the Press Democrat’s coverage. “I’m surprised to hear you say you haven’t known about the Courthouse Square plan, Mr. Thomas, [all city officials] knew of this plan as far back as four years ago.” Thomas was “trying to make it appear we’re attempting to rush this,” he charged, and make it look like the URA was attempting to get the city to “approve something which hasn’t had prior study…we’ve been studying this thing for several years.” He also said, “we’re in no hurry, here,” apparently forgetting that at the top of the meeting Panas had announced they were expecting construction bids in six weeks.

Commissioner Thomas was not reassured. He found it “amazing” that they didn’t see a problem with their street through the square having “two-way traffic dumping into one-way traffic.” Christensen – a structural engineer who specialized in schools and large commercial buildings – replied that wasn’t the URA’s worry; working out traffic problems was a job for the city to “accomplish.”

Another voice of dissent was Wells Fargo manager James Keegan, whose bank was on the corner between the Empire Building and Fourth street. With Exchange avenue slated to be sidewalked over in the URA’s plan, he was “considerably disturbed” that bank customers would be dependent upon construction of that proposed garage at Third and B and the proposed walkway where the drugstore used to be. What assurances could the URA give that the property could be acquired for the walkway?

“None,” replied Chairman Panas, who added there were “ways” to get the land, but it was “out of the hands of the agency.” There was no money in the URA budget to buy it. Banker Keegan commented that the area designed for public assemblies should then be turned into parking, as having an assembly area was a “big joke” anyway.

The meeting closed with the URA admitting the cost for all this was “quite over” what they had planned, but was worth it. Remember the thumpity-thump faux cobblestone paving that shook your fillings loose? That cost an extra $40k.

Despite the complete lack of input on the project by the public or any other governmental body, the URA plowed ahead on building the new roadway that autumn. Suggestions were made on its name: Main street, Burbank Plaza, Central Plaza, Rosacino or Mendorosa avenue. Hugh Codding took note of all the heavy construction equipment parked on the square and quipped it should be named the “Demilitarized Zone.”

“Old Courthouse Square” was chosen as the name for both the street and the plaza on its west side (which wouldn’t be built for another year). Street signs were erected at both ends with “Old Court House Square” [sic] lettered in Ye Olde English style because Santa Rosa was apparently founded by Sir Walter Raleigh.

The ribbon cutting was November 5, 1966. Mayor DeMeo gave a shout-out to the city’s founders, albeit one slightly incoherent: “Their gift to the city even now is more enhanced than originally.” That was followed by a “Parade of Progress” where antique autos and the latest models thumpity-thumped in both directions. There was soon a traffic jam on the Fourth street side.

Aside from the roadway and the adjacent sidewalks, no other work was completed in 1966. Exchange and Hinton avenues were still open and the little west side plaza was to come the following year. As for the east side of Courthouse Square, the URA had big plans – to sell it off. “For Sale: 26,000 sq. Feet” read a Press Democrat headline.

NEXT: WHO OWNED COURTHOUSE SQUARE?

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Ask baby boomers who grew up in Santa Rosa what they miss from downtown: Chances are many will name the courthouse. Now climb into a time machine. Go back to the years those boomers were born and ask anyone working downtown what they wouldn’t miss if it were gone: Chances are most would name the courthouse.

In the mid-1950s downtown Santa Rosa was bustling, but not in a particularly healthy way. The population had grown by about 150 percent over the previous ten years¹ and more people meant more businesses. But since this was also the Sonoma county seat, those retail stores or professional services were competing with city, county and state offices. Making matters worse, any available space was extremely tight because the downtown core still had the same footprint as the original tiny 1853 village as discussed in the intro to this series, “Yesterday is Just Around the Corner.”

As a result, government offices were mainly scattered between Third and Fifth streets with addresses subject to change. The county probation office was above the Topaz Room (Santa Rosa’s premier cocktail lounge) until it was moved to the Rosenberg building; you paid the water bill at the City Hall Annex before the Water Dept. was shuffled a block away to Third st. and the Annex – a small, one story building which was originally a gas station – became the Police Identification Bureau. Got all that? And this was just a small sample of the ongoing game of municipal musical chairs; when you see photos from that era with lots of people downtown, assume that a goodly portion are simply wandering about trying to find where the hell they’ve moved Parks & Rec.

But even before the population boom made matters so much worse, the courthouse was bursting at the seams from all the county offices housed in there. In 1945 they considered adding a third floor “penthouse on stilts” to the existing building, with most of the expense going to reinforce the structure. The solution settled upon in 1954 was to build a new county center (the present location) and migrate all administrative offices out there starting in 1956.² By the year 1970, downtown Santa Rosa would only have the county jail and the courthouse which would still house the County Clerk, Tax Collector, and other offices that dealt with the public over a counter.

And then came the 1957 earthquake.

The March 22 quake was magnitude 5.5, which was the worst seen here since 1906. People were rattled but no one was injured and no buildings fell. The only damages reported at the courthouse initially were some fine paint cracks in one section of the building.

