But this is Chico, too

Among the alleged saving graces of living in big cities is that individual neighborhoods feel like small towns. You may be a faceless entity in San Francisco, with its 750,000 people, but in Cole Valley, Bernal Heights and the Marina and Mission districts people who live around the corner will greet you with a smile and shop owners will know your name.

One of the missions of the new urbanism movement is to create neighborhoods that foster this sense of intimacy. The streets are narrow, the sidewalks are wide and the front porches are prominent. In some instances, businesses and residences are intermixed in the same block, even the same building. It’s enough to make you want to say “Howdy, neighbor.�

This isn’t a workable model for people like me. We introverts are sociable, but we mainly like to sit down with one person at a time and talk for an hour or two. We aren’t up to having conversations with people constantly. About a year ago at a work-related seminar, an uber-extrovert told us to stand up and introduce ourselves to everyone in the room. That 10-minute exercise wiped me out for the rest of the morning.

I think if I lived in a place like San Francisco, which is packed with people, I’d want to further fortify the walls that surround my personal space. I wouldn’t be inclined to get to know my neighbors. I’d seek out a few people I might be able relate to. It wouldn’t matter if they lived on the other side of the city. It wouldn’t matter if they lived in another city. I’d eventually develop ties with people I’d get together with — usually one at a time — every now and then. That’s how it was when I was a single person living in L.A. Getting married and becoming a father further reduced my need to socialize.

None of this means I’m bothered that Chicoans have a way of feeling connected to each other just by living here. I like Chico’s community spirit. But the feeling doesn’t depend on my ever meeting the people I share this connection with. It’s impersonal, but in a good way. We Chicoans may feel a bond, but we don’t have to pretend we are one big, happy family or even that we all have to shake hands and say “Howdy, neighbor.�

Posted by at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of Chico’s best features is its combination of big city and small town amenities. One thing I like about a city of 100,000 people is that you can go about your business and feel relatively anonymous. Personal contacts are few and far between. This suits my personality perfectly.

Small towns are designed for extroverts. One of my friends is the mayor of a Sacramento Valley town of about 4,000. Whenever we walk along its main street or have a meal together in one of its restaurants, we are constantly meeting people he knows. It goes on literally nonstop. He seems to thrive on these contacts, but it makes me want to jump in my car and drive back to Chico. Oldtimers tell me this is what Chico was like several decades ago. How did introverts stand it?

Before my family and I moved to Chico, we lived in Lompoc, a city of about 50,000. We were there 14 years, and it began to feel like we were living in a fishbowl. We became connected to everyone by no more than two or three degrees of separation. My wife Gail said Lompoc was small enough for everybody to know your business, but too big for anybody to care about your business if you were going through a rough patch. One of the columnists at the newspaper where I worked wrote a column that was partly about the people she ran into as she did her errands. Gail said whenever she saw this person in the grocery store, she would turn her cart and head in the opposite direction.

Over the years, I became acquainted with several Lompocans I would just as soon avoid. I’m sure they felt the same way. But because the city had relatively few places where people congregate, it was impossible to do this. Whenver our paths crossed, we did our best to pretend we didn’t see each other.

In some ways, Chico is has become big in a negative way. Its volume of traffic has outgrown its road infrastructure. Driving here is becoming as miserable as it is in big cities. One thing I’ll say about Lompoc is that it had no traffic problems.

But I take comfort in the fact that in the eight years I’ve lived in Chico I’ve become acquainted with no more than about 2 percent of its residents. Everyone else is a perfect stranger. This keeps me from feeling like I’m living in a fishbowl.

Posted by at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At least once a year I whine about Chico’s heat. It’s second on my list of top rants, below traffic and above housing prices.

In “But this is Chico,� my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record, I pledged to cut down on the whining. But I’ve decided to dedicate some of this blogging space to whining and other emoting. Look for pendantry, curmudgeonliness, outrage, cuteness, whimsicality and incredulity in “But this is Chico, too.�

Don’t look for the postmodern version of an ironic temperament, a sensibility my Sixties psyche isn’t able to grasp. Irony of that sort requires a degree of detachment and cynicism that I lack. I’m too earnest, idealistic and judgmental. The downside of a sensibility like mine is a tendency to be dour and thin-skinned. I'm always having to remind myself to lighten up.

