But this is Chico, too

The reach of Carnegie libraries into even the smallest communities never ceases to amaze me. Few of the original buildings are still used as libraries, but many of them are still standing, and they are usually among the cities' chief architectural treasures. The early 20th century was a time when people cared a lot about how their public buildings looked.

As you can see from the photo, Corning's Carnegie library, a block north of its main street, was built in 1914. The photo doesn't show the roofline, but the building mirrors the mission architectural style the community favored at the time.

The city's transportation center, built in the 1990s, reflects the same style. I first visited Corning about five years ago and had lunch at a café at the center. Last month, when friend and fellow Norcal Blogs blogger Greg Fischer and I visited the town, the café had closed. The center seemed more quiet than I had remembered it. When I later tried to find out more information about it on the Web, I discovered that Greyhound bus and Amtrak train service, which once had stops at the center, had been discontinued.

As it moves into the second decade of the 21st century, Corning is both quiet and bustling, depending on where you are. The historical center of town has quite a few vacant storefronts, but five blocks to the west, next to the I-5 freeway, there's plenty of business activity. In effect, the freeway is Corning's transportation center. As in most places, the car is king here and I-5 motorists are provided with all the services they want and need just past the exits.

Another modern-day hub is Rolling Hills Casino, one exit south of Corning. After taking our usual stroll through town to admire the older buildings, we drove over to the casino and had lunch. For the first time in my life, I played a slot machine. Before losing $2, it gave me $4 worth of play. I told Greg I still feel like I'm underage whenever I pass through a gambling casino. Legally, this isn't true, but I notice that most of the gamblers belong to my parents' generation. What will casinos do when all the people now in their 80s and 90s die?

Corning continues to have strong ties to its roots. It's still surrounded by olive orchards. Bell-Carter Foods is a major olive packaging plant. Every August, Corning hosts its Olive Festival. The industry is now transitioning from producing table olives to olive oil, which has become all the rage in cooking. Olives will retain their allure for decades, maybe centuries to come.

In the last five or six years, Greg and I have toured most of the major towns of the Sacramento Valley, to learn about their history, admire their old buildings and sample their restaurant cooking. We've covered a lot of ground, but I imagine there are still places waiting for us to discover them.

Wal-Mart's proposed expansion has become a "But this is Chico" saga. The phrase "But this is Chico" has many shades of meaning, some of  them laudatory, but in this case it describes an issue that becomes larger than life. It turns into an epic struggle  between two opposing forces, each believing that reason and righteousness are on their side alone. The struggle can go on and on and take a long time to resolve.

A decision has supposedly been made about Wal-Mart. Its expansion has been officially blocked, but I can't believe we've heard the last of it. This is Chico.

Since I've come to Chico, I've seen several contentious issues become sagas. Some examples: the proposal to extend Otterson Drive over Comanche Creek/Edgar Slough, the fate of the property known as Bidwell Ranch and disc golf in upper Bidwell Park.  I see some  potential for the proposal  to relocate the Saturday Market to become a "But this is Chico" saga.

Chicoans who become immersed in these struggles display far more righteousness than reason. This is understandable. If you apply reason to just about any  issue, you end up seeing  it from not one, not two, but  from many of points of view. The drama of a saga demands polarization.

I'm not immune to the seductions of righteousness. I'm that way about the health care reform debate. I think people who are happy with the current insurance industry-run system simply have not yet seen the light. Eventually, a public option will gain almost universal support. That's because, sooner or later, just about everyone will get burned by the current system. It's that black and white to me.
 
But so far none of the Chico sagas have succeeded in  completely derailing  my ability to weigh the merits of competing arguments. The Wal-Mart expansion intrigues me not so much because I'm attached to any particular outcome but because, for once, the main point of contention isn't growth or land use. Not really. It's about the viability and value of capitalism.

People say "Why pick on Wal-Mart?" That's not hard to figure out. If  what we're really discussing is the soundness of our country's economic system, there isn't a better target. Wal-Mart is the most profitable retailer in the world. It has pursued its policy of offering consumers the lowest prices with a single-minded aggressiveness. It does this with cheap labor and putting the screws to producers, many of which are becoming increasingly dependent on the company because Wal-Mart has become a major buyer of their products.

Wal-Mart has become dominant in many sectors of the retail industry.

And now it's going after the discount grocery business.

Some of the arguments for  Wal-Mart's expansion have focused on the notion that it's important for the free-enterprise system to remain unfettered.
 
Let's look at the opposite argument first. Whenever people assert that  government ownership and control of the economy is their ideal, they are branded as fringies.

