[Session 3, July 31, 2007]
HENLEY
[Begin Tape 4, Side A]
PRINCE:
Hello, it’s Tuesday July 31, 2007. I’m Lisa Prince, back at the
Sacramento Archives and Museum Collection Center in Sacramento with
Jim Henley, retiring manager. This is our third interview on behalf of the
City of Sacramento for the Old Sacramento Historic District Oral History
Project. Good morning Jim.
HENLEY:
Good morning Lisa.
PRINCE:
How are you today?
HENLEY:
I’m just fine.
PRINCE:
Good, good. I wanted to clarify one point of our last conversation. We
were discussing you’d gone to work in Old Sacramento, you were doing
historic research, and working on the buildings and you were working
with or in conjunction with DeMars and Wells, the architecture firm hired
by, was it Candeub and Fleissig?
HENLEY:
Well, DeMars and Reay were hired by Candebu and Fleissig. DeMars and
Wells, which is the successor firm was hired by the Redevelopment
Agency to continue the architectural work after Candueb and Flessig.
PRINCE:
After their master plan.
HENLEY:
Yes.
PRINCE:
Okay. I just wanted to clarify who you were working with – who hired
you and I know you had been working with Aubrey Neasham but how did
that work out, who was it you were working for at that point?
HENLEY:
Well, I was hired by the city; it’s kind of a strange relationship because it
really wasn’t, as we would call an employee/employer relationship at the
time. They called me a contract employee which later was deemed
probably not legal, and it was a couple, three years later that they changed
the designation to regular city employee, but the Commission was kind of
an unusual character at that time in every other aspect of the city …
PRINCE:
When you say the Commission, are you talking about the Historical
Landmarks Commission?
HENLEY:
The Historical Landmarks Commission.
PRINCE:
Okay, so that’s who you were working with or through?
HENLEY:
Well, this is – I’m working for the city, the Commission is a city
commission …
PRINCE:
Okay.
HENLEY:
… and it’s doing work with that commission and the Commission is
unusual in that it’s an appointed body by the City Council, but under the
city charter all employees are responsible to the city manager – there’s a
separation of powers there. And it’s the city manager’s responsibility to
submit budgets and things like that to the council but this time it was done
differently. The city council would appoint a council member to sit with a
committee or commission and they together would draw up a budget and
submit it to the council, sort of bypassing the city manager. And so, in a
sense, even though I was a city employee, who I was reporting to, was a
little bit confused. Was I reporting to the Commission? Was I reporting
to that council member? Was I reporting to Aubrey – who actually hired
me? That was sort of up to me to figure out and I very quickly decided
that Aubrey was the lead and so I would follow him as my supervisor, and
no one else seemed to care, so that’s how it came to be what it is.
PRINCE:
That worked out okay with everybody?
HENLEY:
Seemed to work out fine with everybody.
PRINCE:
So then, was Aubrey Neasham, was he answering to the city council, or
working through the Redevelopment Agency, or?
HENLEY:
Well, Aubrey’s role is equally sort of confusing. He truly was a
consultant, he never was an employee of the city, in fact he was at one
point an employee of the state in State Parks, and a contractor to the
Commission or the city for consulting services and was acting as the staff
person to the Commission at the same time he was a State Parks
employee, and at that same time he also had a company called Western
Heritage Inc. which was his company. And he put it together essentially
to do historic research and historic projects and he was the consultant to
Candeub and Fleissig for the history part of the report through Western
Heritage. So he sort of had his foot in all pots of water at the same time.
PRINCE:
Hmm, that’s very interesting. Can you just review a little bit what your
specific duties were when you were first there and how it changed as you
went along. I know that Aubrey Neasham had gone, he was gone in, what
three years after you started or two years?
HENLEY:
Well, he sort of semi retired about three years afterwards. But he stayed
around as a part-time consultant for another couple of years, at least, and
then he did really pull out completely. When I came to work we had a –
we, meaning the city – had a contract with the Redevelopment Agency to
provide historic services for the Old Sacramento Project. What was going
on at that point is the master plan by Candueb had been accepted and it
was determined that the next step would be to refine all of the drawings
and the research that had been done for the master plan into schematic
studies of the facades of these buildings so that you could have some
drawings and some historical information to attach to a contract or
contracts for the development of the building or buildings in Old
Sacramento when you got a developer.
PRINCE:
So this was the package that the developer would receive?
