[Session 2, July 26, 2007]
[Begin Tape 2, Side A]
PRINCE:
Today is Thursday, July 26, 2007, and we’re back with Jim Henley,
working on the Old Sacramento Historic District Oral History Project for
the city of Sacramento. Hello Jim.
HENLEY:
Good morning, Lisa.
PRINCE:
I wanted to clarify a couple of items from our interview last week. We
had mentioned the agency, and I just wanted to specify that we were
talking about the Sacramento Redevelopment Agency. And also, I had
mentioned I thought an early project of the agency’s was a two-block
redevelopment project, and that came from my reading of their initial
concerns about the entry to the city off the new Tower Bridge – the two
blocks on either side. But their first actual project was a fifteen- block
portion of the redevelopment area number one – was designated as the
first project in February of 1954 and was called the Capitol Mall Project,
Project 2-A – you were right about that. And the final redevelopment plan
for this area was prepared by the Redevelopment Agency and approved by
the city council in September 1955, after public hearings, and that’s taken
from a “A New Sacramento Progress and Promise Report,” of the
Sacramento Redevelopment Agency, around 1968. So last week, we
ended our discussion – we were taking about Aubrey Neasham and his
pivotal role in establishing the Sacramento Historic Landmarks
Commission in 1953, and you’d been talking about how that was what
really inspired the historic preservation of Old Sacramento. You had
specifically mentioned a council member by the name of Edgar Sayers.
So, I’m wondering if we can jump off from that point.
HENLEY:
Ed Sayers was a, as you said, a council member and then later became the
county treasurer. Ed had long-tied interests to the history community in
Sacramento and probably was connected to groups like Native Sons [of
the Golden West] and things like that, although I’m not sure what the
connection was. He became very interested in the city being involved in
identifying landmarks, marking them officially on behalf of the city, being
interested in a historical museum, the preservation interests as they were
emerging in the 1950s. So in 1953, I believe was the year, he created a –
he introduced an ordinance to create the Sacramento Historic Landmarks
Commission. And I believe he’s right, Ed used to be very proud of it and
he said, “We created the second local history commission in the state, the
first being San Jose, and he seemed to know quite a bit about the San Jose
model because I think he actually had a copy of their ordinance and had
seen it and modeled the one here in Sacramento after that.
PRINCE:
Do you have any idea when the San Jose one was founded?
HENLEY:
Oh, it was probably only about a year older, it was founded in 1952,
something like that. The new ordinance that was created – to paraphrase it
– gave the Commission sort of specific responsibilities. One, they were to
identify and mark historic landmarks on behalf of the city. Two, they
were to operate any museums that the city owned except the Crocker,
which was excluded specifically. And the inference of that was they
didn’t have any museums so they probably anticipated they would, so
that’s how that came up. Then the third responsibility they were given,
and I’ll paraphrase Ed’s comments to me when I used to talk to him about
it, their purpose was to look at the West End, which was construed to be
everything below Seventh Street to the river, and come up with some ideas
of how the city should preserve the history of that area. The commission
when it was formed included some very prominent people in the
community who were interested in history – there were some attorneys,
there was Alan Otley with the State Library, and there were a number of
people like that on the board, and they took the landmarks thing very
seriously and they identified, I think maybe fifty or sixty landmarks very
quickly and managed to get a guide – put together called “A Sidewalk
History of Sacramento.” Then they began a program of putting up plaques,
and they were little double-sided porcelin-enamel plaques that were put on
a post right at the curb.
PRINCE:
Are any of those still there?
HENLEY:
You know, there are a couple around town still surviving, and we have a
couple in collections. The problem with those signs is they were right at
the edge of the curb and delivery trucks tended to hit them, and being
porcelain enamel, they shattered – the surface porcelain shatters off of
them. I believe the one for Crocker is still around, although it must be
down now because of the remodel that’s going on, but it was a couple of
years ago, and I believe the one for the city cemetery is still out there. But
other than that I’m not sure how many are left. We have a couple in
collections that were purposely taken down. And then they turned their
attention to the last of those issues and that was the West End. They
catered to and gained favor with Eleanor McClatchy about the West End,
so she became a big supporter of what they were doing.
PRINCE:
Eleanor McClatchy, of the Sacramento Bee.
HENLEY:
The Sacramento Bee. Then Aubrey Neasham came into the picture being
with State Parks at the time. He was watching this, I think, probably was
actively involved in the background, Sayers certainly knew him. But his
name doesn’t come up as being one of the establishers of the Commission.
But he’s probably the first person they hire – not as a staff person per se it
was more of a contract arrangement.
