But this is Chico, too

New and old buildings can look good together — for reasons I can’t explain.

I took this photo standing inside the new transit center at the southwest corner of Second and Salem streets. It’s sleek, stark and shiny, but I like the way its solar-paneled roofline frames Madison Bear Garden.

The transit center could have been designed to be quaint to make it fit its surroundings. But that would have been too predictable. This 21st century look dropped into a much older cityscape is refreshing.

I suppose I would have felt differently if a four-story structure in the style of the transit center had been put up.
So here, at last, is the successor to Hotel Oaks, which stood at this corner for almost 50 years, followed by 40 years as a parking lot. The hotel was a hub of Chico. Now, in a different way, the transit center also serves as a hub.

I would have preferred that the hotel were still standing. But it was our tastes that doomed it. We stopped patronizing downtown hotels in smaller cities that don’t cater to tourists. All eyes are on the recently-restored Hotel Diamond to see if it signals a resurgence in travelers’ preference for hotels over motels or bed and breakfasts when they come looking for a place to sleep in Chico.

Posted by Steve Brown at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chico’s first cooke-cutter houses were built more than 100 years ago.

How can that be? Those were the good old days, right? Each house was different from its neighbor, wasn’t it?

The problem is that we are quick to use the term “cookie-cutter” in a pejorative way. We think of it as a post-World War II malady. If housing is mass-produced, then it must be mediocre, right? It must be ugly and charmless.

Well, take a look at these three identical houses on Third Street, just east of Flume Street. Cute, aren’t they?

They were built in 1902 as rentals, at what was once the east end of town. It’s just outside the original grid of streets John Bidwell laid out almost 150 years ago. Today, their location places them inside the city’s historical core. They are still used as rentals.They look a little worse for wear, but I bet they’ll be around for a long time to come.

There are four or five other sets of these cookie-cutter houses scattered throughout downtown Chico. Just a half block away on Flume, next to the vacant lot that was once Enloe Hospital, is a set of two look-alike houses.

In our rosy view of the past, we like to imagine everyone owning their own house. But renting was far more common than it is now. People in small towns rented little houses like these, rooms in other people’s houses, hotel rooms or apartments in bungalow courts, or they took up residence in garages, barns and other outbuildings.

The first apartment buildings in Chico began popping up in the early 20th century. A good Chico example is the Waterland Apartments, on Normal Avenue between Third and Fourth streets. The building itself has been around since the 1880s, but it was converted into apartments back in 1914.

In Chico, at least, there’s a lot more to older neighborhoods than grand corner domiciles, such as the Stansbury, Earll, Walker and Barnard houses. Surviving structures show that people of modest means lived here, too.

Posted by Steve Brown at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At long last, Chico State University has a new building that’s easy on the eye.

The designers of the almost-completed Student Services Center, at the northeast corner of Warner and Second streets, have gone the extra mile to give the campus a building that is respectful to the qualities that make Trinity and Kendall halls, Laxson Auditorium and a couple of other buildings so memorable.

About a week ago, I went on a tour of the historical core of the campus organized by the university’s public affairs office in observance of the completion of Trinity Hall 75 years ago.

The tour concluded on the east side of the Student Services Center, where two of its architects, David Israel and Mark Kelly, from the San Francisco firm Bar Architects, talked about their efforts to design a building that has some of the qualities of the older campus structures.

They said the use of bricks, tall windows with lintels over them and extended moldings with brackets at the roofline give the building a sense of massiveness and gravity. Israel said the shape of the east side of the building creates a courtyard. “We wanted it to resemble a cloister.”

The building is across the walkway (formerly First Street) from Meriam Library, one of Chico State’s most aggressively modernist buildings. I talked to Kelly about the contrast between it and his new building. He said although he’s not an architectural historian, the library is a good example of the “brutalist” style that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. He said these buildings were prized for their functionality and distinctiveness; they didn’t attempt to fit in with their surroundings.

He said nowadays clients want buildings that have a more human face.

I watched this building take shape. It wasn’t until the final stages of construction that its face came into focus. I appreciate the use of columns in this building, which take their cue from the porches of Kendall Hall and Laxson Auditorium.

The Student Services building doesn’t mark a return to the Chico State’s 1930s masterpieces. I’m sure the cost of recreating such structures would be prohibitive today. But maybe it will set a trend. Most of the buildings that have gone up in the last 60 years have disfigured the campus.

Posted by Steve Brown at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What would Annie Bidwell do? It was the topic of a recent installment of “But This is Chico,” my column in the Enterprise-Record. I have more to say on the subject.

It’s interesting to speculate about what Chico’s founding mother would think, say and do 90 years after her death. (She died March 9, 1918). One of the ways I explored this in my column was to assume she didn’t die and, at 168, is now the oldest person who ever lived. I took kind of a SciFi approach. But it would have been nice if she had lived just a little longer. I think if today’s medical treatments had been available to her, she could have lived well into her 80s.

It’s possible that the treatments she received in her old age may have hastened her death. The late Lois McDonald alluded to some of them in her biography of Bidwell. For example, she was prescribed medicines that contained arsenic and cocaine. Physical therapies she was subjected to included jolts of electricity to her body and the breaking of ligaments in her shoulder to correct a “constriction” problem. It’s the old story of the “cures” being worse than the ailments.

If she had lived just one more year, she would have been pleased at the ratification of the 18th Amendment, which outlawed the manufacturing, importing and exporting of alcoholic beverages. Throughout her life, she was an ardent Prohibitionist.

If she had lived just two more years, she would have applauded the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Woman’s suffrage was another of her causes —a progressive one, in this case.
If she had lived into the 1920s, she would have seen drastic changes in women’s fashions — not just the tossing of the corset, but the coming of short hair and knee-length dresses.

She would have observed that female students at Chico State College were starting to live on their own, unchaperoned. She wouldn’t have failed to notice that grown women were now pursuing careers and defining themselves as more than just wives, mothers and community volunteers.

What would she have thought of all this? Would she have said “All we wanted was the vote. What did we unleash?” Or would she have concluded that it was high time for these other changes to occur?

There would have been a lot of technological changes in the 1920s for her to react to. This was the decade that the last of Chico’s streets were paved and cars replaced horses and carriages as the main way to get around. Would Bidwell have learned how to drive? Would she have owned several cars?

Would she have been among the first commercial airline passengers? When she was first married, the coming of the transcontinental railroad made it possible for her to reach her family in Washington, D.C. in a week’s time. How would she have felt if she knew she could cross the country in a matter of hours?

Bidwell would have found herself living in interesting times if she had managed to stay around another decade.

Posted by Steve Brown at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)