[Session 1, July 18, 2007]
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
PRINCE:
Hello, my name is Lisa Prince, and today is Wednesday, July 18, 2007.
I’m here at the Sacramento Archives and Museum Collection Center in
Sacramento, California, on behalf of the City of Sacramento’s Historical
[Old] Sacramento Oral History Project. Today I’ll be talking with Jim
Henley, the manager of the Sacramento Archives for our first interview.
Good morning, Jim.
HENLEY:
Good morning, Lisa
PRINCE:
How are you today?
HENLEY:
It’s an exciting day – let’s just get on with it.
PRINCE:
Okay. Tell me when and where you were born.
HENLEY:
I was born on June 14, 1944, in Sacramento, California.
PRINCE:
Oh, you were born in Sacramento.
HENLEY:
Didn’t grow up here, but I was born here, yes.
PRINCE:
Okay, and where did you grow up?
HENLEY:
Mostly south in the valley, east of Modesto, a little town called Oakdale.
PRINCE:
Oakdale. What was that like growing up there?
HENLEY:
A little farm town.
PRINCE:
A farm town, did you live on a farm?
HENLEY:
I did live on a farm, yes.
PRINCE:
And what did you farm there?
HENLEY:
We had nut crops, walnuts and almonds, and my grandfather, who owned
the place originally was a chicken farmer.
PRINCE:
Oh, so there were chickens there too.
HENLEY:
Way too many chickens.
PRINCE:
Way too many … how do you feel about chickens today?
HENLEY:
Well I like to eat them only because it does them more harm than me.
[Laughter]
PRINCE:
You hope …
HENLEY:
I was not very fond of being around chickens.
PRINCE:
So, what were some of your childhood interests, hobbies, or things that
fascinated you while you were growing up in Oakdale?
HENLEY:
Well, I think probably the answer to that lies in the fact that we were in a
rural setting, there were no children my own age anywhere nearby, and it
was a pretty good hike to anybody’s place. So, it really was – and my
brothers, I have two older brothers, they’re six and eleven years older than
I am.
PRINCE:
Oh, what are their names?
HENLEY:
Well, the middle brother’s name is Bill, or William, and the older brother
is Ronald. And so consequently it’s sort of a self-contained childhood for
a large measure and you know, the family is fairly literate certainly. My
mother was a teacher and my father was an engineer. We were encouraged
to read a lot as children. I read extensively and I kind of lost myself in
books at a fairly early age.
PRINCE:
What did your mother teach?
HENLEY:
She started out in a one-room school.
PRINCE:
In Oakdale?
HENLEY:
No, actually, about thirty miles from there. It was her parents’ farm that
we moved to – and then eventually, she settled on fourth grade.
PRINCE:
Okay. So what kinds of stories were you interested in when you were
reading as a child? Was it just all sorts of things, or were there particular
types of books that you liked more than others?
HENLEY:
[Laughs] Actually it’s fairly, pretty universal what I would read. I did
take as a child quite a bit to world geography, I loved science books, I
loved travel log kinds of books. I also have, always have had a long
fascination with literature and particularly mystery, science fiction, but I
was reading classics at a pretty early age.
PRINCE:
So, that brings me to my next question concerning your education – did
you go to a one-room school when you were a child?
HENLEY:
No, no. Interestingly enough Oakdale had a – Oakdale was not a small
school district – they were one of those we used to call union schools.
They moved all – long before I was born – they moved all these little
school districts into one. So the grammar school districts – some of the
kids traveled an hour and a half or two hours on the bus to get to the
schools. And we had big schools – in the school district I was in there was
probably four, maybe five schools in a town that was only ten thousand at
most, or probably less than that when I was a child, maybe five-thousand
when I was a child. The high school had a -- the high school graduating
class was about a thousand – so it’s a pretty good-sized school.
PRINCE:
That is a good-sized school.
HENLEY:
A good-sized school.
PRINCE:
So were you one of the children who had to travel for hours on a bus in the
early days?
HENLEY:
No. My travel time on the bus was relatively short, relative to others. I
probably had a twenty-minute ride.
PRINCE:
Oh, that’s not bad. So now, when did you come back to Sacramento?
HENLEY:
Well, after high school I spent a semester, maybe it was year – I guess it
was a year, in junior college. I had done some extension class work
through the University of California, actually when I still in high school,
then I spent a year in junior college – that’s in spite of the fact of having a
scholarship to go to Santa Clara, which I didn’t want to …
PRINCE:
Why not?
HENLEY:
Actually, well, I had a girl who I was interested in, and she wasn’t there,
that’s why I went to junior college.
PRINCE:
Oh, I see …
HENLEY:
Then, that scholarship was gone, the opportunity was gone. My father’s
mother, my grandmother wanted me to go the Stanford – she was, as I
understand it, the first woman to graduate from Stanford University.
PRINCE:
Oh, what was her name?
HENLEY:
Stella Henley.
PRINCE:
Stella Henley. When did she graduate from Stanford?
