But this is Chico, too

The Rio Chico neighborhood is an anachronism, an island of old houses surrounded by Chico State University.

The university has had its eye on this block, bounded by First and Orange streets, Rio Chico Way and Cherry Street, for decades. The current master plan calls for it to eventually become the home of a recreational aquatics center and a physical education building. The plan proposes to either retain or move historically significant houses.

I’m sure the question of whether the houses in this block are historically significant will be the subject of much debate.

Annie Bidwell, who was left land rich and money poor when her husband John died in 1900, sold the property that become the Rio Chico neighborhood to attorney and land investor Frank Lusk in 1904. He then promptly subdivided the land into lots and sold them. The houses were built between 1905 and about 1920. Many of them have been extensively altered. They are all used as student rentals. The block is directly north of where the Wildcat Activity Center is now being built.

I don’t want to portray Chico State as a predatory villain. This is a landlocked campus with a growing need for facilities. It’s far better for it to remain in the heart of Chico than to move to a more spacious site on the outskirts of Chico. The downtown area owes much of its vitality to the university.

I just hope the university has developed more sensitivity toward historically significant buildings than it showed in the past. In the 1980s, when it was proposing to tear down the so-called Language Houses on property it owned on Third Street between Chestnut and Hazel streets, it displayed a lack of concern that still rankles some Chico residents.

Tensions between city residents and the university over land use are inevitable and never-ending. Mansion Park residents, for example, are irritated by a dorm complex and natural history museum the university is planning to build next to their neighborhood. Even when the issues have nothing to do with historically significant buildings, the university’s need to expand creates potential conflicts with people who live nearby.

Posted by Steve Brown at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A hundred years from now, when we look back on the architectural legacy of the first decade of the 21st century, we may point to the towerlet as its crowning achievement — such as it is.

By definition, a towerlet is a modest crowning ornament. It’s not to be confused with a tower, which is a taller and more timeless feature. Towers top the 1860s Bidwell Mansion, the 1920s Senator Theatre, the 1930s Trinity Hall, the 1990s building at the intersection of Mangrove and East First avenues and the main building at Garden Villa on Cohasset Road, which was completed a year ago.

Towerlets didn’t start peeking up above buildings’ rooflines until about 10 years ago. They seem to have been built as a reaction to the unrelenting horizontal lines of contemporary commercial buildings, especially the big box type.

You can see an early version of the towerlet at the entrance to Office Depot on Dr. Martin Luther King Parkway. At this point, it’s little more than a facade adornment.

By the time Tara Plaza, home of the Market Cafe, was built around the turn of the 21st century, the towerlet had become a distinct building appendage.

You can see the 2007 version of the towerlet on the buildings next to Kohl’s department store just north of the Chico Mall.
At the new commercial complex at Mangrove and Vallombrosa avenues, a towerlet is the central feature. It’s so separate from the surrounding buildings that you can walk underneath it.

So far, towerlets show no signs of becoming full-fledged towers. It’s as if their designers have decided they have already done enough to address criticisms about the unrelieved horizontal lines of their buildings.

The only historical precedent for the towerlet can be found in some of achitect Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie style houses from the early 20th century, which also have a preponderance of horizontal lines.
Look around Chico and you will see a lot of towerlets on newer commercial buildings.

Not all new buildings have softened their horizontal lines. The new Costco building, which has popped up seemingly overnight alongside the existing Costco building, is the most boxy non-industrial building to have gone up in Chico in the first decade of this century.

Posted by Steve Brown at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t count myself among those snooty Chicoans who sneer at Oroville.

Just recently I overheard a Chicoan criticize an experience by referring to it as “Orovillian.”

I’ve defended Oroville in print, and now I’m going to do it again in the blogosphere.

There are cities in the Sacramento Valley that I don’t like. You won’t hear me say one word about them. Then there are cities I can find good things to say about: Gridley, Biggs, Tehama, Yuba City and Marysville.

Oroville is in a different class. It’s among the places in the Valley I truly like, such as Woodland, Winters, Colusa and Davis.

I took a walk in Oroville recently and turned my flaneur’s critical eye upon it.

I continue to like what I see.

Montgomery Street, with its shady trees and handsome century-old houses, is Oroville’s equivalent of The Esplanade, a grand gateway to its downtown. The neighborhood on either side of Montgomery has the same quality as Chico’s charming, livable older neighborhoods. Some of the properties are a little rough around the edges, but the good far outnumber the bad.

