[Session 3, July 31, 2007]
HENLEY
[Begin Tape 5, Side A]
HENLEY:
We were turned down on the NEH Implementation grant, and I remember
this very well because when we read the reviewer’s comments I was
appalled by the reaction of the peer group that looked at it. And the
reaction was that they felt that it should not be funded because they felt
that the technology would overwhelm the humanities.
PRINCE:
Wow. It had to be early ‘eighties.
HENLEY:
Yeah, and that sort of stunned me for a long time and I was shocked by it.
Long story made short, we went to the California Council for the
Humanities and asked them if they would help with it and they agreed
immediately to help with it, which is ironic because they get their money
from NEH.
PRINCE:
Oh.
HENLEY:
They’re a re-granting entity. And so we put the package together to put it
through and got it through and got it implemented. But it was several
years later, I was at a AAM meeting – it wasn’t several years later it was
probably a year later – I was at a AAM meeting, and I was at a cocktail
party discussion where this guy who didn’t know me from Adam was
talking about how he’d been reviewing NEH grants and how appalled he
was at this application of putting computers in a museum to tell the story
of ethnic groups – oh I knew exactly what it was the second I heard this
conversation so my ears kept really open because I wasn’t really a part of
the conversation – well, the gist of it was, he was from a very prestigious
eastern museum and when people asked him why he was so opposed to it
he said, “Well, if we funded that, and it was successful, we’d all have to
do it.” In other words, he didn’t want to put up the money in his own
institution.
PRINCE:
Ahhh, yeah, yeah.
HENLEY:
Hey, I always felt the program was very successful. You know, it was
primitive technology, it was done on Apple 2Es, and the programming
was bizarre and we had lots of problems with the software but it
eventually worked and it worked pretty well. The only thing that did it in
was the museum was unable to afford to replace the machinery and the
technology when it wore out.
PRINCE:
So it had to stop?
HENLEY:
It ended up being eventually all torn out.
PRINCE:
What was the community response to this project?
HENLEY:
That’s kind of interesting. It was, in the beginning the way it was set up,
when people went in and looked at information – if they could find their
own family, or they could find some friends that they recognized and we
hadn’t identified them they would start to give us information and we
actually had the ability to go back and add that information to the database
to massage it …
PRINCE:
So it was really interactive.
HENLEY:
It was interactive in that sense quite well. And we got quite a lot of that in
the first year or two.
PRINCE:
That’s great.
HENLEY:
And we also created at the same time a couple of computer games, one on
water and one on the gold rush. And the gold rush one wasn’t very good
in my estimation but the water one actually controlled all the dams and the
release of water on the whole northern California water system. And you
began to learn what the impact was of your decision how long it would
take for that to become an issue and adults found that intimidating to do
and children found it almost too easy.
PRINCE:
Wow.
HENLEY:
It was fascinating. That actually hung around the museum for a good ten
years.
PRINCE:
Who came up with that one?
HENLEY:
All that design work was done by a design firm in New England called the
New England Technology Group out of Boston and it was a group of guys
that went to M.I.T. and they or their professors were the people who had
developed what was called the artificial intelligence unit at M.I.T. It was
very interesting the one guy with the firm that I had dealings with so much
– his name was Steve, I can’t remember his last name right now – but he –
I asked him, “What do people do who have graduated from M.I.T. in your
specialty area?” Well, he said, “About three quarters of us went to work
for the military,” and he said, “ And a quarter went to work for the game
world.” Doing computer games.
PRINCE:
So that was what they were doing for you guys …
HENLEY:
Well he was trying to start a firm that was dealing with education as a
basic subject. The people who were trying to introduce interactive
activities as an educational component in the educational system. His firm
stayed around for quite awhile then it merged into a bigger company and
then I lost track of him, I don’t know what happened to him.
PRINCE:
So they’re no longer doing things for the History Museum?
HENLEY:
Oh no, they haven’t done anything for the museum for years and years and
years …now I will say the product of that research and all that material
that was gathered, we took that material and put it on the internet and it’s
an internet site to this day.
