But this is Chico, too

Sometimes, when I go out walking, I wish I could jump into a time machine and travel into the past to see how Chico looked when it was a small town.

I’d be afraid to travel into the future. I might recoil from the Chico of the 22nd century. What if all the city’s 19th and early 20th century neighborhoods had crumbled and been torn down and there were no buildings older than the 1950s?

The last time I wished for a glimpse of the past came at the end of a walk I took on Super Bowl Sunday. What an eerie feeling to be all alone out in the streets, the silence broken only by periodic roars issuing from rooms where fans had gathered around TV sets.

The quiet affected my perspective, reminding me of a time before traffic clogged the streets and before there were so many people in Chico. As I passed Hooker Oak School, I tried to imagine how it looked in the late 1940s when the school playground marked the end of town. As I approached Sherman Avenue I tried to picture how this corner looked before apartments were built there. As I passed by the library, I tried to envision how Sherman looked when it dead-ended into East First Avenue back when it was still a country road.

People who settled in Chico in the 19th century would be amazed at how much the city has grown.
When Oscar Stansbury and his family moved into their house at the corner of Fifth and Salem streets in the 1880s, it was on the outskirts of Chico. When Joseph Krikak and his family moved into their house at the corner of Arcadian and Fifth avenues in 1918, it was on the outskirts of Chico. (The youngest of the Krikak children is still alive. She recently shared her memories of the house with its current owners).

Hooker Oak School once defined the city’s northeastern frontier. Its construction proved to be a harbinger of growth in that area. Within another 10 years, houses would stretch almost all the way to the Hooker Oak Recreation Area.

The frontier has moved far beyond the school. The subdivisions that sprang up just north of Bidwell Park in the 1950s foreshadowed a wave of growth that would extend its tendrils in all directions in subsequent decades. Today, if you were to use a map of Chico as a dartboard, you would just about score a bullseye if you hit Hooker Oak School.

I’m still amazed at all the open space that still lies beyond the city’s boundaries. But after a lifetime of witnessing the state’s phenomenal growth, I don’t need a time machine ride to help me envision a time when Chico might extend as far west as the Sacramento River.

Posted by at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I like to give credit where credit is due — or at least I like to give the impression that I support such a proposition. It’s part of my struggle to keep an open mind despite my aging brain, which I wrote about in a recent blog entry.

That’s why I can say “no” to doing business with Starbucks while saying “yes” to its new building on The Esplanade.

I don’t like the predatory nature of Starbucks. The company deliberately sets up shop next to independent cofeehouses to woo away customers who either don’t care where they go or who are impressed by Starbucks alleged coolness factor (which as far as I’m concerned is bogus).

Because it’s a huge company, Starbucks can afford to wait it out at these spots even if it’s not initially profitable there. I’m sure most of the independents have no such luxury. Because of this unfair advantage, it’s innacurate to say Starbucks is in competition with the locals.

But I do like its building on the northeast corner of The Esplanade and Ninth Avenue.
It’s an improvement over its predecessor, a building that housed The French Gourmet Bakery, which I did patronize.

The new building somehow manages to blend in well with the varied architectural styles of its nearest neighbors — Al’s Drive-in, the Matador Hotel and Avenue 9 Gallery.

Chico needs all the decent-looking new buildings it can get. That’s why I also applaud the design of Wal-Mart’s proposed supercenter at the north end of Chico. If the store is built there, I will never set foot in it, but I will compliment the company on its efforts to think outside the big box.

Similarly, I’m hoping Costco’s new Chico store will be an improvement over the current bland-looking building.

Posted by at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new version of the City Plaza is becoming a hit. Whenever I drive by it, I see plenty of people out there, apparently enjoying it. I assume they aren’t there against their will. I sat in the plaza for about a half hour a couple of Sundays ago. With so many people constantly coming and going, it was hard to take an accurate census, but I came up with an average of 75 people using it at any given time. When I was there, no special event was being held.

The new design seems to be a great people magnet. The old plaza, as beloved as it may have been in principle, just wasn’t that popular in practice. People may have admired it, but they did it mainly from a distance.

A lot of people are still sniping about the new plaza. Among the criticisms: skateboarders are defacing it, dogs are pooping in it and the owners aren’t cleaning up, vandals are fooling around with the fountain and the back-in parking spaces are a joke.

In another month, when the weather warms up, I imagine we’ll start hearing more complaints about the lack of trees, but I predict the plaza will become even more crowded as people use the fountain to cool off.

