[Session 2, July 26, 2007]
[Begin Tape 3, Side A]
HENLEY:
They found the remains of a syringe in there and they looked at it and they
said, “Well, it does look like it’s possible blood but we can’t tell, it’s too
contaminated to be sure that it’s blood.” But in the historic research that
we did, we found that low and behold, in the addition behind the City
Hotel there was a doctor in residence and his name was Stillman, Dr.
Stillman, one of the most famous of the gold rush doctors, and he has quite
a reputation in Sacramento, he’s of that group that did bleeding as a
common treatment at the time, but also he’s one of the handful of doctors
that remained in town during the cholera epidemic.
PRINCE:
He was one of the survivors …
HENLEY:
And he survived it.
PRINCE:
Wow.
HENLEY:
But, you know, so it was easy for our imaginations to say, “Ah, he was
bleeding cholera victims and dropped the syringes in there …” well, we
can’t… but clearly the medical waste is probably his.
PRINCE:
That’s interesting, that it was there. So you’re talking about the historical
studies that you did for Old Sacramento – and that brings me back to your
role in Old Sacramento. We’ve talked about the background, some of
these major people like Aubrey Neasham, and even Eleanor McClatchy,
and the Kennedy Administration, and many others – I want to hear more
about your role now. It’s now 1965, and you’re there and you’ve taken
Aubrey Neasham’s course at CSUS, and what happens after that?
HENLEY:
He approached me one day, asked me to come down to his office, and
said, “I understand” – and we had a class together so he knew this – he
said, “I understand you read blueprints pretty well.” And I said, “Well
yeah, I can read blueprints, I’ve been around them all my life and I’m
pretty good at interpreting what comes off blueprints.” And he said,
“Well, I got a little secret to tell you. I have a hard time with that.” And
essentially what he was saying was that he could understand what was on
the blueprint, he could see the lines and, but he had a very difficult time in
his mind taking a two-dimensional drawing and visualizing it as three
dimensions. Now if it was a perspective drawing, it wasn’t a problem, but
isometric drawings, he had a hard time assembling them in his mind to
understand them as three dimensions. And he said, “Well, I’m involved in
this project with Old Sacramento and we’re about to hire – we’re about to
work with a group of architects to do schematic studies of each of the
buildings and I need some help with the drawings, and would you be
interested?” And I said, yes, to me that was right up, that was heaven, and
mean literally. I had just gone through this whole exercise and been
disappointed trying to figure out what the heck I’d do with a history
degree, I didn’t want to teach so that left very little, you know. So I said,
yes and it turned out it was an immediate thing, I needed to do it right
away, and so I actually dropped all the classes and everything, and went to
work for him.
PRINCE:
Oh.
HENLEY:
And within a week or two weeks I was down in what was called Pioneer
Hall, and we would set up an office, and we were in business, and the pay
was lousy, but it got better eventually.
PRINCE:
And you were doing what you liked to do?
HENLEY:
I was doing what I thought I was trained to do and could apply skills that
I’d acquired and it was very exciting, actually I considered it a great deal
of fun, I thought it was an honor to be able to do it, And as it turned out,
the architects that are doing all these schematic studies was a firm called
DeMars and Wells. They were an offshoot of an earlier firm called
DeMars and Reay. DeMars and Reay were the architects for the Candeub
and Fleissig Report that Neasham had been involved with in the early
1960s.
PRINCE:
And that was the original master plan for Old Sacramento?
HENLEY:
Exactly. Exactly. At any rate, Reay was gone, and Wells was in and
DeMars was running the firm, and Vernon DeMars was the head of the
school of architecture at Berkeley. They just had a real good group of
students that they’d picked up and went to work in the firm that were, you
know, some of the best and the brightest that the school was producing
and DeMars would hand pick them and they were a delight to work with.
I mean they were really – I mean DeMars was just an ultimate gentleman,
but they were just a delightful firm to work with,
PRINCE:
Were these historical architects or just architects?
HENLEY:
Well, there was no quote, unquote, thing called historical architect. These
were urban planners for the most part. These were people, who did bigscale projects for the most part, and this intrigued them and this was
something really different and kind of interesting. And they were getting
into it, they would be the first to admit they weren’t historians but you
know, I felt they had actually a pretty good sense of discipline of what the
right thing to do was as an architect towards these projects, and they also
had a pretty good sense of relying on people to bring them information,
and interpret information for them, they didn’t argue with you a whole lot
about it, except, you know, they’d say, “Well where did you come up with
that kind of a cornice,” and you’d show them the picture, and they’d say,
“Well, I don’t think it’s that way, I think it’s this way.” We’d sit down
and go back and forth until we came to something we agreed with.
PRINCE:
So now, this was your first job there then, you were doing these drawings
and working with these architects that had the contract with Candeub and
Fleissig – master plan, so this was in essence, what was building Old
Sacramento from the ground up?