HENLEY:
Well, it was right around the turn of the century, thereabouts, I don’t know
exactly the year now without looking into it. At any rate, she always had a
long time relationship with the university and she was willing to pay for
the room, board, and tuition and the whole thing if I would go. And it was
a dumb move, I should have done that, but I didn’t.
PRINCE:
So you went to junior college, where was that?
HENLEY:
In Modesto. Now it’s called Yosemite Junior College, but it was Modesto
Junior College. Then I did a summer school session at Cal, and then I’m
still chasing a girlfriend …
PRINCE:
Same girl?
HENLEY:
Yes, same girl. CSUS – that’s where I went after that and then I finished
there and then I went into graduate school there.
PRINCE:
So now, what year was this when you went to CSUS – do you remember,
approximately?
HENLEY:
1963, I believe.
PRINCE:
And what were you studying there, Jim?
HENLEY:
Ahh, that’s a good … I took history and anthropology, and I actually
ended up with enough units to have a degree in either one, but they
wouldn’t let us do that.
PRINCE:
They wouldn’t?
HENLEY:
They wouldn’t let us do that at the time.
PRINCE:
You couldn’t do a double major?
HENLEY:
You had to have a major and a minor, and then you could have another
major but it couldn’t be your minor – at least that’s the way it was
explained to me. I actually kind of wanted to get a degree in archeology
and a degree in history, but I had to pick one and I took the history.
PRINCE:
History. So it was archeology, or anthropology?
HENLEY:
Archeology was within the anthropology.
PRINCE:
I see. Did you find that that was helpful when you started some of the
projects in Old Sacramento?
HENLEY:
Oh, it gave me a definite bent towards that.
PRINCE:
It’s definitely a good mix.
HENLEY:
Yeah, it was helpful, it was not the cause for my getting a job in Old
Sacramento by any means, but it was helpful when I had the job and
certainly in later years it was very helpful because I managed a number of
archeological digs, I supervised contracts with archeologists.
PRINCE:
Was that in Sacramento, Old Sacramento?
HENLEY:
Yes.
PRINCE:
So – I’m going to go back just a little bit. When you came back to
Sacramento – that was after you did your summer at Cal, and then you
came back to CSUS, so you moved here by yourself, you weren’t with
your family, did your family move back to Sacramento?
HENLEY:
Oh no, no. No they stayed in Oakdale.
PRINCE:
What was you impression of Sacramento then, what was it like in the early
sixties?
HENLEY:
Well, you know it wasn’t like it was coming back to a place that I didn’t
know because as a child, we would come back every once in a while, and
so there were certain things that I had familiarity with, so it was a familiar
place to come back to.
[phone rings]
The whole adventure of coming back here – I didn’t have much of a
feeling for the town because I moved into the dormitories of the college
and it was isolated, it was sort of – there was Sac State and then there was
the rest of the world. I mean, where did you go if you didn’t have a car at
the time, about as far as you went was Shakey’s, you know, or you went to
the river, that was about as far away from the campus as you went. It was
probably in my second year there when I got a car that I started really
getting around town and seeing a lot of the areas. Sacramento was an
interesting town in the 1960s. There still was a downtown, though not as
it was maybe in the fifties, but there still was a downtown, people still
shopping downtown, most of the department stores had some presence
downtown and it was kind of an exciting place to go do that. There were a
couple of fairly substantial shopping centers that had come up – the ones
out in the north area like, at El Camino and Watt Avenue. They were a
little further than I would have normally traveled to so I didn’t really know
much about them, on the other hand, I did get as far as Town and Country
– which I went to quite a few times.
PRINCE:
Wasn’t that the first shopping center in the …
HENLEY:
Recorded as being the first one, along with Southgate, yeah. And it was
pretty exciting, I kind of liked the place because it was full of interesting
old stuff.
PRINCE:
Artifacts?
HENLEY:
Yeah, artifacts. And I later found out a lot about how that stuff came to
be but I didn’t know then. It just looked like it was an interesting place
and they had interesting shops and so we’d get out there. And then
gravitate downtown. Downtown was still where for us students it was
where the action was. I can remember when I was a senior, there were a
lot of students living in the dormitory who, you know, had kind of
challenges – they were of drinking age and so how could they drink their
way through town in bars going from A to Z.
PRINCE:
Oh? Were there a lot of bars?
HENLEY:
Oh, there were a lot of bars.
PRINCE:
From A to Z, huh?
HENLEY:
All the way to the Zebra Club, yeah
[Laughter]
PRINCE:
So, did this … I guess downtown, was it larger than it is today – I mean in
terms of what’s considered downtown – for shopping, or theaters, or
restaurants, or would you say it’s bigger now, within that old city grid?
HENLEY:
Oh, the commercial area is bigger now than it was then, but the activity
was more compact along J Street and K Street, and not as vertical as we
see the streets now with the high-rise buildings – there were three or four
buildings of significant height, you know, maybe five. There was the
cathedral, which still loomed pretty high, and the capital that showed up
and the Elks building and the 926 J building, and then you’d go down
towards the waterfront, there would be the California Fruit building which
stood up fairly high. Those were the tall buildings and everything else fell
below that. And people who worked downtown, shopped downtown, and
you could see it at lunchtime, they would move out at five o clock they
would move out into K Street and shop, before they went home.