Ten years from now, the trees will provide as much shade as anyone might wish. I know that seems like a long time to wait, but one shadeless decade in the lifespan of a plaza that is already about 150 years old and will probably be around for another 150 years doesn’t seem so bad.

I’m all for looking at the big picture. I think over time the plaza will again become as cherished a part of Chico as The Esplanade, another piece of hallowed ground that lost a lot of trees in a redesign, but which today looks completely unscathed.

In Chico, “progress” doesn’t always have to be a dirty word.

Posted by at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Do you remember the first time you drove around a corner and realized you were heading in the wrong direction on a one-way street?

If you live in Chico long enough it’s bound to happen. In my nine years here, I think I’ve done it about five times. I’ve suffered no ill effects.

I can’t recall where I was the first time it happened, but I know that I panicked. Then I had one of those “But this is Chico” moments. The other drivers looked out for me. In the block that it took me to notice my error and correct it, nobody honked or screamed at me. They calmly moved into the other lane and used polite hand gestures to encourage me to get myself turned around.

This seems like a potentially lethal mistake, but in a community that takes bouts of wrong-way driving in stride, I’ve learned that it’s nothing to feel frantic about.

A couple of years ago, I was heading downtown with a friend who was visiting from the Bay Area. For some reason I turned right on Fourth Street when I should have waited until Fifth to make that move. My friend normally enjoys spontaneous gestures and novel situations, but she spotted my mistake before I did and immediately freaked out. In the Bay Area, a wrong turn like that could well be the last turn of your life, but I wasn’t rattled. As I expected, the other drivers moved out of my way and put their pointing skills to work to get me back on track.

In Chico, the driving situations that ought to be scary turn out not to be. Getting on the freeway and merging into its traffic without getting hit always feels like a losing proposition, but so far it has worked out.

Oddly enough, my most harrowing adventures take place in parking lots, where people are coming at you from every direction and the rules of the road seem less clear cut than when you’re out on the road. Pulling into a crowded gas station always proves to be more stressful than I imagine it will be. There’s usually not enough room to form a line, so everyone ends up circling the pumps until an opening appears. Then there’s a scramble to get there first. Sometimes the gas tank side of the car is facing the wrong way, so I have to go around again.

It’s always reassuring to finally be able to pull up to a pump, stop the car and get out. It feels good to again feel the ground underneath my feet. After more than 30 years of driving, I still feel more comfortable on foot than I do riding in a car.

Posted by at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of my pet peeves about Chico is its lack of small neighborhood parks geared to recreational activities.

For several decades Chicoans reveled in the luxury of having a huge park within walking distance of where they lived. This windfall from Annie Bidwell 101 years ago gave two generations of residents more than enough open space.

Urban sprawl has changed that. Chico has grown far beyond the 50-block grid John Bidwell laid out in 1860. In fact, the city now extends beyond what was once the northern boundary of Bidwell’s Rancho Arroyo Chico. People who live out there are a couple of miles away from Bidwell Park.

That’s why it’s so gratifying to see DeGarmo Park taking shape — or at least phase one, which will have three softball and two soccer fields. In time the 36-acre park next to Shasta School will have more playing fields, a playground, picnic areas and an aquatic center.

When the park is finished, it’s certain to become known as the gem of north Chico.

Development of a more laid-back sort of park at E. First and Verbena avenues has also been approved. Neighborhood residents wanted it to be kept in its natural state. Indeed, nature will be improved upon. Lindo Channel, on the north side of the park, is going to be allowed to meander a bit, which will result in more wetland areas. Invasive plants will be removed and replaced with native varieties.

The manmade objects at the site will be put to better use. Concrete scattered throughout the property, which was once a gravel quarry, will be used to build walkways.

A network of creekside greenways offers yet another approach for ensuring Chico has a comprehensive park system. I like New Urban Builders’ plans to enhance the Little Chico Creek Greenway that runs through its proposed Meriam Park development in southeast Chico. Plans call for community gardens, a small playground, bike and walking trails and a dog park.

I hope the city is conscientious in its efforts to acquire property along the stretches of Little Chico Creek that run through its established neighborhoods as parcels become available. It would be a wonderful legacy for future generations of Chicoans to have a greenway running all the way along the creek from Bruce Road on the east to Dayton Road on the west.

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

Writing health stories for the Enterprise-Record sometimes brings me in contact with New Age ideas.

Many Chicoans are exploring them. In their quest to overcome an illness or just feel better, they embrace the exotic — from foods our mothers never fed us, to spiritual philosophies and physical regimens once confined to the part of the world that lies east of the Mediterranean sea or known only to indigenous cultures of North America.