PRINCE:
The Ethnic Survey?
HENLEY:
The Ethnic Survey stuff. But the work is all work that was done twenty
years ago.
PRINCE:
Now, that’s the CD we have?
HENLEY:
That’s the CD and it’s also on the internet through the County Office of
Education.
PRINCE:
Oh it is? Well that’s really, I think there’s some great stuff in those
research files, definitely, that’s wonderful.
HENLEY:
Now not everything that the researchers came up with got into the
database or into the interactive program but a lot of it did.
PRINCE:
And the oral histories, did they get in there too, some of them?
HENLEY:
I’m not sure, I think that’s different.
PRINCE:
So now, how do you feel about the museum? What do you think of it
from its beginnings to now? Do you feel that it’s been successful, and if
so, how, or if not, why not?
HENLEY:
It was an enormous rush to build it and we had some really talented people
who were working on it that were just a joy to work with. And that
process I think was one of the more positive adventures I think I can say I
did.
PRINCE:
In Old Sacramento?
HENLEY:
In Old Sacramento or generally in my career as an historian. It’s one of
the high points – it’s that development process. I think two things were
just so fundamentally flawed in the museum that it’s hard to imagine how
it will overcome them. The first one was we didn’t have enough space.
And we knew we didn’t have enough space in the beginning and we were
forced politically to deal with that much space – that was it, that’s all
you’re going to get. And I suspect that we probably, if we were in the
same situation today we might maybe be more interested in limiting the
scope of what the museum did to more adequately fit the space. But we
were so excited about it that we crammed all this stuff in a small paper
bag. I think that problem has had a terrible impact on the museum over
time. The second one was the nature of the way – at least this city –
looked at projects like this. Okay, what’s it going to cost to build it?
Alright, it’s going cost three million dollars to build this museum. How
much is it going to cost to operate it? Okay, here’s an operational plan for
the museum, it calls for – I don’t remember what it was, but let’s say it’s
ten or twelve employees to make it work. Oh, well that budget’s too big,
that operating budget’s way too big. And so they say, no, you just can’t
have that much. And so they force a reduction in the operating budget
before they were going to build this. It strikes me – I could be wrong –
but it strikes me the opening budget for the museum was somewhere
between one hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred thousand dollars
a year, and it was supposed to be, as we planned it twice or three times
that.
PRINCE:
And you had ten staff?
HENLEY:
We didn’t because we had to cut the staff down. But that wasn’t enough.
They decided that they developed – they, and I have to admit, I
participated in this, I wouldn’t call myself the author of it but I certainly
participated in it along with a lot of other people of creating a pro forma to
make it palatable to get the thing built. We created a pro forma that
showed that it could pay for itself. We all knew that museums don’t pay
for themselves, it was a charade, and we knew it was a charade, and I feel
really bad about that but that’s the reality of what happened at the time.
So we suggested that it was going to pay for itself. So what did the
political side of the thing end up doing in the city? They said, “Well we’re
going to run this with a non profit.” So they created it, and we’ve got a
pro forma that shows it’s going to pay for itself, and they create a non
profit – well, they didn’t, there was a non profit in existence, the non profit
raised most of the money to build the thing, over half of it was created
privately. And they turned around and said “Well, we want you to be the
operators.” And we said, “We don’t have enough cash reserves to be the
operators for a year. We’ve got to have a year’s worth of cash reserves to,
so we can handle the budget and we know where the money …[they said]
“We’ll front end the money to you. We’ll give you a year’s operating
budget …”
PRINCE:
This is to the non- profit?