But somehow, belief in a pure market system is still regarded as mainstream. The fact is, this country is a a mixture of socialism and free enterprise. The public and private sectors have always been collaborators, and government subsidizes and promotes private enterprise as often as it restricts it.

The notion that Chico is either  open or closed for business is simplistic. In real life, Chico is open to some businesses and closed to others.  Would we welcome a smoke-belching factory? No way. A prison?  I don't think so.  An Indian gambling casino inside the city limits? Not likely.
 
Chico has a reputation for caring about its quality of life. The issue isn't as esoteric as it sounds. What Chico needs more than anything to ensure it has a good quality of life is to attract and retain  jobs that pay at least twice the minimum wage.  Wal-Mart is apparently unable to do that and keep prices down at the same time. Creating  more modest-paying jobs  is not exactly a plus for Chico.

On the other hand, low prices are also a quality of life issue. Most people in Chico don't make $16 an hour or more. They don't have the luxury of being able to patronize higher-priced stores. This is a community of residents of modest means. We live in a county where the unemployment rate is above the statewide average  even in the best of times. So when it comes to keeping prices down, the free market - that is to say, competition - is critical.

There is a fear that Wal-Mart is so predatory  that, if it were permitted to expand,  it  would  drive every other discount grocer out of Chico and then raise its prices.

It would be in trouble at that point. Customers would lose their  faith in Wal-Mart and stop patronizing it.  New competitors, just as cunning and aggressive as Wal-Mart, would arise and crush it. Much of Chico's economic base is fragile, but its retail sector is  strong  enough to keep Wal-Mart in check.

"Some professional journalists have a sense that they are like polar bears pacing pack and forth in high anxiety as the ice around them melts away."

That's a good way to put it. I've been working for newspapers for 35 years and I didn't start becoming nervous about the future of the profession until a year or two ago.

The quote is from a book called "Losing the News."  It's written by Alex S. Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and frequently cited media authority. His family has owned a 15,000-circulation newspaper in Greenville, Tenn. for four generations.

This is the first book I've run across on the subject, although of course I've read plenty of articles about it, both online and in print.

ln addressing the anxieties journalists face  in times of declining circulation and revenues, he's not reassuring.

He writes that the nation's newspaper companies will survive and eventually thrive again. "It may not be as healthy in terms of profit as it was in the lush 1980s, but I have been too long in the newspaper business to believe it won't find a way to survive in some form."

But he's not so confident that the business will continue to  have news as its central mission. "The great problem for the nation's newspapers is not whether they can save themselves, but whether they can do so without losing their meaningful public service mission.

"They have been businesses built around reporting and providing news  that their communities want and need. I fear newspapers are trending overwhelmingly around what people want, and all but abandoning anything that doesn't make money or draw eyeballs."

In making these assertions, he's aware that his ideas are a little out of date. Part of the current thinking is how dare we tell readers what they need.

Jones is worried about the loss of  what he calls the "iron core" of newspaper content. He divides this into three categories: bearing witness to events, explanatory news and investigative journalism. He writes that even in the best-regarded newspapers, the iron core has never made up more than 15 percent of the content. Half the space is devoted to advertising and the remaining 35 percent is taken up by what he calls "crowd-pleasing news."

But with newspapers in financial trouble, he  believes owners' concerns about the costs of what he calls "accountability reporting" are causing the iron core to shrink.

This is certainly true at the largest newspapers.

For me, huge metropolitan dailies might as well be a fantasy world.  Jones writes that a few years ago the Los Angeles Times allowed three reporters to work for three years on one  investigative series. It had a huge effect on the community, but cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce.
 
With such formerly extravagant news budgets, it's not surprising that the "iron core" has been jeopardized  by round after round  of staff cuts cuts. Smaller newspapers have been frugal in the best of times, and so it has been easier for them to adjust to lean times.

Although Jones is  worried that  finding a profitable business model  may hurt what he calls the "public stewardship" side of newspapers, he's skeptical of  the whole concept of  newspapers supported by foundations. "Funders can change their minds, get mad, get bored or simply want to do something different."

He writes that turning newspapers into nonprofits, thereby reducing the financial  pressure, is an appealing model, but  believes it will rarely happen, as most newspapers have multiple stakeholders "who are unlikely to give away what is likely their principal asset."

He also balks at the trend of  newspapers allowing members of the community to cover news events. "The hyper-localism of many papers requires everything be covered, and a convenient and inexpensive way to do it is to recruit unpaid volunteers who do the best they can. Some of them can do the job of any professional and follow the same ethical standards of impartiality. But this arrangement can be exploitative and it is unreliable in the long term."

So if the present business model isn't working, new profit-making efforts are eroding news coverage and every alternative has its drawbacks, what does he suggest?