For about two weeks this summer, it was impossible to be upbeat about the heat. Except for periods in the summers when my family visited my grandparents’ farm in the Mojave Desert when I was a kid, I’ve never been through such an ordeal. Between July 14 and 31 I almost went crazy. I almost renounced Chico. I know that sounds terrible, but I was getting desperate.

As the days and nights went by without so much as a breath of cool air, I began to lose my will to live. It was enough that I was trying to recover from surgery during those two weeks. That experience alone was sapping my energy.

July is one of the worst months for nights of no chill. As the heatwave progressed, the lows got higher and higher. The usual 60 or 70 became 80. It was unbearable. Even the surface of Venus cools down at night. Why couldn’t the heat on the surface of Chico have relented a little at night?

What a relief that August wasn’t a repeat of July. The average high temperature last month was “only� 95. I never thought I’d see the day when I temperatures in the 90s would seem pleasant, but after a few days in a row of enduring highs above 110 I learned to appreciate the relatively benign quality of the typical Chico summer day.

I like to garden. A lot of plants do well in Chico, but during a heatwave they have to be watched closely. Forget to water them two days in a row and they’re toast. One of my problems is my choice of plants. I developed my green thumb in coastal climates. I like camellias and azaleas, but they’re touchy about heat. So are fuchsias.

Every year, I buy one fuchsia plant and stick it in a pot. Every year, I’ve turned my back on it just long enough to have it shrivel when I’m not looking. This year I was determined not to let my guard down. So far, everything is all right. But I sure don’t want to become too complacent. The last week of September could still have some scorching days. We’re not out of the woods yet.

I know I ought to put in more native plants, but they’re ugly. Any plant that can survive rainless summers and three straight months of 90- to 100-degree heat is bound to turn out looking mean and ugly. I don’t blame them for that, but that doesn’t mean I want them in my yard.

Posted by at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There has got to be a lot of suffering going on in Butte County. A report released in August by the California Budget Project came out with the shocking finding that among the 39 largest of the state’s 58 counties, only two had household median incomes that were less than Butte’s.

In Butte County, the median household income in 2005 was $36,602, according to the report. This is less than half of what the median income was in Marin, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties last year.

It seems likely that the incomes of Chico State University students, who account of about 7 percent of the county’s population, would tend to skew the figure downward, but I was still surprised by how badly we’re doing.

Figures for the smaller counties surrounding Butte — Glenn, Colusa and Tehama — weren’t included in the report, but Sutter County had a median income of $49,913, Shasta $42,227 and Yuba $37,695.
At the bottom of the heap of the 39 larger counties were Imperial at $35,533 and Humboldt at $33,093.

These figures ought to have convinced me that my own household is downright affluent by comparison. My wife’s and my combined income is well above the Butte County median figure. And yet I know for a fact that our claim to middle class status is shaky. I’m in charge of our household finances, so I know what I'm talking about.

For one thing, we don’t own a house. That has become an impossible dream in most areas of the state.

The newer of our two cars has well over 100,000 miles on it and our old car, the rattle trap, is on its last legs. We have no idea how we’ll finance a replacement although the car we buy will certainly be used and have at least 60,000 miles on it.

Our credit card is always on the verge of being maxed out.

Next week, my wife and I will be taking our first real vacation in more than 20 years. By that I mean we won’t be staying with friends and family. We’re not going to Europe or on a Caribbean cruise, but at least we’re leaving the state. No complaints about that. Southern Oregon is a nice place to visit.

We hold on to our linens until they’re threadbare. We still use the towels we received as wedding gifts — more than 27 years ago.

We often run out of money between paychecks. That’s when I issue an edict to my wife and son. I tell them “Don’t buy anything until Friday.�

My son attends Chico State University. Part of his expenses are covered by a grant, but we’re still expected to come up with about $2,000 a year for tuition (Oops! I mean fees) and books. The days when California’s public colleges offered an education that was virtually free (fees were $600 a year the back in the early 1970s was going to UC Berkeley) are a faint memory.

We are having to make monthly payments, stretched out over a year, to pay off my 2005 hospital bill — for the 3 percent of the cost not covered by my health insurance. How do median income Butte County households with no health insurance manage to avoid going bankrupt after even one trip to the hospital? The California Budget Project reported that 21.3 percent of Californians had no health insurance in 2005, up from 20.6 percent in 2004. When it comes to health care, we’re living in scary times.