HENLEY:
This was what was building Old Sacramento from the ground up, there
still hadn’t been a building done yet.
PRINCE:
Okay, so 1965, 66?
HENLEY:
’66. They start in 1966. I was late in ’65.
PRINCE:
And the freeway’s in, right? Or is it not yet?
HENLEY:
Hadn’t started yet. It begins in ’66.
PRINCE:
Oh, it hadn’t started yet, oh … but a lot of the clearing had taken place.
HENLEY:
Yeah, it’s clear, oh absolutely, it’s all – it’s a wasteland.
PRINCE:
Okay, okay, the bombed out look.
HENLEY:
Yeah, except, you could see the path of the freeway, you could see it all
cleared out, and all those buildings had been taken down, the archeology
was done. It’s ’66 they start driving the piles.
PRINCE:
Okay, for the freeway?
HENLEY:
For the freeway. That was pretty exciting time too. The project that
DeMars and Wells were hired to do is to go a step beyond the master plan.
It sort of decided that you needed a – for the Agency – you needed a set of
schematic floor plans and façade elevation for each of the buildings, and a
little history packet that went with it that the Agency could tie to each
development proposal. There was a very critical decision happened in ’66
that I kind of intimately got involved with and I kind of think I persevered,
and today, I kind of maybe feel it wasn’t the right decision. But it was for
the time, I believe. The issue was: how do you develop that project – do
you get one master developer that gets all of Old Sacramento, less the
State Park? Or do you parcel it out, building by building to somebody?
PRINCE:
To different individuals?
HENLEY:
To different individuals to build. As that argument evolved, it came to be
that there are a lot of little buildings in Old Sacramento either to be
reconstructed or as existing restorations that the individual little building is
too small to be economically feasible, that only if you can take three of
them or four of them are they feasible as a development, are they feasible
to develop. So it never was an issue of every single building was for sale,
it always was, you know, individual buildings, or a group of buildings for
sale versus one developer to do the whole thing. There was great
advantage to the single developer because it was one person to deal with,
one firm to deal with. The land could be parceled together and you could
get rid of all the conflicts that are associated with party wall – because
some of these buildings share a common wall, and that’s not legal, that’s
not legal today in development, but if you put them all together, you could
define it as a single lot, at least per block, you could define a whole block
as a lot, essentially. And then you’re free of the party wall issue because
it’s all the same owner. But the problem was – they got a couple of
proposals for overall development and they were appalling in what they
proposed to do.
PRINCE:
The Sacramento Redevelopment Agency got those proposals? By this
time they owned a lot of the parcels right?
HENLEY:
They pretty much owned all of it. By 1965, they pretty much owned all of
it.
PRINCE:
And just to clarify, the master plan had been created, had been approved
by the city council – the Candeub Fleissig and Associates Plan, so then
DeMars and Wells had come in and they were developing the actual,
physical plan of what it would look like? Had it reached that stage yet or
were guys still doing the historic research about what was going to be built
there?
HENLEY:
We had pretty much decided. What happened is Candeub had already
pretty much decided which buildings were going to go up. That was part
of the master plan. But then we looked at them individually and started to
refine that. We changed a few of them because we disagreed with the
conclusions of that study as to which was the more important, which one
had credible architectural information. In a couple of cases we decided
the existing building was too important to tear down, to just reconstruct
something that we had minimal information about. But this issue of the
overall developer, what appalled me, and I think quite a few people in the
preservation movement at the time, was that it was what we would call
almost Disneyesque in the way they were proposing to develop it. They
were not being faithful to historical detail; they were being very cavalier
about how they would develop something.
PRINCE:
These were the commercial interests that were …
HENLEY:
These two developers that proposed to do the whole project.
PRINCE:
Okay, I see.
HENLEY:
And then they did things like, “Oh, that’s a three-story building, we don’t
want that third floor, we’re just going to put up a false front.” And it
looked just like a Hollywood movie set with sticks in the back of it
holding up a wall. And they weren’t going to build that. They just weren’t
going to put up a false front. And we just – I couldn’t go along with that, I
was so angry about it and so opposed to it that I came out on the side for
arguing for the individual developers. Well, in reality, it turns out that
both of those big developers probably wanted more from the Agency than
the agency was willing to provide. And maybe their financing was a little
shaky, but certainly the sympathy was with these individual developments,
and beside, they could get more local community people involved
therefore supporting the project a little more thoroughly. So they went
that route.
PRINCE:
Okay. So they said no to these two developers.
