It’s Hot but Not a Place in the Sun

The big thinkers here renamed the airport a few years back, scrapping “metropolitan” for a far grander term--”international.”

The goal was to make Sacramento seem more cosmopolitan, but one county supervisor smelled trouble. It’s premature, he warned. People will make fun of us.

He was right, because reality has trailed far behind wishful thinking in Sacramento. You can’t fly nonstop to Seoul or London or even Mexico City from here. In fact, you can’t fly nonstop to New York.

Like a youngest child forever pursuing a gifted sibling, Sacramento is on a perpetual mission to prove itself. The journey is grueling. Disappointments abound.

Hunched conspicuously on California’s dun-colored central plain, Sacramento lacks San Diego’s beaches, L.A.’s glitz, San Jose’s dot-coms and San Francisco’s bewitching appeal. Plunk it down in another state and it might have some municipal muscle. In California, it’s the puny kid lost in the crowd.

Next month, however, the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials will be held here, giving Sacramento a morsel of national fame. The event also marks the launch of a marketing campaign to rid the capital city of its image as a hot, dull backwater full of government drones.

The make-over is part of Sacramento’s struggle to reinvent itself yet again. In the mid-1800s, it got on the map as the gateway to gold country. Next it became tomato central, a hotbed of agriculture. Then came life as a government town. And now?

“We believe we’re evolving into a mature metropolis,” says Al Gianini, executive director of the Sacramento Area Commerce and Trade Organization. “We just have to convince everybody else of that.”

It’s no easy sell. Despite its delightful, leafy neighborhoods, twin rivers and wealth of historical landmarks, Sacramento is viewed by many Californians as little more than a steamy pit stop on the way to Lake Tahoe. Lakers coach Phil Jackson perpetuated the reigning stereotype when he called Sacramento Kings fans “redneck” and “semicivilized” during the NBA playoffs.

While civic leaders complain about such jabs and fret that travel books shortchange Sacramento’s assets, everyday folks here don’t mind too much. Indeed, one nickname--the Big Easy Chair--may sum up Sacramento best. Settle in and it’s hard to get up. Move here and the region’s subtle charms--combined with heat-inspired inertia--might compel you to stay.

A few facts about Sacramento--population nearly 400,000 but the hub of a region inhabited by almost 2 million--say a lot about its indigenous spirit.

Per capita participation in softball is tops in the nation. Gardening is pursued with religious fervor. Sacramento residents, one university researcher found, are less likely to wear wristwatches than their counterparts in other cities. It’s a diverse place, and race relations are pretty darn good.

Unlike San Francisco, where civic snobbery is embedded in the DNA, Sacramento is the land of the plain-spoken and unpretentious. Crusaders, grandstanders and the conspicuously rich or educated are viewed with suspicion. There is no large, moneyed elite; there are few class barriers to social and political participation.

“The West Wing” actor Timothy Busfield, who runs a local theater company and moved here in 1986, offers this assessment: “We get up, we go to work, we go home. It’s very Midwestern--a grounded place, stable and steady.”

Busfield’s agent called him “totally nuts” when he left L.A. for Sacramento, but the actor loves it. Still, he laments that the city is not more committed to the arts. He said that when starting his theater company, “I begged door to door . . . and couldn’t get $10. We’ve made headway, but I had to spend half a million to get the thing going.”

Other critics--many of them newcomers from bigger cities--note an absence of energy, risk-taking and high standards, characteristics that they see reflected in the mundane architecture and slow pace of redevelopment along the riverfront and downtown. Perhaps, they suggest, it is the agrarian roots, a lingering provincialism.

“I think people have been told for so long that this is a cow town that they really believe it,” says Andrea Kincaid, an architect originally from New York.

Another frustrated transplant, a developer who asked not to be named, is less generous: “My theory is, there are certain cities that are magnets for people who are really doing something or going somewhere. This is a place people leave to go to those other places.”