These are the reasons I know that $36,602 is a tough proposition for Butte County households. What does it take to even start to feel comfortable here, $100,000? And what percentage of households earns that much? I’ll bet it’s not more than 10 percent. It may even be as little as 5 percent.

Posted by at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Did you know that Chico has 1,258 hotel, motel and bed and breakfast rooms?

I found that out when I read the summer edition of Chico Chamber of Commerce’s Insights magazine. What seems especially impressive is that the number went up by almost 20 percent in just two years with the opening of Hotel Diamond downtown, and Marriott Residence Inn and Marriott Courtyard next to the freeway.

And yet the number is pretty much in line with the statewide average. California, with 37 million residents, had 475,000 rooms in 2005. I’m a statistics nut, so I was interested to find out when I read the magazine that the average room rate statewide was just over $100 a night, up 7.1 percent over 2004. The average statewide occupancy rate was 69.6 percent in April 2005.

A little quick math reveals that the state’s hotel, motel and bed and breakfast establishments are bringing in $33 million a night.

It’s no wonder local governments like to tap into this great money-making force. Through its 10 percent tax on stays of less than 30 days in hotels, motels and bed and breakfast rooms, the city of Chico collects about $1.5 million a year. It’s the sixth-largest revenue source listed in its operating budget. Sales tax is by far the largest single revenue producer.

Much of the transient occupancy tax money goes into the city’s general fund, but about a third of it is allocated to arts, economic development and tourism — activities designed to increase room occupancy rates.

And what are the local occupancy rates? According to Insights magazine, many establishments either don’t keep good records or are reluctant to release them. But one insight that Insight was able to glean was that just about every establishment needs to increase Sunday through Thursday overnight stays.
Short of becoming Las Vegas or putting in a Disneyland North, the best way to increase room occupancy rates through tourism is to promote the kinds of events that last from Wednesday through Sunday or Friday through Tuesday.

The California Nut Festival, sponsored by the Far West Heritage Association, immediately comes to mind. The event’s inaugural run in February lasted a week. In bringing in a popular chef and partnering with Enloe Medical Center to promote a talk by a well-regarded nutritionist, the Association created reasons for people from other parts of the state to come to Chico.

Sunset magazine did its part to increase room occupancy rates by running a story in its April issue that outlined a three-day tour of Chico. By emphasizing the city’s perfect blend of small-town and bigger-city amenities, a case could easily be made for a five-day tour.

Of course, there are other ways besides tourism to fill hotel rooms from Sunday through Thursday. I’m in favor of exploring all other possible avenues because I don’t want Chico to become a tourist trap. A large number of occupants during the slower time of the week are business travelers. So economic development obviously has the potential to help hotels overcome their mid-week slump, especially if we attract the kinds of employers — Chico State University is a good example — that host seminars and conferences. Graduation most readily comes to mind when we think of the university’s power to cause hotels to post “no vacancy� signs, but people come to the campus from out of town for weekday events as well. It seems that the city could attract even more of these kinds of travelers by building a first-class convention facility.

Posted by at 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Earth is one of the marvels of the postmodern world. This Web toy — I mean Web tool — allows desktop travelers to swoop and soar as they make their way across the home planet. Zoom out and Earth is a tiny orb in the star-studded sky. Zoom in and I can see the roof of the house on the street where I live. If I had enough time, I’d glide across every continent and look down on 100 million rooftops.

In my recent journeys, I’ve been above Mexico City, London, Venice, Jerusalem and Istanbul. This is one instance when Google literally lives up to its name. Google is a number so huge it might as well signify infinity. It’s a one followed by a hundred zeroes. With Google Earth as my navigation system, I could travel for a thousand years gazing at satellite images and still not see everything.

I’ve been using the system to check up on my old haunts. Some of the little houses on big lots in my boyhood Silicon Valley neighborhood have been torn down and replaced with huge houses. Two blocks from the house that my wife, son and I rented in Lompoc on the Central Coast, where we lived before we moved to Chico, ground has been broken for a new subdivision. The old house I rented in Whittier in Southern California, where I had my first newspaper job, is still standing, a holdout among row after row of apartment buildings.