HENLEY:
Yeah, and that’s what they did to this day, now the negative side of that is
today we find out they don’t get along sometimes. Owner one doesn’t get
along with owner two. You know, and they’ve got all these issues that
they’re supposed to share solutions to, garbage, or whatever, they have to
share the solution, and they can’t get along, and it’s to this day it’s still a
struggle and a fight. And some people don’t talk to some people, and
some people say, “We’ll see you in court,” or, you know, it’s messy. And
in some ways we’ve learned to regret some of those decisions. But it was
a town born in confusion and chaos, and a lot of individual developers
doing their thing, so to that end, maybe that’s what it should be now, but
in trying to control it – which control is a little easier with one or two
people to deal with rather than fifty.
PRINCE:
And then you’ve got your different entities, you know, like State Parks,
their historic district there and your private investors and developers, the
merchants association, management board…
HENLEY:
There’s a Merchant’s Association, there’s a Property Owner Association,
now there’s an Old Sacramento Historic Foundation, then you have the
city with their own management people, and their own crew for
maintenance in the area. You have a lot of players, a lot of players.
PRINCE:
But at the beginning, was that considered seriously, do you think, that
there would be a need for all of these different components of governance
there? I mean was it basically the city and the Redevelopment Agency
and your private investors, of course, the state. So you’ve got these four
major interests there and then I guess, it branches off after that, right?
HENLEY:
Yeah but I think you’ve got to realize that in the beginning people were so
wrapped up in the initial part of the project that they couldn’t think much
about the back end of it. First of all the Agency is not designed to operate
anything. The Agency is designed to build things. And so all attention
was: let’s solve the problems of getting something built, and then we’ll let
the city worry about operating it because it’s not our problem. And by the
time the city got it to operate, there were many decisions made by the
Agency that the city found difficult to live with, or they hadn’t been
conceived of at the time the project was built and might have been much
more easily solved had there been some thought about the operational side
of it. The problem – that is the problem Old Sacramento still faces, and
that is there are problems that were problems thirty years ago that are still
the same problems today because of some of these issues of turf and
who’s an operator and who’s a builder, and the responsibilities that were
not thought through and therefore every solution that’s been proposed is a
band aid and when the band aid falls off – gee, there’s the wound again,
and so, they go looking for another band aid, and we’re still looking for
band aids.
PRINCE:
So the real issues, like you say, were always there, had never really been
seriously addressed, resolved, for example – can you give me an example?
HENLEY:
Oh, trash, the collection of trash and garbage. There is no solution to that
that doesn’t require people to work together. First of all, you’ve got a lot
of different property owners owning their own little piece of property, and
the Agency gave them a shared service court in which to install the
equipment necessary. No one realized how many restaurants were going
to show up or if they did they didn’t go so far as to figure out what to do
with their garbage. Yet on the other hand, there are people who feel that
the underutilized part of Old Sacramento are the alleys, and they would be
interesting and they would be quite attractive had, if it wasn’t for the fact
that they stink, and that, you know, there are rodents running around out
there, you know, feeding on garbage, or the garbage is not compacted and
it takes huge bins to collect this stuff. It’s inconceivable to me right now
how you can make the alleys attractive without finding a solution to what
are you going to do with all that garbage?
PRINCE:
So now, the city doesn’t service that part of it … but not enough, or?
HENLEY:
Of course they do, but how many times – well not enough, not enough
facilities, can’t get the property owner to agree on paying to put in a
compacter for example versus a – just a big dump.
PRINCE:
I see.
HENLEY:
And no one thought out all the other infrastructure problems that come
with that kind of operation: where do you put grease traps? And when the
building occupies the entire footprint of the property, where do you put the
grease trap? And where do the service vehicles park? And how do they
unload? What do you do about people today who refuse to enter an area
like this without bringing their car? Where do you put the car? What do
you do about employees that are working on minimum wage and they
come down and park on the street when it was free, in front of the business
– then where’s the customer park? They got a solution to that one, that
was unpopular – parking meters …
PRINCE:
The parking meters, and there goes the historical integrity according to
some people.
HENLEY:
Well, some people would argue that, I guess I would say the historical
integrity was compromised with the automobile. I don’t find the parking
meter nearly as offensive as the car. But the trap there isn’t whether
there’s a meter out there or not, and how much the meter might
contaminate the view shed, the trap is the meters are a revenue source and
many of the things that are going on in Old Sacramento today that
potentially are improving or could improve the area are dependant on that
parking meter money. Now, what would happen if you decided the
parking meters weren’t acceptable and you removed them now? Where
would all those programs get funded from?