PRINCE:
Was this when he was with Western Heritage by now?
HENLEY:
He may have still been with State Parks, I’m not sure, but certainly – well
Western Heritage is older than that, Western Heritage goes back quite a
ways. I think Western Heritage is probably around in the late 1940s. I
don’t know that exact date of the establishment of it but his company,
Western Heritage, was joint effort between him and two or three other
people but primarily a guy by the name of Don Segustrum, who owned the
Sonora Herald, or something like that …
PRINCE:
Right, you had mentioned that in our last interview …
HENLEY:
… and was a big collector of gold rush material. Neasham became, very
soon afterwards, became their advisor and sort of guru with the
Commission. It’s hard to find anything on paper, but it seems very clear
that he sort of shaped the direction in which they were going on issues
related to the West End. And I think he eased their way into making
contacts to improve the position that they were taking, and certainly that
included meeting and connecting with people at State Parks, and people
over at the Legislature – people like William Knowland, Neasham was
pretty close to.
PRINCE:
And he was at State Parks, did you say?
HENLEY:
Knowland was a Senator, owned the Oakland Tribune.
PRINCE:
Oh. Well I’ve read a few articles in the Sacramento Bee and the Union,
where Aubrey Neasham has gone before the Legislature, or he’s written
essays about what the Commission’s goals were for the West End – to
preserve it. So it seemed to me that he was sort of their spokesperson.
HENLEY:
Ultimately he became their spokesperson, he may even have been paid to
be their spokesperson, ultimately, whether he was in the beginning, I can’t
answer. When he left State Parks, Aubrey was really interested in
establishing a curriculum education component for Rangers to be trained
as mangers so he worked with people at CSUS to create a department of, I
think it was called Environmental Studies, or maybe it was Environmental
Management, I can’t remember, might have been both at some time. That
was his love, and he went over there and became head of the department
and quickly recruited two or three people to be – pretty nearly full-time
professors working on it, one was a guy name Deturk who was the former
head of State Parks, another one named Malcolm – I can’t remember his
last name, Malcolm was his last name, I can’t remember his first name,
who was at one time, head of County Parks, and also involved with State
Parks, and he, I think, moved to Australia. But he was getting a pretty
good group of people involved in it, and then a bunch of part-timers
including people like Tom Hammer who was a much younger man, very
active in the history community, an attorney …
PRINCE:
Now were any of these people in the History Department at CSUS?
HENLEY:
No.
PRINCE:
And when you say it was a curriculum for the rangers as managers, was
this a curriculum for interpretation at State Parks?
HENLEY:
What Neasham was interested in was training rangers to be managers.
How to work as administrative people because most rangers were trained
to put it sort of bluntly – to hug trees, to build boat ramps, you know, to
care for the forest, they were being rangers, and he saw that the
Department needed to professionalize, that they would have a structure,
and that the management of the Department should be in fact, people who
are trained as rangers, but also trained as managers. And so he was trying
to build a management class. In the Department it was a little bit of a red
herring. It was a little bit of an issue in the Parks Department because
very quickly, rangers took that other group of people – people who were
trained to be managers and started to call them the “suits.” They called
them the “suits” and called themselves the “uniforms,” and so all of a
sudden there became two classes of people in State Parks – “suits’” and
“uniforms.” It’s a controversy that even exists today on some level. But
he was very keen on what he called professionalizing the Parks
Department.
PRINCE:
I see.
HENLEY:
So he ran that program for a number of years at Sac State but ultimately it
was a one-man operation. He was sort of the energy behind it and what
made it work and he was getting old. And he wasn’t as aggressive and he
wasn’t as forceful as he used to be when he was younger and so slowly, he
got to the point when he needed to retire.
PRINCE:
Now, are we still talking about the early fifties, or is this later?
HENLEY:
No, this is in the sixties, he retires in the sixties. I don’t know when he left
Parks, exactly, it seems to me about ‘58, or ‘59 …
PRINCE:
I can look that up.
HENLEY:
… and then he went to the university.
PRINCE:
Okay. So, but by this time, he’s working with the Old Sacramento
preservation project, with the urban renewal federal funds. And you had
talked about last time how he had been working on these historic districts
throughout the state, and it was in preparation for the centennial – the gold
rush centennial – so we’re talking back in 1949, when that all started but
by the time he gets to Old Sacramento he’s realized that there has to be
more to preserve these area than just turn them over to the state as a sort of
museum or, you know, having the state or the government in some
capacity pick these up and save them – there has to be another component
– and that’s where he comes up with this idea of “Preservation for Use,” is
that right?