"Journalists must hold fast and persevere," he writes. "Owners must do the right thing and news consumers must notice and demand the news they need."

In other words, we should all just be good people. I suppose we could be, but I wouldn't count on it. Newspapers have been successful  because they  melded commerce, entertainment and community service. But the current  financial challenges have upset this equilibrium, and we may have to accept that things will never go back being to the way they were.

Fort Bidwell was established  in 1865 to keep Indians from attacking American settlements in the remote northeast corner of California.

Since 1890, it's been a Paiute Indian reservation. Today, the reservation is the center of activity in a community that is otherwise turning into a ghost town.
 
This ragged, faded sign, which points the way to the Fort Bidwell store, tells the story of this shrinking settlement.  When I reached  the store, it was locked and shuttered. A sign on the front of the building says the store was established in 1876. There is nothing to document when it might have closed.

This isn't the only vacant storefront in the town of Fort Bidwell. As I drove around, I couldn't find any operating businesses. The post office and volunteer fire department were the only signs that the part of Fort Bidwell outside the reservation is anything more than a handful of  residences.

The reservation property starts just west of the town. Most of the buildings that offer services and provide housing for tribe members are grouped around what was once Fort Bidwell's parade ground, which is now a children's playground.

Aside from the parade grounds, the only remnants of the days when Fort Bidwell stood guard at California's northeast border are a former  chapel (left)  --  a wooden structure that is more or less intact --  and the crumbling stone walls of what was once a hospital (below right).

A tribe member, who spotted me walking around the complex trying to find someone to talk to, pointed out these landmarks. He said over the years other buildings were torn down and replaced with new facilities as the tribe needed them. He said the historical features of the site weren't allowed to stand in the way of the tribe's progress.

There's  justice in this. When settlers came to California, the Indians who weren't killed or didn't die from diseases  had to  move forward. They had to figure out how to fit in to the new culture.

Military reservations are typically named after military leaders. Fort Bidwell is named after John Bidwell, Chico's most famous citizen. Bidwell was appointed a brigadier general in the state militia during the Civil War. He was charged with boosting public support for the Union war effort and suppressing political dissent.

Bidwell's wife Annie called him "general."

That a fort more than 250 miles away from Chico should be named after Bidwell shows the stature he attained as a California  settler. To see a place replete with signs saying "Bidwell" was one of the reasons I made the trip. The other reason was to explore a part of the state I had never seen before.

Until I took this day trip, I had never traveled in the northeast beyond Burney Falls. I like to see new places, but other destinations always seemed  to take  precedence. But the time finally came, on a weekday in October.

On the way to Fort Bidwell, I stopped at Alturas and had a latte at this coffeehouse (left).

Alturas is the biggest settlement in this region, but in most other parts of the state it would be considered small. I have no idea what keeps it going, aside from providing services to ranchers who live in the surrounding countryside.

It has some handsome old buildings, but seems to be well outside the tourist belt. The coffeehouse proprietor told me the  town's historic Niles Hotel has been closed for four years.

I then drove east through a range of mountains, entered the Surprise Valley and had lunch at this grocery store in Cedarville (below right). Both this store and the coffeehouse in Alturas were once banks.

The name Surprise Valley has always intrigued me. I had often wondered if I  would find  anything surprising about it if I ever visited it.

If I had to name it, I would call it Predictable Valley. It's right at the point in the state where the trees end and the barren landscape typical of the Great Basin begins. The only surprise is that  there is one last mountain range between the valley and the basin.

Fort Bidwell is at the northern end of Surprise Valley. On the way there, you pass by a lake that seems to be mainly a mud flat. This only adds the bleakness of the terrain.

On my first sweep through Fort Bidwell, I couldn't locate the fort.  Just north of the town I spotted a promising ruin of a building on top of a hill. A worker at the post office told me how to get to the reservation. She said the building I'd seen had nothing to do with the fort.   

Earlier in this post, I noted how the banks in Alturas and Cedarville had been put to new uses. In Fort Bidwell, all that remains of its bank is the crumbling vault.

California is often thought of as a place of frenzied, unending growth. But once I left the outskirts of Redding behind, I might as well have been in Wyoming. This is one of the most empty parts of the state. By the time I arrived in Fort Bidwell, I felt as if I had traveled 2,000 miles.          

 

San Francisco is a collection of urban villages. It's what you'd get in Butte County if you  put Chico, Oroville, Durham, Paradise, Biggs and Gridley , Dayton and other communities  side by side,eliminated whatever suburbs are around them, took away most of the  yard space and scrunched the houses so that they became three- and four-story structures.