Most of the satellite images don’t resolve well enough to offer a view of rooftops. You can see Chico from just a few hundred feet up, but you have to be a few thousand feet above Biggs before the image becomes sharp and clear.

I’ve always wanted to charter an airplane and a pilot and spend an hour or two flying over Chico, but I’m sure it would be expensive. Google Earth comes close to granting my wish. The only drawback is that you are obliged to look at an image that’s frozen in time. Google Earth’s overhead view of Chico appears to have been taken three or four years ago during the dry season. The fields around the city are brown. At North Valley Plaza, the Cinemark Theater has already been built and Montgomery Ward has already been torn down. The lot where the Garden Villa Complex is to be built on Cohasset Road has been cleared, but construction hasn’t started yet. The City Plaza elm trees are still standing. The Sorrento housing development is still an orchard.

From the air, Chico is diamond-shaped. The southern edge still has a long ways to go before it is filled in, but everywhere else the urban landscape is boldly asserting itself. It’s only when you zoom in a little closer that you see dozens of modest-sized pockets of open land waiting their turn to be gobbled up. There are a surprising number of them just north of Bidwell Park in an area that was developed several decades ago. On the city’s northern edge, the triangular parcel that is proposed to become Tuscan Village — neighbors have nicknamed it Sorrento North — is surrounded by block after block of single-family homes. The square patch of land south of Lindo Channel and east of the Longfellow Shopping Center that is destined be left mainly in its natural state is one of the largest islands of open space. Another big green oasis is the orchard that straddles West Eighth Avenue.

In the older parts of Chico, it’s hard to see the rooftops. Over many decades, the trees have created a dense canopy. The urban forest is a distinct part of the diamond’s appearance from above. The only barren parts of Chico are North Valley Plaza and Big Box-land.

Bidwell Park and the Chico State University campus cut a long, lush swath of greenery from east to west across the center of the diamond.

Zoom out and the diamond is surrounded by vast stretches of open space, both flat and mountainous. In California, where cities have spread so far that their edges touch each other, this is a sight for sore eyes.

Posted by at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The natural forces that created Bidwell Park’s landscape are well-known, but a comprehensive view of the human forces that shaped it is only now starting to emerge. Jeanne Boze, author of “The Nature of Bidwell Park,� began to put the pieces together last year when she wrote a booklet called “Bidwell Park: The Beginnings� for the park’s centennial observance.

Some of the human footprints that altered the park in the early years have vanished. They include the zoo at Cedar Grove, an auto campground at the lower end of the park and tennis courts at the Children’s Playground. Others, such as the golf course, Caper Acres and the athletic fields, seem to be an indelible part of what the park has become. Most intriguing to me are the parts of the park, such as the World of Trees, that appear to be natural but are manmade alterations.

Nowadays, there are campaigns to restore Bidwell Park’s natural landscape to the way it was before Chico was settled. They seem to be based on the premise that nature’s way is always better and that human activities, such as introducing non-native plants, automatically upset the balance of nature. We’ve come to think of ourselves as interlopers, as environmental bulls in a china shop.

In fact, we’re part of nature. That we’re the product of evolutionary forces that turned us into landscape tamperers may make us feel guilty, but this is who we are. We are a force that changes nature — along with glaciers, earthquakes, asteroid hits, volcanoes, tornadoes and hurricanes. One day, the sun will devour the Earth. It’s a force we can never hope to emulate.

We can be destroyers, but we can also do nice things. We’ve kept Bidwell Park around for 101 years, after all. We could have allowed the sylvan stretch that spans the heart of Chico to have become a series of hoity-toity housing developments called “Annie’s Glen,� “Sycamore Estates,� “Sherwood Forest� and “John’s Woods,� but we left things pretty much alone.

And what we didn’t leave alone, we sought to make even better out of love for the park. One of those improvement projects is the legacy of F.W. Seydel, who served on the Chico City Council from 1938 to 1947, including two one-year terms as mayor.

He’s responsible for starting the redwood grove between Big Chico Creek and picnic area No. 37 off Peterson Drive. A reader wrote to us and sent old newspaper clippings about that part of the park’s history after Mary Nugent’s story about Lester Olsen, who waters the redwood trees, ran in the Enterprise-Record.