HENLEY:
Yeah. Neasham was involved with virtually every historic district State
Parks touched in their entire history. If not in the front end of even
creating them in the beginning, in somehow or another he definitely had
his finger in every single one of them. You can watch what happens over
time as these things come on line – his thoughts are starting to evolve
about historic districts and they start out very pure trying to be a
reestablishment of a certain time period, a certain look, a certain historic
moment in time, preserved like a house museum, run by state parks. To
ultimately saying, “Well, wait a minute, we need to have a concession in
this building because this company sold soda.” So in a place like
Columbia, you have a place where a soda pop store – an ice-cream soda
store – is in fact what was historically a soda company, and so it’s a new
use, but replicating an old use starting to show up. And his thoughts are
starting to move towards getting more outside involvement in the projects
except for the one sort of throwback which is Bodie. And Bodie is one of
those rare opportunities that he really immediately saw how important
what was there was and rather than try to tear it apart and reassemble it to
some look of Bodie, when it was an active going place, he said, “We
ought to just keep this like it is.” And that’s a strange thing – that’s a
strange throwback in the way he worked, and in many ways, probably it
will be one of the most important projects …
PRINCE:
Now where is this, Jim?
HENLEY:
Bodie? Bodie is on the east side of the Sierras down near Bishop, down
below June Lake and it’s a mining community, late gold rush town, and
it’s kind of unique because it’s off the beaten highway, it’s off 395 quite a
ways, twenty miles or so, something like that. And it’s pretty remote, and
therefore it remained pretty intact. It also had the fortunate situation
where a single family virtually owned the whole thing and the family
decided to donate en total to the State for a State Park. Neasham and the
directors at State Parks at the time, I can’t remember all who was involved
at that moment, really saw that this was a real opportunity, so they worked
this arrangement to the best advantage they could. Neasham just coined
this phrase – arrested decay – let’s keep it like it is, rather than change it,
and that’s quite interesting, but everywhere else in these districts you see
this evolving move towards more commercialism in the parks and not
being purely a house museum because he firmly believed that government
would not continue to sustain more house museums. They wouldn’t be
able to afford to run them and that purports to be probably very true.
PRINCE:
So it seems to me that it’s realistic – of course you have to consider how
these are going to be supported, at the same time it’s such a conflict with
this arrested decay concept, because, well, I think Old Sacramento is a
very good example of that – of what can happen, and I’d like to talk about
that maybe a little bit later with you, but talking about Aubrey Neasham
and his ideas of preservation for use, and for arrested decay – how did he
define ‘preservation for use?’
HENLEY:
His term to me was, “for use” was an adjective. That’s the way he used to
put it. It was an adjective. That it’s a historic district that is modified
enough to ensure that it can be commercially viable, and in his mind
unless government wants to pay the bill to preserve an area, the only way
you can be sure that it will remain preserved is if it is commercially viable.
And so he felt that there had to be certain modifier – which is what an
adjective is – it has to be modified enough to ensure that it has a viable
commercial use. How that was to evolve, ultimately maybe even he didn’t
know. He didn’t know where it was going, I think. There were some
decisions made really early on that are unique to Old Sacramento in
everything else he did. First of all he came very strongly to the opinion
that in a street scene that the buildings restored could be from different
time periods, and so the street scene as an honest street scene doesn’t
exist. You have an 1870 building standing next to an 1850 building.
PRINCE:
Right.
HENLEY:
And his argument was, we need to restore or preserve or reconstruct,
either the building for which we have the best visible evidence for or the
building that is historically most important. Or some jockeying of those
two values in determining that one is of a different time period than the
one that is not nearly as important as it is to make sure that we reconstruct
the right building for, either its history or its architectural significance
and/or evidence. That makes the street look – it never looked like any
street scene that we have down there, but there’s pieces of it that are very
close, you know, but in the total you’re looking through a time spectrum
rather than a … in some ways that’s not unlike what preservation is all
about today. And maybe he would have evolved to the preservation
values that we have today had he been around long enough because today
we try to preserve buildings with all of the alterations that happened,
rather than strip history off of it, we keep all that evolution of history on a
building. He hadn’t gotten to that point yet, this was in the 1950s and 60s.
But he might have gotten there eventually, but that isn’t where it was so
consequently we take a building like the Democratic State Journal that had
a turret on the corner of it that was probably built in the late 1890s, and
took it off and turned it back to what it looked like in 1857.
PRINCE:
So now, whose decision was it to isolate this historical period between
1849 and 1870. Was that his decision, or did that come later?
HENLEY:
I can’t tell you that I know for sure but my instincts tell me it was his
decision.