The City, of course, has a main downtown, but its urban fabric is  woven out of dozens of smaller communities. Every 20 blocks you're in a different district, each with its own name. There seem to be no unnamed neighborhoods in San Francisco. Chico has a few such areas - Chapmantown, the avenues, Barber, but I wish it had more. I've already half-jokingly suggested NoPa for an area east of Mangrove Avenue and north of Bidwell Park and SoDo  for the area between downtown and The Junction.

A couple of months ago I took a trip to San Francisco and strolled through three neighborhoods: Glen Park, Bernal Heights and Excelsior. They each have their own center and other qualities that distinguish them from each other.  At the same time,  you always know you're in San Francisco. There's no other place quite like it in California. It's densely built, has little pockets of open space, offers lots of public transportation, preserves main streets in miniature rather than turning them into strip malls and boasts a rich ethnic mix of people. One of its common physical features is that the upper stories of buildings invariably  have bay windows.
 
In terms of size, Glen Park is probably the Biggs of San Francisco. Its center, shown at the top of this post, is four or five blocks of intersecting streets that beckon strollers leaving the nearby BART Station. My first order of business was to get something to eat and have a caffeine fix, so I picked  a place that was close at hand, a small bustling coffee shop (as opposed to coffeehouse) where some people were obliged to share tables with  strangers, except at this place there seemed to be no strangers.  Everybody sort of knew each other. This was clearly a place for locals. The waiter who served me had a smile so broad and beaming that it felt like sunshine.

I was pleasantly surprised by the congenial atmosphere. San Francisco is one of those places where human warmth is in competition with the coolness factor. Totally cool places like San Francisco  usually aren't that friendly. Fortunately, Chico isn't overwhelmed by its coolness factor. People here are open, engaging and down-to- earth. In San Francisco, people are more aloof, more wary, more self-absorbed, more conscious of who is cooler than whom. So it was nice to have a warming experience in Glen Park.

To be a flaneur (a sentient ambler through urban space)  in San Francisco you need stamina and strong legs. San Francisco has been laid out in a series of interlocking grids that have no bearing on the topography. As a result, you are walking up and down hills - up and down, up and down. I have made a commitment to get  my desire to explore San Francisco on foot out of my system by the time I'm 60. That gives me two more years.  I don't know how long it will be before hills become too much for me.

After I finished eating, I climbed my first hill, to see the residential part of Glen Park.  There are a lot of houses in this neighborhood, rather than apartments, but they are tightly packed together. I hate seeing this in new suburban developments, mainly because the houses are way too big for their lots. But the tall, narrow profile of San Francisco houses seems better suited to higher densities.

To get from Glen Park to Bernal Heights, my next neighborhood, I had to go down a hill , cross car-jammed  San Jose Avenue  and climb another hill. Cortland Avenue is the main street of Bernal Heights, which in terms of size is perhaps the Gridley of San Francisco. I'd read that it was one of those areas that  in recent times has  been discovered by affluent people and is being revitalized. It looked prosperous, tidy and well-maintained.

 Cortland was thronged with people, especially since this was an uncharacteristically hot day. The neighborhood library was in the throes of being refurbished.

I then went down a hill, climbed to the crest of another hill to take a walk around  circular-shaped Holly Park, descended the hill through St. Mary's Playground, which had shiny, brand new children's playground equipment.

 It seems that by default the tops of the hills that were too steep to be graded and incorporated into the street grid became parks.

Then I took a footbridge across Interstate 280. San Francisco is  famous for  its freeway revolt of 45 years ago, but the grassroots action didn't stop this juggernaut from cutting an east to west swath through the  south part of the city. For most people who drive through San Francisco from the Peninsula and Silicon Valley, this is their only contact with Glen Park, Bernal Heights and the Excelsior, which means they experience these places as a blur.

The Excelsior district lies south of the freeway. It's one of those neighborhoods that has yet to be revitalized. The paint on the houses is peeling, there are bars on the doors and windows, the small yard areas are overgrown with weeds and the streets and sidewalks are full of litter. It isn't a slum, but at this point in its life it's not one of San Francisco's most charming districts.

With a minimum of hill climbing, I made my way to Mission Avenue, which is Excelsior's main drag. In terms of size, this neighborhood is perhaps the Oroville of Butte County . Many of the businesses along Mission are bars and liquor stores. This photo shows there are other types of businesses as well. The street was peopled mainly by seniors, some of them nattily dressed. I didn't see any beggars.

I then crossed another section of the Interstate 280, made my way back to the Glen Park BART station and headed off  to the parts of San Francisco that  are more familiar to tourists. I've reached the point where I  know many parts of San Francisco so well that I have to seek out  unfamiliar neighborhoods to experience a little novelty.  Because I'm a  lover of cityscapes, I'm easy to please. I don't need to spend money on expensive amusements or restaurants. Just  strolling through the neighborhoods is entertainment enough for me.