I looked up Seydel in the Enterprise-Record’s “morgue� of newspaper clippings and found his obituary. He died in 1962 at age 84. The obituary said Seydel insisted the city be continuously planting and replanting trees in Bidwell Park to see that future generations would be able to enjoy their beauty just as he did. “If we don’t keep adding to Bidwell Park we sometime won’t have anything left,� he is quoted as saying.

He reminds me of John Bidwell, who planted trees in the same spirit. Bidwell thought his projects would improve on nature.

With the help of horticulturists at Humboldt State University, Seydel and other city officials went to Arcata and returned with 24 redwood trees, according to the obituary. Olsen said he has planted another 52 redwoods in that grove.

I suppose purists would say redwoods don’t belong in Bidwell Park because people planted them. But John Bidwell would have loved them.

Posted by at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve made it clear that I’m against Starbucks in Chico and Wal-Mart in general, but what am I for? Which stores do I patronize?

There’s Trader Joe’s, of course, which I’ve recently written about. When it first opened, it was too crowded for me, so I stayed away, leaving my wife Gail to shop there alone. But now the crowds have receded, so I’m back at her side helping out on our big shopping day.

But what about the locals? What about the businesses that make Chico so Chico-ish?
At one time I played the field with coffeehouses. Now, I’ve pretty much settled on Café Mondo and Moxie’s, with an occasional Naked Lounge chaser.

I still play the field with restaurants. I can’t imagine having such a cushy life that I could afford to have dinner at a place like The Red Tavern every week. Our one regular eating stop is Cozy Diner. Gail and I go there and make out our grocery shopping list while we’re eating. Gail orders a latté, and I order a tall glass of some of the best orange juice in town. I like Cozy Diner’s bread pudding and Gail says their gravy is just like her mother’s.

Gail has discovered Bella’s Beads. She’s scored some snazzy little baubles for the necklaces she’s restringing. Bella’s is a place where a talent for making fine distinctions can be amply rewarded. Bella’s must have tens of thousands of beads. In the same shopping center, Hubb’s Stationery gives superb customer service. I always feel like I’m being treated like a VIP whenver I go there.

The employees at Collier Hardware never fail to answer my questions whenever I undertake my admittedly modest home improvements projects. If I fear I may be leaving with the wrong gismo, they alway tell me I can come back and exchange it. The staff at Lyon Books goes to great lengths to find the books I order from the store. Melody Records is a great place to browse for vintage vinyl, although after 40 years of collecting, I have just about everything I ever wanted.

Rerunz bookstore is in the heart of Big-Boxland. Sometimes, it’s hard to find a place to park there because of the crowds that shop at Target. But we are never daunted. We keep circling until we find a space. Gail and I live in a house that’s too small for the number of books we’d like to own, so we sell our surplus at Rerunz so we can buy more books at half-price. It’s a constant cycle of buying, reading the books and selling the surplus.

There aren't a lot of "regulars" on our list. We don’t shop much unless we want to replace something. We keep things a long time. Consumer spending makes the economy hum, but our household is kind of a dud in that department. We tend to like what we have and don't let go of it. In decorating our house, we picked our "period" 30 years ago and stuck with it. We're immune to fashion fads and our hunger for electronic gadgets is modest.

Chico has more stores than I could visit in a lifetime.

Posted by at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The window shoppers have cleared out of Trader Joe’s. This is good news for people like me, who think of grocery stores as means to an end rather than as experiences in themselves.

The experiences are supposed to come later, when the food is cooked and eaten. The buying part is a chore that must be handled in a disciplined way. You make out a list and stick to it. You march down the aisles, pick up what you need and head to the checkout line. You don’t let food that’s not on your list seduce you into buying it. So what if the figs are plump and brown, the bread is pinchable and fragrant and there’s a flavor of ice cream you never knew existed. Just say no.

If you do your regular grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s it’s a lesson that must be learned. The food itself is endlessly alluring and inexpensive. Frugal shoppers can do well if they stick to the program. They cannot allow themselves to leave with twice the number of items they planned to buy.

My wife and I like to do our twice-monthly big grocery shopping together. We go to a restaurant and make out a list while we eat. Then we make the rounds of two or three stores. When Trader Joe’s came to town things changed. The store was crowded with people who were there just to hang. Sure, they would leave with something in the store’s brown paper bags with the sturdy handles, but their tiny yield hardly justified their obstructiveness.

