But this is Chico, too

The upper reaches of The Esplanade are starting to look — how should I put it? — less ugly. New projects are transforming this stretch of Chico’s major north-south thoroughfare from a semi-rural hodge-podge of architectural styles and land uses into a street that looks like it belongs in a city. By upper reaches, I mean anything north of Lassen Avenue.

The Garden Villa complex on Cohasset Road is the platinum standard for well-designed new buildings. But several new projects in Chico have attained the gold, silver or bronze standard. I’ve written extensively about the glories of old buildings, but I want to give credit to recent efforts to give Chico a decent-looking inventory of late 20th and early 21st century buildings.

Philadelphia Square, on the southeast corner of Eaton Road and The Esplanade, started the hopeful trend along the upper Esplanade several years ago.

Evergreen Plaza, on the northwest corner of The Esplanade and Aspen Glen Drive, illustrates this blog entry. It is my favorite new project on this stretch. I like its rustic, informal look. It’s not trying to mimic a historical style. Its spirit is more attuned to the early 20th century arts and crafts movement, which was a reaction against the ostentatiousness of Victorian architecture.

Other new projects on the upper Esplanade I like are the R Mc (Ray Morgan Co.) Business Plaza, on the northwest corner of Greenfield and The Esplanade and Shasta Plaza, on the southwest corner of Shasta Avenue and The Esplanade. I also like the landscaped entrance to the Aspen Glen subdivision.

More changes are inevitable. Vacant lots will be filled in and most of the houses along the stretch will be torn down and replaced with businesses. Current businesses that belong in a more rural location will move away.

The Rice Bowl, which has stood for decades at the northeast corner of Lassen and The Esplanade, is in a class ny itself. Its longevity and its whimsically exotic architectural style give it an iconic status. For slightly different reasons, Al’s Drive-in, on the southeast corner of The Esplanade and Ninth Avenue, has the same quality. Al’s is the quintessential mid-20th century casual eating establishment.

Both Big Al’s and The Rice Bowl are the kinds of places that would trigger a huge outcry if anyone suggested tearing them down. Despite the fact that they aren’t architectural masterpieces, we would assert that their loss would destroy part of Chico’s character.

Posted by Steve Brown at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of weeks ago I summoned my nerve and checked my latest blog numbers. If “But this is Chico, too� were a TV show, it would have been cancelled by now. Week after week, the number of “hits� on my blog has been heading relentlessly downward.

At the rate I’m going, my numbers will reach zero in six months.

I’m losing readers despite switching to short and punchy entries, despite “updating� three times rather than just once a week and despite adding photos and other illustrations.

I’ve decided I’m not going to beat myself up over this. I’m going to be a brave soldier and stick with this for at least a year, numbers notwithstanding. This is an experiment. This is a step into the future. I’ve got to have a little faith.

The only good news, if you could call it that, is that the numbers of just about all of my fellow bloggers at NorCalBlogs are down. Maybe we’re all in a seasonal slump . Maybe we’re going through post-election doldrums.

But what if we are all becoming old hat, has-beens, back numbers in the estimation of our readers? What if survival in the blogosphere demands that we run harder just to stay in the same place? What if the bar for the sharpness of our commentary is always being raised? In such a world, we can’t just be insightful, we must be prescient. We can’t just be funny, we must be hilarious. We can’t just be impassioned about our beliefs, we must express them with a messianic fervor. We can’t just be irreverent, we must be iconoclasts. We must turn the world upside-down every time we update.

You may ask why I’m so preoccupied with numbers. It’s simple. Everything I write for publication is intended to be widely read. I keep a journal just for myself. I write poetry and show it to just a few people. But that sort of writing is private. This, on the other hand, is public.

I’ve decided that my numbers will have to to triple before I’m convinced I’m doing more than just talking to myself.

Despite all I’ve just said, I felt wonderful when my mother and sister told me they had been reading my blog. Having faithful readers does matter, especially when they’re family members.

What’s weird is that posting a blog similar to this one — a blog about blogging — attracted the most page views I’ve ever had. But this blog isn’t about blogging. It’s about Chico. What’s up with that?

Posted by Steve Brown at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

My potted fuchsia made it all the way through the summer heatwaves — only to perish in the cold spell.

Had it lived, my little plant with the Tinkerbell flowers would have celebrated its first birthday this spring.