PRINCE:
So, when you say that they shopped, was there, for example, what was the
department store?
HENLEY:
Weinstocks and Breuners were the two big ones but there were a number
of them – there was the Roos Atkins, there was the …
PRINCE:
Woolworth’s?
HENLEY:
Woolworth’s was down there, Kress was down there, Sears was down
there until they moved out eventually, which was actually just a little
before my time.
PRINCE:
Were there also things like bakeries or little markets, and fish markets, or
those sorts of things that people …
HENLEY:
I don’t remember too much of bakeries and I don’t remember a fish
market downtown, but there was a big fish market on Ninth Street, Ninth
or Tenth, and T or U, called Capital Fish Market. But I don’t … there
were a lot restaurants downtown, seriously congregated right around K
Street – not like we know restaurants today – Sacramento’s loaded with
restaurants today, there’s a restaurant at every corner, but there were a few
old mainstay restaurants downtown that you certainly went to, you know,
the furthest out you probably went was Rosemont, on Folsom Boulevard
just above Alhambra.
PRINCE:
Now is that gone?
HENLEY:
The building is still there. That became, I think, Andiamo’s.
PRINCE:
Okay, I think that’s changing hands again.
HENLEY:
I believe it’s closed right at the moment.
PRINCE:
So it sounds like there was more of a lively type of community there in
Old Town, where, I mean in downtown, whereas I think after the urban
renewal projects with all the state buildings going in and all of the
clearing, it’s really changed that type of culture of downtown.
HENLEY:
Yeah. When I started to go downtown, redevelopment was already
starting to have really significant impacts.
PRINCE:
I wanted to ask you about that.
HENLEY:
They were beginning to clear a lot of spaces, and yes, one of the first
things to disappear was the residential component of downtown. And it
would be easy to say that redevelopment displaced low income or
unemployed people out of the West End, but they would displace more
than that. There were actually a lot of apartments that were – I wouldn’t
call upscale by our standards today, but they were certainly upper working
class and lower middle class apartments and they went.
PRINCE:
Were these in the West End or were these just sort of scattered in the …
HENLEY:
Well, they went up as far as Twenty-first Street, but certainly the most
famous of that group was the Merriam Apartments that was torn down for
the Convention Center.
PRINCE:
Which we have some of here in the archives.
HENLEY:
We have one apartment here, dismantled, yes.
PRINCE:
So some of the large-scale clearing was happening when you came here at
this time, and you could see that. What did you think of that when you
first started noticing it?
HENLEY:
Well, the initial reaction was kind of exciting, ‘wow, look at this they’re
clearing and going like crazy’ but, you know, then I came to work down
here and as I watched year in and year out, the lots stayed empty lots. And
the only revenue they were generating was as surface parking – I parked in
many of those lots when I worked, several of them, and they were cheap
enough – the redevelopment gave almost free parking, of course you had
to worry about nails in your tires and things like that because you literally
were parking on the rubble of buildings that they demolished.
PRINCE:
Had torn down. So, now, did this happen quite a bit in those days? I
mean did they have plans for redeveloping some of these places that they
had torn down like the Merriam Apartments, and then those deals fell
through – why did that, why were those lots empty for so long?
HENLEY:
Well, before I was involved with the agency, or through the city, or any of
those things, it was clear the agency had adopted some master plans for
redevelopment. They didn’t tear buildings down before they had a
concept of what they wanted to do, but they may not have had a specific
plan. And a case in point – you could see the clearing was significantly
related to Capitol Mall first, and then over towards L and then K Street,
and then over to J Street. And it was between roughly Second or Third
Street up to Seventh Street – was the most seriously impacted – eventually
they would go on up K Street and work around where the Convention
Center is to clear space for that. I don’t know that until fairly recently
redevelopment went above Fifteenth Street, I think they stayed mostly
below Fifteenth Street, if not entirely until fairly recently. The earliest
projects were along Capitol Mall, which was M Street – got renamed
Capitol Mall to make it a little more attractive. The problem seemed to be
that the conceptual plan drove the agenda to clear the blocks and then once
they cleared the blocks, then it was a question of a specific plan, and
adopting that specific plan with a developer, and then became the game of
jockeying the government agencies – being the city or redevelopment –
and the developer over what each was going to do, and as far as lower K
Street was concerned, they went through a whole succession of developers
and plans emerged, and then the deal could never be consummated and so
then the plan would disappear. I used to watch those kinds of plans come
and go and I came to develop a sort of cynical term for it and I was always
eager to collect those plans and keep them because I considered them
almost history, they never really happened – they were dreams but never
really happened.
PRINCE:
Were there actual blueprints or renderings?
HENLEY:
Oh in many cases there were blueprints, but there were renderings,
certainly renderings. Blueprints, maybe lots of them never got to the point
of actually doing architectural drawings for the buildings.
PRINCE:
I see.