I'm about to go off on another tangent. Until recently, this blog has been about Chico, but I'm running out of things to say about it. I could just end this blog, but it's hard for a writer to stop writing. So I think that over time, the title "But this is Chico, too" will mean Chico and other things.

My first major tangent was a series on the history of rock music from a personal perspective, which I've just finished. It had nothing to do with Chico. This time around I'm focusing on aging. This topic's only tie with Chico is my belief that I will become an old man here. In 12 years, I'll be 70, so we're not talking about a long time before the transformation is complete. I'm not going to do this as a series. I'll just bring it up occasionally.

By the time I'm 70, I hope to be retired. I'll have plenty of time to write, but by then I may be so overwhelmed by aging that I may not want to write about the subject. Now may be the best time to address it.

What do you do when you retire?

What you always did, but more of it. For me that would mean reading, spending time with my family (grandchildren maybe?), traveling, gardening, volunteering, flaneuring, perhaps running. Those things would be my first order of business.

My last order of business would be dying.

I think about that more than all the other things put together.

Twenty years from now we'll start hearing the media talk about how 10,000 baby boomers are dying every week. Thirty years from now, it will be up to 100,000 every week. Bye bye, boomers. We're a large demographic so it will hard to avoid hearing stories about us in our declining and vanishing years.

But even if the rise and fall of my celebrated generation was not automatically newsworthy, I would still be painfully aware of the reality of death. Every day, I feel its talons digging into me, its hot dragon breath searing me.

Fifty years ago today, shortly after I started the second grade, and just days after I went to school dressed as Superman for Halloween, my mother died.

There she was, sitting up in bed admiring my little brother and me in our costumes and praising the pumpkins we had carved with the help of my dad. And then three days later, she was gone.

The main person in my life was gone.

Since then, death and I have been on bad terms.

Until that point, death had been no big deal. A year earlier, my mother told me my great- grandmother had died. But that's OK, she said. My great-grandmother was sick and old. We all have to die someday, my mother said. I accepted that. My great-grandmother looked so ancient and infirm to me I could barely believe she was still alive. Death seemed like the next logical step for her.

But my mother's death changed everything. This was not OK. This was not only a desertion, but an ambush. Nobody told me it was coming. It wasn't just about protecting a child from bad news. The adults didn't talk to each other either. How do you wrap your head and heart around the idea that a beloved wife, daughter, sister and niece, just 30 years old and with two young children, is dying? My family couldn't. They chose to cling to false hope. You'll get better, they told my mother.

Even on the day my mother died, my dad was unwilling to tell my brother and me what had happened. He sat us down and told us a story about how God had taken her away, and how it would be a long time before we saw her again. How long, I asked? Oh, a long, long time, he said. Where is she, I asked? Heaven, he said. That's when I finally knew. I ran out of the room. I'd heard enough of the story.

My little brother still didn't understand. A few days later, I was the one who had to tell him, She's dead. She's dead.

My mother herself never told me how sick she was. Just a flu that isn't bad, she said. Later, I found out from a next-door neighborhood child that my mother had died of cancer. No she didn't, I protested. Yes, she did, the child's mother said.

Lately, I've been thinking about how my dad said it would be a long, long time before we saw my mother again. Well, isn't 50 years long enough? Where is she? I'm not a person who is blessed with the ability to see dead people, but just a little sign would help. I look for signs everywhere.

I assume my dad was trying to tell us we wouldn't see her until we died. He died last year, so maybe he's with her now. I'm not convinced any of this is true - God, heaven, life after death - but all of my religious impulses start with the hope that I will see my mother again.

In this self-actualizing age, we think of life as a journey. But if death is the end of all of us, and if we must suffer the loss of loved ones we will never see again, what's the point of such a painful journey?

Camellia Courtyard, a project of architect Glenn Bruno, is the antithesis of a strip mall. It was one of the first corners of Chico that endeared me to this place when I came here 11 years ago. There is a seamless blending of buildings and landscaping that you see in few other places in Chico. CARD's Community Center is another good example.

If our suburbs looked more like Camellia Courtyard, we wouldn't object to them so much.

Bruno also designed Bidwell Perk.

Bruno is one of the 10 local architects whose work was featured in an architecture exhibit at Gallery 1078 as part of the ongoing Artoberfest. This is the second of a two-part post that includes one photo representing each of the architects' work.

Thomson & Hendricks, Inc. is the designer of the Catalyst Women's Domestic Violence  Shelter, at the south end of Ivy Street in the Barber neighborhood. The building is still under  construction. The parking lot next to it was fenced off, so it was hard to get a photo that does justice to how it looks.
 