I should have covered it with a cloth or brought it indoors, but I wasn’t prepared for such cold. In my nine winters in Chico I’ve never lived through six days in a row of low temperatures in the 20s.

The Enterprise-Records’s temperature records confirm that this is the coldest it’s been since I moved here in 1998. Weather this cold is bad for fuchsias — and ferns, succulents and herbs. It’s also bad for anything remotely tropical.

A couple of dozen plants in my yard appear to be mortally wounded, but the fuchsia is definitely dead — as you can see from the photo I took of it last week.

Chico’s weather is more or less predictable, but sometimes it throws us a curve.

The 115-degree days, the 25-degree nights, the thunder and lightning storms that start forest fires, the two-week sieges of tule fog and the snow flurries that hit every two or three years and last 15 minutes all add spice to a fairly bland climatic diet.

In general, I like being thrown a curve, but I’m sad for my plants. I wish I had done a better job of watching out for them.

This year’s cold snap diverted our attention from another deviation in the weather pattern I haven’t yet experienced in Chico — a dry winter. In my 50 years in California, I’ve lived through three droughts. Are we entering another one? Several powerful storms had been predicted to come our way. They’ve pounded Oregon and Washington, but have broken up before reaching us. Our rainfall total for the season is half of what it’s supposed to be. We’ve had absolutely no rain in January.

Last week I took the unprecedented step running the sprinkler in the dead of winter. I’ve never had to do that here in January, but everything in my yard looked so shriveled. The cold may have been partly responsible for that, but I didn’t want to take any chances and lose more plants because they didn’t get enough water.

The weather has warmed up a bit, with low temperatures in the 30s, but it feels like we’re in meteorological purgatory. It’s time for a change. How about a week of false spring — with highs in the 70s — or a whopper of a storm? At this point, I’d even be OK with a siege of tule fog.

Posted by Steve Brown at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A Sunday "Spotlight� in the Enterprise-Record about Lookout Point, followed by an editorial in the newspaper and a “But this is Chico� column urging construction of a barrier to keep drivers from going over the edge have triggered some comments in the “Tell It’’ section of the paper. I’ve had a couple of phone calls as well.

I’d like to reiterate my support for a barrier. I think Lookout Point is a suicide magnet. But that doesn’t mean I think it should take the place of efforts to help people who are contemplating killing themselves.
I think the biggest problem with suicide is that it remains a fairly taboo subject. We aren’t comfortable talking about death. We have a hard time dealing with other people’s misfortunes or prolonged depression.

I wish we could talk about suicidal thoughts more openly. I wish we could talk about the times we feel depressed, hopeless and stressed out. I wish we could acknowledge these feelings to each other without getting too alarmed about it or feeling tempted to say “Enough! I don’t want to hear anymore about it.� I wish we could stop worrying about infecting each other with negative energy. I wish we could appreciate how typical and how unexceptional it is to feel bad.

Life is about highs and lows. Life is about stress that gets out of hand. Life carries with it the certainty that tragedy lies somewhere up the road, maybe around the next bend. None of this means we have failed. None of this means we should feel ashamed. Living is tough. There’s no getting around it. Suicide statistics bear this out. The older you get, the more likely you are to kill yourself. Time doesn’t necessarily make you grow wise. It may, in fact, convince you that continuing to live isn’t worth the effort.

If we can get past these communication barriers, professionals and lay people alike will be in a better position to help people who are thinking about suicide.

But I still want to see a barrier go up at Lookout Point. I don’t care if it compromises the view of Butte Canyon. Lookout Point is an attractive nuisance in a literal sense. It inspires people to take destructive actions.

Posted by Steve Brown at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s time to get down and get funky. But before we can do that, don’t we have to know what “funky� means? The answer is no, and I’ll tell you why. “Funky� is a chameleon word.

As with many words that have a more than one meaning, “funky� has sexual connotations that have been all but forgotten.

Funky refers to funk, an African-based music that, in this country, followed soul and preceded disco and hip-hop.

Funk is one of many words that mean depressed.

Funky is a vaguely pejorative word that signifies something is a little off. It can mean overripe, musky, unkempt, soiled, decaying. But sometimes it can have those same meanings and be construed as a compliment.