Downtown Oroville has a number of vacant storefronts, but so does Chico. All downtowns are struggling to stay vital in the age of big box suburbia. But there are great places in downtown Oroville to browse and spend money. In my wanderings the day I was there, I bought a used book and a vintage postcard for myself and a kewpie doll for my mother for her birthday. I had a tasty sandwich at a restaurant. And I savored the architecture. Downtown Oroville has a handsome collection of public and commercial buildings, including the Masonic building and hotel that illustrate this entry.

One of the things I don’t like about Oroville is Oro Dam Boulevard, a dreary commercial thoroughfare that, fortunately, steers clear of downtown. But Chico has far more such ugly stretches — the upper reaches of The Esplanade, Cohasset Road, Mangrove Boulevard, Walnut Street, Nord Avenue and parts of East Avenue.

I think the main reason Oroville is maligned is because it’s right next to South Oroville, where drug use is prevalent and the crime rate is high. But I don’t hold Oroville responsible for that. Actually, I don’t even hold “society” responsible. Even the most just and egalitarian society is going to have a hard time eliminating the woes that plague these kinds of communities.

My one encounter with South Oroville was upbeat. I did a story about a faith-based community development program that was having success at physically and spiritually rehabilitating the neighborhood. By giving its clients rules to follow, a family to belong to and goals to achieve, the program seemed to be bringing hope to South Oroville.

Oroville has lots of upbeat people. About three years ago, when I wrote nice things about the city in my E-R column “But this is Chico,” Orovillians Alberta Tracy and Kyra Gottsman came forward to act as ambassadors. They introduced me to dozens of people, all of them bullish about the possibilities of the city of gold.

I share their optimism.

Posted by Steve Brown at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I drove all the way through the sprawling mass of Greater Sacramento just to check out Laguna West. I had been led to believe that it is a “new urbanism” development. We have a few in Chico and we’ll be getting more, so I wanted to see an example of what we might be in for.

After an hour of looking around Laguna West, I fled to the nearest freeway onramp, thinking to myself “There must be some mistake. This can’t be an example of new urbanism.”

It was more like new suburbanism, with large houses on small lots. The only thing distinctive about Laguna West is that the housing developments are grouped around a long, central park, full of fountains and ponds, crossed by bridges dotted by handsome lightposts.

The park has a recreation center, called a “town hall,” but it’s not a real town hall. Laguna West isn’t a real town. It’s part of Elk Grove, which is one of the fastest-growing cities in the state.

I couldn’t find anything in Laguna West that looked like a traditional town. Except for the park, there didn’t seem to be any areas that cater to pedestrians. All of the offices and businesses are grouped around typical suburban-style parking lots.

Laguna West is pretty. I’ll say that for it. Its buildings are attractively designed and it’s lushly landscaped. This helped me appreciate how you can have a great-looking community, but it can still have no soul.
In addition to the large park, small open spaces and playgrounds dot the housing developments. They made me think of the Cat Stevens’ song “Where Do the Children Play?” His worry was that bulldozers were leveling all the places to play. The problem with Laguna West is that although there are plenty of places to play, no children are playing in them. They are in day care, they are at soccer practice, they are hanging out at the recreation center, but they aren’t out playing in the parks. They are at places where other adults supervise them, while their parents work to pay to live in this upper-middle class, new suburbanism development.

After Laguna West, my next destination was the Sacramento Delta. Boy, was I ready for it. After such an unsettling encounter with the new California, which seems more like an Orwellian nightmare than a utopia, I longed to immerse myself in an old, unchanged part of California.

The Delta, which starts less than 10 miles from Laguna West, fit the bill perfectly. This vast flat land has a labyrinth of waterways, winding levee roads, ferry boats, drawbridges, orchards and crop fields and is dotted with the kinds of towns that I believe the new urbanism movement is trying to replicate.

Locke has a sense of place that is almost overwhelming. The guide books say it is the only Chinese community in the state that was built by Chinese settlers. That was 100 years ago. Some of their descendants are still there.

The town has one narrow main street, lined on both sides by weathered two-story clapboard buildings with balconies. The passageways between the buildings invite further exploration on foot.

Locke has a museum and gift shops, a sign that it has become a tourist attraction, but so far it has a long ways to go before it becomes a Disney version of a Chinatown.

I also spent time exploring Isleton and Walnut Grove. They are similar to Locke in that they have so far been able to walk a fine line between becoming either cutesy tourist traps or crumbling ghosts towns.

The Delta is hardly an untamed wilderness. It’s as artificial a landscape as Laguna West. It’s just agricultural rather than suburban. But so far, urban corporate America seems to be content to leave the Delta alone. It still feels like it’s miles from nowhere (another Cat Stevens song) even though the tide of suburban sprawl has crept to within just a few miles of it.

Posted by Steve Brown at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)