PRINCE:
So it brings me back to this whole issue of what this project was really
designed to be, because, if you take those things out of it – you’ve got to
support it somehow, and therefore you’ve got all these private interests,
you know, you’ve got all these shops – a lot of people don’t agree that
these sorts of shops should be there – that it’s been Disneyfied, you know,
it’s a theme park history, and on and on and on, but wasn’t that the initial
design? Maybe not – I’m not saying that the initial design was, “Let’s
build a theme-park history, or a history theme park here,” but I think that
some people thought that way and in my readings of some of the
documents in the Redevelopment Agency’s files, you know, that was
definitely their plan, their consideration was, we can make this viable, and
they had to think that way. So that brings me back to this idea that
ultimately there’s this big conflict of the historical authenticity or integrity
– what some preservationists or historians or different kinds of people
would consider is a true historical district that others would think, well
wait a minute you’ve got these commercial interests that we need to
support that, so how do you avoid the conflict, is that even possible? I
don’t see how it is.
HENLEY:
It isn’t possible. But you know, first of all it’s not a Disneyesque-type
endeavor, it is not a theme park. Some people might aspire to that and
hope for that but first of all it doesn’t have a centralized controlling entity
over it. It doesn’t have one administration, one management, one leasing
agent, one central anything. So it lacks the order that would be present in
a theme park.
PRINCE:
You mean in terms of management or administration.
HENLEY:
Every bit of it.
PRINCE:
But the overall impression it gives to a visitor may be a different thing.
HENLEY:
No, I think the impression is more like a shopping center to some people,
but it lacks that too – it lacks that organization. It does not have that
centralized control that those kinds of entities can provide that will tax the
individual merchant to provide a marketing program. That it will tax
individuals to provide for the maintenance of their buildings, in fact will
maintain their buildings in order to keep them neat and clean – that
doesn’t happen down there.
PRINCE:
But still, nevertheless, I think the point I’m trying to make is it was
designed to be this sort of – it was – to capitalize on this Wild West
history in a way. I mean, obviously historically significant, very
important, but it was that this chosen time frame was the pattern that
would decide, determine any decisions made there as to the type of history
that would be told there. We’ve discussed why that happened, why that
decision was made, so what I’m saying is that to a visitor that’s the
impression that’s – I think – that’s given. It’s that here’s this area, you’re
going back to this time and place and even though it’s owned by – you
have all these different property owners and different kinds of shops and
everything, that adds the theme-park aspect to it. That’s just – from my
point of view it seems that the commercial interests sort of override the
historical aspects of that place.
HENLEY:
Ahh, now you’ve hit on something – I kind of agree with the direction
you’re going. There is no question that the balance between the historic
district versus the commercial district concept is a very delicate and a
difficult thing to achieve. I think that there is a prevailing feeling amongst
not only the merchants but also most of the property owners that they’re a
commercial district and they want to be free to operate like every other
commercial district without restriction. If they want to call it “Ye Olde”
something, they want to call it “Ye Olde” something, and if they want to
fly florescent-colored kites in front of their shops that’s what they want to
do. It is not in their – and I would not say universally, I would say
generally amongst the developers and the owners down there – there is a
feeling that history is not an important element in the project. And I
would base that in the lack of interest and the lack of support of any
historic programming in the area by merchants and property owners.
PRINCE:
Unless it’s a lure, you know, unless it’s seen as a unique aspect of their
commercial interest there.
HENLEY:
You have to make a case for that, for them to be interested in it. If you ask
them, “Do you want to spend a dollar on historic programming – let’s say
put a 19th century merchant in the street, talking – or do you want to spend
a dollar on an ad in a newspaper or a billboard?” No contest, every single
time – they’ll put the money on the ad. They don’t care about that
programming. They – as far as they’re concerned, that’s nice, that’s
quaint and somebody else should do it.
PRINCE:
I see. So the initial packets that were put together by the Redevelopment
Agency to give to potential investors, there were obviously requirements
for the building but not for anything beyond that? They could basically do
whatever they wanted inside that building, sell whatever they want, rent it
out to whomever they want to rent it to, to operate any kind of business
that they …
HENLEY:
With some very limited restrictions, but you know, there are some things
that are not permitted down there. You can’t do industrial kinds of
activities in the project. It’s zoned for certain kinds of commercial work
but it doesn’t say you can’t have any T-shirt shops, or you can’t have any
bars. Actually, they are limiting bars and restaurants now. I mean,
restaurants are not really limited, but bars are. Nightclubs – I don’t think
they’ve issued a nightclub permit for quite awhile.
PRINCE:
That became a problem didn’t it?
HENLEY:
It became a very serious problem because they paid the rent and that made
them attractive but it also created some problems, you know, shootings,
muggings, fighting.
PRINCE:
And that happened pretty soon afterwards. I was reading an article
yesterday – I think it was 1985 – about the problems they were having in
Old Sacramento with, well they were basically lumping all the problems to
these teenagers run amuck, I guess. Although they were talking about
problems with people drinking and so there was the question, well wait a
minute it’s not the teenagers, they may be part of it but you know, the
police were being brought out again.
