But this is Chico, too

For the second time in a month, I’ve been asked to comment on the appropriateness of a house remodeling project under way in a well-established neighborhood. I feel like I’m becoming an architectural adjudicator. Actually, I feel every Chico citizen should serve in that capacity. All new structures that can be seen from a public roadway should be tried in the court of public opinion.

I got a call from a reader who was worried that the alteration of a house in Mansion Park would make it too big and modern for its surroundings. The neighborhood was subdivided in the early 1920s. In the next 20 years, it filled up with houses.

You can’t beat Mansion Park for its location. It’s within walking distance of downtown and Chico State University. It’s right next to The Esplanade — Northern California’s premier grand boulevard — and Bidwell Mansion. That’s how the neighborhood got its name — by being close to the Bidwells’ former home. In most communities, this would be an inner-city neighborhood, but Mansion Park has the feel of a leafy suburb on the outskirts of town.

So far, the only house in the neighborhood that even approaches mansion status is the Albert E. Warrens Reception Center, which illustrates this blog entry. It was designed by famed Bay Area architect Julia Morgan and built in 1923 for Daniel H. Moulton a Chico physician.

Judging by the “house for sale� ads in the Enterprise-Record, Mansion Park has some of Chico’s priciest real estate. Asking prices are approaching $1 million.

Just as falling prices are a sign that a neighborhood is in decay, prices moving into the stratosphere are an unmistakable clue that it is becoming upscale. The transformation of relatively modest residences into bigger, fancier abodes through additions and teardowns seems inevitable.

I took a look at the house in question. Like the house at the corner of Arbutus and Filbert avenues that I was asked to critique a few weeks ago, I have no problems with how this one looks. Mansion Park’s houses come in many sizes, so this one isn’t out of place. But it would bother me if the trend continued and the neighborhood turned into “McMansion Park.� This is a charming part of Chico and the alteration beyond recognition of several blocks of early 20th century bungalows and period revival houses would be a blow.

I have a feeling this is one of the issues the Chico Avenues Neighborhood Association is mulling over as it works with the city to come up with a plan for the neighborhood.

Posted by at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the reasons I moved to Chico was to be closer to my family. For 25 years, I lived in Southern and Central California and northern Oregon, while most of my family — grandmothers, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews — continued to live in Northern California.

Several family members, including my parents, live in Nevada City. The short drive to and from Chico makes it easy for us to get together to celebrate holidays and other special occasions.

When I first set out on my own, I was ready to put some distance between myself and my family. In my early 20s, I was seeking independence. The same tendency is starting to show up in our 20-year-old son Todd, who boycotted this year’s family Thanksgiving celebration for the first time.

That still left plenty of family members at our gathering in Nevada City. We needed two tables to seat all of us: my parents, four of their five children, three of their seven grandchildren, their 2-year-old great-granddaughter and four spouses and significant others.

As usual, we had plenty of food. We all took home leftovers. The husband of one of my nieces is a chef at a restaurant. He cooked the turkey. Other households prepared mashed potatoes, candied yams and other vegetables ahead of time. My mother, dubbing herself “the dessert lady,� made wine cake, chocolate mousse, pumpkin pie and her famous cheesecake.

My family reminds me of Chicoans. Conflict, alienation and indifference play as much of a role in the way we interact as affection. Two years ago, my dad and I got into a shouting match during a Christmas gathering. One of my brothers and his family haven’t shown up for a holiday get-together in more than 20 years. Except for my sister, I see my siblings mainly at family gatherings. Yet we are all undeniably connected to each other.

That’s how it is with Chicoans. We’re not one big, happy family. We squabble a lot and disagree about almost everything. Most of us have a relatively small circle of local acquaintances. By and large, we are strangers to each other. But our deep attachment to the community gives us a sense of kinship.

Posted by at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On a recent visit to Sonoma County, I spent a couple of hours walking in downtown Santa Rosa. This is a city I knew well during the 10 years I lived there and have known slightly in the 30 years since I moved away.

Even 30 years ago, Santa Rosa’s downtown was struggling with the effects of several traumas: The flight of businesses to outlying shopping centers, a scorched-earth redevelopment project that obliterated an old neighborhood and a freeway that sliced the city in half.