Then someone noticed the quake had “jiggled the overhanging cornice blocks a little farther out from the building,” according to the Press Democrat (They really meant the corbels underneath the cornice) and a contractor was hired to do a preliminary inspection.

County administrator Neal D. Smith told the PD the situation appeared “a lot worse than we thought,” and the contractor was afraid to touch them because it “might start a chain reaction” causing a hail of heavy, hard blocks, Smith added.

Smith continued by saying he was worried about the entire exterior veneer of the building, according to the paper. “We don’t know, frankly, what we’re getting into.”

Structural engineers from San Francisco were brought in and their report dropped the Supervisor’s jaws. Estimated cost of repairs was up to $452k – equivalent to over $4 million today. They found the corbels – which were only ornamental – were hollow and made of terra cotta so they weren’t very heavy, but they were attached to the building using tie wires, which were now badly rusted and wedged into holes held by wooden pegs that had rotted. Also, the 10-foot high concrete parapet wall above the cornice was generally in “poor condition,” was “apparently of low strength when built” and at risk of falling from its own weight as well as earthquake and high wind. Beyond that, they said further study was needed to see if the concrete in the building itself was similarly low grade and to see how well the pretty terra cotta cladding was attached to the concrete beneath.

Objectively it wasn’t really a terrible report, other than the decorative corbels had to be fixed or taken off. The big price tag was for stripping off all the terra cotta, bracing the underlying concrete and putting on modern ceramic cladding. If the county chose to simply do repairs the bill would be much smaller, as shown by the Supervisors approving an emergency $25,000 contract to have the corbels removed.

But that report was the camel’s nose; from that point onwards, the sad – and supposedly dangerous – condition of the courthouse became a recurring item on the Supervisor’s agenda and a running theme in the Press Democrat. The newspaper hyped the discovery of a ceiling crack in the Coroner’s office by noting it was directly below the “massive safe” in the treasurer’s office and new bracing was required because of the “questionably strong floors.” (Finalist in the competition for worst PD headline ever: “Engineers Find Many Bad Faults”.)

It’s important to understand the mindset of those times. The earthquake had left the town unnerved and learning that the courthouse may be in structurally “poor condition” was not reassuring to all those who worked there or just needed to do business there. Second: The new County Administration Center was still nearly a year away from having even the first building ready; should the courthouse be condemned as unsafe, there was no place to relocate all those many county employees.

Further complicating matters was another big issue which the Board of Supervisors was simultaneously grappling in the spring and summer of 1957: The creation of the county’s first set of uniform building codes. In one part of a meeting the discussion might be the politically hot potato of whether the new standards should be applied to older buildings that were being altered in some way – a scenario which would very much fit the courthouse. Later in the same meeting they might be wringing hands over the latest developments in the courthouse situation, particularly how far they should go with repairs. Petaluma’s Leigh Shoemaker was the first to say explicitly that it should be demolished, but all of the Supervisors joined in spitballing “what-if” scenarios about what should be done with Courthouse Square sans courthouse.³ Here was the first mention of splitting it in half with a roadway connecting Santa Rosa and Mendocino avenues.

More engineers were called in. This company drilled core samples and found the average strength of the concrete was around two-thirds of the minimum required in 1957 standards (the PD again pushed a negative angle, calling this “very low”). They also found that the huge slabs of terra cotta cladding were secured to the building in the same funky manner as the corbels – rusty tie wires held in place by dowels hammered into holes in the concrete wall. They reported there was a gap between 2-8 inches behind the terra cotta, but it was not explained whether that appeared to be caused by new slippage or how it was constructed.

Even the subpar concrete and discovery of the wall gap was not (yet) a death sentence for the courthouse. County administrator Smith told the Supes that for as little as $50k the terra cotta could be anchored to the back wall with the space between filled with an adhesive grout.⁴

And all was not bad news – addressing the earthquake safety risk, the final engineering report said the courthouse “is capable of withstanding only relatively minor earthquake shocks,” but cryptically added that like many similar buildings in the state, it “will no doubt remain in use for many years to come.” No, the building wasn’t up to modern building codes, but based on the average concrete strength found in the core samples it “just about” met the state’s standards for public buildings.

The year 1957 ended with the Board of Supervisors indecisive, agreeing only that the Fourth street scaffolding should be left standing and places where the terra cotta had been removed by the engineers should protected with plastic sheets until the end of the rainy season. It was expected that all of the cladding would come off the following year and the building would be covered in plaster.

Had all of this played out a year or two or three earlier, I have little doubt that the courthouse would have been repaired and preserved – that was, after all, the most economic route. At the start of 1958, four out of the five Supervisors agreed. But that was the year Santa Rosa caught a serious case of redevelopment fever and the Supes were not immune. Plus, they had a new prestigious consultant.