The firm also designed the building that contains the City Hall meeting room and the Chico branch of Butte County Library.

Laurie Norton of Norton Construction Co. was gracious enough to show me around the house he built 12 years ago on what was one of the rare remaining vacant lots on Chico's east side, just south of Bidwell Park. Most of the neighborhood has houses from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. Whenever I had walked by the Norton home, I had assumed it was an older home that had been remodeled, as its architectural style is a good fit with the surrounding homes.

Norton's home was designed by his brother-in-law, Tom Norlie, the architect for several houses in Chico and the surrounding area. The 2,000-square-foot house has bedrooms, laundry facilities and office space on the ground floor and a huge room that includes a living room, kitchen and dining area on the second floor. Norton built the "green" (as in energy-efficient ) house on Mulberry Street.

Wittmeier Ford on Forest Avenue in southeast Chico was designed by Larry Coffman, whose other projects include Chico Volkswagen and the Enloe Outpatient Center. The complex is in Big Boxland, but, refreshingly, it's not big and boxy. What I also like about the design is that it did not succumb to the retro-mania that has swept the country in the last two decades. It's a striking design, yet it manages to avoid overwhelming the landscape.  This is one of my favorite buildings in this part of town, although there are a few on Skyway at the southeast edge of Chico that I also  admire.

Griffith & Associates did the remodeling work at Esplanade Professional Offices, a mid 20th-century building that now sits in front of the new Enloe Medical Center parking garage.

The firm also designed Chico Fire Station Five, which now sits in the middle of a roundabout, and the expansion of the  Glenn County Courthouse in Willows.

Architecture is the most pervasive kind of public art. When I say public, I'm not talking about the source of its funding, but the fact that it can be seen from the street. Most buildings are privately funded, after all. For better or worse, it's buildings that give streets their character.

Like most public art, buildings are capable of  stirring up controversy.  However, unlike paintings or sculpture, people's objections aren't so basic. We seldom say "Call that a building?"  We don't dispute that a building is a building, only whether it's ugly or beautiful.

At the start of Chico's Artoberfest, Gallery 1078 hosted an exhibit that displayed the work of 10 Chico architects and architectural firms. When I found out this was going to be part of the month that focuses on the arts community, I thought it was a great idea. Architecture is an overlooked form of art and architects' achievements often go unnoticed. My only gripe is that this exhibit lasted just four days. I wish it had run the entire month.

Exhibits come and go, but buildings last. The designers' work is always on view. In this post and the next, I'm going to show you one example each of the work of the 10 featured architects.

The first (at top of this post) is an apartment house close to northeast corner of Sixth and Ivy streets, designed by Tim Leefeldt. It shows that you can bring higher density development into a former single-family home neighborhood without destroying its character .In his two-bedroom apartment built over a garage, Leefeldt took pains to make sure  the building blended in with the craftsman style architecture found in this and other old Chico neighborhoods.
 
I've  observed that it doesn't take much to achieve a design that's sensitive to its surroundings. The biggest failing of most of the apartment buildings in the South Campus neighborhood is that the builders were oblivious to the character of the neighborhood. It's almost as if they were scoffing at it for being old.

Leefeldt  has also designed commericial  and residential projects in Tehama and Glenn counties.

Just a couple of blocks from this apartment, at the edge of downtown, is Afton Place, on the northwest corner of Salem and Seventh streets, designed by Patrick Cole, of Arcademe. Functionally, it's the sort of building that  the new urbanism school of developers  believes is ripe to make a comeback, particularly in city centers.

It's a so-called mixed-use project, with businesses on the ground floor and residences on the upper  floors. In the days before land use zoning became so segregated, buildings like this could be found commonly in cities. I remember when I was growing up my great aunt and great-grandmother rented an apartment in Berkeley that was  above a grocery store. I grew up in the suburbs, so this arrangement seemed unusual to me, although even as a child I could see that inner Bay Area cities looked much different than the outer suburbs.

Arcademe also designed the Walker Commons low-income housing project behind the Mangrove Shopping Center and the remodeling of the Holiday Inn.

Another project built in Chico's core area is  Campbell Commons, designed by Dave Schleiger.

It's on Flume Street, right across from The Pageant Theater. This is a 56-unit complex of studio apartments for low-income residents.

Schleiger's other projects include the new Chico Creek Nature Center building, Chico Transit Center and Murphy Commons.
 
Moving out a little farther from the center of Chico, in the Barber neighborhood, is a contemporary version of a granny cottage, designed by Nan Jones. Its access is from an alley behind Normal Street.

The trend in American housing is for bigger and bigger houses. This house suggests viable alternatives are possible.