HENLEY:
Well, one of the prevailing problems in Old Sacramento is probably …
[End of Tape 3, Side A]
[Begin Tape 3, Side B]
HENLEY:
… your immediate reaction is to say, “Oh, my problem is I don’t have a
big enough sign, my neighbor is doing terrible things. Everybody has a …
it’s every problem except my own problem. I didn’t do anything to cause
problems because I have a wonderful idea and my shop should succeed.”
And the last people they will blame are themselves for any problem that’s
happened. And that’s what was going on in Old Sacramento in, not really
early on, actually, I wanted to make a point – I was thinking about when
you were talking earlier – and that is there’s a collection here at SAMCC
that just came in from a guy named Bill Atwell. You should look at that
collection and think about it a little bit. You would be amazed at the way
people in the beginning merged together. The merchants got together,
they conned themselves into wearing period costuming, they talked about
putting on events together, they created almost a family like atmosphere
for themselves that was a cooperation and an attempt to increase the
historical aspect of the project – they thought of it as a benefit.
Unfortunately those people didn’t stay.
PRINCE:
So early on there was that cooperation.
HENLEY:
There was some cooperation, sure there was an enthusiasm that wore out.
And I can’t put my finger on why it wore out. There are other people,
maybe merchants down there who have come and gone that are the ones to
talk to, but my sense is they ran into a few issues that they couldn’t deal
with and it kind of burnt them up. The first one was an organized effort
called, SOS, Save Old Sacramento. And SOS was over the fact that a guy
named Stagin wanted to build a high-rise building on the corner of Capital
Mall and Second Street and it was so big, that it cast a shadow on Old
Sacramento, and they banded together and went to war on it but it took an
enormous amount of energy to fight that, and in the end, Stagin got to
build his building but half as high as he wanted.
PRINCE:
So is this Capitol One?
HENLEY:
Yes, so it’s about seven or eight stories tall instead of sixteen stories what
he thought is was going to be – or eighteen or whatever. And then they
got trapped in trying to get service courts built and they couldn’t get the
service courts built because the Agency was having their own
organizational problems and funding issues and that sort of thing, and they
got trapped in parking issues and the early merchants were trapped in the
fact that I-5 was still being built, people weren’t coming down there and
they couldn’t attract people in they were -- that kind of burned some of
them up. And then Old Sacramento started to really roll and they started
building wooden sidewalks and things, and there was a lot of progress but
people couldn’t get in the stores, you know, and so I think that burned
some of it up, they just couldn’t deal with it all. That combined with a lot
of those merchants were pretty inexperienced merchants. This was not
their career – they worked for the state or something, and they had a love
for something and decided that they were sick of the state and they would
get themselves their own little shop and be their own boss and they didn’t
know anything about business licenses or marketing or promotion or
inventory control or customer service or all those things. They had to
learn them all at once. And they didn’t last; they got consumed in the
process.
PRINCE:
Yeah, yeah. And the project itself, it took a very long time it seems, from
the very beginning – to even the original concepts to even now, I guess it’s
still ongoing.
HENLEY:
Well, it’s still not done.
PRINCE:
Yeah, but, so I would imagine that would cause some impatience with
people.
HENLEY:
Well, it does, and then of course the developers who came in and built the
buildings, some of them were marginally capitalized to do it. They just
barely had enough money to put a project together and build it, and so
they’re desperate to lease it and if there’s any downturn in the market and
leasing a little more difficult, they get desperate and they’ll lease to
anybody who comes through the door. Plus no one ever came up with a
solution for what to do on second and third floors or in basements because
the main floors in Old Sacramento are just universally pretty easy to rent.
But what do you do about basements and second and third floors? People
don’t walk upstairs very well, people don’t go into basements – you’ve got
to put in elevators, even then, it’s hard to get people to go up or down.
And so there was a high vacancy rate in those areas. Interestingly, and I
can’t explain why it is but at the moment the vacancy rate is almost zero.
It’s almost all filled.
PRINCE:
Really?
HENLEY:
I heard that just the other day and it was news to me, but I heard that they
did a survey and they found that most of the space is occupied now.
PRINCE:
What about basements?
HENLEY:
Well, basements are a problem because they don’t have view shed,
number one, no views, and they might have great brick walls that people
like but they also tend sometimes to have little problems like dampness
and mold issues, and if there’s a little flooding in a storm drain it’s bad
news.
PRINCE:
So it’s not really an attractive place to lease for business.
HENLEY:
Some people did well in it, but you know, it’s one of those kinds of places
that if you work down there for four or five hours – lunchtime you’re
ready to go out and get some sun. So that’s unattractive. Plus the modern
merchandising technique is to have something in the window to suck you
in, and so how do you have something in the window if you’re in the
basement? How do you get people to go down there? So the kinds of
tenants that worked in basements are pretty specific. I can remember one
of the early tenants in a basement was a barber and he wasn’t relying on
any particular walk-in traffic from a sign, these were people that knew the
barber and wanted the barber’s services and so …
PRINCE:
So he had a following already.