HENLEY:
And they worked with very large companies that were taking advantage of
redevelopment activities all across the country at that time, and there were
major companies – one of them was an outfit out of Los Angeles called
Kishman, another one was Reynolds – the Reynolds aluminum people –
some huge plans – later it would be Rockefellers, and there were plans for
building with them. But it always seemed to get back to what is reality
versus what is the dream and the city became so concerned about the –
called the ‘bombed out look’ – in downtown, that they started to say,
“Wait a minute, maybe we need to work with some local people and get
something done.”
PRINCE:
Because they would have more interest in seeing something actually go
through rather than …
HENLEY:
That’s right, and besides, they’re a little easier to get a hold of and shake
their body and say, we need to get this done, you know, and vice-versa,
they have a little more power on local government if you’re somebody
local. And so there was a combination of families that got together,
including Teicherts, who came in and said, “Listen, let’s put together a K
Street downtown development and they ultimately worked with the
agency and the city to build the multilevel, underground garage that goes
from L Street to J Street, and from Seventh Street to Fifth Street,
approximately, so that’s four square city blocks underground parking,
virtually. And then they built a shopping center on top of it, which went
from Seventh Street to Macy’s – at Fifth Street, Macy’s was a stand alone
project. And in part, in conjunction with that the agency redid the K Street
strip as a mall, a pedestrian mall from Seventh down to Fifth it was done
as part of a shopping complex, but before that from Fifth Street to Third
Street, or Fifth to Fourth, in front of Macy’s they hired a Los Angeles firm
to do a mall design. And I want to say it was Victor Gruen, but I’m not
sure that’s right.
PRINCE:
Now the city hired them to do the mall plans?
HENLEY:
The city and the Agency.
PRINCE:
And the Agency. [Redevelopment]
HENLEY:
And they put a very elegant one-block mall strip there with reflecting
pools and concrete seating benches, and sort of large, concrete animals
that kids could play on or ride, they were little sort of interesting little
hippos, and snakes, and various things for children – very nice, fanciful
sculpture, and it was a very attractive piece. The piece from Fifth Street to
Seventh Street along with the mall was quite different, but again, it was
reasonably tasteful. Then the city felt that the Convention Center and
Seventh Street – the distance between that was blighting fast, there was
nothing going on, so they decided a mall would revive it, they would build
a new mall in there. The council decided on an engineering firm in, I
think Kansas, to do the design, they weren’t an architectural firm, they
were an engineering firm …
PRINCE:
Was this for the pedestrian mall that they were …
HENLEY:
For the pedestrian mall from Seventh Street to what’s now the Convention
Center. And it was a major rip out of a traffic street, I mean there was
serious impact on the city. And then as the mall began to emerge, the
structures began to emerge, some people were appalled by what they were
seeing, and the city got pretty negative about it in the community, in fact
they frequently referred to the features as tank traps.
PRINCE:
What were they?
HENLEY:
Well, they were geometric, concrete shapes with waterfalls that came out
of pipes and there was one at the – by the cathedral that was down there,
and other than a few people that played in it occasionally, most of the time
people referred to it as an overflowing storm drain, or sewer, or … it just
didn’t appeal, it was very angular, very sharp. It was a lot of concrete.
Teichert poured all the concrete and I can remember one of – a senior
Teichert, Henry Teichert’s brother, Adolf. Adolf and I sat in a meeting
and he said, “It’s so embarrassing. We poured that concrete. It’s so ugly,
we’re so embarrassed.” And so they just really felt bad about it, and to
show you, even the city council – some of them – realized that this was a
huge mistake, a young councilman, who voted for it, who was gung ho for
this development – a guy by the name of Ralph Scurfield – and I’d known
Ralph for many, many years.
PRINCE:
He was a council member?
HENLEY:
He was a council member and a developer, a major developer in Old
Sacramento, involved in lots of historical activities. Ralph and I sat in a
meeting and he goes, “You know, we saw the plans and we didn’t realize
what we were approving.”
PRINCE:
Why didn’t they realize it?
HENLEY:
Well, I just don’t think they could understand what it was they were
seeing, they couldn’t visualize it as a three dimensional thing.
PRINCE:
I see, the drawing looked a lot better than real life …
HENLEY:
The drawing looked a lot better than real life, and he said, “You know,
that’s one of the worst decisions I ever made, when I was on the council.”
And I think he really believed that. It was one of the worst decisions he
ever made. So it was, it started out with bad reviews and it never got
better.
PRINCE:
And when was this put in?
HENLEY:
Late ‘60s.
PRINCE:
So how long did it stay there?
HENLEY:
It was torn out, I can’t say exactly, it was torn out, actually for light rail.
PRINCE:
In the eighties, maybe?
HENLEY:
Yeah, in the eighties.
PRINCE:
So it was there for about twenty years, how could people put up with it
that long?
[Laughter]
HENLEY:
Yeah it was pretty – and it received lots of criticism. Merchants continued
[complained], their businesses started to close because no one could park
in front of their stores. That was their excuse for why they were going out
of business, because no one could park there. And it’s true, it became a
backwater because there was no traffic going down the street, whether
they were parking there or not, there was no traffic anymore. And the
pedestrian traffic was pretty insignificant because usually people go down
malls to go from one place to another, and that’s not what the mall did. It
was just a mall that really wasn’t succeeding in attracting people to go
from one place to another. And it was not easy …
[End of Tape 1, Side A]
[Begin Tape 1, Side B]
PRINCE:
So the mall was not … really as attractive as it was hoped to be.