PRINCE:
So when you came in it was already decided, established.
HENLEY:
It was already decided. Actually the date was 1849 to 1873, or 1875, it
had a very specific end date which I never did understand, and he never
gave me a satisfactory answer either, and ultimately we overrode that by
allowing some buildings as late as 1890.
PRINCE:
I would think that by isolating it to such a, you know, to such a limited
time would end up being problematic.
HENLEY:
Hindsight’s good at that.
PRINCE:
Absolutely. So what I’m wondering is if you ever talked to Aubrey
Neasham about his objectives and goals for how he saw this – to how it
would evolve, you know, like you say, I guess he didn’t give you a
satisfactory explanation as to why he chose those, that time span.
HENLEY:
Well, his explanation, though I find unsatisfactory, he had an explanation
that was that it’s the most important period in its history. Aubrey didn’t –
Aubrey is a product of his time and the twentieth century wasn’t important
yet to him. I mean, in some way obviously it was but not in preservation.
In history he would argue to save the historical evidence of things but in
preservation he was interested in the nineteenth century, and he very much
was a romantic. And he had a very, very strong sense of his own ability to
reason out and come to a conclusion – some would say rationalize.
PRINCE:
And it sounds to me – you keep saying what he thought was most
important, what was most historically important. I keep thinking back to
what was being planned for – what had occurred for the centennial, and
his background, and like you say, he was a product of the nineteenth
century. So it sounds to me like that really influenced his objectives for
Old Sacramento, saying that this period of time had the most important
history – important in which way? Did he mean nationally significant in
terms of, you know, the railroad, the telegraph … so you’ve got these
transportation and communication terminus there, is that what he was
talking about? Was it even an issue to make it nationally significant in
terms of it being historically most important?
HENLEY:
Well I think he was involved a long time ago in the case for making it a
nationally important historic district. It was important enough that he
certainly in the background was the leading force for turning it into a
national historic landmark.
PRINCE:
Okay.
HENLEY:
Aubrey believed that Old Sacramento had certain historical themes that
were really very significant. First, nationally, also regionally and to the
state and he’s pretty much a product of the idea that those important
themes are important, other things are less important. And so, again it’s
hard to look at preservation projects and not get wrapped up in the idea
that it’s very easy – even today – for preservationists to get wrapped up in
the architecture and the physical details and lose the story, lose the cultural
significance. That’s really easy to lose and in many, many preservation
efforts they do lose it. It’s understandable in some ways, it’s easy to talk
about architecture, it’s a thing you can look at and define and all the rest of
it’s messy business you got to do research, and you’ve got to make
interpretations, and you’ve got to stand on those interpretations and let
others challenge it, and that’s not comfortable to the preservation
community. I don’t think that was particularly uncomfortable to Neasham
although he was a highly defensive guy. He took challenges very
seriously and he tended to be very quiet for a long time and then he’d kind
of strike back because he didn’t like to be challenged.
PRINCE:
Now are you talking about challenges by the Redevelopment Agency, or
the developers at this time …?
HENLEY:
Oh, it would be the community at large or other historians or people that
he would call quasi historians.
PRINCE:
I see, and they were challenging his selection of history or his
interpretation?
HENLEY:
Where they really got in trouble usually with him is when they would
challenge his information. And that would be tough because he was good
at it. He tended once in awhile to get a little bit over exuberant in
interpreting what the facts meant, but when it came to gathering raw data,
he was very good at it. He was good at it going clear back to the
Depression and before where he was trained at working people to gather
data, and so he was a great amasser of information and generally he
organized it in thematic ways that he could understand and he could define
to people, and it is surprising to me that – well today it is – that people
didn’t accept the way he organized the data. People, sometimes foolishly,
challenged the data. And they usually lost because he usually had it right.
[End of Tape 2, Side A]
[Begin Tape 2, Side B]
HENLEY:
… it’s a different issue. That is open to challenge and I think by today’s
standards some of it seems archaic.
PRINCE:
And could be questioned.
HENLEY:
Could be questioned as to the way he organized it. And that would go
back to why he chose to create a historic district the way he chose to do it.
I would also not want to underestimate something else that he did and that
was when he came to work for State Parks – probably when he was
working for National Parks he learned this – and that was if he was going
to drive a historic agenda he had to be extremely mindful and wise as to
how politics works.