HENLEY:
Yeah.
PRINCE:
So – I want to ask you to go back a little bit to your job, doing these
drawings, you’ve been hired by Dr. Neasham, you’re working with
DeMars and Wells, and so, how was it working with the Redevelopment
Agency’s architects as a historian working on this project? What was that
like for you?
HENLEY:
Well in some ways it was kind of gratifying. There was a certain business
atmosphere about doing things and organizational structure, and no
nonsense, and that was very gratifying. We weren’t housed with the
Agency so we were oblivious to any kind of internal politics or social
issues that were going on amongst themselves or intrigues that were
happening within the organization. We were sort of oblivious to that we
were away from it. But it was, in that sense it was a pretty interesting
experience but there was a general impression I think I probably had,
maybe it was my naiveté at the time but I came to think of a lot of the
Agency people as you know, suede shoe, white belt, big plaid coat group,
you know, they looked like a lot of salesmen.
PRINCE:
And they were basically, some of them, right?
HENLEY:
They were, some of them were salesmen, that’s right. But they had a – it
really did in some sense seem like a sales group going in that you were
talking to all the time and they were pretty respectful of us and maybe they
didn’t know quite what to do with us in some ways. They didn’t – we
produced a product, they expected it, they got it and so they kind of left us
alone. But once in awhile you’d get this stream coming out of, “Well,
can’t we just do it this way because we could sell a lot more widgets,” you
know, it was interesting. It was a different kind of job than any job I’d
had before. It was meeting people who had different motives and different
agendas. You know the Agency was new to preservation, they didn’t
quite know what to make of it. They understood how to tear a building
down and how to sell a piece of ground, but this business of preservation
was a little strange and when it came to doing a building, I remember a
very famous incident in my mind of – we were talking about the Morse
building, it was the first building that was restored by the Agency, it was
sort of like the model home project – tested a whole bunch of things,
actually tried several different engineering and architectural solutions in
the same building which is sort of weird but it was interesting, it was a
laboratory, you know, an experiment.
PRINCE:
That was the demonstration building?
HENLEY:
That was the demonstration building. And it had a piece of the ground
floor façade had been torn out for a store front and had to be replaced and
included some cast iron columns and things, pilasters is the technical,
correct term. And it was a no brainer – we had some existing and it was
pretty easy to see what the new ones were going to have to be. They went
out and got a price and at that time the only foundry in the area – well
there were two foundries in the area that would do this, one up in Sutter
Creek and the other one in Lodi. The Lodi foundry got the contract to do
these, it was called Pinkerton Foundry, and they came in with a price of
what these cast iron pilasters were going to cost and it appalled the
Agency because they were so expensive compared to anything else and so
they went around to see what kind of alternatives could be had and they
found this guy who sold fiberglass. And he came in with a proposal to
build fiberglass columns and we said, “No, no, that won’t work, we’re
going to use like materials, we’re not going to use modern materials.”
And they couldn’t quite understand that argument at the Agency because
this was cheap, it looked good, it painted well, it might even be more
efficient in many ways than the cast iron, it was easier to install – all kinds
of things. So they called a meeting in their office and we go over there
and here’s this guy in his big plaid coat and he’s the salesman for the
fiberglass company and he’s got a full scale piece of one of these columns
– he’s made it out of fiberglass to show how good it is, and there’s the
Agency, they’ve got two or three of their staff people there, and there were
a couple of us there, Neasham wasn’t there, it was myself and somebody
else, can’t remember who now – and an Agency commissioner, who
actually happened to be the chairman of the Redevelopment Agency – a
guy named Frank Durkee – and Durkee was brought in to kind of keep
control over this procedure because they had someplace they were going,
see they were going to get fiberglass, that was the bottom line. So this guy
makes his little song and dance, you know, and he says, “ We can replicate
this cast iron so beautifully in the finest detail and we can do it so much
cheaper.” And somebody said, it wasn’t me, somebody said, “Well it
doesn’t sound like cast iron when you touch it or knock it.” “Well, it’s
going to be painted, you know that, so what they touch will be the paint,
but oh, we can make it sound just like cast iron because we fill the inside
with sand so it thumps like cast iron, see I put sand in this one.” And he
thumped it and it did kind of sound like cast iron, and you could see where
they were going, you know, it was getting better and better and better, it
was going to be fiberglass, and all of a sudden the guy said something that,
oh, I know he regretted saying, he said, “And you know, cast iron loses
it’s strength when it gets hot. It becomes less and less strong and it
collapses and this fiberglass is fireproof, we add a retardant to it that’s
fireproof.” To which Durkee jumped on this and said, “Really?!!” And he
reaches over on whoever’s desk it was there and he picks up a cigarette
lighter and he goes over and ‘click’ on this thing and it takes off like a
torch in the office and they had to get a fire extinguisher to put it out.