It is true that, on the whole, Sacramento people rarely voice noisy passion or grand ambitions for their city. Many say they enjoy living here, but when asked why, they give a curious reason--its proximity to more appealing places like San Francisco, the Sierra and Napa Valley.

Rob Kerth, a city councilman running for mayor, acknowledges that location, location, location is a common refrain. It suggests that Sacramento is nowheresville, but Kerth insists that “there are great and exciting things happening here. We’ve got real momentum now.”

Big-City Amenities

Sacramento’s amenities indisputably are multiplying. The symphony may be dead and the ballet uses mostly recorded music, but there’s interesting theater, free rock concerts in city parks, thriving farmers’ markets and an eclectic art community.

Downtown’s sputtering renaissance is finally nearing critical mass, with an expanded convention center, public art projects and a stylish mall anchoring the effort. Several office towers, a megaplex theater, a sprawling campus of new state buildings and a 500-room Sheraton are in the works.

Affordable housing is within easy reach of downtown, and there are improving schools and abundant parks, including a spectacular 23-mile greenbelt and bike trail along the American River.

And while the region has stumbled in its efforts to draw big-league baseball or football, a Triple-A baseball stadium--home to the River Cats--opened in May to rave reviews and sellout crowds.

While such perks enhance the quality of life, they have so far done little to alter the outside world’s opinion of the place. Nobody knows this better than Gianini, who travels the globe touting the region’s virtues and begging companies to move here.

Within California, he battles Sacramento’s image as a hot, flat, boring, overgrown farm town. He concedes only one point--the heat. Perhaps home-grown writer Joan Didion put it best: “August,” she wrote, “comes on not like a month but like an affliction.” (The winter fog is dreadful too.)

Outside the state, Gianini’s challenge is more basic--he has to grab a map and point out where Sacramento is.

“Even my mother calls [from Connecticut] every time there’s an earthquake in Southern California,” he says wistfully. “We’re just lost in the shadows of the Bay Area and L.A.”

It wasn’t always that way. A century and a half ago, Sacramento--the western terminus for the Pony Express--was a boomtown, a magnet for fortune seekers drawn by the discovery of gold in the nearby foothills. News of the strike drained San Francisco’s population and deposited it in Sacramento, then a dusty outpost of 150 hardy souls, virtually overnight. The boom helped Sacramento pull off another coup several years later, when it got the nod as California’s capital.

Playing host to state government gives Sacramento an identity that many second-tier cities lack. It also has meant a stable employment base, both in government and in natural spinoffs like lobbying and fund-raising. And from time to time, a political scandal serves up a special brand of entertainment. The current travails of state Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush, for example, have created a buzz all over town.

But life as a capital town has downsides as well. State government pays no property tax, and need not get the city’s OK on land-use decisions.

One consequence can be seen on Capitol Mall, the wide boulevard leading from the west straight to the white-domed home of the Legislature. The street has the scale and grandeur to be a western Champs Elysees, a majestic gateway to the city. But it is blighted by ugly squat block buildings birthed by the state.

Being ground zero for government also has given Sacramento something of a bipolar personality. Phil Isenberg, a former Sacramento mayor and assemblyman, notes that “for the people who work in and around the Capitol building, it’s the center of the universe. But for the rest of Sacramento, it’s a place you tour with your grandkids. It’s hardly on the radar screen.”

That contrast has grown more stark as Sacramento’s economy has diversified. Twenty-five years ago, government--including three now-closed military bases--accounted for one of two jobs in the region. Now the figure is about one in four.

High-Tech Future

The weaning process has not been easy. The base closures that began a decade ago, for example, cost the region more than 20,000 jobs.

To compensate, Sacramento did what many cities do--plotted a future in high technology. Hewlett-Packard Co.’s opening of a plant in suburban Roseville was an initial drawing card, luring Intel Corp. and others.

Those early successes were propelled forward, oddly enough, by natural disaster. After the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, Bay Area companies went hunting for seismically stable places to house their worldwide data centers. Many--including the Gap, McKesson Corp. and American President Lines--wound up in the capital.