HENLEY:
Yeah, I mean people just simply couldn’t get across it, I mean it was
difficult to traverse from one side to the other. You had a path that didn’t
take you where you wanted to go. You wanted to go from that store to
that store but you had to go in a diagonal path out of your way to get
across, to come back, and so it was pretty unsatisfactory. And then of
course the architectural critics were pretty quick to point out it was done
by engineers, after all it wasn’t done by a real architect.
PRINCE:
Oh, okay. So the engineers were the ones who delivered the drawings and
everything to them and …they actually did that? Didn’t have a design
crew do it, or?
HENLEY:
Well, the engineers had a design crew, I’m sure. I don’t know … never
heard from the firm again – they’re in Kansas somewhere.
PRINCE:
Kansas.
[Laughter]
PRINCE:
So, that was one of the early urban renewal projects. It seems that the
very initial one was supposed to be, just maybe – I had read something
about two blocks, or maybe four blocks in the – you know closest to the
river, and then it was expanded to, I think, fifteen blocks, the Capital Mall
project and the riverfront project – so there were several of these projects
going on …
HENLEY:
The agency had gone through a number of project description changes
from the 1950s to the time I showed up which was in late 1965. The, and
I can’t give you an exact breakdown of the evolution of each of those
other than a general knowledge of what happened. You’re right, they had
a smaller project to begin with. The first project was really the Capital
Mall project, and they would give that a number, I sort of vaguely
remember it being called project 2-A, or something like that. Then I guess
there was some significant reason, in terms of acquiring federal money for
redevelopment, why you would either enlarge a project area, or create a
new project area, so you have these issues where 2-A gets expanded to
include, I believe the freeway right-of way, and Old Sacramento. But then
they redefined them as project 4, and then they had a project 3, and I never
did hear what project 1 was, I’m not sure there ever was a 1. [Laughter]
PRINCE:
I think 1 was the designation of the redevelopment area, which was the
two blocks in the very, west, west end – skid row – is what it was called,
and I wanted to ask you about that. What was your impression of that
area, what was considered skid row, or the slums?
HENLEY:
Old Sacramento was pretty, a pretty tough area below Seventh Street.
PRINCE:
Back in there, below Seventh …
HENLEY:
And to be honest, it probably was below Fifth Street for the most part, that
it was really kind of tough. The best example I can think of to illustrate
how tough it really was down there is my own experiences, and you know
this is 1965, this is not 1950s. In 1965, the first legitimate reason I had to
be in Old Sacramento for a project, a job – was as a student at Sac State. I
was given the opportunity to help save a building in Old Sacramento from
being demolished in lieu of taking a midterm for a class.
PRINCE:
Oh, that sounds like a good deal.
HENLEY:
It was a very good deal.
PRINCE:
Now was this when you were, had you met Dr. Aubrey Neasham at this
point?
HENLEY:
It was his class. That’s where I met him.
PRINCE:
Yeah, I wanted to hear about that …
HENLEY:
So I go down there and what’s the first thing I see when I get out of my
car on a Saturday morning? There are two guys, not more than twenty-five
feet away from me, going around in circle, one with a knife – fighting.
PRINCE:
And where was this?
HENLEY:
It was between Front and Second Street on J, at the alley. A big guy and a
little guy.
PRINCE:
With a knife.
HENLEY:
The big guy had the knife. Little guy killed the big guy with a pipe.
PRINCE:
And you saw this happen?
HENLEY:
Right in front of my eyes.
PRINCE:
Oh my goodness …
HENLEY:
I wasn’t twenty-five feet away from them. That’s my introduction to Old
Sacramento. On the other hand, I don’t consider the people who were
living down there to be nearly as dangerous sometimes as the people who
went into the area. As an employee of the city, the only time I was ever
threatened down there was by bottle hunters or diggers who were down
there to try and dig or somehow steal out of the area. I was never
threatened, I was never, I never even felt threatened by the people who
were living in the area.
PRINCE:
I see. So, were there any families living down there? Where there … I
know there were a lot of seasonal laborers, and then of course …
HENLEY:
Well I know by the statistics that there were some families down there, but
I honestly don’t have a memory of seeing a family unit down there.
Mostly it was single men, but the ones that you probably remember are the
women down there. Used to call them bag ladies because they frequently
would wear plastic bags.
PRINCE:
They wore the plastic bags?
HENLEY:
They’d wear the plastic bags, because they’d provide warmth.
PRINCE:
Were they homeless, or did they live in …
HENLEY:
Of course they were homeless. There were a few who lived in what we
would call flophouses in the West End. But sometimes they could afford a
room and sometimes they couldn’t. There were people who were living
under sidewalks, there were people who were living in the flophouses
themselves on a night by night basis, there were a few people who lived
long-term down there, who were working stiffs that were at the railroad
yards or someplace like that.