PRINCE:
Okay, present day politics … sure
HENLEY:
Well, yeah, at that point in time when he was working, he had to
understand how to work the system, and you know there are people who
worked with him at State Parks, probably most of them are dead now but I
used to talk with them and they said, well you know one of the traits that
he had was that he was very, very good at working the political side of the
game. In fact some of them said, you know, there was only one historian
for State Parks, that was him, there wasn’t like today there are a whole lot
of them but there was just one and what did one mean? Well what it really
meant was that he was the actual equivalent of a deputy director for the
State Parks. And what he would do is that he would handle sometimes the
legislative agenda for the Department. He was the guy that worked on the
legislators.
PRINCE:
Well these were government agencies that he was working with and
working for, so you would think that you know, you would have to be that
way.
HENLEY:
Yeah. I think that in that kind of mindset is involved in his thinking
process when he’s developing projects like Old Sacramento – you’ve got
to be mindful of politics. So I think in some ways he came to the
conclusion that, in part because of the politics of the time and the
knowledge that the general public had of regional and local history. He
needed to emphasize those areas that they understood or at least had
become romantic about.
PRINCE:
I see …
HENLEY:
So when you go to city council and you see that he goes and puts this
painting up on the wall of city council to explain what Old Sacramento’s
all about – yes, it’s an educational device that makes people aware of what
the potential of the area is, but it shows the potential they want to see – a
very romantic image of the gold rush and the railroad.
PRINCE:
And placed right there in their chambers where they’re forced to look at it
and think about it all the time.
HENLEY:
Yeah, right …
PRINCE:
That’s a political move.
HENLEY:
It’s him at his best at what he does. It’s him at his best.
PRINCE:
So let me go back a little bit. So we’re talking about – in 1953, the
Sacramento Historic Landmarks Commission gets formed, Aubrey
Neasham is involved in it somehow, ends up being their sort of
spokesperson, heads this project for Old Sacramento. He’s had experience
with historic districts like you talked about, so what I’m thinking is that’s
a span of ten years basically when Old Sacramento actually gets approved
– all these different agencies have finally agreed to move the freeway east
to save that district. I would like to hear more about that process. What I
want to ask about is the freeway controversy. I know that Aubrey
Neasham also had a series of essays he was writing in this time about the
freeway, and this was something that was happening all across the nation.
And it happened here in Sacramento to coincide with the urban renewal
projects and the historic preservation efforts. So it seems to me that these
major decisions occurred right around the same time and he seemed to be
involved in all of it. But there was also something that you had talked
about with Eleanor McClatchy and her influence can you talk a little bit
about that?
HENLEY:
Yeah, if you go back a little bit – you’re talking about the Commission –
the Landmarks Commission issued a report of their own, it’s the first
report that sort of basically suggests that the West End should be defined
by Seventh Street and the River. And Eleanor bought that, hook, line and
sinker. And there are a handful of artists’ renderings that show up in the
paper and various places that sort of show an important building here, and
important building there, and people are trying to come to grips with how
can Seventh Street west to the river become a historic district? And you
know, it’s a pretty mind-boggling task – this is a lot of blocks. I think
probably very early on, Neasham looked at this and said “This isn’t
economically and politically possible, it’s too big for this region to
absorb.”
PRINCE:
Too big. And do you mean also the I Street Bridge and Capital, or is that
farther out?
HENLEY:
Well, it would have been I Street to Capital, some people might have gone
over to N, but I think no one seriously thought of it. I think most people
thought of it as from I Street to L Street.
PRINCE:
Okay.
HENLEY:
By the time the Commission had issued that report Capital – M Street or
Capital Mall was already a defined redevelopment project, it already had
pictures out of what they were going to do to it and so people just had to
sort of say, okay get out of their way, they’re going to do this, can’t stop it.
I think that L Street is probably your limit. But Neasham’s a warrior, he’s
still tugging along with the Commission and trying to keep a larger area.
Somewhere in the mid 1950s, of course the issue comes up as to where is
I-5 going to be? And there are several planned routes that are emerging.
But at that time period the division of highways was very imperial, they
didn’t give a rat what the local community thought, they only really cared
what they thought. As far as they were concerned engineers make these
decisions, not communities. And they pretty much were going to march
that thing right up along the river on this side right straight down the
waterfront, take out the first row of blocks all the way across. That
galvanized the Commission into a role of resistance, which represented,
for all intents and purposes all the historic community in Sacramento and
Neasham began to work on the State Parks – over the issue that there
should be a State Park down there. And that meant working the legislature
and clearly he and a few people in the city worked the legislature pretty
well. The legislature authorized funding to be matched by the city or the
Redevelopment Agency or other parties to do, I think a series of three
reports by State Parks about the potential of a historic district eventually –
a State Park. It also included a site or a place for a city-county museum
down there.