HENLEY:
That’s correct. It would define which building, what time period, and
what the history of that building was. Well, most of the background
research had been done before I came. Aubrey had two or three students –
maybe as many as four or five at some point that were working with him
at doing research. I knew most of them but I didn’t know them well
because most of them had started to leave about the time I came. But it
became real apparent that there were some gaps in the research, and so in
my job, I started to do some original research but the majority of my time
was working with DeMars and Wells staff in reviewing what they were
drawing, interpreting what they should be seeing in the photographs as
they transmitted it. That quickly got to be that there needed to be some
organizational structure to this and so we started to create files for each of
these buildings and we accumulated the photographs and the graphics that
were known about each building and we tried to start to define the logic of
how we chose which building to be restored to which time period. That
was my job for about three years.
PRINCE:
Now did you, of course there was some buildings that were going to be
restored in their place …
HENLEY:
Right.
PRINCE:
… but, am I right to say that a large amount of the buildings were
reconstructed?
HENLEY:
Oh, I would say that forty percent, or more of the buildings were
reconstructions, but probably more than half of them were existing
buildings. That would change a little bit because at least three buildings
collapsed during the process of restoration.
PRINCE:
Was that when they were being worked on?
HENLEY:
In two cases it was when they were being worked on. One case was while
waiting for work to be done. Another two or three buildings had partial
collapses, which they were able to lose a wall and continue to restore the
rest of the building. So that’s about the ratio, and there is a small number
of what we classified – we classified all the buildings in three categories:
restorations, reconstructions, and relocations. And it was before I came, in
the Candeub study that they determined that there would be certain
relocations. And it was determined that the relocation buildings would be
located at the edge of the historic district, on the north and the south end.
There are several reasons for that – one, they didn’t want to mess with the
central part of the district, and two, the peripheral edges of the district, the
buildings that were there were twentieth century buildings and they felt
they could easily dispense with them and infill with these relocations.
And all those relocations came from under freeway – they were all part of
the mitigation: the Big Four building; the Rialto, D.O. Mills; Fig
buildings on the L street side – those are relocation buildings.
PRINCE:
So those were actually dismantled and moved to …
HENLEY:
They were in varying packages from literally dismantling and saving the
brick and every single piece that they could and reconstructing it like in
the case of the Big Four buildings – the Huntington, Hopkins Hardware
store and the Stanford Brothers store – to the other end where the Rialto,
D.O. Mills, Fig buildings are, they used historic brick that were
dismantled from under the freeway but not necessarily from those specific
buildings and they used some cast iron details and things that were
salvaged but it’s much more like a reconstruction than a restoration. You
know, it’s not a dismantle, pick it up, move it over set it down.
PRINCE:
This was part of, you say the mitigation so it was sort of the ultimate
compromise between the opposing parties: the preservationists that
opposed the freeway from the very beginning, didn’t want the freeway on
the Sacramento side at all, and the Redevelopment Agency, and by this
time the city council that was pushing for this route by this time. So they
had agreed that, I guess it was the Daly plan that had, that wanted this
route and that had agreed to save some but not all of the buildings and
create this historic zone, but the freeway would still go through what the
opponents considered the heart of the city.
HENLEY:
Yeah. I think as I understood the battle, and again, most of it was long
over by the time I came, but as I understand the fight the preservation
community was pretty unified in wanting the freeway out of Sacramento –
over on the West Sacramento side. I think that at some point they came to
realize that it probably couldn’t happen, that it was going to be in
Sacramento. And so the preservation community and what we would
maybe call the environmentalist movement type people today started to
look at what they could salvage versus total victory – what can we get out
of this? How much can we save? So they started to work towards some
compromises and the ultimate compromise that came out of it was that
serious bulge that occurs to make Old Sacramento have, as Neasham
would put it, a full Second Street with buildings on both sides of the street.
He didn’t want that freeway so close that there would be no east side of
Second Street.
PRINCE:
So that was also compromised by the Daly Plan that had wanted the
freeway to go right between Second and Third that would wipe out the
east part of Second Street, so they bulged it in towards the east even
further than they had originally intended.
HENLEY:
I think so, and I think that – when you say Daly Plan I think you’re talking
about the Leo Daly Plan that the city had commissioned.
PRINCE:
Yeah.
HENLEY:
I really think that that may be giving it a name that it doesn’t deserve
because I think all these routes were determined by the Division of
Highways, they were not determined by Leo Daly …
PRINCE:
I see, yeah.
HENLEY:
I think Leo Daly looked at them and said this is the preferable one.