Chico has a thriving New Age community. A recent visit by Deepak Chopra, one of its luminaries, confirms this. Why Chico is an incubator for this kind approach to life has something to do with its being a college town in a rural setting. A book called “Valley for Dreams” by Susan Hardwick and Donald Holtgrieve does a good job of explaining why Chico has attracted people it calls “seekers” over the last 35 to 40 years. (In fact, this is one of the best books about the Sacramento Valley I’ve ever read.)

In making the acquaintance of New Age believers and practitioners, I’ve become aware that they part of a common culture that even has its own language — words like holistic, chakras and auras and terms like collective consciousness and guided meditation.

The typical Chico New Ager is almost imperturbably laid-back, but there are a few cracks in the mellow persona. One of them is a skepticism, verging on hostility, toward churches and other forms of “organized religion.”

As a journalist, I’m skeptical of everything. This includes religious dogmas as well as knee-jerk negative reactions against religious dogmas. I’m similarly wary of overly reductionistic and materialistic views of life that are supposedly based on science.

Whenever I encounter New Age thinking, I try to get past its sometimes vague and silly trappings and try to find whatever kernels of truth may lie at its core. Despite an aging brain that seems increasingly inclined to resist new ideas, I still try to value the openness that characterized my outlook on life when I was younger.

And yet even as I write the word “openness,” I’m a little offended by it. It sounds rather vacuous. It smacks of the kind of New Age terminology that feeds my skepticism.

Posted by at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The rest of this walk around the block starts on the the northeast corner of Fifth and Chestnut streets. The first building on your right, which houses the St. John Parish offices, isn’t bad looking, but about 20 years ago it replaced one of the South Campus neighborhood’s most historically significant houses.

The offices occupy the site of the Camper house. Built in 1872, it was the first house to grace W. Fifth Street, which connected downtown to the railroad station and surrounding hotels. The two-story structure had a seven-gabled roof. In its heyday, it was surrounded by a picket fence. It was built by Henry Camper, a wagon and carriage builder.

As you approach the end of this block your attention will be drawn across the street to St. John the Baptist Church, one of Chico’s few examples of Romanesque revival architecture. This version of the church has been around for more than 90 years. It replaced a gothic revival church that was built at the site in 1870, a year after John Bidwell donated the entire block to the Catholic Church. The church shares that block with Notre Dame Catholic School.

If you stand at the corner of this block and look across Fourth Street, you will see a boarded-up building that until recently was used as a fraternity house. The colonial revival structure was built in 1908. In the early 20th century, colonial revival was almost as popular as the craftsman bungalow style.

Turn right and head east on Fourth Street. The second house on your right, another colonial revival, built in 1903, is known as the Lizzie Crew Canfield House. It was built for A.H. Crew, a Chico banker. His daughter, Lizzie, inherited it from him, but never lived in it. In 1907, she rented to students at the Chico Normal School, setting a precedent that has turned the entire neighborhood into student rentals.
Join me again in a few weeks for another walk around the block.

Posted by at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s one thing about Normal Avenue that’s not normal. It’s the only “avenue” in a neighborhood of “streets.” Normal started its life as Sycamore Street, but after Chico Normal School was built, it was renamed.

Other than that, Normal is about as normal as you can get. It’s one of the streets where Chico’s most upstanding citizens lived back in the 19th century. Today, its main occupants are Chico State University students.

Start this walk around the block at the southwest corner of Normal and Fourth Street. The stucco corner house with the crenelated parapet was built in 1918 for Albert Abraham. He was a partner of Morris Oser, who owned Oser and Co., which for decades was Chico’s leading department store.

The house next door, built in 1861, has been around almost as long as the city itself, which was laid out in 1860. It is the oldest house still standing in Chico. Named for three successive owners, it’s called the Allen-Sommer-Gage house. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll call it the Gage house.

When we think of the 19th century, we picture opulent Victorian houses, but they didn’t come into vogue until the 1870s. (The Bidwell Mansion, completed in 1868, is an exception). The Gage house, with its simple lines, is pre-Victorian. It’s been described as a combination of modified colonial and Greek revival.

It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Its most famous resident was Helen Sommer-Gage. She was born in the house in 1888 and was living there at the time she died in 1980. As a child she knew John Bidwell. She took part in the communitywide effort to preserve and restore the Bidwell Mansion.

Today, the house is owned by Wayne Cook, who rents it out to students.