PRINCE:
And this would all be located in …
HENLEY:
In someplace in the West End. And out of those reports, number one and
two, number one kind of deals with the history, number two deals with
some more of the issues and number three gets a little more specific.
PRINCE:
About creating a historic district there?
HENLEY:
Yeah. What it’s moving towards is a suggesting that there are a
concentration of buildings and that it isn’t the whole West End, it’s the
area from maybe Third Street to the river. Of course, Eleanor’s tug would
be for Third Street to the river because the Bee building was there and the
Big Four building was there …
PRINCE:
Now the Bee building wasn’t being used by the Bee at that time was it?
HENLEY:
They didn’t even own it.
PRINCE:
They didn’t even own it – but it was there still.
HENLEY:
Still there. Now the freeway right-of-way is something going on in the
minds of the engineers and the engineers also want to play politics and do
those things so they lined up some people on their side of the issue which
ultimately became the Redevelopment Agency, the Chamber of
Commerce, the City Council, and the Sacramento Union. And in that
process the issue came out as can you save anything, in the West End right
next to the river? Can you bulge the freeway? And ultimately they came
up with the solution that we have now which is under grounding by
Crocker because they were also concerned about the visual image
marching across the waterfront. So they kept it underground, brought it up
underneath Capitol Mall and then brought it up high enough to go across
the railyards. Now, then how much can they bulge it to the east? Part of
the bulging in keeping – and I will preface this by saying that McClatchys
and some other interests didn’t even want it in Sacramento, they wanted I5 in West Sacramento and were arguing for that route, which was one of
the alternate routes.
PRINCE:
Had that been proposed by the Division of Highways?
HENLEY:
Yeah, it was one of the five, or whatever it was routes.
PRINCE:
Did that have much support?
HENLEY:
Not enough.
PRINCE:
It seems like that would have been a better place to put it.
HENLEY:
Well, there are some interesting issues about it. It has some real impact on
Sacramento because how many times can you cross the river to get into
Sacramento, and at what elevation because it’s a navigable Stream – so
everything has to be high enough for ships to go under or the traffic that
travels the river, which is barges and that kind of stuff. Somewhere in that
mix, the Redevelopment Agency signed an agreement with Macy’s – to
build Macy’s. And as I understand it part of that agreement was Macy’s
would be within some specific distance of a freeway onramp.
PRINCE:
So this must have been in the late 1950s, right? If it was built – completed
in 1963.
HENLEY:
Late 1950s. And then what happened is now it became critically
important for the Redevelopment Agency to win the battle of the freeway
being on the Sacramento side.
PRINCE:
Because they’d already signed these contracts with Macy’s or made these
promises.
HENLEY:
That’s right. Now Eleanor – she doesn’t go back on anything, her position
is the final word, end of story, no more discussion. She wants it in West
Sac, and when John Kennedy was elected president – it can’t be
underestimated how much power the McClatchys had to talk to the
Kennedys and to the Kennedy Administration – but it is pretty well known
that they went and asked the Kennedy Administration to stop the
construction of I-5.
PRINCE:
So this was Eleanor McClatchy or somebody speaking for her?
HENLEY:
Well it was someone speaking for her, she doesn’t do that directly,
probably would have been the editor. But the end result is one of the first
acts of the Kennedy Administration is the Department of Transportation
freezes funds for I-5.
PRINCE:
Was this throughout the state?
HENLEY:
No. The only connection is in Sacramento. It’s between Woodland and
Stockton essentially, and they built from Stockton up to the outskirts of
Sacramento and they had built, or were building the bridge across the
Sacramento River out by the airport. So it’s that section, that’s it.
PRINCE:
It was just the section coming through the city of Sacramento then …
HENLEY:
And it stops, and it sat. It sat right up to just about the time of his
assassination. They were just releasing the funds to go ahead and
construct it because an agreement had been reached. And I’ve always
been told and I believe it to be true that Neasham played an active role in
deriving the agreement and the agreement was that they would bulge the
freeway a little more towards Macy’s than Cal Trans wanted to do – the
Division of Highways – a little more than they wanted to do, it made
Macy’s even happier that the – as mitigation, all the buildings underneath
the freeway, there would be serious archeology done on them and several
of the buildings would be identified and dismantled for reconstruction
outside the area, and that the feds would pay for that as part of the funding
of I-5. And they would also pay for a master plan for an urban renewal
project called Old Sacramento, and that’s the really strange one – that’s
the one where they hadn’t done that kind of thing before. Redevelopment
didn’t do historic districts, and so this was sort of plowing through a new
ground. It’s consistent with Neasham’s thought about eventually, you
know, you have to modify things to be economically viable? Well, also
the politics side of it – he knew where the money was. The only way you
could get money to do Old Sacramento would be through urban renewal.