My stroll confirmed that downtown had survived, after extensive rebuilding and refurbishing and the construction of a shopping center that slices through the heart of the central business district. In its efforts to avoid decay, much of downtown Santa Rosa has ended up looking sterile and lifeless. It has a few appealing pedestrian-friendly streets, as this image of the historic railroad district from the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce Web site shows, but they are isolated from each other by dead zones of glass, steel and concrete buildings.

Slicing through things seems to be a Santa Rosa trait. When the county courthouse that sat in the middle of the town square was torn down, the square was cut in half to allow traffic along the main north-south thoroughfare to make its way through the city in a straight line. This was hardly essential, as the freeway lies just a few blocks to the west.

The one thing that wasn’t allowed to slice its way through the middle of town was Santa Rosa Creek, which was encased in a culvert and covered with dirt as part of that scorched-earth redevelopment project. The spot is now covered with buildings, so the damage can’t be undone. Fortunately, a creekside greenway project to the west of the buried creek has restored a stretch that for decades had suffered the indignity of being turned into a concrete flood control channel.

Santa Rosa reminds me a lot of Chico, but its downtown has been tampered with so much that its structure has been hopelessly fragmented. The lesson for Chico should be to leave the street grid alone, preserve historically and architecturally significant buildings and avoid redevelopment projects that require the leveling of entire blocks.

Posted by at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I was growing up in the Bay Area, everyone knew about the storied places where rich people lived: Belvedere in Marin County, Pacific Heights in San Francisco, Piedmont in the East Bay and Hillsborough and Atherton on the Peninsula.

That was 50 years ago. Today, the Bay Area has far more people. It has far more rich people.
All of Marin County, all of the Peninsula west of the Bayshore Freeway, all of the East Bay Hills and much of the Silicon Valley have become enclaves for the wealthy.

Even the more rural areas of the Bay Area have become posh. I spent my teenage years in Sonoma County. We lived in a 3,000-square-foot house in an old Santa Rosa neighborhood. A photo of it illustrates this blog. My parents bought it for $20,000. Today, the average Sonoma County house costs $500,000. It would be mind-boggling to imagine what my family’s former house might sell for today. Our once-modest abode, where seven people and almost as many pets lived, has turned into a rich person’s house.

What’s strange about Sonoma County is that it’s still growing. New development is gobbling up the countryside on all sides of Santa Rosa. Windsor, which barely existed 20 years ago, is filling up the space along Highway 101 between Santa Rosa and Healdsburg. Newcomers, eager for the social cachet of a Sonoma County address, are somehow finding a way to cope with the high prices even if they’re not rich.
Napa Valley — or at least the part of it that lies north of Napa — is a different story. It has a no-growth policy. The wine industry insists on it. Last weekend, on my way to visit some of my family in Sonoma County, I drove through the Napa Valley along the Silverado Trail. It occurred to me that this is the only part of the Bay Area that has been successful at keeping farmlands from being paved over.

I’d like to say that the Napa Valley hasn’t changed in 50 years, but that’s not true. The bulldozers have been active, replacing orchards and grazing land with wall-to-wall vineyards, which are starting to creep into the hills. And the pretentious-looking wineries, restaurants, bed and breakfast establishments and houses that masquerade as French chateaux and Mediterranean villas are relatively new on the scene. They proclaim that the Napa Valley has become another haven for the rich.

Chicoans like to think that high housing prices here have made the city off-limits to everyone except rich Bay Area transplants. But compared to the coast, Chico remains a bargain-basement for potential homeowners. Chico has a plebeian spirit, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. It still offers a high quality of life at a relatively low price.

Posted by at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the rate the Chico City Council’s ideological makeup is changing, will there be any conservatives left 10 years from now? Will candidates have to claim they are moderates in order to be elected?

Worried about a day when all seven council members will vote the same way on every issue? Fear not. If the time comes when voters elect only liberals, new rifts will emerge. Chico’s polarized political environment will find a way to perpetuate itself.

This happened in Berkeley about 35 years ago. The last conservative had just been booted off the city council and a new coalition of leftists had been voted in to challenge the liberal majority.

As a journalism student at UC Berkeley, I covered some of the meetings of this fractious city council. What a circus. I remember a meeting at which the council was considering legalizing marijuana within the city limits. Supporters of the measure climbed through the council chamber windows and started passing out joints to everyone in the audience. A few people lit up. The memory of the lively proceedings has stayed with me, but I can’t remember what the outcome was. I think the measure failed.