PRINCE:
Oh my god …
[Laughter]
HENLEY:
And the salesman is sitting there saying, “but, but, but, but, we didn’t put
the retardant in this one!” But it was dead. There would be no fiberglass
in Old Sacramento.
PRINCE:
Oh. Wow.
HENLEY:
And Durkee was the first to jump on the bandwagon, “We’re not going to
have any of that stuff in any of our buildings.” It was the end of that.
PRINCE:
That’s so funny. And it’s funny that you mention the Pinkerton Foundry.
I can’t remember which building it was – I noticed that – I look at those
pilasters and see, some of them obviously are the originals, right? And
then the ones that aren’t most of them are the Pinkertons, right?
HENLEY:
Yeah, Pinkerton and Sutter Creek.
PRINCE:
Okay. What I noticed was – before I’d seen the maps I wasn’t sure which
ones were reconstructed or rehabbed, and then I saw the Pinkerton
pilaster, and on the bottom it had 1985, or something like that. Now, did
they have to put that date there?
HENLEY:
We encouraged it.
PRINCE:
You did.
HENLEY:
First of all, it’s not original, and second, that’s the way they identified
their stuff at the time. You go around and find some of the old ones and
you’ll find the date cast in the bottom, 1857, or 1859, or whatever and the
foundry put their name – their proud of it, it’s a little advertising, and we
said, you know, it’d be good to mimic that, and so we encouraged them to
do it.
PRINCE:
Huh. I thought that was interesting.
HENLEY:
The business of what is the right product to use, interestingly enough, we
came to the conclusion about using product of the period, and not using
products that were not made in the period on the buildings before the
Secretary of the Interior Standards were ever produced.
PRINCE:
Okay.
HENLEY:
And I’m actually kind of proud of the fact that in many of these things, we
were there and we did it exactly as they finally concluded it should be
done. But not all of them, they have standards that we didn’t adopt, I
mean, we’re not perfect and we didn’t have those guidelines. And we are
being beat a little bit about the ears now about things – they way we
handle buildings down there. The most interesting issue – you were right
when you said earlier that it’s not done. It could be from a development
point of view this project will never be done, it isn’t just that there’s two
or three vacant spots left that still have infills to be put in, it has to do with
the fact that parts of it now are thirty-five years old, almost forty years old.
And we’ve changed the wooden sidewalk three times, completely since
the project began. We have buildings that are in serious deterioration –
they need to be worked on. So there’s always going to be an element of
building in Old Sacramento. We have a very interesting issue in the
building of Pioneer Telegraph just a week or ten days ago the back end of
it burned out, they had an electrical fire that burned out the back end of the
building and now we’re going to have to go back in and see how we’re
going to fix that. So there will always be some aspect of construction.
PRINCE:
Is that an original building?
HENLEY:
Yeah, that is an original building. Actually, I think that not much of the
building was damaged, the staircase burned off, the back of the building
and probably doors and windows got burned, but I don’t know that the fire
actually got inside because I haven’t been in it. But there always will be
activities like that that come along. And so then what rules do we apply to
it? I’ve sort of always been in favor of saying, all right, with all of its
warts and imperfections, Old Sacramento is a product of a certain time
period. A certain era formed the idea of how it should operate, and unless
you reject the whole thing, and say it should be done really different, I
think maybe you should stay with the same controlling principles with it.
I find it to be a little bit like creeping reconstruction when the preservation
movement evolves and finds what they consider to be a better way to do
things, to take those rules and then try and apply them on top of the
principles that were used at the time. It’s a little bit like putting band aids
on the building, the band aid stands out and I think that project should be
controlled by the rules it was set up by. That isn’t to say there aren’t
issues that need to be resolved, changed, or altered because obviously it
isn’t working totally. The problems that are there today are the same
problems that were there in the 1980s. The same issues.
PRINCE:
Right … and probably like you said earlier a lot of those same issues
would be the issues in any commercial district, and that was one of the
initial goals for this project was that it would be an extension of the central
business district, although it is isolated and, I guess, positive consequences
from that but ultimately, it’s operating as a commercial district.
HENLEY:
Actually I think that sort of the optimal statement is that Old Sacramento
as a physical project is not nearly as controversial as Old Sacramento as an
operational project. The construction poses very few problems other than
maintenance, poses very few problems – It’s how you choose to operate
the district. The governance of the district and its operation is the root of
almost all the issues that come to surface today. The only argument with
the physical structure that remotely comes up for argument is “oh golly,
that costs too much I want to make it out of something cheaper.”
PRINCE:
Until it burns up.