PRINCE:
Absolutely.
HENLEY:
And so he accepted the bulged freeway from the quote, unquote, the
historians’ point of view. He accepted the bulged freeway and in turn they
got the money to do a master plan, which as far as Neasham was
concerned would allow for an intensity of development that would never
have been possible had it been a bigger area. And I would say he
employed a certain level of rationalization at this point where he said,
“Listen, this freeway creates a barrier between Old Sacramento and the
rest of the city that allows us to do it differently than the rest of the city
would do. We’re not constrained by what’s going to happen on the other
side of the freeway. We can do a really intense development here.”
PRINCE:
So he saw that as a bonus, rather than it being an obstacle.
HENLEY:
He came to believe it as a bonus. At the point he did that, I don’t think
Eleanor ever spoke to him again. McClatchy.
PRINCE:
Because the freeway ended up plowing through Third Street …
HENLEY:
And right through her family’s building and …
PRINCE:
Was that torn down and carefully reconstructed?
HENLEY:
The Bee building was demolished and Eleanor bought every brick and
everything out of it and put it in storage.
PRINCE:
Oh. Where did she store it, do you know?
HENLEY:
Yeah, she stored it over by Nineteenth Street, right near the Bee building.
PRINCE:
So is it still there do you know?
HENLEY:
No, when she died, the family gave us, essentially the contents of that
building which included a lot of printing machinery and equipment that
came into collections, along with her private personal collections, and the
foundations, etc. And as part of that they had a foundation that had some
money and they gave us the foundation and the money. They also gave us
all the brick, so we sold it.
PRINCE:
So the reason why, I always wondered why that wasn’t reconstructed and
it was because basically she took the building and stored it somewhere.
HENLEY:
That’s exactly it plus the fact that she walked away from the project.
PRINCE:
She walked away at that point?
HENLEY:
She had very little to do with Old Sacramento for the next twenty years,
rarely went down there, would go to the Firehouse once in awhile but
rarely …
PRINCE:
I had heard that she was very supportive of it, is that not the case?
HENLEY:
She was supportive of it to that moment and then she walked away from it.
The Bee took a kind of benign position on Old Sacramento at that point.
They didn’t oppose things but didn’t really get out and actively support it,
for quite a long time. I may be overemphasizing a point but I thought I
could see a change in the way the Bee looked at Old Sacramento. A
number of years after that – the freeway had been built for maybe ten
years and the chief engineer for the Division of Highways responsible for
this project – a guy named Womack – made a statement, he was retired,
was quite elderly, in fact I think would die shortly after that, he made a
public statement that the Bee picked up and actually put in a little article
where he said that they made a mistake.
PRINCE:
That the Division of Highways had made a mistake?
HENLEY:
They’d made a mistake, they should have built the freeway in West
Sacramento.
PRINCE:
Did he say why it was a mistake?
HENLEY:
Oh, I don’t remember, I only remember the article, it wasn’t very long and
it was a pretty short thing, but I had a sense that after that, it was kind of
like, okay, we can be involved again. We were right. And the Bee
became much more involved. It isn’t that they didn’t report on what was
going on down there, they did, but there was no zeal for the project for
years. Certainly every issue that came up that was a problem or anything
else, and when it comes to things like the decision to put the railroad
museum in they’re very supportive of it. I think they were delightfully
supportive of the concept that in putting the railroad museum in they had
to tear down a piece of the I-5 freeway, which they did, they tore out the
pedestrian ramp, you know, in the corner of Second and I Street.
PRINCE:
So it seems to me that that still is and will probably always be
controversial – where the freeway was put, why wasn’t it put in West
Sacramento.
HENLEY:
Yeah. I think there’s a strong tendency in all of us who were involved in
Old Sacramento to sometimes rationalize things. If you can’t change it,
you tend to look at it in terms of what can you get that’s good out of it,
you know?
PRINCE:
Absolutely.
HENLEY:
I’ve always felt that I-5 is a negative influence on Old Sacramento from an
overall perspective. It’s a sound blight, it’s a visual blight, it provides
enormous circulation problems. On the other hand it has some positive
aspects for Old Sacramento. Neasham was right, it allowed for a
concentration of development that would never have been possible. We
would have never extended out into the larger part of the West End and
built buildings with their historic canopies over them and wooden
structures that – just wouldn’t be permitted.
PRINCE:
Do you mean like the wooden sidewalks?