PRINCE:
That’s what it was, it was the Leo Daly consulting firm out of San
Francisco that the city had hired to do this study and they came up with
that route being the most favorable for all interests involved.
HENLEY:
One of the things that came out of this is, at least when I arrived, to me it
looked like the preservation community was still essentially intact, that it
had survived this trauma of the freeway and maybe was stronger than it
had been before because it had learned to organize a little bit, but, in
hindsight looking back at it I think in fact what happened is some people
took their marbles and went home. And we never heard from them again.
They removed themselves from the movement and any active involvement
in it. Others said, “Okay, we won this, now what can we do with it?” And
started to – that’s the group that I tended to know and that’s the group that
I tended to work with the most.
PRINCE:
Who were some of those people?
HENLEY:
Oh, there were some old families. One that stuck around the Commission
a long time would be somebody like Don Rivett, his father, Dexter, or his
brother Dexter, they go back – they had a building in Old Sacramento,
they go back to 1849. There were some people from Native Daughters [of
the Golden West], a gal named Audrey Brown that was around for a long
time. Gee, you know a lot of these names have failed me now, because
they’re dead and I haven’t dealt with them for a long time. There were
several commissioners that were very active in the movement for a long
time. There was a guy who was the head of the state fair marketing group,
he was their public relations guy, a guy named, oh man, I just lost his
name – a great big, tall guy over six foot six, and he was very active. He
used to go around and speak to every community club and everything
about, “Now that we have this, how do we make it work, how do we get it
moving, how do we fund it?” He was kind of a loud, vibrant kind of a guy
and I don’t think he seriously meant this by any means but he used to go
around and say, “Well you know, Old Sacramento will fall down waiting
for Redevelopment to do it. All I want you to do is let me have one
gambling establishment, and one house of ill repute and I’ll pay for the
whole thing!”
[Laughter]
And he used to go around and say, “That’s part of the history of Old
Sacramento.”
PRINCE:
He was right.
HENLEY:
He was right about that to some degree. But oh, you know, that worked
really well when he’d go to a lot of these little clubs around town and
people would giggle and they’d remember his talk, you know, he had nice
slides to go with it.
PRINCE:
So did he garner much support in this process?
HENLEY:
Freddie Heitfelt was his name.
PRINCE:
Freddie Heitfelt?
HENLEY:
Freddie Heitfelt. Oh yeah, he garnered a lot of support and he stuck
around for pretty close to ten years I would say but he was around until
about 1970. And then I think his age kind of took its toll, and he sort of
retired.
PRINCE:
He got to see a little bit …
HENLEY:
Yeah, he was around when the Morse building was built, so I know that.
Yeah, he bought the vision, hook, line, and sinker that Neasham put in that
painting. He saw that activity in the street. I give Freddie a lot of credit
because I think that Freddie understood intuitively what no one else has
understood about Old Sacramento.
PRINCE:
Which was …
HENLEY:
And that is with all the effort we’ve put into it with restoring and building
those buildings, no matter how well-restored they are, that argument is
sort of superfluous to the other side of the coin, and that is by restoring all
those buildings, all you’ve created is a skeleton. If you believe in the
image of the picture, there’s life there, and Freddie wanted that life to have
an historical ambiance. He wanted history to be told down there and so he
was the first person I recognized that saw that there were two sides to this
coin. You not only had to restore buildings but you had to bring some life
to it. And that’s what we failed to do in Old Sacramento. We failed to do
the interpretation; we failed to do the cultural side of the project. We just
put the bones in place, there’s no flesh on them.
PRINCE:
Ahh, yeah. Yeah, that’s a very good point and I would think that maybe
that came about because there was such a focus on the buildings, just as
artifacts or – why do you think that was overlooked in the beginning?
HENLEY:
It’s probably the same reason that people write histories of communities
based on events and famous people and physical actions like completing a
railroad or doing a transcontinental stage route, or a telegraph line, or the
discovery of gold. Those are the traditional ways we deal with our history
and it takes a little while for people to start thinking about the cultural side
of it. What – beyond those events is there to this story? And that usually
is the last thing to happen, at least in a historic district. You can’t – if
you’re going to have a historic district you’ve got to have the skeleton in
place, you’ve got to build the buildings or restore the buildings, or
preserve the buildings, or what ever you’re going to do – then it’s about
what you do with them after that is done is what’s important. And in
many ways that’s about community history in general, we tend at first to
anchor the community down by the events and the personalities, the
“important” personalities in quotes, and after a while we get beyond that
and we start to want to talk about communities and we want to talk about
cultural movements and actions and interactions, and what is the impact of
technology on people rather than just talking about the technology, what’s
going on with the people?
