Way back when
This walk along the block starts at the northeast corner of Main and Fourth streets with remarks about the Summer of Love. I was determined to turn this into a blog topic.
What better place to talk about this period of our history than standing in front of Melody Records, with its vintage vinyl, rock concert posters and sticks of incense for sale.
It was 40 years ago today (give or take two weeks) that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play and tourists and teenage runaways overran the Haight-Ashbury District in San Francisco.
Back in the Summer of Love, I was 15 and too young for love, but I wasn’t too young for music. I still have the copy of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” that I bought that summer. The jacket is falling apart, but the grooves of the record aren’t too scratched.
I still collect vinyl and still like 1960s music, so I spend more time in Melody Records than I do in most other stores downtown.
Follow Main north and pass by The Underground, the only other downtown record store. When I came to Chico, there were two other record stores downtown and one on Mangrove Avenue.
The building two doors down from the southeast corner of Main and Fourth was once the home of the J.C. Penney store. It moved to North Valley Plaza in 1968 and moved again to Chico Mall in 1993.
The building on the corner is the site of the Butte Hotel, which thrived in an era when Chico reportedly had 1,000 hotel rooms downtown.
Somehow, downtown survived the loss of its hotels and major retail businesses. You hear complaints about all the empty retail space, but the heart of Chico still has plenty of life in it.