HENLEY:
Wooden sidewalks, wooden canopies and balconies, wooden fire escape
exits, the rear exits out at the back of the buildings are wood. We
managed to do those things for a couple of reasons. One is we – Old
Sacramento is part of the reason why the state adopted an alternative
historic building code, it was part of the driving force for that, But
secondly, the freeway is one block wide, it’s all concrete, and the fire
underwriters who set the fire rates for all the insurance in the region, the
fire underwriters took a look at it – at one point when the questions was
specifically put to them because we wanted to build wooden structures in
Old Sacramento, and downtown doesn’t permit that, people were saying,
“No you can’t do it because you’re going to damage the fire writing for
the entire community.” The fire underwriters said, “You’ve got a threehundred foot fire break, concrete. We don’t see how Old Sacramento has
any impact on the rest of downtown, in terms of fire insurance, it has none
at all.” Now, fire insurance might be different in Old Sacramento, but it
won’t have any impact anywhere else. As it turns out, it doesn’t have any
impact in Old Sacramento either because they got the state codes says –
construction, you know, you can do different, as long as it’s equal. So you
could build a wooden stair in the back of the building and use it as a fire
exit as long as you sprinkled it. You could build wooden structures out
over the sidewalks, canopies, balconies, sometimes two stories tall, as long
as you sprinkled it.
PRINCE:
What do you mean “sprinkled it?”
HENLEY:
Fire sprinklers
PRINCE:
Oh … as long as they’re there.
HENLEY:
As long as it’s there that provides the rating of equal. It’s not “the same
as” – it’s equal.
PRINCE:
So it basically allowed a different set of codes, or guidelines for building?
HENLEY:
Also, the freeway development and the mitigation that came with the
freeway’s development went a long ways in funding the State Park. Direct
money went right to the department to help develop the park.
PRINCE:
That’s a pretty amazing negotiation to have the state agree to do all this
archeology and to bulge the freeway, and to do all the studies,
archeological studies, and the historical studies, right? And to fund that,
because that hadn’t been done before, am I right to assume that? Had the
state, in building these highways, had they ever done anything like that
before? Were archeological studies required? I know they are now, but…
HENELY:
Well, most of this predates the 1966 Historic Preservation Act.
PRINCE:
Right, right.
HENLEY:
And the answer is yes, but I wouldn’t say it’s the first. I mean there are
other places where -- maybe not to this level – but some activities had to
occur. They had a lot of archeology in the freeway right-of-way – they
really had a lot of work and it’s mostly at State Parks or at UC Davis
where the stuff was kept.
PRINCE:
Now you had talked about earlier how you oversaw some of these
projects, was this one of them?
HENLEY:
Not freeway archeology, because that was done before I came through this
part – it was finished in ’65.
PRINCE:
I see, it was finished.
HENLEY:
No, we did an archeology in several other areas. We did some stuff in Old
Sacramento. We did do some stuff in State Park. We did some stuff in
the ’49 scene very early on. We did an excavation for the Eagle Theater.
PRINCE:
Was this done at that site?
HENLEY:
Right at that site, yes.
PRINCE:
And what was found?
HENLEY:
We found a piece of the theater’s foundation, or at least we think it was a
piece of their foundation. We found additions that were placed on the
back of the City Hotel, which was the adjacent structure.
PRINCE:
Now was that Sam Brannan’s hotel, the early one?
HENLEY:
Well, they claim, he has credit for it, yeah. But you know his foot, his
fingerprints are all over it but it’s not – Brannan frequently left a trail of
fingerprints but it’s hard to see a picture of him sometimes, he owned a
lot, and caused a lot to happen, but maybe wasn’t always present.
Probably the most notable thing I can think of from that dig is we found a
trash pit in one of these additions on the back of the City Hotel, and in the
trash pit came out, a syringe – several glass syringes.
PRINCE:
Really?
HENLEY:
In the period of 1850s, or thereabouts they had a syringe much like a
doctor would have a syringe today except it doesn’t have a metal needle,
because they didn’t have those metal needles. The glass blower drew out
a long, thin glass tube, which is the needle, and the syringe becomes less
useful when the needle breaks off too many times.
PRINCE:
Oh … so was this still intact?
HENLEY:
It was intact with very little needle left. But it was intact and it had dried
up in it a substance, which we’d look at that and we’d speculate and we’d
say, “Blood, it’s got to be blood.” And so we sent it over to the UC Med
Center in San Francisco, where they had a museum on medical technology
and they came back said, “Well, yeah, this is clearly from your time
period, there was not doubt … they used to make these syringes with the
glass needles and … they had that information they had it all, and as far
the residue inside, they did a test on it and it was consistent with what
could be dried …
[End of Tape 2, Side B]