Chico City Council meetings would become sleep fests if all of its members were of an identical ideological bent. We’ll find a way to keep that from happening. Should my prediction of a conservative washout pan out, I am almost certain that an insurgency will emerge within the liberal ranks. Inevitably, those in power will be charged with cozying up to developers and those who want to snatch power from those awful pseudo-liberals will be characterized as radical no-growthers.

The truth, as always, will lie somewhere in the middle.

But the middle, as always, will be boring. It will lack the elements of a good “us against them� story. For dramatic purposes, we will always need people who are willing to fan the flames of contentiousness and preserve the battle lines. We will need two camps and people in them who can passionately recite their well-rehearsed lines. We need people who can stand up, face each other and lob the usual accusations: Developers are greedy despoilers. Slow-growth advocates are wild-eyed obstructionists.

Posted by at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What would John and Annie Bidwell think about the redesigned City Plaza? Let’s assume they return from the dead next week and have no memories of the intervening years. They are surprised to be back, can’t believe a century has gone by and are amazed at how much Chico has grown, but their outlook on the world hasn’t changed. My hunch is that they wouldn’t find the plaza to be to their taste.

Like many Chicoans today, the Bidwells loved trees. They’d be aghast to find out that the elms had to be cut down. They wouldn’t care for the fancy retaining walls and fences of the new plaza. They wouldn’t appreciate the formal look. They liked their parkland to be natural. Their favorite part of Rancho Arroyo Chico was the woodland along Big Chico Creek, which they called Vallombrosa. They enjoyed going on camping trips in the mountains. They spent time exploring California’s wilderness areas with John Muir.

Let’s not forget that John Bidwell donated the City Plaza block because he envisioned it as the site for a future courthouse. One of his dreams was for Chico to be the county seat. When that didn’t happen, the site became a park by default. Bidwell planted elm trees, and lived long enough to see them become huge. By the time he died, he must have been happy with the plaza’s natural appearance.

When Bidwell laid out Chico in 1860, he donated some of his land for public buildings and churches. He was willing to give away lots to people who agreed to build houses on them. He didn’t set aside any blocks for public squares, so I don’t think they were part of his vision for how he wanted the city to look. Street trees were fine, but he wanted to fill his multi-block grid with buildings.

So let’s assume the Bidwells wouldn’t have approved of the plaza. So what? Opposing change just for the sake of respecting the Bidwells’ personal tastes seems pretty extreme. The new plaza design is a departure for Chico. That’s what I like about it. Its artificial environment reflects its relationship to the surrounding buildings, not the wooded expanses of Bidwell Park and the Chico State University campuses. I think that’s a step in the right direction. We should be grateful to the Bidwells for preserving many of Chico’s well-shaded landscapes, but why make a fetish of trees? Why not have a plaza that looks like a plaza instead of a miniature forest?

Posted by at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One of my jobs at the Enterprise-Record is to put together the weekly Health pages in the Style section. Right now I’m doing a series about the human brain, one of the most amazing creations in the universe.

Chico isn’t necessarily the nerve center for the study of the brain, but I’m finding it has a wealth of people who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about it. Their ability to use simple terms to explain difficult concepts has been helpful to me.

A couple of weeks ago, I covered a talk by Dr. Joel Rothfeld, a Chico neurologist and neuroscientist. He said he hoped we would one day know enough about the brain to be able to understand its “spiritual� nature. That’s why the brain intrigues me. It’s where the mind lives, but so far we don’t have a working definition of what the mind is. The brain’s structure and processes have been found to be staggeringly intricate, but that does not yet explain what gives us our unique identity.

I believe we have a spiritual nature and that it continues after our body dies. What we call the mind is the most likely seat of this part of ourselves. But I’m also a believer in science. As I learn more about the nature of the universe and life, my belief about my fate is constantly being put to the test. Some biologists say our purpose in life has nothing to do with us as individuals. When we die, that’s it. Our purpose is to pass our genetic information on to the next generation. Some physicists say the universe has no ultimate purpose and that it and everything in it will eventually die.

My way of reconciling this to my spiritual beliefs is to conclude that science is still in its infancy and that our ways of explaining the universe and why were are here are still primitive. My hope is that one day faith and science won’t seem so at odds with each other. Maybe one of the reasons we have such a fabulous brain is that it will allow us to make sense of everything and understand our purpose in the cosmos.

Posted by at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The flags are flying over Chico thoroughfares again.