PRINCE:
What’s going on with them and what were their motivators and their
mindsets and all the interconnections of the different personalities from
the smallest to the largest, in quotes?
HENLEY:
Old Sacramento is interesting because it can represent enormous forces of
change, not just the forces of change within the community, which is
certainly true – to the state and to the nation – enormous changes that it
represents. And it’s like having a locomotive on a pedestal without
explaining what it means.
PRINCE:
Yeah, what its significance was. Not just for the immediate surrounding
community, but for the wider community in this case – not just for the city
of Sacramento, or the state of California, but for the nation, and for the
world …
HENLEY:
That’s right. Exactly.
PRINCE:
… when you think about what happened in that little place. I know there’s
– like you say, the heritage history, or the celebratory history, the
discovery of gold – but when you really study that and you think about
what happened in that short period of time – how the world sort of
converged on the banks of that river there and moved out from that point –
that has so many stories to tell, and I think that that would be one of the
real important parts of significant history that is missing there.
HENLEY:
Well, you know when you talk about Old Sacramento; just about
everybody knows who the big four are. Certainly a large number of
people know about John Sutter Jr., and the founding of the city, or they
know about Sam Brannan, or they know about early governors that were
down there, or maybe D.O. Mills and his banking empire, things like that.
But, you know, almost no body knows about the people that came and
worked there every day, and almost nobody knows about what the impact
was of these events that occur – be it a major advancement in commerce
such as banking represented in California, or the railroad – that’s the thing,
nobody knows about what that means to the people that were here. Or for
that matter, beyond here, and that’s the unfulfilled promise. Ultimately, I
think that’s what will either make this project continue to be a relatively
highly significant historic district nationally, or it will shrink into
something less and less important and perhaps ultimately its historic value
will get lost.
PRINCE:
Or just serve the tourist objective.
HENLEY:
Ultimately just serving a tourist objective. It could be the difference
between history that is well documented, and perpetuation of a myth.
PRINCE:
Right, right. And I guess how creative the interpretation of that
documentation can be.
HENLEY:
But you know, the importance of the bones is hard to ignore. I remember
being involved and actually being quoted in an editorial in the Sacramento
Union many years ago about the B. F. Hastings building. The state was
looking at the B. F. Hastings building and was somewhat appalled by the
challenges of its physical deterioration, about how they would restore it
and preserve it. And there were people in the state architect’s office who
were advocating we just tear it down and reconstruct it. And an editor at
the Union called me and asked me how I felt and I sort of cavalierly said,
“Well you know some people will go a long ways to see the real thing, but
won’t go around the block to see a replica.” And I think that’s sort of
what the bones represent down there, and I think that for some people a
story well told about things that are happening in Old Sacramento are
more meaningful if you’re standing there and looking at the building
where it actually happens …
PRINCE:
With the actual bones …
HENLEY:
… than not. Yeah, if you tell it in the classroom it’s a different
environment.
PRINCE:
Absolutely. That kind of goes back to Aubrey Neasham’s idea of arrested
decay, or I had read a statement of his that he had given – I think it was
before the Legislature in one of these articles I read about the freeway
battle – where he had said that he thought it was, the best thing to do
would be to rehab something, that to reconstruct was the worse case
scenario. I mean if that was your only option left available, you would
take it, which is I think what happened to some of those, the big four and
such, but he always, like you had mentioned earlier, believed that
authenticity was most important in preservation. Because he felt –there
was also a project he’d been working on, I can’t remember the name of the
mission, it was a mission, and it was, parts of it were in ruins and he had
said that he thought it should be kept in that state. That was more
significant than if you just rebuilt something and if you didn’t have
enough evidence to show you exactly how it should be then you were
really corrupting the authenticity of its history.
HENLEY:
He comes up out of a period when those kinds of ideas are actually pretty
revolutionary. It’s only fifty, sixty, fifty years before Aubrey is an
important figure in history circles that you have fundamental issues being
resolved about Sutter’s Fort. Where you have a group of people who kind
of know history was made there, they know it’s important and they go out
and look at it and they try to figure out what to do and the immediate
reaction is, “Well, there’s this crummy little adobe building left, if we just
tore it down and built in its place a monument, we can tell the whole world
what happened here.”