PRINCE:
So there were houses?
HENLEY:
No, there weren’t houses, they were more like apartments, or hotels that
were providing some services, and you know, it was all pretty substandard
stuff by the way we look at it now, you know, it might be a hotel room
with a hot plate that’s an apartment.
PRINCE:
Was it more like a warehouse district at that time, I mean if you were to go
there now, would you have seen the warehouses along the river where
now you have the docks?
HENLEY:
Well, Front Street had two rows of wooden warehouses that paralleled the
river between the river there were two sets of warehouse structures, and
there was a railroad track running between them.
PRINCE:
Now was this from J, or I Street?
HENLEY:
This would have been from I Street all the way down to O or P –
sometimes it was only one row of warehouses, but in what we called Old
Sacramento, there were two, one on each side of the tracks. They were
owned by the Southern Pacific – they were in fact, the interchange
between the railroad and Pacific Motor Trucking, which was a trucking
company that Southern Pacific owned. The area was kind of interesting in
that from Front Street up – the city Police Department was the responsible
law enforcement agency, even though technically they should have been
from Front Street to the River, they deferred Front Street to the River to
the Southern Pacific Police Force.
PRINCE:
So the Southern Pacific had there own police force?
HENLEY:
They had their own police force actually authorized by the Legislature.
PRINCE:
Really? I didn’t know that. So these were more than just security guards
there?
HENLEY:
Oh absolutely, absolutely. And you might find things happening like what
I experienced between Front and Second Street, but you didn’t see that
kind of problem between Front Street and the River, because the railroad –
their police were tough. They were no nonsense tough people, and so
transients and people tended to stay away, they’d move across the street
into the older buildings between Front and Second before they would mess
around with the SP Police – they were really hard-nosed tough, tough,
tough.
PRINCE:
Did they have their own jail down there, or did they send people to the …
HENLEY:
No no, they used the city jail, if they went that far.
PRINCE:
Wow.
HENLEY:
They were heavy on the billy club, very heavy on the billy club.
PRINCE:
Did they ever … make people disappear?
HENLEY:
Oh I don’t know about that, I think they wanted them to appear – but to
look rather bruised, as a warning to stay off the lines.
PRINCE:
So it was a pretty rough area in lots of regards as you say. It was also,
from what I hear, one of the largest central hiring places for agriculture
and the railroads, and …
HENLEY:
Yeah, even when I came in ’65 you could go down there at oh, 5:30 in the
morning and there would be several hundred people waiting to get a job
through one of the labor agencies, farmers would come in with trucks and
pick up laborers by the truckload, or if they were a little more organized,
by bus, but it didn’t usually end up that way. And there were a lot of those
older buildings converted into actually what were called labor agencies.
And you would go there as a farmer and say, “I need fifty farm laborers,
or I need a carpenter, or I need a plumber, or whatever. And they would
match them up with … (unintelligible).
PRINCE:
… were these some of the businesses that were designated blighted and …
HENLEY:
They were certainly ones that were moved out and I haven’t followed
them after they moved out, I don’t know where they are, I’m sure there
must still be labor agencies, something like that, but I haven’t followed it
after they left the West End.
PRINCE:
Well, let’s get back to Dr. Aubrey Neasham, tell me about the
circumstances of your meeting him, and what your relationship was like
with him.
HENLEY:
Well, when I was in graduate school, one of the important things, of
course, at that time was if you wanted to maintain a – your status as a
graduate student you had to take the equivalent of six units, and I only had
three going and I needed another class, and a guy I had known in the
dormitories wanted to be a park ranger, and he said, “Well you know I’m
in this new department they got up at college called Park Management, or
maybe it was called Environmental Management, I can’t remember. And
he said, “I’m taking this class from this guy who’s a historian named
Aubrey Neasham,” – who happened to be the head of the department too –
“He’s really interesting.” And he said, “he was the former National Park
Service Historian for the Western Region.” And I thought, “Well, that’s
interesting.” Because to me, the idea of teaching did not appeal to me and
I didn’t know what I was going to do with a history degree but I knew I
didn’t want to teach. So, I thought, “This class will be interesting, it won’t
be too hard, obviously, I’m going to take this class.” And it was a class on
Museum management.
PRINCE:
Museum management …
HENLEY:
So I went to this class and the whole purpose of the class that semester
was to design a hypothetical museum, which wasn’t hypothetical at all.
Neasham had cut a deal with the city to open up a temporary city-county
museum in a building downtown called Pioneer Hall.
PRINCE:
On Seventh Street?
HENLEY:
On Seventh Street. And so we’re plowing through this course and
designing it and Neasham wanted somebody do some drawings for this
and drawings for a contractor to build some walls and things inside the
building. And he asked for a volunteer, and said, “Anybody have any
experience with that?” And I raised my hand because I had worked a little
bit as a draftsman, and my father was an engineer so I knew a lot about
surveying and drawing plans and stuff like that. So he gave me the
assignment to draw this drawing of a floor plan for this exhibit. And I was
enjoying it and then it was time for a midterm and he said, “Now, we just
got a building that burned in Old Sacramento, and the city wants to tear it
down, now if any of you want to volunteer to go out and save this
building, you need to clean it up so that the Redevelopment Agency
doesn’t board it up, to try to save it before it completely collapses. If you
want to volunteer to do that, I’ll do that in lieu of a midterm. So that’s
where the former story comes from.