I guess if you think of your visit to Trader Joe’s as something apart from normal shopping you will escape the temptation to buy too much on impulse. But the window shoppers drove me crazy. For about three months, I stayed away. After my wife and I finished our list, she’d go to Trader Joe’s and I’d go to the other grocery stores. But a couple of weeks a go, she reported that the store had become much less busy. So on our last shopping day, I rejoined her. She was right. The only congested spot was the frozen foods section, where the employees were unpacking boxes they’d placed in the middle of the aisle.

It didn’t take us more than about a 45 minutes to make our way through the store, filling up our cart. The checker told us we were the top-spending customers on his shift. The best thing is that we stuck to our list. The items we’d piled high in our cart were all on our official menu.

I’ve gone on record as being critical of some chains and franchises, especially in a place like Chico, which prides itself on its special identity. What a loss if all of Chico were to end up looking like Big Box-land at the south end of town.

But grocery chains are here to stay. I don’t see Mom and Pop stores making a resurgence, just holding on in a few specialty niches. Produce markets, bakeries, butchers and natural food stores will always be with us, but they will never dominate the market.

I like Trader Joe’s niche. It’s hard to beat a place that sells specialty goods at low prices.

Posted by at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The total area covered by urban parkland in the United States exceeds one million acres.
A nice little chunk of that is right here in Chico. Bidwell Park, with 3,670 acres, is the 18th largest municipal park in the country. It is the 14th largest city-owned park.

I’d heard this already, but I’ve finally seen it in writing. It comes from a document put together by the Trust for Public Land, which has tabulated all of the park acreage and come up with the one millon figure. Irv Schiffman brought this to my attention in an e-mail he sent me earlier this week.
The largest city park is Franklin Mountains State Park in El Paso, Texas. It has 24,000 acres. The largest city-owned city park is South Mountain Preserve in Phoenix. It has 16,283 acres.

For a long time, we boasted that Bidwell Park was the third- or fourth-largest city park in the country. I was one of the boasters. But even at 14th or 18th place, we’re doing all right. As Schiffman pointed out, Chico is one of the smallest cities on the top 100 list. We have more acreage per person than most cities. If everyone in the Chico urban area went to Bidwell Park at the same time and stood as far apart from each other as they could, there would be less than 30 people per acre. In some of the wooded areas, we wouldn’t be able to see our nearest neighbor.

Among famous parks, Griffith in Los Angeles, with 4,218 acres, ranks 15th, Balboa in San Diego, with 1,091 acres, ranks 74th, Golden Gate in San Francisco, with 1,018 acres, ranks 76th, and Central in New York City, with 840 acres, ranks 85th.

If we could fudge a little and include the 750 acres of the Bidwell Ranch — which in time will be accessible to the public — and fudge a lot and include the 4,000 acres of Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve — which you can enter if you get a permit — then Chico would jump to 5th place. After all, both parcels adjoin Bidwell Park. But I suspect the Trust for Public Land is a stickler for counting only parks, not other kinds of open space preserves.

Posted by at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How many Starbucks does Chico need? We already have eight and two more will soon be opening. I’m wondering when this town is going to wise up and stop giving them so much business. We’ve got such great homegrown alternatives. We certainly don’t need any more Starbucks, and I think we could manage fine if there were fewer of them.

I can understand Starbucks’ success in the suburbs — all of them home to the same two dozen businesses — but its penetration into the urban core of America surprises me. San Francisco has had a thriving coffeehouse culture for decades and its residents have an aversion to chains, yet no less than 78 Starbucks have set up shop in The City, according to the company’s Web site.

I recently talked to Tim Hamor, owner of Café Mondo, one of my regular haunts. He said his coffeehouse has held its own against a Starbucks that opened about a year ago just up the street. He said he’s experienced an increase in the number of Chico customers, but a downswing in the number of Chico State University students. He said students seek out Starbucks because they are accustomed to seeing them in their hometowns and because many of them get pre-paid gift cards to Starbucks from relatives.