HENLEY:
They told the non-profit, “and then you can pay us back at the end of the
year.” Three hundred thousand dollars, well, at the end of the year, they
didn’t have three hundred thousand dollars because there wasn’t any
income equal to what the pro forma said, number one, and the expense
budget was unrealistic anyway, and so it couldn’t come in. So they were
in debt at the end of the first year – the non-profit was in debt to the city,
couldn’t pay the city back the money. And so the city put them down as a
debtor and went ahead and advanced the money for one more year and it
didn’t get any better, and so the city took over the operation of it
themselves. And the city operated it for a while and nothing ever really got
any better – the attendance was not going to measurably increase. There
were two reasons why the attendance wouldn’t increase: number one, it
was meant to be a community museum, built in Old Sacramento where the
community fundamentally thought of the area as a tourist area. Two, it
didn’t have money for a lot of heavy changing exhibits – all the changing
exhibits were done by grant work.
PRINCE:
Oh.
HENLEY:
And so compared to today the museum was very active – they probably
changed, probably installed maybe four, five, maybe six good exhibits a
year, that were good exhibit changes.
PRINCE:
So where were they getting the money to do that?
HENLEY:
All through grants.
PRINCE:
All through grants, really? A lot of grants.
HENLEY:
They were getting a lot of grants. They were very successful in the grants
at that time. The programs were inventive – they were very interesting
programs. Most of the exhibit changes were carried on under the theme of
continuing traditions. They dealt with ethnic communities and their
continued presence in the community. And they were outstanding
exhibits.
PRINCE:
Are these exhibit materials stored here?
HENLEY:
Yes, they were borrowed and returned in some cases, sure. All the
research stuff for those exhibits are here, all of the – and that’s another
thing, at that time we took this all very seriously. We researched these
exhibits extensively before we did them. But when Prop. 13 came along
and the city got ____ under that crunch they decided that they could no
longer support the museum at the level it was supporting it.
PRINCE:
The city decided?
HENLEY:
The city and the county.
PRINCE:
And the county.
HENLEY:
So they decided, “Well, we’ve got two museums that are having financial
difficulty – the History Museum and the Science Center.
PRINCE:
So where was the Science Center at this time?
HENLEY:
Out on Auburn Boulevard.
PRINCE:
But it was under the same umbrella of …
HENLEY:
It was under the History and Science Division. It had been given to us as
a failing institution by a non-profit.
PRINCE:
So there was a history museum and a science museum?
HENLEY:
Yeah. So the city decided maybe we can just put two of them together and
they’ll do better together. So I don’t know how you put two people in
trouble together and expect them to be successful, I’ve never figured that
one out. [Laughter]
But at any rate that is the decision that was made and they decided it
would be run by a non profit because that would be more, quote unquote,
efficient than the way the city would do it. So they created a non-profit
and then layed off all the city employees. And then the non-profit hired
some of them back and then went on to hire additional people. That’s two
groups that did not want to be put together and never were happy with that
arrangement, and are not happy to this day.
PRINCE:
And it’s still that arrangement?
HENLEY:
That’s still that arrangement. They were under funded when they were put
together and that’s never resolved itself, in fact everything has
deteriorated. It’s gone from, oh I guess there probably were six or seven
staff people at the History Museum – full-time staff people, and a very
large well-trained docent group that was working it – remember they were
changing exhibits and doing this pretty regularly – to I don’t know what it
is today I suspect maybe one employee full-time at the museum.
PRINCE:
Really?
HENLEY:
There is no registrar anymore, there is no curator anymore. Well, they’re
starting to bring some of that back now, slowly but those things all
disappeared and you know that means you just don’t change the exhibits
or you don’t think about the exhibits, you take what you can get and you
create things without doing the research behind it. You know a lot of
people just think exhibits happen because you go back in the back and
shop for things and you take them out and make an exhibit. They don’t
understand how much is involved in the background to making an exhibit
happen …
PRINCE:
And the interpretation …
HENLEY:
… a history museum is not like an art museum where you can do
relatively inexpensive exhibits from your own collections. You can’t do
that in a history museum because it’s all about interpretation. So I’m very
disappointed where it is now.
