Sacramento Renaissance: Art, Music & Activism in California's Capital City

By William Burg

Touted as progress, postwar redevelopment spawned a new age in Sacramento, California. As city planners designated areas of urban blight and directed bulldozers to make way for commercial districts and pedestrian malls, the churches, jazz clubs and family homes of the West End and Japantown were upended and residents scattered. Displaced families and businesses reestablished themselves and redefined their communities around new cultural centers. Historian William Burg weaves oral histories with previously unpublished photographs to chronicle the resurgence of Sacramento's art, music and activism in the wake of redevelopment. Celebrate the individuals and organizations that defined an era: the beatniks and Black Panthers of Oak Park, Southside Park's "League of Nations," George Raya of Lavender Heights and the Royal Chicano Air Force in Alkali Flat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625840042

William Burg

William Burg moved to Midtown Sacramento in 1993. In 2003 he became interested in local history and neighborhood activism, returning to college and graduating from Sacramento State University's Public History program in 2010. He joined Sacramento Old City in 2007 and became president in 2012. This is his sixth book about Sacramento.

Book preview

there.

Introduction

The Biggest Lie in the West

The first time we came here, we flew into Executive Airport. There was a couple sitting on the other side of the plane, and the man said to the woman, Janie, everything there is to see in Sacramento you can see outside of this window.…I was thinking, Oh dear, I’m going to have to live here? But there was much more to Sacramento than you could see out of that window. And I’ve never regretted coming here.

—Anne Rudin

In 1950, Sacramento’s central city was home to fifty-eight thousand people. The majority lived in the West End, a multicultural neighborhood surrounding the business district of K Street, generally west of Capitol Park at Tenth Street. North of K Street was Chinatown, alongside the Southern Pacific shops and passenger depot, a community dating back to the Gold Rush known as Yee Fow, Second City. South from K Street to Q Street was Japantown, home to thousands of immigrant and American-born Japanese intermixed with Mexican, African American and Filipino populations. Along the waterfront, about five thousand migrant workers, mostly single men, lived in the Labor Market between the I Street and Tower Bridges. By 1970, the vast majority of this population had been removed by redevelopment projects, highway construction and condemnation of homes. Half the central city’s population and approximately ten thousand homes were gone.

Each community that escaped from the West End’s demolition relocated to a nearby neighborhood, reestablished businesses and social traditions and defended its new social space as part of a national struggle for civil rights. Each took elements of its culture and community, including businesses, churches, social institutions and traditions, almost like packing a survival kit into the lifeboat of a sinking ship. They unpacked their survival kits in their new homes and began again. Their rebirth in new neighborhoods fostered a generation of creative activists who celebrated their culture and called for social change through art, music and activism. Alongside this rebirth, two new neighborhoods emerged in the central city, inspired by the social movements of the 1960s.

This 1953 religious procession led by Philip Zuniga passes by the Japanese Methodist Church on 4th and O Streets, designed in 1950 by Sacramento architect George Muraki. This modern building was demolished within a decade of its construction, declared blighted by the Sacramento Redevelopment Agency. Socorro Zuniga.

Three neighborhoods became new homes for the West End’s population. Sacramento’s African American population moved to Oak Park and North Sacramento; the Mexican population moved north to Alkali Flat and south to Southside Park; and the Japanese and Chinese populations moved primarily to Southside Park. Sacramento State graduate student Ken Lastufka researched this geographic shift, concluding that while the original idea of redevelopment was to address issues of urban poverty, the displacement of the West End simply moved poor people into new neighborhoods, doing little or nothing to address the issues of poverty, substandard housing, racism or economic opportunity. Some of the displaced left the city entirely, but most stayed, moving wherever they legally could. The main beneficiary of redevelopment was the business community, which saw the value of West End real estate increase from about $5 million to $369 million. Redevelopment of downtown Sacramento was the conclusion of a half century of planning by the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce, starting in the early 1900s.¹

THE VISION FOR A CAPITOL MALL

K Street was Sacramento’s original geographic center, between the railroad levees at B Street and R Street, but relocation of the R Street levee in 1902 expanded the city south to Y Street. A new electric railroad bridge constructed by Northern Electric Railway in 1911 was the first bridge over M Street, a location also used by River Lines as its passenger dock for riverboats to San Francisco. In 1909, the city of Berkeley attempted a statewide referendum to relocate the Capitol from Sacramento to Berkeley. The effort failed, but the Chamber of Commerce decided that Sacramento needed a new public image. It hired three of the best-known urban planners of the era—Charles Mulford Robinson, John Nolen and Werner Hegemann—to prepare recommendations for civic improvement.