Next door is an apartment building that is as hideous as the Gage house is handsome. I will never tire of complaining about the desecration of old Chico neighborhoods. The apartment building is not the worst offender, but it’s on the Top 10 list. The building takes up half the street frontage along Fifth Street between Normal Avenue and Chestnut Street.

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

Posted by at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When is an eyesore not an eyesore?

When you say it isn’t. It helps if you can be persuasive about it. Chances are you’ll be facing a skeptical audience. In the end, though, it’s a purely subjective matter. Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.

Take huge, bright signs that light up the night. They’re part of what Las Vegas is all about. And we know that’s not good. Las Vegas is as crass and charmless a place as you can imagine.

I once considered moving to Las Vegas, but instead I ended up coming to Chico. It’s as unlike Las Vegas as you can get and still be on the same side of the Continental Divide.

But I’m charmed by the Thunderbird Lodge and Senator Theatre signs. I’d be fine if there were a half dozen similar signs lining the part of Main Street just south of the downtown core. Why not put one in front of Jack’s? How about Vagabond Inn? Or Chico Natural Foods?

I don’t go downtown much at night, but when I do, I like to look down Main and see the two signs. They always remind me of the song “Downtown,” by Petula Clark — the part where she sings “Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city, linger on the sidewalks where the neon signs are pretty, how can you lose? The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares ...”

I don’t know if the two lights are neon. I think nowadays “neon” can be used as synonym for any sign that is bright and brassy. I’ve seen small and restrained versions of them. They’re usually placed in bistro and coffeehouse windows to attract customers. But I must confess it’s the gargantuan signs I associate with an uplifting nighttime urban experience. They exude a distinctly American blend of straightforwardness, exuberance, vulgarity and superficiality. There are times when it’s the right remedy for the blues.

Chicoans may object to my suggestion for more signs along Main Street — Too close to downtown, they may say. If that’s a problem, why not put a bunch of them along Mangrove Avenue? Since we’ve already decided to make Mangrove Chico’s garish, gaudy and glitzy thoroughfare why not go hog wild with it? Let’s create a design overlay district to allow huge up signs that blink, pulsate and shimmer.

Posted by at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Architect Paul Lieberum showed some of his slides of Chico as part of a presentation on the city’s archtecture, which was sponsored by the Chico Avenues Neighborhood Association.

One of his slides was of 1200 Park Avenue, a new three-story apartment complex for people 55 and older, across the street from the Jesus Center. The complex was partly financed by the city of Chico in an effort to provide affordable housing for older people and help revitalize the neighborhood.

Lieberum said he hopes the project sets a precedent for the transformation of Park Avenue.
He noted that the part of the complex facing Park is designed to blend in with businesses on that street, while the part facing Oakdale Street reflects the smaller scale of the residences on that block.

For the last three years the city has talked about turning the section of Park between Little Chico Creek and 22nd Street into a more pedestrian-friendly corridor that would knit the Barber neighborhood to the west and the Mulberry neighborhood to the east together.

The “vision” for this section of Park is for it to have both commercial and residential uses, some of them in the same building, with businesses on the ground floor and living space on the two floors above that.

Judging by how 1200 Park looks, I think the building has set a good precedent. This is yet another project that shows new buildings don’t have to be ugly and that three-story buildings along major thoroughfares don’t look out of place in Chico. It gives a sense of the potential of the street to become the showplace of the neighborhood. That would be a welcome change from the drab, rundown place it is now. This is Chico. A city that has produced a showplace street like The Esplanade is capable of improving Park Avenue.

Posted by at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last month, I went to a presentation sponsored by the Chico Avenues Neighborhood Association. One of the speakers was architect Paul Lieberum, who showed slides of good and bad examples of Chico architecture.

One of the features he liked is the cluster of businesses , which illustrate this blog entry, on the southeast corner of Third Avenue and The Esplanade. It’s an example of how commercial and residential uses can be compatible and enhance the pedestrian-oriented quality of a neighborhood.

It reminds me of the corner of Fifth and Ivy streets in the South Campus neighborhood, where another cluster of businesses is surrounded by a residential neighborhood.

The Longfellow Shopping Center on East First Avenue, built by Hignell & Strange in the 1950s, is a car-oriented example of a cluster of businesses in a residential neighborhood. Even with this suburban twist, it’s a nice alternative to strip commercial development.