Jones also designed the Torres Homeless Shelter.

The last building in this post is the Woof and Poof factory, on Orange Street, just north of the Chico Train Depot, designed by the Tarman Architectural Group. This building fits in well with what was once Chico's warehouse district. The ironic twist is that several of the old warehouse buildings have been torn down since Woof and Puff went up. So it's a style that increasingly exists only in memory.

Tarman also designed Faith Lutheran Church on East First Avenue near Mangrove Avenue and St. John's Episcopal Church on Floral Avenue.
 

This post is the last in a series on the history of rock music.

It's 1992 and I'm 40 years old.  Appropriately enough, "Midlife Crisis" by Faith No More is my favorite song. I've moved away from my 1980s musical obsessions and am enjoying a few contemporary artists. Like just about everyone else, I own Nirvana's "Nevermind."

The group has a punkish appeal, but older listeners like it, too. Older. That's the category I have fallen into, much to my surprise. How did I get to be "older" so quickly?

Nirvana  represented the rough end of  punkishness. Throughout the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s and into the present, REM, with its folkish sound, has represented the smoother end of the punkish spectrum.

 REM is one of my all-time favorite groups, but by the 1990s, I wasn't claiming any one artist  as my current favorite.

By that time, I had heard too much amazing stuff to be able to claim a favorite.  I hardly ever have a favorite song anymore, one that I play and play.


But once in a while, it still happens. The most recent favorite song is "Sorry," a collaboration between Madonna and Paul Oakenfield. It's - what do you call it --  techno, house, trance?  No matter. As the Billy Joel song says, "the next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways, it's still rock and roll to me."
 
I think  my enthusiasm for rock music began to flag because I had reached the saturation point. I had already heard a lifetime of great sounds. But I continued to soldier on. I kept my eared glued to the radio until I was in my mid-40s.

A look at the CDs I acquired in the 1990s shows I was still a rock music fan. Among the artists from that decade I own are Live, Garbage, Oasis, Kula Shaker, New Radicals, Midnight Oil, Alice in Chains, Moby, K.D. Lang, Vertical Horizon, Foo Fighters, Barenaked Ladies, Counting Crows, Peter Murphy, Sam Phillips and the Dave Matthews Band. I did not become stuck in the Sixties.

Since the turn of the 21st century, I have to give credit to two musical mentors for preventing me from falling completely out of touch with rock music.  Both of them are female friends. Their  intense interest in  the music  -- and  their  ability to enjoy it with the head-banging abandonment of an adolescent male  -- is refreshingly uncharacteristic  of their gender and their ages (30s and 50s).  My son has also influenced me, but he's not  into  music the way I am.

Thanks to  my mentors, some of the artists I've enjoyed in the last decade include Eiffel 65, Beck, Death Cab for Cutie, Radiohead, Covenant, Front Line Assembly, Franz Ferdinand, The Dandy Warhols and The Killers. But I must give credit to my wife for introducing me to Coldplay. She and I still like some of the same artists - Enya, Loreena McKennitt and Clannad are examples - but we haven't been fellow musical explorers since the progressive rock era. Being parents  has been the main interest we've explored together  in recent decades.

The whole approach to owning  and listening to music has changed. Young listeners download it from their computers onto their i-Pods. They don't buy CDs with the same fervor with which  I once acquired vinyl LPs  and 45s. I  like the idea of the music I love being part of a collection you can touch and display in a special place. I like owning records that are now more than 40 years old. It's hard to live in a musical world where record stores are no longer important.  I love going to  Melody Records  and browsing - for vinyl and CDs. It's part of what it means to be a rock music fan

Maybe the music of the 2010s will be so riveting and unique that I will stop relying entirely on my mentors . But if that doesn't happen, I'm content to have lived in the era when rock was young and to have experienced so much magic.

In 2003 I devised a car tour of Chico and put it in my E-R column "But this is Chico." I've decided to do a shortened version in this blog, this time with illustrations. Unlike the newspaper column, this post will be available in the archives of this blog. You won't have to go and dig up back issues of the E-R. The cooler weather of fall makes this a good time to go for a drive.

I'm going to focus on Chico's core area. I've put together a route that  doesn't  have too many twists and turns. The tour includes a few buildings I've never written about.

Start at the Bidwell Mansion, built between 1865 and 1868. It was once the home of Chico's most  famous citizen and one of California's most prominent pioneers. This house was not built for his future wife Annie, but it was completed  shortly after they were married. She remained there for the rest of her life, which turned out to be 50 years. The house is an Italianate villa, with three floors, a partial basement and a tower.  It has 26 rooms, covers almost 12,000 square feet and  cost $56,000 to build, which was an astounding sum for a house.