All three designers were influenced by the City Beautiful movement, following the model set by the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. Nolen, a landscape designer, focused on parks and parkways and recommended that public buildings have a shared central location surrounded by open space. Robinson recommended that the Capitol become a centralized hub for the city with grand radial boulevards, a common characteristic of City Beautiful design. Werner Hegemann’s report specifically identified M Street as the best choice for a civic boulevard: Leading toward the bridge as it does, M Street will more and more become very important as a thoroughfare. If properly treated and protected it may, with the capitol in view, become one of the most beautiful streets anywhere. If not properly protected nor properly developed it will become as meaningless and vile in appearance as K Street with its lack of shade and mixup of competing structures. City Beautiful design, and its associated school of urban planning, was based on zoning, a geographic separation of uses. Mixed-use neighborhoods like the West End were anathema to their efforts to showcase a city via enormous vistas, grand scales and civic monuments. The busy sidewalks, little shops and crowded apartments of downtown Sacramento were barely worth mentioning, and their inhabitants were not mentioned at all.

In 1925 and 1928, the first step toward the Sacramento River was taken when two new state office buildings, Office Building I and its younger sister the Library & Courts Building, were completed on the blocks between 9th and 10th, L and N Streets. Designed by well-known civic architect Charles Peter Weeks, the paired Classical Revival buildings flanked the Capitol, with a traffic circle and central fountain as the centerpiece, and provided ample room for state government offices.

A 1929 city-sponsored study by Bartholomew & Associates recommended development of public buildings along M Street, with deep setbacks and wide landscaped parkways with monuments, fountains and reflecting pools. A 1935 Public Works Administration proposal suggested extending Capitol Park all the way to the Sacramento River between L and N Streets, more than doubling the park’s size with a landscaped parkway through its center. During the 1930s, there were no funds to acquire the necessary sixteen fully occupied city blocks and relocate the thousands of people who lived there.² Instead of expanding onto M Street, the State of California built a row of three Streamline Moderne office buildings on N Street: the 1936 Motor Vehicle Building, 1937 Public Works Office Building and 1939 Business and Professional Building.³ In 1935, M Street received another improvement: the Tower Bridge. This Streamline Moderne span replaced the earlier M Street bridge. While the Tower Bridge still carried interurban passenger trains, it also had four lanes for automobile and truck traffic, befitting M Street’s new role as part of Highway 40, the main automobile route from San Francisco over the Sierra Nevada. In 1939, M Street received a new name as part of a citywide centennial celebration, becoming Capitol Avenue.⁴

This 1935 Public Works Administration project proposed a grand park and promenade on top of the West End. Sacramento Public Library.

During the 1940s, the City Planning Commission reviewed and ratified three different plans to redesign M Street. Delayed during the Great Depression and World War II, national efforts to reorient the American economy in the postwar world included new tools to reshape cities. By identifying portions of their cities as blighted, cities could receive federal funds to acquire and demolish private land and resell it to private parties as part of an urban redevelopment plan. Defining blight was left to individual cities and was generally an economic condition based on the property value of land and racial composition of the neighborhood, not the condition of the buildings or other social factors.

BLIGHTED!

Many histories of Sacramento describe the West End using terms like the biggest slum in the West—a place of decay, misery and extreme poverty, replaced by a series of government-funded projects, including Capitol Mall between the Sacramento River and the State Capitol, the K Street pedestrian mall, the multi-lane Interstate 5 and the city’s best-known tourist destination, Old Sacramento. However, many of the lurid descriptions of the West End are wildly inaccurate, and most do not mention the people who lived in these neighborhoods, other than occasional references to derelicts, honky-tonk bars and human blight. Downtown Sacramento’s redevelopment had enormous repercussions. Redevelopment and highway projects removed entire neighborhoods, both the people who lived there and the buildings where they lived. Without physical evidence of the neighborhood that was once there, the myth of the West End as an enormous slum became easier to perpetuate. What could justify the destruction of an entire neighborhood and displace tens of thousands of people unless the decay and depravity of Sacramento’s waterfront matched or exceeded the scale of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Los Angeles’s Skid Row, San Diego’s Stingaree, Portland’s Old Town Chinatown or Seattle’s Pioneer Square? What sins justified a smiting on the scale of Sodom and Gomorrah?

On 5th Street, the Salvation Army office sat alongside the Modern Hotel and an ornate Sierra Hotel between K and L Streets, the eastern edge of the Labor Market. Author’s collection.

In 1946, the California State Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission produced a series of pamphlets intended to guide statewide urban development policy in the wake of the Second World War and Great Depression. Both events taxed the resources of the state and limited the abilities of American cities to rebuild and repair their downtowns. Pamphlet No. 10, entitled BLIGHTED! (printed in stark, diagonal letters on a black background), outlined the miserable conditions of California cities, using Sacramento’s West End as the featured exhibit.