The grocery stores scattered throughout many of Chico’s older neighborhoods are another variation on this theme. Examples are Chinca’s Market in Chapmantown, Laurel Street Grocery in the Mulberry neighborhood, Downtown Market on Eighth Street east of downtown, Warner Street Grocery in the avenues and ABC Market in student land on Ninth Street. (The Korner Market in the Barber neighborhood has migrated to the suburbs. It’s now part of La Dolce Piazza at Cohasset Road and Lassen Avenue.)

These smaller-scale commercial configurations help give Chico’s older neighborhoods their fine-grain appearance. This feature tends to be dsicarded whenever suburban-style zoning, with its strict separation of housing from other land uses, sets the tone for development.

Posted by at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Now that I’ve become a blogger, I’ve decided to read up on the history of blogging. I’m doing all of my reading online, of course.

Most of the early blogs — and by early I mean the mid-1990s — were personal diaries. Justin Hill, who started his blog diary in 1994 and kept at it for 11 years, finally gave it up after concluding that blogging was no substitute for intimacy.

I could have told him that back in 1994, but the young never listen. I’m glad that at age 30 he finally wised up.

If people’s lives are juicy enough and they are willing to tell all, their online diaries can make for fascinating reading. Samuel Pepys, a 17th century British naval administrator and member of Parliament, would have been a hoot as a blogger. He kept a diary for nine years, writing about dalliances with several women.

Anais Nin would have ensorceled the masses. (Nin liked the word “ensorceled” and so do I. I use it to describe the hold that Chico has over me.)

Nin owes her fame to her diaries, which she kept for 60 years. She had a juicy life. She was the mistress of Henry Miller, whose photo illustrates this blog entry. (It’s a bad photo, but that’s OK. Miller had a reputation for being a ladies’ man, but he wasn’t much to look at.) Nin had several other famous bedmates and had an affair with her own father when she was 30. She eventually settled down to a quiet life of bicoastal bigamy.

The problem she would have faced as a blogger is that she was discreet. When she started publishing her diaries, she left out most of the juicy parts. The unexpurgated editions didn’t appear until after her death. Nin wasn’t a kiss-and-tell kind of person. This trait is anathema to blog diarists, who are called “escribitionists” for good reason.

Erica Jong, whose racy novels were thinly-disguised autobiographies, would have been a compelling blogger in her youth. Her fame is a result of her sexual candor. Her career took off when “Fear of Flying” was published, right at the time Nin’s life and her career as a diarist were coming to a close.

Miller was impressed with Jong’s writing and formed a friendship with her at the end of his life.

I’m not an escribitionist. The only juicy thing you’ll ever get out of me is that I was seduced by Chico as soon as I came here. Nine years have gone by, but I still haven't been able to break off the affair.

Posted by at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One of the touted benefits of a Wal-Mart supercenter coming to Chico is cheaper grocery prices.
But will they be cheaper than the groceries sold at Winco, Food for Less, Costco and Grocery Outlet?

And if that’s the sole benefit of Wal-Mart groceries, how will that help those of us who look for other things besides lower prices, but can’t find them in one store? Could Wal-Mart ever become our one-stop grocery store?

Right now, my wife Gail and I patronize three grocery stores: Trader Joe’s, Raley’s and Safeway. In an ideal world, there would be just one. Could a Wal-Mart give us that?

Here are some of the pluses and minuses of the three stores:
Trader Joe’s:
• Good selection of exotic and organic foods at non-specialty store prices;
• Limited selection of grocery staples;
• Helpful employees, who will always find out if something is in stock or tell you why it isn’t;
• Checkout clerks unload your groceries;
• Carts are too small for those of us who go there to do major grocery shopping;
• Traffic flow problems, especially in the meat and bread sections, which are right next to each other.
Safeway:
• Well-stocked service bakery;
• Carts are dirty and in bad repair;
• Checkout clerks don’t unload your groceries;
• It’s close to where we live; it’s close to where a lot of Chicoans live because there are three of them;
• Good price discounts, but you always have to use a membership card, a distracting extra step at the checkout line;
• The Safeway store on Mangrove discontinued its health food section in its latest remodeling; these products are inconveniently scattered throughout the store.
Raley’s:
• Seldom crowded;
• Service deli has good selection of food and provides places to sit;
• Service bakery is too sweets oriented;
• Carts are clean and in good repair;
• Checkout clerks unload your cart;
• Limited frozen foods section.

Do people on tight food budgets shop at just one grocery store? If a Wal-Mart comes will they just trust it to offer the lowest prices on all items or will they have a better chance of coming out ahead if they shop at several stores?

Posted by at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)