Today, Sacramento is home to massive fiber optic networks running along historic railroad right of ways. If you place a call to Tokyo from San Francisco, it is routed through here.

What’s missing are corporate headquarters, the cream of the crop, the prestige people who lead companies. Headquarters not only give a city the brainpower and talent that lead to spinoffs, they are also a source of big-dollar philanthropy, a commodity in short supply here.

Sacramento is home base for a few medium-size companies--Blue Diamond Almonds, Tower Records--but also has lost some headquarters to mergers in recent years. Concern over those losses--plus a critical shortage of engineers and white collar workers--spawned the marketing effort, which aims to sell Sacramento as an “urban frontier” ripe for those who want to “mine their future in the technological revolution.”

So says Alicia Ritter, a public relations consultant working on the image campaign. The effort will debut during the Olympic trials, and mainly targets the Bay Area, because 60% of Sacramento newcomers arrive from there.

“We want to accelerate that migration,” she says, “and convince all those people trapped in the Silicon Valley rat race that they can come here and be a pioneer on the leading edge.”

Gianini added this to cinch the deal: “If you move here, you can keep your 49er tickets and be an hour closer to your cabin at Tahoe.”

As it strives for big-league status, Sacramento faces the typical problems besetting many California cities. Traffic is getting bad and people seem unwilling to get out of their cars. Air quality is poor--it is the 11th smoggiest area in the nation--and getting worse, the result of the basin topography, the burning of rice fields and proliferating automobiles.

Sprawl is creeping east up the foothills and west toward the Bay Area, gobbling up the flat, fertile farmland where apples and rice and tomatoes once grew. The six-county region around the capital is one of the fastest-growing in the country, expected to add another million people over the next 20 years.

There also is a lingering tension between go-go newcomers and those who like the place the way it is. This was reflected in last year’s contest, sponsored by the Sacramento Bee newspaper, to create a fitting landmark for the city--a sort of inland Golden Gate Bridge.

Surprisingly, Sacramento’s agricultural past and much loathed nickname--”Sacratomato”--inspired many of the suggestions. There were tomato dirigibles, tomatoes on top of skyscrapers, even a giant glowing tomato.

The judges, however, sniffed at such suggestions. Says one: “It seems disrespectful to me. It would reinforce our status as a second-tier city. . . . This landmark, whatever it is, should advertise Sacramento, and move us up to the front row.”

The challenges are daunting, but Sacramento’s leaders take time to celebrate small successes with gusto. When the Hard Rock Cafe announced that it would open a branch here, everybody went hog wild; the Bee decided it was Page 1 news worthy of a banner headline.

And in April, the day after a recent episode of “The West Wing” mentioned Sacramento, a reporter for the local NBC affiliate raced over to interview Busfield. The red-haired actor was rehearsing his theater troupe’s current play, but declared himself happy to go on camera for the hometown crew.

The interview didn’t last long, and closed with this exchange.

Reporter: “Can we expect to hear more about Sacramento on the show in the future?”

Busfield: “I doubt it.”

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The Sacramento Story

Sacramento is the Spanish word for “holy sacrament.” The city is 90 miles northeast of San Francisco, at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers.

History: It began in 1839 as a land grant awarded to Swiss adventurer John Sutter by California’s Mexican governor. It boomed after the discovery of gold 30 miles away in 1848, serving as a supply center for miners. It became the state capital in 1854.

Population: 396,200 in the city, 1.9 million in the region

Median home price: $156,000 (state median is $241,000)

Median household income: $36,490 (state median is $44,620)

Racial mix: White 56%, Latino 15%, Black 14%, Asian 13%

Professional sports teams: Sacramento Kings (National Basketball Assn.), Sacramento Monarchs (Women’s National Basketball Assn.)

Nicknames: River City, Sacratomato

Miscellany: One university study found that Sacramento residents talked slower, walked slower and were less likely to wear wristwatches than their counterparts in other cities.

* Hosts country’s biggest Dixieland jazz festival.