[End of Tape 4, Side A]
[Begin Tape 4, Side B]
PRINCE:
1895, or something like that?
HENLEY:
Yeah, 1889, maybe, as early as 1888, ‘89. And you know, people start to
think about it and say, “Oh we need to save this remnant of this building,
maybe we should reconstruct what’s missing.” You know, it’s only fifty
years later or so that he’s getting involved in and refining the idea, many
of the ideas that we have in preservation today of should we preserve the
evolution of things? Well, certainly in same cases he didn’t do that, but
you can see he’s thinking about it you can see he’s trying to move a
thought in a certain direction. He’s a very deliberative sort of thinker.
When I first went to work I sort of asked him, “What do you want me to
do for you, I mean what is it really that you’re asking me to do?” And it
took a little while to get that out of him but finally what he said is, “I want
you to be my devil’s advocate, I want you to tell me what you think is
wrong with what I’m saying.” So I played that role for several years with
him. And it’s interesting because in all honesty, he wanted you to be the
devil’s advocate until he got angry, and then you knew to stop. You knew
to stop at that point because it wasn’t going anywhere. Once he got angry
it was the end of the conversation. But we used to sit there at a desk and
just talk and challenge thoughts, and he would listen to that, and
sometimes change his mind about how he did things.
PRINCE:
Now was this concerning details of buildings, or people that had lived in
them, and things that had occurred?
HENLEY:
Well, it certainly had to do with restoration and reconstruction and
preservation and where each of those topics belonged in a hierarchy.
PRINCE:
For this project?
HENLEY:
For this project. But frequently would range to much more philosophical
attitudes towards preservation or the writing of history. He and I did a
publication or two together, and I remember the City of the Plains book
that we did. I think we went through – they’re not very long chapters, the
text is very short – I think we went through something like thirty-two or
thirty-three drafts of this text.
PRINCE:
Wow. Discussing them together? Finessing it?
HENLEY:
Arguing what it meant, you know? And it isn’t all that important – the text
in my mind now – but it was then, it was important to us at the time. And
then I didn’t write it at all he wrote a thing called A Reference Point in
Time, actually before I came to work and then we reissued it and cleaned it
up and had it, in the graphics, improved quite a bit – put color in it and
various things – and he agonized over that. He was a plodding sort of
writer. He’d do these things over and over and over and over.
PRINCE:
Well just looking through his papers, some of his notes, you know, you
look at them and there are a lot of places where he has lines scratched out
and words above it, and then those scratched out, and I mean they look
like a mess until you really study them and see what was going on in his
mind as he was working on these drafts. It’s very interesting.
HENLEY:
Yeah. Well, he also had a luxury that historians don’t have any more very
often. First of all, all of his adult life he worked for government and he
always had a secretary. And so he was just used to getting draft after
draft, and working it over and sending it back to be redone. I know people
complain bitterly about my handwriting, but his was small.
PRINCE:
Yes. Very small.
HENLEY:
He crammed four or five – in a line on a tablet he put four or five lines of
text.
PRINCE:
[Laughs] I’ve seen that in his notes.
HENLEY:
And he used ink pens that weren’t always good quality ink pens so they
would skip, and he didn’t care if it was red ink or what and it would get to
be kind of a mess.
PRINCE:
So now, we’ve talked a little bit about the cooperative efforts among the
different interests in the project – the Sacramento Redevelopment Agency;
by this time the state that had the State Park there, the historic State Park;
your group who you were working with; so DeMars and Wells was
through the Redevelopment Agency and you had a good relationship with
them you say, that was a delightful experience …
HENLEY:
Very much so.
PRINCE:
… you felt that you were progressing very well with them, so I wanted to
ask you about some of the other groups or interests, what were those
relationships like? Did you come upon any obstacles, working with, say
the city or the Redevelopment Agency, did they want, did they have
different goals or did you feel like there was one common goal and was
that articulated or how did that work out?
HENLEY:
Well, in the early 60s my perception was that the city had – essentially
once the fundamental plan was adopted of having a historic district and
having these various redevelopment project areas created – abdicated to
the Agency to get it done. And even though I know, and I know more
now than I did at the time, I know that the Planning Director, later to be
City Manager definitely put a heavy hand on the Agency and how they
would do things. I was not aware of that particularly at the time. I found
that almost everything was defering to the Agency – we worked with the
Agency. We actually didn’t work with city staff very much, I have to
admit probably the first three years or so I didn’t know what the structure
of the city was at all because my contact was so minimal. I knew
somebody sent a paycheck, and I probably remembered who signed the
check but that’s about it. The contact was with the Agency.