PRINCE:
So that brings me to a question that I think we wanted to address from our
last conversation about the issues – the big issues down there, and the
museum happens to be down there in Old Sacramento, so that’s one of
them. What do you think are some other issues or problems that you’d
like to see addressed in the near future, for Old Sacramento?
HENLEY:
Well, in my estimation there are some big successes down there, there are
some things that have gone reasonably well, I think. I think overall, the
use of redevelopment funds as a force, a financial tool to make a historic
district happen, is well proven that it could happen there. We did get the
buildings sort of restored, but the biggest problem in Old Sacramento has
been in the failure to look at the big picture – to look at the larger context
of why you do it and what you do with it once you’ve done it, and how
you manage it when you have it. Clearly, there was a disconnect between
redevelopment and the city when the Agency always went on the
assumption they would build this, and then to turn it over to the city to run
it – they weren’t going to run it. So they didn’t worry about operational
issues, and the city wasn’t able to get in and worry about the nuts and bolts
so that it would be operational, and that’s assuming the city was the best
one to operate it.
PRINCE:
So I see that as kind of saying that the Sacramento Redevelopment
Agency was in charge of building it or assuring that these would be ready
to be built, and them thinking, well, operations – that’s the city. So there
was not really the thought of operations built into the …
HENLEY:
In many cases that’s true, many, many many, cases that’s true. Then
there’s the governance itself. Old Sacramento is a complicated situation in
its best scenario. I can remember years ago when we were working on
development issues, somebody from the Agency, it might have been Ted
Leonard, shaking their head and saying, “You know, we’re working on the
waterfront, and we’re going to need to get a meeting together of all the
players and I don’t have a table big enough for all the players.” Who ever
it was said “There’s thirty-seven government entities involved here in this
discussion we need to have.”
PRINCE:
Wow, I had no idea there were that many.
HENLEY:
And, well, in this particular one instance there was – it was dealing with
the waterfront issues. But that is indicative of the problem. You have so
many players with so many vested interests in here and they all protect
their own turf to some degree or another. The city is responsible for the
creation of this district, no question about it. And is naturally the
government entity responsible for it’s continued operations, some way or
another. State Parks has got a third of it, or a quarter of it, and they’re
responsible for their portion. The Redevelopment Agency was responsible
for making the vision happen – creating the bones, the structure, the
skeleton, whatever, and the property owners have a responsibility but what
it is, is sort of tough to define. But they own the building, they caused it to
… and they want to make some money on it, that’s what they’re there for
and so they’ve got a vested interest in it and a direction it needs to go to.
And they don’t get together and decide anything. They tend to disagree
more than they agree on things.
PRINCE:
So there’s no central …
HENLEY:
So the city tries to create that by creating a manager for Old Sacramento.
First it was in the Parks Department and then it was decided it needed to
be out of the Parks Department, because Parks just treated it like a park,
you know they would cut the grass and pick up the litter and to heck with
the rest of it, you know? Then they decided to create a manager with
some theoretic authority over the whole area, less whatever the State’s
jurisdiction is. And they brought Ed [Astone] back to do that. He had
been with the Agency – he was there for the development side and then
left. Now they were going to bring him back and they asked him to be the
operator, the manager for operations. And Ed had some very strong
opinions about how you should operate a district, but for heaven only
knows what reason, they couldn’t bring him back as a city employee, they
had to find some way creatively to hire him without making him an
employee. So the city ships the money to the Visitors and Convention
Bureau and they hire him, he’s an employee to this day of the Visitors and
Convention Bureau, so that brings another player to the table. After all,
Old Sacramento is a tourist attraction and shouldn’t the Convention
Bureau have a major say in it? So, instead of actually simplifying the
arrangement they made it a little more complex and brought another
player to the table.
PRINCE:
Now, why couldn’t they hire him? Why couldn’t the city hire him?
HENLEY:
I can’t answer that. I don’t know.
PRINCE:
Okay. That’s really interesting.