After taking a tour of the mansion, which is a state historic park, head north on The Esplanade, which I have always  described as  Northern California's premier grand boulevard.  John Bidwell had it laid out in 1869, as it was on his property.  By the early 20th century it was home to some of Chico's finest buildings.

Here are some highlights in the first eight blocks of The Esplanade:
• The  1918 prairie-style house on the southeast corner of The Esplanade and Frances Willard Avenue;
• The  1939 Spanish colonial revival house on the southeast corner of  The Esplanade and Lincoln Avenue;
• The 1927 Italian Renaissance revival Veterans Memorial Building on the northeast corner of The Esplanade and East Washington Avenue, which now sits empty, in need of major repairs;
• The 1901 Queen Anne-style Victorian cottage on the southwest corner of  The Esplanade and First Avenue;
• The 1906 "classic box" Goodman House on the southeast corner of  The Esplanade and Fourth Avenue, which is now a bed and breakfast;  (shown in photo)
•The 1937 colonial revival Adam House on the northwest corner of  The Esplanade and  Fourth Avenue.

Turn left on East Sixth Avenue  to get a good sense of how the new  can overtake the old. Enloe Medical Center, which has been on The Esplanade since the 1930s, is undergoing a major expansion. To its credit, it has preserved several older structures in the neighborhood that it has acquired over the years for offices and patient services.


Turn left on Arcadian Avenue and pass by the Grateful Bed bed and breakfast, a colonial revival with Queen Anne touches, built in 1905. (shown in photo)

Turn right on East Fourth Avenue and pass by Citrus School. Built in 1936, it is one of the Chico Unified School District's oldest  structures still being used as a school. Turn left on Warner Avenue and again experience how the new can overtake the old. Warner has smaller, older houses and newer apartment complexes for Chico State University students.

Continue on Warner through the Chico State University campus. On the northeast corner of Second Street, right where Warner becomes Ivy, is the new Student Services Center, one of  the few decent-looking  newer buildings on the campus.

Cross Second. On the  northwest corner of Ivy and Third Street is the Italianate Victorian Walker House, built in 1875. It's one of Chico's few brick houses. Turn left on Third. At the northwest corner of Third on Hazel Street  is the stick-style Victorian Earll House, built in 1883. Its owner, Ray Murdoch, is refurbishing it.

Cross Hazel and go by the block of six so-called Language Houses,  most of them built in the early 20th century. (The house on the northeast corner of Hazel and Third is shown in photo).

These houses were once owned by the university and slated to be torn down for a parking lot. Their preservation has led to a much better outcome for this block.

 On the northeast corner of Chestnut and Third is the 1920 prairie-style Dean House, which the university owns and uses for offices.

At the northwest corner of Normal Avenue and Third is the 1884 Italianate-style Victorian Barnard House, also owned by the university.

At the northwest corner of  Salem and Third streets  is the 1905 gothic revival St. Augustine of Canterbury Anglican Church (shown in photo).

The building was a restaurant for a few years. Today, Augie's, a coffeehouse operated by  the church,  is right next to it. The church was moved to this site from the southeast corner of Main and Fifth streets to make way for the post office almost 90 years ago.

Turn right on Salem. On the southeast corner of Salem and Fifth streets is the 1882 Italianate Stansbury House, which the family lived in for  90 years. It is now a city museum and  is open for tours on the weekend.

Turn left  on Fifth. At the corner of Fifth and Broadway where the Anglican church once was is the 1914 Italian Renaissance revival post office. (Shown in photo).  It's listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
 
At the southeast corner of Fifth and Main is the 1928 art deco Senator Theatre, designed by Bay Area architect Timothy Pflueger.
 
Head east on Fifth until you can go no farther. Along the way, you can look at more late 19th and early 20th century houses:
• The 1889 vernacular style house at the southeast corner of Fifth and Orient;
• The octagonally shaped 1881 "Downing Cottage"  at the northwest corner of Fifth and Olive streets;
• The 1913 craftsman bungalow on the north side of Fifth midway between Pine and Cypress streets (watch out for traffic when you cross Pine and Cypress);
• The 1922 prairie-style bungalow at the southeast corner of  Fifth and Poplar streets;
• The 1912 colonial revival on the south corner of Fifth just before it intersects with Woodland Avenue. (Shown in photo).  It was the home of Ella Gatchell, Chico's first female doctor. She was Annie Bidwell's doctor.

You are now only a block away from an entrance to Bidwell Park's One-Mile Recreation Area. If it's not raining, finish off the tour with a picnic there.

As always, just about all of my information about the buildings comes from a historical inventory the Chico Heritage Association put together in the 1980s. I'm not an expert on old buildings, just intensely interested in them.