PRINCE:
So you worked with Ed Astone, the Project Director, quite a bit?
HENLEY:
I worked with Ed, quite a bit. I worked with a guy named Don Kline who
was the Deputy Director and I don’t know what else they called him at the
Agency.
PRINCE:
Was he the planner, the chief planner?
HENLEY:
He was the chief, sort of the chief planner, yeah. And then the first agency
architect was a guy named Wes Witt that I worked with.
PRINCE:
Wes Witt?
HENLEY:
Wesley Witt.
PRINCE:
Okay. Was Clyde Trudell there when you were there?
HENLEY:
Clyde was there but he was going. He was going or gone by the time I
arrived, and there was very little contact there because I think there was a
lot of tension between him and Aubrey. Aubrey had no real respect for
him.
PRINCE:
Oh. Was Clyde Trudell – he was an architect?
HENLEY:
I believe he was an architect who thought of himself as an historian.
PRINCE:
Well, yeah. Because I’ve looked at some of their correspondence – or
correspondence of Clyde Trudell’s and he seemed, well he seemed like he
was VERY specific about details about some of the buildings. I remember
looking at some of his letters where he was questioning some decisions
that had been made about – little details – about, say, you know, a
doorway or the edge of this building or something like that.
HENLEY:
Well, the devil is in the details and in preservation, it really is in the details
because the overall picture can look swell, works for ninety percent of the
people one hundred percent of the time maybe, but ten percent – it’s
what’s in front of their nose that they look at. It’s not looking at the whole
building and if that doesn’t look right, they begin to question everything
about it.
PRINCE:
So that brings me to another question. Was there ever a review process,
an official review board appointed or selected from some of these different
groups, to review the different developer’s blueprints or building plans to
okay them? How did that work out, how was it enforced?
HENLEY:
Well, we were – it gets a little gray after the early 1970s. First developers
start to come online, we’re still working for the Agency, we’re still
essentially getting our money via the Agency to the city then to us. But
the city is starting to have a little more say in what’s going on, building
permits are being issued and Redevelopment can’t do that – the city has to
issue the building permit. So when a proposal came through – I know
your question was there a board or commission or somebody that looked
at it – the Commission, the Museum and History Commission, or the old
Historic Landmarks Commission, whichever it was at the time – actually
had a review process, they could look at them but to be honest, they
didn’t. They deferred to the staff to do that. That was us. Which means
we were the ones that pretty much called the shots. First as the Agency’s
consultant and then later on behalf of the city when we reviewed it, we
were the same people doing the review. Some people might criticize that
but it did expedite the process.
PRINCE:
So now, you just said something – the old Historic Landmark
Commission, was that what merged into the History and Science
Division?
HENLEY:
The evolution of the Commission is it started out as a historic landmark
commission then it got reorganized and it became known as the Museum
and History Commission, and when it became a Museum and History
Commission it was a joint city/county commission rather than just a city
commission. And then it morphed one more time and the Museum and
History Commission got renamed History and Science Commission, or
Sacramento Commission of History and Science. And it’s still a
city/county commission and it still exists, but there was – when I went to
work, there was a commission budget and we were part of that budget as
staff.
PRINCE:
And this is that commission that began in 1953.
HENLEY:
That’s right the Historic Landmarks Commission. And after about two
years the separation of powers business between the city manager and the
council started to become an issue. I doubt it was really over us but we
certainly got into it. And what it was is the charter says that the council
doesn’t supervise employees and therefore their commissions can’t
supervise employee. So it has to be city manager and budgets are
prepared by the city manager and submitted to the council – that’s the way
it is, you know, and somebody went back and explained that to the powers
that be at the time and they realized they had to make some changes. So
what happened is the Commission no longer at that point had a budget
they became a Museum and History Division, well actually it was a
department, the Museum and History Department. We didn’t become a
Division – which was a reduction in our position …
PRINCE:
From being a department?
HENLEY:
From being a department until we got placed underneath the Parks
Department.
PRINCE:
Was this in the seventies, or later?
HENLEY:
Yeah, it was in the mid seventies.
PRINCE:
So you were placed under the Parks Department?
HENLEY:
Yeah, which had another name at that time. It was Parks, and a bunch of
other things. And so the Parks Department was a department so we had to
become a division.