Funky is whatever the group the Beginning of the End meant when they sang “Nassau’s gone funky� in the early 1970s.

The “whatever� in that song is probably the definition I’m looking for. What do people mean when they say cities or neighorhoods are funky? In this case, it seems to be something positive and upbeat.

I’ve used the word in that context. In “But this is Chico,� my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record, I’ve claimed that funkiness is one of downtown Chico’s attributes.

Let me venture to say that funky is about ambiance. A funky place is what you get when comfortable and unpretentious meet imaginative and exotic. Funky is the opposite of fussy and sterile. At the same time, funky is a far cry from blighted and neglected, but it can be a little seedy.

Funky doesn’t play well in suburbia or in respectable older neighborhoods. It doesn’t thrive in places where keeping up appearances matters. Funky has to be able to laugh, sing and dance in the streets. It has to be able to wear brightly colored clothes. Outside of downtown, Chico's funky places are mainly to the south or directly to the west of downtown, although the northerly reaches of the avenues have touches of funkiness.

Architecture is seldom funky. Architectural styles have rules. Funky requires that rules be broken. Antonio Gaudi’s still unfinished Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City are funky.

The Queen Anne Victorian style comes close to being funky. The sprawling Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, which is full of Queen Anne touches, is utterly funky.

Houses made out of bottles are funky, as are houses that were once buses, streetcars, boats or airplanes.

Sometimes the face of a conventional building can become funky when the right kind of makeup is applied. Artist Norm Dillinger’s house, which illustrates this blog entry, is the king of Chico’s funky buildings. The row of businesses on Humboldt Avenue just east of The Junction, with their varied facade treatments, strikes me as funky. The exterior of the building that now houses the Crux Artist Collective on Park Avenue is another of my nominees for funky.

The many meanings of funky are worthy of further study. I’m hoping that somebody will do for funky what essayist Susan Sontag did for camp (the aesthetic sensibility, not the place you pitch your tent) more than 40 years ago. An essay on all things funky would make a great read.

Posted by Steve Brown at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There’s a huge swath of the Sacramento Valley that has hardly any people in it.

It’s an area that lies west of Highway 99, Gridley, Biggs and Yuba City, south of Chico and Willows, east of the coast ranges and north of a line that extends from Winters to Woodland.

Compared to the rest of the state’s flatlands, it seems pristine. In one sense it is. It’s free of urban sprawl. The towns are still mere dots on the landscape. When you drive through them, you can pretend that you have stepped back into the middle of the 20th century. That’s the kind of experience I attempted to offer a few years ago in “But this is Chico,� my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record. I devised a tour through what I described as the spine of the valley. To come up with such a route, I had to stay away from Chico, Red Bluff, Yuba City and parts of Corning and Gridley. Most of my tour was through wide-open spaces.

Colusa and Glenn counties are still such places. A mere 50,000 people live there. If you doubled that number, you’d still have fewer people than live in Chico.

But it’s obvious that the valley landscape is as altered as it would be if it had been paved over. Before the white settlers came, the Sacramento Valley was as wild as the most remote regions of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges.

This is how John Bidwell described it: “It was, apparently, just as new as when Columbus discovered America, and roaming over it were countless thousands of wild horses, of elk, of antelope.�

Bidwell was one of the first people to alter this landscape. He led the way in turning this wilderness valley into a world-famous grain, nut and produce basket. So much land was converted to farmland that the few spots that were left untouched ended up being altered.

This was brought home to me a few weeks ago when I went out to the Gray Lodge Wildlife Area to do a story about naturalist Lori Dieter. The area encompasses about 9,000 acres, which I found out are about as natural as the Jungle Cruise ride in Disneyland. To maintain it as an attractive habitat for wildlife, water has to be pumped into it, the vegetation has to be mowed, cut or burned, native plants have to be planted and the ponds sometimes have to be drained. Unlike on the Jungle Cruise, at least the animals are real.

Dieter said even if all of the land were taken out of crop production and all the dams were removed, the valley would never return to the way it was. Too much native wildlife has been lost and too many invasive species have taken over.

Humans, of course, are the most invasive of the animal species that have taken over the valley. You can bet that we aren’t going to relinquish control.

Posted by Steve Brown at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My son Todd and I took a road trip to the Bay Area a couple of weeks ago.

