A Fond Farewell to Oddball City

They call this “River City,” but the choicest piece of downtown riverfront property is a parking lot. And the river is walled off from view. The biggest and most heavily promoted civic/charity event of the year is the annual Pig Bowl tailgate party and football game between police and sheriff’s deputies.

Goodby, Utopia.

After more than a dozen years, it’s time to leave the state capital. Sacramento is at once one of California’s most livable cities, and one of its more frustrating. It is not unlike other provincial state capitals across the country: small, pleasant hamlets suffering the residence of fractious legislatures and burgeoning bureaucracies. It is a city where, at this moment, a controversial downtown mall is being ripped out even before the debt of building it is retired. This is to make way for a controversial light-rail transit dreamline that was over budget and behind schedule almost on conception.

Barely 12 years after 22 people were killed in the crash of an airplane into an ice-cream parlor, one of the worst air-ground disasters in state history, the planning commission has approved a new ice-cream shop for the same area at the terminus of the Executive Airport runway.

Sacramento is one of the last sizable congregations of people in the nation without cable television. Not that the citizens don’t want it; it’s just that the city fathers have made so many demands on cable companies for extraneous civic goodies (like requiring them to plant trees) that nobody can afford to build the system. “We don’t want just more television,” the head of the city’s cable commission says defensively and incongruously.

Even civic boosters have to wonder why this city of government is so--shall we say--oddly governed. In a recent interview with the Sacramento Bee, Mayor Anne Rudin revealed more than she may have wanted in responding to criticisms: “Those of us who make policy have made the right decisions. But for some reason we weren’t getting the total picture.” Anyway, she explained, at least City Hall was trying: “If we did absolutely nothing at all we would have no problems.”

Perhaps this helps explain such tales as the one about the convention hotel. During the last few years a downtown convention center was built, and the only major hotel, the nearby Senator, was converted into an office building. Then a new convention hotel was approved for a site 10 blocks away.

Meanwhile, the city renovated old, derelict homes into tourist sites, and police and retailers shepherded the displaced derelicts into the mall connecting the new hotel and convention center. Welcome, conventioneers! Now the city has purchased some property and is offering multimillion-dollar subsidies for someone to build another convention hotel across the street from the original Senator Hotel/office building.

Government foibles, however, no matter how maddening, have not spoiled the basic easy and enjoyable life style of the capital. The meandering miles of the American River Parkway are a wilderness gem preserved in the middle of booming suburban growth. And I would argue that Corti Bros. grocers cannot be topped anywhere in the West. They offer everything from $160 one-cup measures of French vinegars to personalized assistance in picking $2 worth of cheese.

Because of its relatively affluent and young population, as well as its isolated television market, Sacramento is one of the nation’s most heavily used test markets for new products. That means that the tastes of residents here have a disproportionate influence in deciding what kind of new beer or chewing gum or whatever will be (or won’t be) offered elsewhere in the country in the months ahead. And a new generation of restaurants is beginning to belie the old cliche that the best thing about Sacramento is that it is only two hours from San Francisco’s eating establishments.

Then again, Sacramento is within comfortable cruising reach of great art, theater, gambling, skiing, sailing, hunting, fishing, diving, rafting and mountaineering. And for just this reason it may remain content not to aspire to be the Big League City that government social-climbers want. Sacramento may save what it can of itself for itself.