Whenever they appear, I’m reminded of the strong feelings our flag evokes in me. I’m glad the city decided to display them no more than a few times a year. It heightens their impact. If the flags were to fly all the time, I would probably stop noticing and reacting to them.

That’s how it was in elementary school. The flag was a daily part of our lives, so we didn’t think about it. Each morning, we stood, recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang a patriotic song. It was part of the routine. When I was 5 or 6, I didn’t know what some of the words meant. One of the songs starts out with the words, “There are many flags in many lands, there are flags of every hue ...� My only clue about “hue� was that one of the first-grade teachers was “Mrs. Hughes.� I assumed there had to be some kind of connection.

I didn’t start thinking about what the flag meant to me until we got ourselves into that earlier messy war. That’s when the bumper stickers with the drawing of the flag and the slogan “Our flag: Love it or Leave It� started appearing. I think “America: Love it or Leave It� was another variation on that slogan.

It was the first time in my memory that the flag had been used to convey a specific message. In this instance, it meant “Support the war in Vietnam; support our country; support our president.�

At the time the bumper stickers appeared, I still supported the war, but I was affronted by the implication that if you opposed the war, you didn’t have the right to be here. I was more than affronted. I was incensed.

To me, the bumper sticker was saying the opposite of what America is all about. This is the country where the right to dissent is unquestioned. That’s what the flag represents.

It may be hard for people who are under 40 to understand this, but back in the mid-1960s, opposing the war in Vietnam was thought to be subversive. People who spoke out against it were regarded as part of the lunatic fringe.

Compare that to the war in Iraq. Before we even invaded the country, hundreds of thousands of protesters were out in the streets. Some polls show that most Americans now oppose this war. It’s no big deal to say you’re against it.

That’s what I think about when I see the flags flying above Chico’s streets. To me, the flag stands for our freedom to disagree with the government. In many countries this is still a crime.

When I look at the flag and think about our two unpopular wars and the 30 years that separate them, I’m encouraged to see how far we’ve come in accepting the idea that we can freely state our belief that the government is on the wrong track.

Posted by at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the bounties of living in Chico is watching the colorful side effects of the seasonal die off of the chlorophyll in leaves before they fall to the ground. A coastaI dweller for most of my life, I’ve never lived in a city with so many deciduous trees. When I was in my 20s, I took a trip to New England in October so I could indulge in my leaf-peeping propensities for the first time. Little did I know then that I would end up living in a city with an eye-opening leaf display and not have to leave California.

My favorite tree for fall colors is the Chinese pistache. They line the Midway between Chico and Durham and Cramer Lane at the entrance to the Genetic Resource and Conservation Center. They can be found throughout Chico.

The season peak for fall colors varies from year to year. We’ve had years when the leaves have barely started turning before the beginning of November. But in other years, they are at their most colorful by that time and every last leaf has fallen by Thanksgiving.

My estimate is that we will hit the peak within the next week. The recent rains have speeded up the cycle. If this is your first autumn in Chico, you’ve got to take a drive through the city. Be sure and catch the trees along The Esplanade. The leaves of the ginko trees that grow along the center divider have turned a bright yellow and haven’t yet dropped to the ground. Another spot for colorful trees is near the intersection of W. First and Ivy streets on the Chico State University campus.

Chicoans boast that we have a four-season climate. I think that’s an exaggeration. Summer is mercilessly long and spring and fall can be disappointingly short. We don’t really have winter, just a chilly, wet season that lasts almost as long as summer. The rare snowstorm that punctuates the rainy season and the occasional thunderstorm that provides a brief respite from the months of heat add spice to the times of the year when the forecast is most predictable.

Fall may be short, but it is dramatic. The red, yellow and orange leaves are the most enjoyable heralds of the changing of the seasons in Chico.

Posted by at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Jane Jacobs, author of the seminal work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,� referred to people who spend their days sitting on benches in city squares as “the leisured indigent.� It’s the most euphemistic description I’ve ever heard, yet it confers a sense of dignity upon people whose transient status is sometimes scorned.

I think she would have used a different word for transients who punctuate their leisure hours with intervals of panhandling. She probably would have called them mendicants. To her, they would have just been part of the life of a city. Any serious trouble they might cause would be taken care of by the crowds of people in the neighborhood going about their business while keeping their eyes on the streets. That was one of her ideas about what makes densely populated urban neighborhoods safe.