We had glimpses of some of the most memorable geographical features of Northern California — from the peaks of Mt. Lassen, Mt. Diablo and Mt. Tamalpais, to the Carquinez Straits, San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Straits.

It would have been different if we had been traveling through Nebraska — or so I hear. I’ve never been to Nebraska but I hope I have a chance to drive through the Grain Plains just for the novelty of traveling hundreds of miles without seeing mountains or large bodies of water.

California is truly “the great exception,� as Carey McWilliams wrote almost 60 years ago. Its varied climate and topography, its never-ending population growth, its increasingly diverse ethnic groups and cultures and its dynamic economy make it a nation in its own right, a world unto itself.

Even the Great Central Valley is exceptional. It’s a slice of the Great Plains, surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges. It stretches for 400 miles, but has distinct boundaries. The only gap in the mountains is the Delta, where the melted snowfall from the mountains drains into San Francisco Bay. The Delta itself is distinctive, honeycombed as it is with thousands of square miles of islands and waterways.

Moving to Chico more than eight years ago gave me my first experience of living in the Central Valley. That the valley had a community as exceptional as Chico was a surprise in itself. But even more unexpected is that over time, I’ve developed an affection for the surrounding countryside. My coastal dweller’s prejudices have been overturned.

The best thing about Chico’s countryside is that there’s so much of it. Even if I make it to 100, I will never live to see the day when it has been entirely paved over.

Posted by Steve Brown at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My 20-year-old son Todd and I do most of our talking when we are riding in the car, especially when we go on long road trips.

One of our conversations is so predictable it might as well have been scripted. It starts when I exclaim over a feature of the countryside we are driving through and Todd replies that it seems boring compared to the kind of scenery he gets to see whenever he plays his computer games. It leads to a couple of more exchanges. I’ll tell him that real scenery is better than electronic scenery, then he’ll staunchly defend his own point of view. At that point the conversation has nowhere else to go, so I move on to other topics, such as does he plan to get a job this summer, has he registered for his classes yet, has he gotten rid of the soda cans in his room — nagging parent questions that are equally certain to be shortlived conversational subjects.

A couple of weekends ago, we started having the scenery discussion right at the start of a trip to the Bay Area. I did my exclaiming and he did his “it’s so boring� rejoinder. This happened on the Midway, just south of Chico. Still more than two hours away from our destination, I decided I wanted to try to make the conversation last a little longer.

So I asked him what kinds of scenery he gets to look at when he plays his games. He told me about being in the crater of a volcano just a few feet away from flowing lava. He told me about islands that float in the sky. When you look up at them, you can see the roots of trees sticking out.

I said what he was describing sounds intriguing. He then talked about how even conventional computer game scenery, such as clouds and bodies of water, are looking better all the time. I asked more questions. He told me more about the way world that he inhabits most of his waking hours looks.

By this time we were actually on friendly terms. I told him how much I appreciate the uniqueness of the state’s geography, especially the Great Central Valley. He made sympathetic noises. We also talked about other distinctive features, such as San Francisco Bay and the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges. He wa willing to agree with me that they are special.

Our conversation about real versus computer game scenery took us through the wide-open spaces of the Glenn and Colusa county farmlands and past the Sutter Buttes — virtually the only geographical anomaly in the entire Central Valley.

We were still talking as we approached Williams for a bite to eat before getting on the I-5 Freeway.
It was a great interlude, full of beautiful scenery and the kind of give-and-take conversation that comes only when two people are willing to listen to each other.

We both enjoyed this respite from the kind of father and son banter that leads to conversational deadlock. We liked it so much that when we swtiched to other subjects we continued to make an effort to listen to each other.

Posted by Steve Brown at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m starting to feel trapped.

The Enterprise-Record parking lot has just two exits, both of which lead to the notorious Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway.

Until last week, it was the notorious Whitman Avenue, but that’s another story.

I wish our building were in a part of the city with grids of alleyways and streets, but I work in a land of big boxes and few roadways.

The traffic on the former Whitman Avenue is getting to the point where it’s bad all the time, but it’s reaching critical mass during the holiday shopping season.

Gridlock seems to increase exponentially. Each stop or slowdown has a ripple effect. Multiply each traffic flow interruption by a factor of 10 and the mess seems to become 100 times as bad.

