Anxiously, City of Napa Braces for Jolt of Prosperity

Few of the 5 million tourists who crowd the Napa Valley each year to enjoy wine and gourmet meals ever visit the city that bears the valley’s name, a 15-minute drive south of the vineyards and a world away.

Home to the grape pickers and cork makers, the waitresses and housekeepers who keep the inns and wineries up the road running, the city of Napa is best known outside the valley for its tendency to flood when the Napa River overflows.

There are no bistros or wine tasting rooms here. But there are eateries like the Butter Cream Bakery, where biscuits and gravy have been bestsellers for 50 years and the hot-pink vinyl booths never went out of style. Most people have been glad to see the tour buses that ply California 29 pass the city by.

“The wine culture is a snob culture,” said Harry Martin, who has lived in Napa for nearly 30 years. “These people are meat-and-potatoes people.”

Robert Mondavi is determined to change all that.

The 84-year-old vintner who helped make Napa Valley synonymous with fine winemaking in America says he wants to do for the city of Napa what he did for the northern valley. Bring tourists. Lots of them.

Mondavi is investing a fortune to transform Napa into an international arts and cultural center, a showplace of all that Wine Country has come to mean.

So far, he has sunk $7 million into his pet project, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts. His plans for a riverfront center in downtown Napa include an amphitheater for concerts, exhibits on the history of food and wine, wine tasting, renowned chefs offering cooking courses, and a gourmet restaurant serving vegetables harvested from the gardens outside.

Mondavi also has donated $6 million for a residential art school to be built across the river and linked to the center by footbridge, and pledged $2 million to help transform the city’s historic opera house into a performing arts center.

When he is through, Mondavi promises, “Napa will be a shining light to the world.”

Fund-Raising Campaign

The wine baron’s plans have some fellow vintners grumbling that he is bent on luring even more crowds to a valley that already is California’s second-most-popular tourist attraction after Disneyland. But Mondavi has gathered chefs Julia Child and Alice Waters behind his efforts and launched a massive fund-raising campaign that he says is halfway to its goal of $40 million for the new center.

“Some of my fellow vintners thought I was crazy,” Mondavi acknowledged during an interview at his Oakdale winery. “Up Valley never had anything to do with Down Valley. And they never had anything to do with us. I thought: Why not do something to bring Up Valley and Down Valley together?”

Napa, Mondavi said, “is not much of a city now--downtown is almost like a morgue. But when we build something outstanding, it will attract people.”

The vintner’s vision both thrills and frightens people here. Many say they want a piece of the prosperity that has flowed north for two decades to towns such as St. Helena and Oakdale.

But some fear that outside investors will remake their town into a “Mondaviland” that caters to the wealthy and worldly. Where then, they ask, will the valley’s working folks live?

“There is a forgotten segment living in this valley,” said Dan Corsello, executive director of a coalition representing 40 of the city’s nonprofit agencies. “People think of Napa and think: wineries, ambience. But we have poor people here too, and they have to live somewhere.

“People are getting interested in this town, starting to buy up property and put in upscale stuff. That means that the poor could get squeezed out.”

The city, population 70,000, is home to more than half of Napa County’s residents. It is the county seat, and many residents work at government offices. Others hold jobs at the wineries, or commute to larger, out-of-valley cities such as Vallejo and Santa Rosa for work. The city’s average household income was $49,674 in 1995, which is less than the county average.

About 8% of Napa’s residents live below the federal poverty line, and officials say there is already a chronic shortage of housing for low-income residents.

“The city of Napa and developers have not created moderate [-income] housing,” said Jeff Redding, the Napa County planner. “As this whole thing develops, it will push people even harder.”

Concern that Mondavi’s plans will transform this town were further heightened in March, after county voters approved a $220-million federal flood control project. Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers plans to solve the flooding problems that have plagued Napa since the town was founded during the Gold Rush.

The corps intends to tear out the current flood control system to try to tame the 55-mile Napa River by returning it to something resembling its natural state. Dikes and levees will be removed as part of the largest public works project ever undertaken in the valley. Below Napa, 600 acres will be returned to wetlands. In the city, bridges will be demolished and rebuilt higher above the flood level.

The flood project, coupled with Mondavi’s plans, has some Napa residents worrying that small-town life is coming to an end.

“We’re really at a crossroads,” said Redding, who lives in the city of Napa. “It’s certainly going to be a different place, and these are people who feel threatened by change.”

At the Butter Cream Bakery, residents shook their heads on a recent afternoon as they contemplated Mondavi’s estimate that the American Center will bring 300,000 tourists a year to downtown Napa after opening in 2001.

“I moved here in 1930,” said Harold Banks, who over the years has grown grapes, flown planes and ranched in the valley. “It was a nice little town then. You’d wave at your neighbors. You knew everyone. The old-time Napans don’t like this tourism business. It helps the businesspeople, that’s all.”

Martin, a City Council member, says that he joined his colleagues last month in voting to improve traffic flow and landscape roads leading to the American Center, but not without trepidation.

“The night we voted for [the Arts Center], I said that this was the death of a town and the birth of a city,” said Martin, who also owns a weekly newspaper called the Napa Sentinel.

But Martin, Corsello and other residents say they realize that their city could not remain untouched forever by the valley’s booming tourist trade.

Just 90 minutes north of San Francisco, the valley is a popular day trip for visiting conventioneers and an easy weekend getaway for people from the Bay Area. In recent years, Silicon Valley millionaires have been snapping up homes on the northern end of the valley.

Mondavi plans to break ground on his center next summer, and private investors are bringing proposals for downtown developments to the city Planning Department at a pace that has not been seen in decades. Along the river, there are plans to turn a three-story, turn-of-the-century brick mill into a retail center housing an open-air market, boutiques and restaurants. A small hotel is on the drawing board, along with an office and restaurant complex.

Mondavi’s plans are the catalyst for it all, his supporters say.

“Bob’s vision was that this was the city that had the room for the center and the need for revitalization. He saw that this city could help take the pressure of tourism off the real gems of the valley, its vineyards,” said Moira Johnston Block, an author who founded Friends of the Napa River, a group that lobbied hard for flood control measures.

Block said the new projects will do what city redevelopment efforts, which started in the late 1960s, never accomplished--focus downtown Napa on the river and make it an attraction for townsfolk and visitors.

“Some people do fear the loss of the old Napa,” she said. “It is true, it will not be the old Napa. But the old Napa died when the city tore out the old buildings downtown and abandoned it for the suburbs. It has been a hanging-on kind of town ever since.”

Historic Downtown Buildings Razed

Today, downtown Napa is dominated by an anonymous-looking shopping mall anchored by a Mervyn’s department store. The river borders downtown on the north and the east, but the city’s commercial center has faced away from the waterway since the early decades of the century, when trucks and trains replaced the river as the preferred transport systems.

After railroads and highways were built, the river “was deemed useless,” Block said. In the 1970s, redevelopment planners tore down many of the long-abandoned, historic brick buildings on the river’s west bank. They were replaced with the mall and hulking concrete parking structures that most everyone in town seems to loathe.

The flood control project calls for restoring hundreds of acres east of the river, just across from the heart of downtown, to a marsh.

A more beautiful river, Block and others said, will serve as a dramatic backdrop for Mondavi’s new center and the new restaurants, boutiques and hotels in the works.

“East of the river, you will have egrets and blue herons rising from the land. On the other side, 150 feet away, you will have one of the most dynamic, festive, people places in the nation,” Block said.

“Down home Napa and upscale Napa will come together in a few square blocks, looking out on the thing that unifies them all--a beautiful river.”