HENLEY:
Yeah. It’s always looking for a more efficient, modern approach to doing
it you know. And you know we acquiesce to a lot of fairly modern things
that we probably shouldn’t have done maybe, but maybe it was all right.
Inside, we didn’t force people to use plaster, we let them use sheetrock –
there was no sheetrock. And you know, today the argument comes up:
what about the exterior of these building now, the few that are left to be
built, what kind of materials are we going to use on the facades, are we
going to make them put up lap and stucco, or wire and stucco to be that
plaster façade? Or are we going to let them use one of the modern things
where the plaster part of it is probably less than an eighth of an inch or a
sixteenth of an inch thick? Much cheaper to apply and some argue that it
might be more durable, it might last longer, and I have to admit we’ve sort
of gone along with that, particularly when it comes to building things like
cornices and things because the sheer expense of an infill – this is not in
the case of a restoration of an existing structure, but in the case of an infill
building that’s gone in, even though it may mimic in fine detail a building
that was there historically. When you come to the cornices on these
buildings they were run out of, historically, out of plaster in place. In
other words wet plaster was put up and they ran the shape with a molding
device to do it. Those kinds of people – those skills really don’t even exist
today. People have to train themselves to do them again and they do lousy
work when they start out. On the other hand, and a case where that was
done is the Howard House, a three-story building in Old Sacramento on K
Street between Front and Second. The moldings and details were run out
of plaster, in place, up there, and they are very nice, they are very nice
details but the truth is, that’s one of the first buildings restored down there,
not the first but one of the first ones and there still were some old timers
left in the plaster trade that could do it. They hadn’t done it in years, and
some of them were really frustrated that they had to – but they had the
basic knowledge, they knew what they were doing. We actually even
saved the molds for running the mold in here somewhere. But every
subsequent generation after that has lost that skill, and no one knows how
to do it, they have to train themselves to do it again. So why not make that
on the ground in a process that mimics it because now it’s a reconstruction
infill – it’s not a historic building – why not make it on the ground, it
looks right, and put it up? Actually the Secretary of the Interior Standards
kind of gives a lot more latitude to infills than it does to …
PRINCE:
Rehabs?
HENLEY:
Rehabs.
PRINCE:
Well that makes a lot of sense for many reasons.
HENLEY:
But it’s being criticized when we do it we’re being criticized.
PRINCE:
Yeah, I can see why, but you know, when you’re telling me this I’m
thinking – historically, sort of the long durée – I’m thinking this is a
historic preservation project, at some point, maybe hundreds of years from
now if there’s any archeology done somebody will go through and say,
“Oh look, this is when originally this was here – here’s a foundation or
whatever – and this is when two hundred years later, or one-hundred and
fifty years later they tried to rebuild it like this, and they’re using these
kinds of materials and such – and that’s what’s really historical. Do you
know what I mean?
HENLEY:
To reinforce your point, here’s what I would say about it. Look at Sutter’s
Fort and the restoration of Sutter’s Fort. Sutter’s Fort restoration is so old
and so early in the story of historic preservation that it’s eligible to be on
the National Register as a historic preservation project. Forget its history
as a fort; it’s probably the second or third preservation project in the
country.
PRINCE:
Right. So it’s on the register for that?
HENLEY:
Well it isn’t but it could be, right behind Mount Vernon and one of the
missions. Now the fact that if you dig into the walls of Sutter’s Fort you
find that it’s made out of fired terra cotta blocks covered with plaster or
adobe is in itself almost an interesting story. People have come to believe
that that is the fort. That that’s the old fort, that’s it. When in fact, only
the central building is original, but to them that is the real fort. That’s the
only fort they’ve ever known and they come to accept it as that, actually
they’re surprised when they see a picture or something showing that it
isn’t, but, I would think that had they made those walls then out of adobe
blocks as the original fort walls were, people would even more believe
that they were probably the original walls and you’d be falsifying the
story. Interestingly enough they did some repairs in the fort, well, I think
it was at the fort, or maybe it was at Vallejo’s Adobe – I don’t remember
which – but State Parks so carefully replicated the adobe, they got the
straw – they actually had people munching this stuff up with bare feet and
putting it in blocks and doing all that stuff – somebody, actually one of
Neasham’s protégés got worried about the fact that people might not be
able to tell the real thing from the old [new] thing and so they started
dumping things in the adobe blocks like coins and stuff, so that if someone
ever broke one apart and analyzed it they’d realize it was a fake.
PRINCE:
That’s a really interesting aspect of this, of all historic preservation.
HENLEY:
But now, and Old Sacramento is beginning to approach that time period
but it’s constantly evolving so it may never be the same as Sutter’s Fort
but the preservation movement itself is old enough that some of its early
efforts should be preserved, rather than changed.
PRINCE:
Yeah, yeah.
[End of Tape 3, Side B]