The last holliday season was the first time it became impossible to outwit the traffic. Whenever I leave work, I prefer to head north on the former Whitman Avenue. But when the cars start backing up as far south as the empty lot next to the World Market building, I change strategies and use the southbound lane even if it temporarily sends me in the wrong direction.

Not that long ago, it was possible to leave the more northerly of the Enterprise-Record’s exits and turn left. But during this holiday season, southbound traffic was backing up all the way to the California Water Service Co. building.

In this situation, the only hope of turning left depends on the kindness of the motorist who is willing to create an opening. I’ve noticed that drivers’ manners deteriorate dramatically in bad traffic.

If I’m using the former Whitman Avenue to do my last-minute Christmas shopping, I feel like I’m getting what I deserve.. But my situation is different. I’m just a guy who needs to get to and from work.

Nowadays, there are evenings when the former Whitman Avenue is backed up as far south as the entrance to the parking lot in front of Circuit City.

This is happening any old time of the year.

Things are getting bad for us out here. We need help.

Posted by Steve Brown at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I like how winter looks. I like to see the outline of bare branches against a gray sky. I like to see the grass in the fields turning green after so many months of being brown. I like to see the first shoots of spring bulbs poking up above the ground. I like to see the creeks raging and threatening to overflow their banks.

I don’t like how winter feels — not this far north. I think I suffer from seasonal affective disorder. I miss the sunlight I complain so much about in the summer. I don’t like having to get up to go to work when it’s still dark and having to come home from work when it’s getting dark. I don’t like how the sky can be cloudy for days on end or — worse yet — foggy for weeks on end. I don’t like how the sun looks when it does make an appearance — always to east, south or west and never straight overhead. It feels like it’s 93 million miles away and then some.

Winter turns my mood blue. January used to be my only bad month, but now it’s seeping into December. Each year, the holiday season is becoming less able to brighten my mood. My childish delight for Christmas is a thing of the past. I don’t feel so much like Scrooge or the Grinch as I do Old Man Winter.

I used to wonder what my problem was. It has taken a lifetime of living at different lattitudes and talking to a friend who has it to come up with the seasonal affective disorder diagnosis. I didn’t feel this gloomy when I lived in Southern Californa and the Central Coast. It never seemed like it was winter there, even when it was raining.

The dividing line seems to be the northern part of the Bay Area. I’ve felt blue as far south as Santa Rosa and was inescapably blue when I lived in Portland, Ore., which has some ugly winter weather to boot. Chico is unmistakably in the blue zone.

It’s a drag to feel blue in Chico, a place I like so much. But because I know what’s bugging me, I try to put a good face on it as I’m counting down the days until the end of January.

Posted by Steve Brown at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of my jobs as a blogger and columnist is to use my amazing gift of prophecy to predict Chico’s future.

In “But this is Chico,� my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record, I’ve closed each year with a look at what life is like 200 years from now in a city that became known as Chico Grande.

The city had survived a succession of natural disasters, one of which had turned it into a coastal city with a mild climate.

But I regret to say that in the autumn of 2206, the northern ice cap and the glaciers covering Greenland melted, raising the ocean level by 400 feet. Chico Grande was no more.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that in 2206 people were still arguing about whether global warming was a natural or manmade occurrrence.

As an optimist, I had been hoping we had cause it. I’m not a huge fan of nature. I’ve always felt its ways are much more harsh, arbitrary and mindless than our’s. In view of what happened to Chico Grande, I have to blame nature for this.

If it’s any comfort, I can tell you that 2206 opened on its usual optimistic note. Swimmers celebrated New Year’s Day by swimming across Big Chico Creek in Bidwell Park. The creek was still there, the park was still there and the custom had lasted more than 200 years. People still called it the “Polar Bear Swim,� although they had no idea what that meant. The polar bear had long ago gone the way of the Dodo Bird and the waters of Big Chico Creek were no longer cold. Climate change had done away with unpleasant winters.

In 2206, people still knew who the Bidwells were and what their legacy was. A year earlier, Chico Grandeans had celebrated the 300th annivesary of the creation of Bidwell Park.

Were you to have awakened in 2206 after a Rip Van Winkle sleep, you would have recognized many landmarks. You’d be thrilled to see how the City Plaza had become as shady as it had been at the end of the 20th century. You’d be pleased to see that a new Hotel Oaks had been rebuilt at the southwest corner of Second and Salem streets and that it was doing well. It would gratify you to discover that Chico Grande had stayed true to its roots right up to the end.