PRINCE:
Ahh, I see.
HENLEY:
Then the end of the semester was approaching and he said, “We’re going
to build this museum now.”
PRINCE:
In that building?
HENLEY:
In that building.
PRINCE:
Now it hadn’t completely burned down obviously …
HENLEY:
Oh, no, no, no – a different building, not the building that burned, the
building on Seventh Street. The building that I’m talking about that
burned was on – between Front and Second on J, which was where this
incident happened with the pipe. It was nothing to do with the museum,
he just wanted to board up a building and save it, and he offered us an
opportunity in lieu of a midterm exam – we jumped on it. It was a pretty
big group of guys.
[Laughter]
PRINCE:
Was it?
HENLEY:
Yeah.
PRINCE:
So there were several of you in the class that decided to do the project?
HENLEY:
I think there were probably about fifteen of us in the class, and I would bet
at least fourteen of the fifteen thought it was a good idea.
PRINCE:
Okay, just to be clear – this was a building on you say Front and …
HENLEY:
On Second, no, it’s on J Street, between Front and Second – it’s called the
Vernon Brannan Building.
PRINCE:
Oh, okay – so that was the building that he wanted to save.
HENLEY:
Yeah.
PRINCE:
Okay, and the Sacramento Redevelopment Agency was going to demolish
it? Was that part of their plan?
HENLEY:
The city building inspections condemned it because it had burned and so
you have to demolish it – the agency already owned it. They had acquired
it and vacated it. It burned because a group of transients had gotten into
the building, and it happened in a lot of buildings down there, when it got
cold, they’d tend to scrape up some pieces of wood right out of the floor
into a pile and start a little fire …
PRINCE:
In the building?
HENLEY:
Right in the floor of the building, and they put it out, theoretically before
anything collapsed or burned down, but they’d do that to keep warm, and
sometimes it got away from them, or they got drunk, or this and that, or
whatever.
PRINCE:
And this time it did …
HENLEY:
And it did, it got away from them. Or they thought they had put it out and
left, and it still had a glowing ember, and it fanned itself up and turned
into a real big fire, burned out a piece of the floor and the support structure
on one side and a wall fell into the alley, that was an exterior wall of the
building. That’s how that happened.
PRINCE:
So why did he want to save that building?
HENLEY:
Well he was a preservationist at heart – he was into Old Sacramento, he
was already the historian for Old Sacramento – they’d already done the
master plan for Old Sacramento and this was one of the buildings that was
deemed to be historically one of the more important buildings, they
associated it with Sam Brannan, which was not true.
PRINCE:
Oh, it’s not the Brannan building?
HENLEY:
Well, it’s called the Brannan Hotel, or Vernon Brannan Hotel, it actually
is not, it has a more innocuous name – I think it’s historic name was Jones
Hotel.
[Laughter]
PRINCE:
Oh.
HENLEY:
But Brannan owned the adjacent property, and he may have owned that
property at some time in time, but not to build that building.
PRINCE:
I see, I see. So now, this was what, about ’66?
HENLEY:
’65.
PRINCE:
Now, so then the historic district, in fact, I have something here – I’m
holding a copy of a program for the dedication of Old Sacramento as a
National Historic Landmark, and this was also in commemoration of
Sacramento’s 126th birthday, and it’s dated August 21st, 1965, I think Dr.
Aubrey Neasham was involved in this, were you around for this event?
HENLEY:
Actually, I came in September.
PRINCE:
You came in September. So you came right after this had happened.
HENLEY:
Right after this had happened, yeah.
PRINCE:
So, then the Old Sacramento, that area – had already been designated as a
historic landmark.
HENLEY:
Yes, actually I think the thing was designated as a landmark in something
like 1963 – the application was done, or ’64, something like that. And the
dedication of a plaque occurred in 1965.
PRINCE:
Oh, okay. And this before …
HENLEY:
The plaques down there, next to the freeway.
PRINCE:
Yeah, I’ve seen the plaque, it’s sort of hidden down there in the …
HENLEY:
In the plaque land, the plaque wall.
PRINCE:
In the plaque land … right. So, Dr. Aubrey Neasham, was … was he the
president of the Sacramento Landmark Commission? He was a part of
that right?
HENLEY:
Well, Aubrey was … here’s his involvement in Old Sacramento, sort of
the longest term to his leaving. Aubrey was the Regional Historian for the
National Park Service in the 1940s and early ‘50s. And he did survey
work frequently for the National Park Service at that time – he did a
survey of Hawaii, and the Illiani Palace, he did the survey of Alaska for its
historic cultural resources for the National Park Service. And his – he
became fascinated with the concept of historic districts and where his
interest was – he felt you could save isolated buildings, but it’s far more
meaningful to save groups of buildings and environments in which they sit
than to simply save an isolated building. And he had great interest in that
and he was involved in lots of historic districts but in the case of Old
Sacramento, as redevelopment went in, something triggered the Park
Service to look at the area. And he wrote a report, late 1940s, I think,
1948, or 49, something like that. Actually, he left the Park Service before
that – probably it was in 1947, or ‘48. He wrote a report that said that the
West End of Sacramento had more nationally important historic buildings
in a single setting than any place in the country.