Take a walk down Capitol Avenue, from the State Capitol to the bridge that enters the city. Nine blocks. Then follow the streets that flow into Capitol Avenue on either side, 45 blocks that should make the triumphal entrance and the downtown core of the governing city of California. What do you see? Crowded hovels where people live. Miserable holes where business is transacted. You don’t see the price to the city in fires, disease and crime. You don’t see the price to builders, banks, labor, retailers in lost opportunities for construction, business and investment in what could be the choicest area of Sacramento. And you don’t see the assessment rolls. In 1937, that land was worth $1,785,945 in assessed value to Sacramento taxpayers. In 1944, it was worth $1,233,710, almost a third less. Even so, most of the land is now worth more than the so-called improvements on it.⁵

Equally terrifying accounts of miserable conditions in Upland, Lodi, Huntington Beach, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego followed. In each case, an older central city neighborhood saw conversion from homes of the city’s pioneers to mixed-use neighborhoods of apartments and businesses, with successively poorer occupants and higher populations as the wealthy moved away from the city core. The consequences of blight, from lowered tax rolls to degradation of young people in places that impair their health, their morale, their morals and their civic consciousness,⁶ could only be remedied by the Community Redevelopment Act, passed in September 1945. This act enabled cities and counties to acquire property by eminent domain, clear the land and sell or lease the area to businessmen or private developers, using a master plan in a defined redevelopment area. This vision focused on how redevelopment can rebuild an existing neighborhood but did not discuss displacement of the people who lived there.

Instead of BLIGHTED!’s stark black cover and diagonal horror-movie lettering, Forecasting a City’s Future: Sacramento, California featured a friendlier script font and a hopeful icon of a telescope. This pamphlet was based on an economic study sponsored by the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce. Detailing Sacramento’s industrial sectors, including its railroad shops, canneries and regional agriculture, the study called out military spending as Sacramento’s savior during the Second World War, doubling county revenue from $124 million to $264 million between 1939 and 1944, and praised the stability of local industries:

The reason behind Sacramento’s income stability is the nature of most Sacramentans’ employment. Earnings from government jobs, the railroad car shops, trade and private services fluctuate less than earnings from agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction. Government income, in particular, is almost depression-proof. In times of economic stress, employment in State Government tends to expand rather than contract. For Sacramento, government is a trench which will serve as a fire-break against the spread of economic holocaust. It is this relatively high stability of income which distinguishes Sacramento from other cities, and which should make it so attractive to its own residents, businessmen and local government officials.⁷

The Chamber’s study was less optimistic about the future potential of agriculture and canneries. The seasonal and unpredictable nature of agriculture meant jobs of short duration and uncertain future. A city which has many workers in occupations which cannot be counted on to provide steady, year-round employment—construction work, farming, amusement and recreation are among the least reliable—can expect relatively poor retail business, and high public welfare costs, in off seasons and in depression times.⁸ Their predictions for the Sacramento of 1960 were for moderate growth, perhaps 150,000 in the city and 300,000 in the county by 1960. (Actual figures were 191,000 in the city and 500,000 in the county.) The chamber’s study also called for new spending to account for future growth: "They can start building the necessary facilities for 1960’s population and industry today, so as to not throttle the city’s growth by sheer lack of lebensbraum.⁹ Shopping areas, convention centers, tourist attractions and hotels were recommended projects. Freeways, parking structures and removal of railroad grade crossings were also proposed. The study repeatedly insisted on the interdependence of regional economies, using the phrase every human being depends on every other human being." However, the human beings of the West End, the cannery workers and migrant laborers, were not mentioned as part of the Sacramento of 1960.

In 1953, the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Sacramento sponsored a new study, titled Analysis of Potential Commercial Expansion: A Study of Present and Future Needs for Land to Permit Central Area Commercial Development in Sacramento’s West End. This study highlighted the decline of agricultural jobs from 1940 to 1950, from nearly 12 percent of the metropolitan area’s workforce to 6.5 percent, with the largest growth in public administration, a job field so small before 1940 that it was lumped into the category of All Others, growing from 13.4 percent of the workforce to 22.9 percent in 1950. Growth of a recession-proof, government-funded workforce and shrinking of the seasonal, fluctuating agricultural workforce was seen as the key to future economic stability. Forecasts suggested continued drops in agricultural employment, with more jobs in construction, manufacturing and service industries, and continued growth in public employment. Growth in many of these sectors was considered a given because of federally funded job centers like military bases and contractors, a major new employment sector for Sacramento.

In order to be ready for the expected wave of postwar growth, the report urged dramatic changes to Sacramento’s business district. Downtown’s inflexible layout and lack of ample parking, due to its design before the age of the automobile, were identified as serious limitations. Without a much larger commercial area and dramatically more parking, downtown Sacramento faced losing most of its retail business to suburban shopping centers. The study proposed expansion of Sacramento’s central business district into the redevelopment zone to serve residents of Sacramento’s suburbs and outlying job centers, to better compete with the suburbs. Comparison with the 1929 Bartholomew & Associates study of the central business district showed that parking occupied a much greater space than in 1929, while residential use shrank to almost a quarter of its 1929 acreage. This suggested, without directly stating, that residential uses were less welcome in an expanded business district. As with the 1946 guide, the residents of the nearby neighborhoods, the most likely candidates for business district expansion, were not mentioned.¹⁰

SACRAMENTO’S COLD WAR TRANSFORMATION IN INDUSTRY, ADMINISTRATION AND EDUCATION

The Second World