PRINCE:
Okay, you were a division of that department. And that was the way the
hierarchy …
HENLEY:
Yeah, and before that when Rathfon was the city manager and the
Assistant City Manager was Walter Slipe and Tom Ebner. Rathfon
retired, Slipe became the city manager and he brought in, and Ebner was
still there until he left, he brought in a guy named Bill Edgar as the
Assistant City Manager and at that point we were still a department and
the city had -- there’s a policy the managers met every two weeks as a
group – but as a department we had essentially nothing to say compared to
the fire department or police department, or the water department or the
engineering department. So very quickly it was determined that they
needed to have two department head meetings – big departments and little
departments. And very quickly the manager didn’t have any time for the
little departments to meet with them; he could only meet with the big
departments. And so we were meeting with Bill Edgar who was the
Assistant City Manager and then the head of Parks, at that time a guy
named Doc Wisham, Solon Wisham became an assistant city manager.
He ended up meeting with the little departments, you know, we were
getting pushed down the pecking order pretty quick. There was about four
of us that were called little departments. And then pretty soon they
eliminated that.
PRINCE:
They eliminated the department and made you a division. And did you
meet with any assistant city managers?
HENLEY:
Well, not officially at that point. We were meeting with the department
head. But by then I had already become a little bit of a fixture around and
so I always maintained some relationship with the assistant city managers
or the manager.
PRINCE:
And this was in the mid seventies?
HENLEY:
Yeah.
PRINCE:
Okay. So back to the review process, that basically then was the
responsibility of you and who else was working with you at that point?
HENLEY:
Well, at one point Neasham was involved for a little while but he left
pretty quick and he wasn’t involved too much in that. It really was
myself, and then I hired a fellow to really do a lot of technical research for
me and he did a lot of the plan review, named Steven Helmich.
PRINCE:
Okay. So you guys reviewed – say a developer had bought a parcel, had
accepted the requirements, the guidelines, had their little package there –
what was supposed to be built at this site. Then they had their planners
draw up some plans and then you guys would look those over and either
okay them or not?
HENLEY:
Yeah, and there was some dissent that arose in the seventies about, you
know, “Well, isn’t there any appeal beyond this?” sort of thing. And the
city and the Agency agreed to establish an entity called the Old
Sacramento Variance Appeal Board, and it was to be staffed by Agency
staff and it consisted of a member of the Redevelopment Agency Board, a
member of the Museum and History Board, and a couple, three people of
specific disciplines, I think a historical architect and I don’t know what
else, I can’t remember the exact makeup.
PRINCE:
And by this time – you’re a member of the Museum and History board?
Not yet?
HENLEY:
I’m never a member of the board, never a commissioner. No, I mean the
closest I ever got at one point I was their Executive Director, which was a
title that the city, that I never felt entirely comfortable with, so they called
me a division head later.
PRINCE:
I guess I’m trying to establish your history with the Division that
coincided with the work you were doing for what was now the Museum
and History Division, had been the Landmarks Commission, working with
the plans and all of this – and then the plans for the Museum and History
Center, was that happening at the same time?
HENLEY:
Yeah. Yeah it was. Old Sacramento gained virtually a hundred percent of
our attention for about four or five years.
PRINCE:
And that was?
HENLEY:
‘66 to ‘71, ‘72, somewhere in there. And we had gotten past building the
Morse building, we had gotten passed the state starting the Big Four
building, started in ‘69 and finished it in ‘70 or ‘71. And we had got the
first buildings – private buildings under development contracts, the very
first buildings were starting to go. And so it seemed like it was on a path
and then we turned our attention back to the museum because that was one
of the original focuses of the Commission, always had been to run and
operate a museum, specifically a museum for Old Sacramento was in the
package.
PRINCE:
And that was part of the State Park land, wasn’t it?
HENLEY:
Well, where we are now was at one point part of State Park property, yes.
PRINCE:
It’s not now?
HENLEY:
Oh no. The city owns the property now.
PRINCE:
Oh, the city owns it, I didn’t know that.
HENLEY:
Yeah, the whole relationship is kind of complicated down there. The
streets, like Front Street and I Street within the State Park, well the city
always owned that and when they created the State Park, I don’t want to
say funky, but I don’t know any other way to put it, kind of an agreement
came about where title transferred, I believe transferred to the state, but
the city retained an easement right for the maintenance of the utilities, the
addition of the utilities as a street they still have the right to utilize it but
the Parks Department is responsible for the surface and … it’s a very
strange, complicated relationship.