Students should consider excursions to places like Café Mondo, Augie’s Fine Coffee & Tea, Coco Caffe, Has Beans, The Naked Lounge, Café Flo, Café Paolo and Bidwell Perk as part of their educational experience. Maybe by the time they leave Chico, this factof life will have percolated its way into their brains: Starbucks is not a synonym for coffeehouse. They can verify this by looking it up in their thesauruses.

Hamor talked to me about his decision to sell fair trade, organic coffee. He said product-conscious Chicoans appreciate coffeehouses that have thought about the economic and environmental ramifications for the countries where coffee is grown. He told me the coffee he sells is grown beneath the rainforest canopy, which keeps the natural vegetation from having to be cut down.

Another thing I appreciate about Café Mondo and other independents is that their decor reflects the owners’ personalities. They’re not a pre-packaged corporate product.

I suppose Starbucks’ supporters and the company itself would claim there’s room for everyone to do well in the coffeehouse business. But I want the locals to do fabulously well. I think we owe it to them to help them prosper, even if it's at the expense of the chains.

Posted by at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’m running a series about Chico’s architecture in “But this is Chico,� my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record. Readers are commenting about buildings they think are beautiful and ugly. Some are proposing ways to prevent ugly buildings from going up in the first place. My ideas for solutions are based on a libertarian philosophy — further proof to my 20 year-old-son Todd that I’m not an ideologue. He insists on calling me a “pop liberal.�

I’m opposed to imposing picayunish rules on architects and builders. I think community input while the buildings are still in the design stage is the way to nip bad projects in the bud. And if a few bad ones do get through, the community’s subsequent scorn should be enough of a deterrent to future mistakes.
Both liberals and conservatives are quick to call for government intervention to help them deal with their respective pet peeves. But some things should be hashed out in the marketplace of ideas and passions.

The only reason this fails to work is that people can be incredibly apathetic. But I’d like to think that in Chico this problem isn’t insurmountable. One of our enduring myths (and by that I don’t mean fairytales, I mean the things we say when we talk about our traditions and values and our hopes and dreams) is that Chico is a place where individuals and grassroots groups have the power to change things. City Hall can be fought. City Hall can be persuaded. City Hall will listen to the little guy because there are no little guys here. We are all the same size. As more Chicoans become sensitized to the importance of creating a pleasing environment and raising a fuss about anything that impedes that aim, the likelihood of ugly things getting in because nobody was paying attention will lessen.

Of course, drawings and computer images of projects aren’t the same as the real thing. The impression of concrete in the actual new City Plaza is a lot stronger than it was on paper. Sometimes our imaginations fail us. We need to see tangible objects before a designer’s intentions can affect us. That’s one of the reasons I worry about imposing too many rules on designers. Those gargoyles perched atop a row columns may look hideous on paper, but they may turn out to be just the stroke of genius that was needed to create a memorable building.

Needless to say, my libertarian impulses have their limits. There are exceptions to every rule. There are exceptions to every instance in which there is an absence of rules. I’m strongly in favor of a historical preservation ordinance for buildings. We need a rule that allows the city to cite a building’s historical value as the basis for rejecting plans to demolish it. Libertarians don’t want to tell people what to do with their property, but I have no qualms about telling owners it is against the rules to exterminate a piece of the city’s history.

In arguing for the need for preservation, I’m talking mainly about recycling. No community can afford to operate too many Bidwell Mansions and Stansbury Houses, which need to be maintained in a state of historical suspended animation. Most 19th and early 20th century buildings have to be able to adapt to 21st century uses if they are to survive.

This reminds me of the efforts of Francis Farley to preserve the eastern foothills portion of the incredibly historic Humboldt Road, a project John Bidwell spearheaded more than 150 years ago to link Chico with recently discovered silver mines in the Nevada and Idaho territories. The road’s future is far more prosaic. It will become part of suburbia. It is proposed to be widened and turned into a collector street for future housing developments.

How do you recycle a historical treasure like this? I wish somebody could figure it out. How do you make the road — Farley calls it Chico’s Appian Way — fit to handle 21st century traffic without destroying it? Farley isn’t content to just have some of the wagon ruts and rock walls alongside the road preserved. He wants the road to be left alone. What do you do when the future creeps in and creates conditions that make it impossible to either adapt this treasure to modern-day uses or feasibly maintain it in a state of historical suspended animation?

The road can remain the way it is only if the hillside is never developed. And we know that’s not going to happen.

Posted by at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)