I bring this up because Chico’s street people have been on our minds lately. They’ve been routed from City Plaza and Ringel Park, which are being rebuilt. And there’s been an outcry against theim hanging out in the Children’s Playground. It’s not that we are seeing them more often, but we’re spending more time thinking about them and wondering what to do with them.

Did you see the report on “60 Minutes� a couple of months ago about young men who beat up and kill transients for sport? I think CBC News chose the story to show the extremes that scapegoating against homeless people can take. This, of course, is Chico, and many of us are reluctant to criticize transients, let alone physically attack them. We may frevently wish they’d go somewhere else so that other communities would have to deal with them, but that’s about as negative as our sense of ourselves as decent, caring humans beings allows us to get.

It seems that despite this community’s best efforts to provide services for homeless people and create opportunities to get them off the streets, we won’t succeed with everyone. We don't have the power to make them go away. They will walk, sit and lie among us as long as Chico’s streets, sidewalks and squares and parks are part of the public domain. It goes to the heart of the meaning of “public.� Everyone’s allowed to hang out as long as they don’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves.

Posted by at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I live at the poor end of my neighborhood, which I call NoPa. It’s north of Bidwell Park and within walking distance of it. One of the houses on my block is on the market for $273,000. Like the house I rent, it’s nothing special — not big, not fancy. It is advertised as having a “new kitchen� and “new bathrooms,� so that’s a plus. Reduce the price to $200,000 and I might begin to call it affordable. Cut it to $150,000 and it would a good buy. It would be within reach of the average Chico household.

Two blocks down, in the better part of my neighborhood, a house with a swimming pool is listed for $375,000. Reduce the price to $300,000 and it would be reasonable. Drop it to $250,000 and it would be a good deal for an upper middle-class Chico household.

Three blocks down, where my street dead ends into the park, a showplace corner house on a one-acre lot with a guest house, swimming pool and volleyball court has an asking price of $790,000. Compared to the two other houses, it’s a good deal at the price it’s listed at. It would be a good find for a wealthy Chico household. This has to be one of the city’s prime properties. Its only disadvantage is that it’s next to the freeway. But all of the houses on my street suffer from freeway traffic noise. This is five times the house of the one for sale on my block, but at only three times the price.

What’s happening on my street is an example of how demand at the lower end of the real estate market has a way of keeping the cost of housing aimed at middle-income buyers disproportionately high. People looking for a house say “Is there any way I can possibly afford that? Am I willing to subsist on a diet of bread and water for five years to do it?� They think, “Housing prices have gone up so fast, if I can just get in, I ought to be a able to do well myself.� They don’t say “these prices are ridiculous� and drive on by. They don't do the sensible thing.

If you’re at an income level where money is no object, you have some great choices in Chico in the $600,000 to $1 million range.

The hunger to beomce a homeowner permeates every fiber of our individual and collective psyches. Americans would practically kill to own a house. They certainly aren’t going to be put off by the prospect of getting in over their heads financially in order to have one.

Posted by at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few weeks ago, I made a grammatical error in “But this is Chico,� my column in the Enterprise-Record.
Recounting my wife’s and my visit to the Little Chapman Mansion, I wrote that owner Michele Shover had invited “my wife Gail and I to come by sometime and have a look at the house.�

The following week, I got two e-mails, a phone call and two letters from people telling me I should have written “Gail and me.� Three of them gave me hints about how to avoid repeating the mistake. “If you take ‘Gail’ out of the sentence, “I� doesn’t sound right,� the caller told me. She said she’d hesitated to tell me about this, but then decided to go ahead. She said her conscience told her “He’s a writer. He should know this.�

She’s right. This is something a writer should know. Another thing I’ve never figured out is when to use “who� and “whom.� If I’m in doubt, I rework the sentence. I think the reason I’m lax is that when I was in school my writing skills were so much better than other students’ that my teachers didn’t spend a lot of time drilling me in the basics. My teachers had far more challenging problems to deal with.

All five people who admonished me for my mistake complimented me on my writing in general. I think they were trying to soften the blow of their criticism. But I wasn’t offended. I like it when people care about my writing. I could use some watchdogs on this blog, where I write and post my entries without an intermediary. I’m in charge of catching my mistakes. I try to be especially careful, but it’s easy to slip up.
There seems to be a belief that blogging is a casual form of writing. I think this is true, but there’s still no excuse for making grammatical errors. Some things never change. The mechanics of good writing will always matter.

Posted by at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)