The recommendations from Ernst & Ernst were more radical than expected. Their experts guesstimated it would cost over one million dollars to rehabilitate the building; better to abandon it ASAP and sell Courthouse Square. (Hugh Codding had already made an offer of $350k – I’m sure Gentle Reader was waiting for him to pop up somewhere in this story about development, just as Alfred Hitchcock always made a cameo appearance in all of his movies.)

All hope of saving the courthouse was now dead, even though there was no clear path forward. The rest of the cladding was removed along with the parapet wall. The building was waterproofed and the scaffolding removed, leaving the once-beautiful building stripped down to its unlovely concrete bones.

Little happened for more than a year, but it was still desired to keep the courthouse near downtown. Santa Rosa’s newly formed Urban Renewal Agency (URA) had enormous powers to declare parts of the town “blighted” and had hired New Jersey architects to come up with an urban redesign that incorporated the courthouse and jail. A drawing of this plan can be found in the recent article about Santa Rosa Creek because the courthouse/jail were to be built on the south side of the waterway.

But the Supervisors – who had agreed to delay a decision for six months to give the URA a chance to present that plan – voted unanimously (with one abstention) to rebuild at the new County Administration Center instead. Now all they had to do was raise $3+ million to pay for it. The county put a bond measure on the ballot in 1960 and it was voted down. In 1961 they tried again and it was voted down. In 1962 it was voted down. Twice. In 1963 it was voted down. Methinks a pattern was beginning to emerge.

Meanwhile, it came to the attention of the State Division of Industrial Safety that people were still working and being held behind bars in those buildings, even though the county was no longer making improvements or doing needed maintenance. An investigation began just days before the first of the 1962 bond votes. The safety department’s report gave the county two months to submit an detailed schedule for making repairs or to evacuate both the jail and the courthouse. The Supervisors instead raised the county’s liability insurance by a million bucks.

The standoff intensified, with the state issuing still more fixit orders and the county appealing for delays until the next bond vote. Some of the repair demands were fairly trivial – move filing cabinets further apart so the weight wasn’t concentrated in one place – but others would have involved extensive work, such as rewiring parts of the courthouse so electrical office equipment would be grounded. The state had the Santa Rosa Fire Department do an inspection and the Fire Marshal found the courthouse to be an “extreme hazard.”

After the bond failed for the fifth time in 1963 the county finally gave up trying, and that summer a non-profit corporation was formed to provide funding (much to the ire of anti-tax activists).⁵ The Industrial Safety office stopped saber rattling.

And so we come to 1966 and the end of our tale, with the judges and clericals and supervisors all nestled snugly into their new digs at county central. It was time to knock down the courthouse.

There’s a story I’ve heard ever since I came to Sonoma county. Maybe you’ve come across it too; supposedly that old courthouse – which was supposed to fall down at the slightest earthquake – turned out to be so sturdy the company hired to demolish it went bankrupt trying to do the job. Welp, that story’s true. Sort of.

(LEFT: The courthouse under construction in 1908. Image courtesy Sonoma County Library)

A company called Bay Cities Excavators was hired and given 75 days to finish the job. Around day 18 the PD interviewed the wrecking-ball crane operator. “There’s a little more steel than I thought, but it doesn’t create too much of a problem,” adding that the courthouse would be down by the end of the following week. Had any of the workers bothered to look at the photos of the building when it was under construction they would have known there were tons and tons of steel inside that crumbly concrete – if anything, the structure had been overbuilt for strength.

A week passes. Another month passes. Eight days from the deadline, the job still isn’t finished and the company has stopped work, claiming to have encountered a “sizable underground structure” which was unanticipated. (I’m guessing it was the old cesspool from the previous courthouse, a topic mentioned here earlier.) After the county whacked them on the nose with the rolled-up contract they continued work “under protest” and threatened to sue. Bay Cities Excavators likely lost money on the job but they didn’t go bankrupt and did several more projects in Santa Rosa over the following years.

The same day demolition began, there was a ceremony where the county sold Courthouse Square to the city of Santa Rosa and its URA. That moment was long the fevered dream of developers; very soon half of it would be up for sale.

NEXT: IT WILL BE A RESPLENDENT CITY

1 Santa Rosa population 1946: 14.9k (within city) 39.4k (metropolitan area). Santa Rosa population 1957: 32.5k (within city) 56.8k (metropolitan area). Source: Polk city directories

2 The Recorder’s office was the first to move out of the courthouse to the County Administration Center in April, 1958. Strangely, the original 1953 plan called for the County Library to be relocated there as well.

3 It was presumed in 1957 that Courthouse Square was county property, although the question of title would not be even addressed until 1963.

4 Smith later mentioned using gunite on the building, which would have worked well to fill the gap between the concrete wall and the terra cotta cladding.

5 Sonoma County Courthouse Inc. was founded to solicit about $5 million from private individuals to pay for the estimated $4.5 million cost of the building, which would be leased to the county for about $350k/mo for twenty years.

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