PRINCE:
So the Parks Department – you mean the State Parks is responsible for the
maintenance but the city can use it?
HENLEY:
Well, and they preserve it as an easement. It’s a preserved easement and
the city has the right to do anything.
PRINCE:
But the state pays for that preservation as an easement.
HENLEY:
The state pays for the maintaining as it is on the surface now.
PRINCE:
So now, is this the same Museum plan from long ago at Pioneer Hall when
you were working with Aubrey Neasham to create a county and city
museum or was this something different?
HENLEY:
Well, before my time the Commission had come up with a plan that said
the museum should be in the Booth Building on Front Street and they even
had drawings of it – some pretty primitive sketches of what it was
supposed to look like. That quickly was determined not to be realistic and
there was a study done, right about the time I came about where – they’d
already decided they ought to do it in the Waterworks building but they
thought due diligence that they should look to see if there were other sites
that made sense, because it in fact was identified at the time that the
building wasn’t big enough.
PRINCE:
The Waterworks building.
HENLEY:
Yeah. That it was not a big enough building to achieve any of the
programming as a community museum, that it simply wasn’t big enough.
And so we looked at a number of other sites at the time. We looked at the
County Courthouse, which had not yet been torn down, that would have
been an excellent site but the county just turned us off.
PRINCE:
And where was that located?
HENLEY:
It’s where the jail is now, on I Street.
PRINCE:
Oh, okay.
HENLEY:
It’s on that block, between Sixth and Seventh, on I, on the north side of the
street. The county said, it’s a code deficient space to be in. Actually it
was an excellent building. It would have been a stunner for the purposes,
but it was taken off the table. Then the SPD [Southern Pacific Depot] was
looked at as a site, and the general consensus at the time was it might not
happen in our lifetime because the railroad wasn’t willing to let go of it.
PRINCE:
That would have been a good one too.
HENLEY:
It would have been a good one too. At any rate, there probably were a
couple other sites to look at I don’t remember them now. Any rate, then
they started to look at the Waterworks site and say, “Oh. Well what can
we do on that site to make it work?” And we were sort of challenged at
one point to say, “How much can you put into that site?”
PRINCE:
You mean in terms of the size of the building?
HENLEY:
Yeah, how much can you actually put in there and what version of the
building do you want to build? Well clearly the aesthetically interesting
building is the original building. After that they start to hack it up and
change it, and it gets to be a pretty ugly looking building, but it does get to
be eventually about four stories tall. So at one point we actually proposed
the four story ugly building and that’s exactly the reaction – too ugly!
PRINCE:
And what time frame would that have been? [historical]
HENLEY:
1870S, ‘80s. So we went back and looked at the original building and all
we could do is bump out in the back of it about fifteen feet, which is not
part of the original building but it’s the building has got three sides and it
turns and then there’s a boxed out projection in the back of it that goes
back towards the Railroad Museum.
PRINCE:
Does that go up the three stories?
HENLEY:
It goes up the full height of the building. And that gave us space for
things like fire exits and elevators and some restrooms and things you got
out of the basic core of the building so we could use all the space. But as
it was we couldn’t come up with very much square footage, so from the
beginning the challenge was no one wanted to tell less of a story,
everybody wanted to tell a big story, and so it became how much stuff can
you put in this little box? And so the end product of the museum when it
opened was a density of artifacts that was sort of overwhelming – there
was so much stuff in a little space. And even at that we were forced to do
something that wasn’t even imagined at the time – telling part of the story
was telling about the community and the communities – the cultural and
ethnic groups that show up here. And their story alone was as big as the
whole museum had physical space for – forget all the other stories.
PRINCE:
Was this the ethnic survey?
HENLEY:
Yeah. And so we started looking for an imaginative way to do that and we
came up with placing it throughout the community gallery as computer
terminals with touch sensitive screens and we could pack a lot of
information into these computers that take very little floor space and it was
kind of a first. I mean, it isn’t the first interactive exhibit by any means in
the museum but it was a real interesting issue. We had something like
twenty monitors total when we were full blow. And I remember it well,
because the original programming, the research for this was NEH grants.
PRINCE:
Oh, it was?
HENLEY:
And they were big NEH grants for us, really big – I think the two grants
for the ethnic study might have totaled maybe close to three hundred
thousand dollars.
PRINCE:
And when was this done?
HENLEY:
It was done two years before the museum opened, I’m a little confused
now about when the museum opened, but I think it must have been around
1985.
[End of Tape 4, Side B]