PRINCE:
In the country?
HENLEY:
In the country.
PRINCE:
Wow.
HENLEY:
And that document he picked up and used in roughly 1948. He’d come to
work for the State Park System, became a State Park Historian. And the
State Park Historian in the 1940s was a much stronger entity than a
historian would be in State Parks now, it was almost equivalent to a
deputy director. And he was very close to the Drurys – both Newton
Drury, and Aubrey Drury – who are, you know, they’re big names in the
preservation field and in the park business, one is State Park Director, and
also National Park Service Director, and back and forth. Anyway –
Neasham used that language to help promote historic districts and – well,
in Sacramento, but he was on a jag, doing that in California and they were
using the centennial of the gold rush, 1949 as sort of a pivotal political
push, or a public push to create these things, and so they got a historic
district for Columbia. They got a historic district for Los Angeles, called
Olvera Street, Old Town San Diego, Monterey, Bodie – which is probably
one of Neasham’s best efforts – and Old Sacramento. By the time they
got to Old Sacramento, which was the last historic district that Neasham
was seriously involved in, he had evolved another kind of concept and that
was that you just couldn’t keep creating historic districts and have them
picked up by the government as … like the historic house museums, a
historic district that is not a viable commercial area – he came to realize
there has to be some viable commercial use to some of these areas if we’re
going to keep saving them. And so he’s very interested in the concept of
commercial involvement in historic preservation. Started in Columbia,
but it never really happened there. They started a concession operation
concept, the parks department would put concessions in – and they’re still
doing that – but when it came to Old Sacramento they said, “There’s a
possibility here for something else – redevelopment. We could maybe, do
a historic development as a redevelopment project.”
PRINCE:
Ah ha. So that was the difference than the other historic districts that he’d
been working on …
HENLEY:
That’s exactly right, and in that process of thinking he met a guy with the
Redevelopment Agency named Donald Kline. And Donald Kline was the
– I’m not even sure, he was like a Deputy Director, literally, of the agency,
he was the chief planner for the Redevelopment Agency. Kline had come
from Washington D.C. where he had had a strong involvement with the
Truman administration in restoring the White House. He had a long
connection with federal people involved in preservation or historic issues.
So he and Neasham fed each other, literally on this idea and it kind of
ballooned up to the point where they decided, maybe they could convince
the feds as redevelopment, to fund a study to create a historic urban
renewal district. And so, at the same time, Neasham could work the state
side of it to try to create a state park as part of it.
PRINCE:
So that would help with the funding of it.
HENLEY:
Yeah. And so they went to the feds, essentially with an idea that well, we
can get some local money, and we can get some state money, but we need
significant federal money to do a master plan. And they did. They agreed
to it.
PRINCE:
The federal government did.
HENLEY:
The feds did. And so there became a plan, which we call the Candeub and
Fleissig Report. And Candeub and Fleissig are a planning and
architectural firm that specialize in redevelopment activities, I think in
New Jersey. They hired a firm out of Berkeley to be their architectural
firm here called DeMars and Reye. Vernon DeMars, the principle, was
the head of the architectural school at Berkeley, and Vernon was the
architect for the Zellerbach Hall at Berkeley, and a number of really
significant projects on the campus.
PRINCE:
Vernon Demars.
HENLEY:
Vernon DeMars. He was originally from MIT. They hired as historical
consultants, for the project, a company called Western Heritage, Inc.,
which was Neasham.
PRINCE:
Yep. Now he founded that company, right?
HENLEY:
That’s correct.
PRINCE:
Now was he still with the state parks, or he had left?
HENLEY:
He had just left state parks.
PRINCE:
And now he was doing this independently.
HENLEY:
Yeah. He had left state parks and had gone to Sac State and became a
professor and created Western Heritage Inc., and they were doing all these
… Western Heritage Inc. might have been around a while – he may have
had it for six or eight years before they did that project because he did
some work for the Department of Education for the state – some historic
things for fourth grade teachers and various educational packages. And he
was not in this alone, you can’t form a corporation alone, you know,
you’ve got to have at least a president and a secretary, and you know, and
actually, you need some seed money, and he never had a lot of money to
put into it so he had to get somebody to back him. His partner in this was
a guy named Donald Segastrum. And Segustrum owned the newspaper in
Sonora, and was a family that had gold-mining interests and had done very
well in the mountains. And he and Segustrum were sort of hand in hand in
the development of Columbia as a state park unit. So that’s how Neasham
got to his role in Old Sacramento, but by the time he left the state park
system, went to Sac State to teach and had Western Heritage, he also
convinced – or played a pivotal role in convincing the city to establish a
Historic Landmarks Commission for the city, and it was carried by a
councilman, who later became the county auditor.
[End of Tape 1, Side B]