Posted by Steve Brown at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my first two years in Chico, I volunteered at the Chico Museum, at the corner of Salem and Second streets. What I liked most about the experience was the opportunity to spend time in the building that once housed the Chico Library.

Chico’s was one of the 1,681 public libraries throughout the country the Andrew Carnegie Corp. provided funding to build between 1889 and 1923. It dates from 1904, but took on its Mediterannean look when it was remodeled in 1939. The building would be right at home in Santa Barbara, but I’m glad it’s in Chico. It’s one of downtown Chico’s bright spots. The architecture of the new Chico Library on East First Avenue leaves me cold, so I’m glad its original home is still around. The Carnegie Library in Santa Rosa, where I lived as a teenager, was torn down in the early 1960s, and replaced with a new version of its library that’s even less attractive than Chico’s new version.

My stint at the museum brought home to me of how klutzy I can be at simple tasks. I struggled to properly record and make the correct change for gift store purchases. I had a hard time working the straightforward phone system. Once, I set off the alarm on the emergency exit door.

I was OK at greeting people and I was successful at leading school tours during the Gold Rush exhibit. It gave me the idea that I could be a docent, which is why I left the Chico Museum and went to the Bidwell Mansion, where I led tours once a week for more than three years.

The point of this blog is to finish this walk around the block, but I don’t have much to say about the rest of the route that will take us back to what I consider to be Chico’s ground zero, the corner of First Street and Broadway.

I’ve already noted in “But this is Chico,� my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record, that the facade improvements to the building at the corner of First and Salem streets have been a big improvement. The edges of the building have quoins, an architectural feature that has regained favor after a lapse of 60 or 70 years.

The coming of Mr. Pickle’s Sandwich Shop to the space next to Tres Hombres is yet another example of how fast businesses come and go in downtown Chico. Good businessman that he is, Mr. Pickle himself gave up his lunch hours for several weeks to stand on the corner of First and Broadway and wave at people. He knows how much Chicoans value friendliness.

Posted by Steve Brown at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve never had a meal at Tres Hombres.

Granted, I haven’t yet seen the insides of most Chico businesses, but Tres Hombres is special. It’s part of Chico’s history. When you look at the north wall, which faces First Street, you are looking at Chico as it was in the early 1860s. You are looking at the building that was John Bidwell’s store.

This is the historical hub of Chico. For that reason alone, I’ve got to make a point of eating at Tres Hombres. And if I like the food, I’ll come back again.

To keep up with the times, the outside of the building was remodeled in the early 1930s to give it an art deco look. The second story was removed. It’s a nice-looking art deco building. The latest color scheme is snazzy. It enhances its architectural features.

A few doors down Broadway is Moxie’s, one of my hangouts. I’ve written about it several times in “But this is Chico,� my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record. I come here to have breakfast or just coffee in the early morning hours on Sunday when downtown is still asleep after surviving another wild Saturday night. I like having downtown to myself at that hour. I’m there even before the first round of Bidwell Memorial Presbyterian churchgoers shows up.

The older I get, the less likely I am to sleep in on the weekends. But my wife and son are nightowls, so I leave the house to them in the morning and go out on the town. Spending time in Moxie’s is one of my favorite ways to experience what it’s like to be a Chicoan.

I look forward to going to Moxie’s for years to come. I want to be there long enough to see owner Jan Bielfelt’s indoor plants touch either other from opposites sides of the brick wall of the coffeehouse. She’s training them to grow toward each other.

I don’t have much connection to the businesses on the north side of Second Street between Broadway and Salem. I went a few times to the El Rey Theatre and marveled at its hugeness and the fanciful murals on its walls. Photos of portions of the murals are on display at Avenue 9 Gallery through Jan. 14. It’s hard to believe the theater has been closed for almost two years. It is destined to be turned into an office and retail complex.

A theater stood on that spot for about 100 years. In 1907, the Majestic Theatre opened and featured opera and vaudeville acts. It became the National Theatre in 1925 and the American in 1939. The theater was gutted in 1946, and reopened in 1948 as the El Rey.

Join me again next time and we’ll complete this walk around the block.

Posted by Steve Brown at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)