HENLEY:
And so what ended up happening – Ed is, Ed has a long history with the
project, he knows where a lot of the bits and pieces of information were
buried and why things were decided the way they were, much maybe in
the same way that I remember a lot of how things happened but he has it
from a different perspective – he was the Agency guy, you know? And if
you wanted to know what the heck was in the boilerplate in a contract with
somebody, or why this contract was written in this bizarre way as we
would look at it today – he would know the answer to that, because he was
party to why they did it the way they did it.
PRINCE:
And you’re talking about a specific property site? Development?
HENLEY:
A specific developer, you know, maybe it says, all construction workers
will wear green helmets or something, and you’ll ask, “Why’s that in
there?” And he’ll know why – that’s being facitious, of course. But the
project has never benefited from the experience and the expertise of a true
historic district manager. It is something that across the country has been
honed now. There are people who specialize, there are even schools that
are cranking them out, and this district desperately needs a professional
manager. A professional historic district manager to come in with that
expertise who understands what it means to preserve a historic district.
This is not a shopping center, this is not a strip mall, this is something
quite different and it needs that expertise. There is a commercial side to it
though – a very commercial side to it – which needs to be satisfied, but so
does the history side of it and you can say that the commercial side is not
successful in some ways because they can’t agree sometimes on marketing
programs and they can’t agree on a lot of things that collectively the
merchants and the property owners need to do. But they do some and they
do a lot more than say, the history side where there hasn’t been any history
interpretation outside of creating the skeleton down there until very
recently, only in the last couple of years is there much attention to it. And
not even much now, I mean they’re trying, but it isn’t …
PRINCE:
So are they trying with, say the walking tours, or the reenactments of
things, would you say that’s …
HENLEY:
But my argument would say, “Wait a minute, you’ve got two natural
entities that have experience in interpretation, in fact that’s their expertise.
One is the museum, that’s what museums are about, and two – is the State
Parks in it. Now if they can get together and work with a historic district
manager to reshape the history component – putting flesh on the skeleton,
so to speak, then it makes sense. What is that product? What’s it going to
look like? I don’t know, I’m not that expert yet, I mean I have a lot of
ideas but it seems to me that when the city hires two or three people for
maintenance down there who go around and clean the area up and literally
go around periodically and pound the nails down into the wooden
sidewalks so people don’t trip on them. Is it that hard to put them in
period costume? Is it that difficult to give them period tools? Is it that
difficult to train them to also be an interpreter down there so people can
get some information out of them? I don’t think so. I think that the
general condition of the buildings – I don’t want to say it’s deplorable, but
it’s bad. The maintenance is bad – they’re peeling, there’s damaged
woodwork, there’s dry rot. There are a lot of things starting to happen to
…
[End of Side A]
[Begin Side B]
HENLEY:
We need to look at a program of maintenance. Now why can’t that be
somebody hired by the historic district manager – put in costume and
given tools of the period and why can’t they go around and do
maintenance on some of these buildings? Why can’t they go out and paint
like they did in the style of the nineteenth century? And why can’t they be
trained as interpreters at the same time to bring some life to this thing?
Signs – signs are always going to be a problem in Old Sacramento but it’s
– the dichotomy is – the conflict is that the signs are for a contemporary
purpose, they’re for a modern use and at the same time they’re supposed
to be somewhat reminiscent of the signs of the period – very difficult thing
to do. Plus there’s another factor. The nature of Old Sacramento the way
it exists now is there’s many, many, many little merchants, little storefront merchants. And they all need their signs and they want big signs.
Historically there were far fewer merchants and so if all those merchants
in the historic period got a sign that’s the ambiance that we would hope to
achieve but today when everybody wants a sign, the density, the sheer
number of signs …
PRINCE:
It’s overwhelming.
HENLEY:
It’s overwhelming and so that’s a tremendous issue to deal with, but
there’s also the whole gambit of quality of workmanship. Many of these
signs are illegally produced in the sense that they’re using materials that
are not allowed legally and the workmanship is shoddy. Now once again,
it seems to me, they could make an arrangement where they have one sign
painter for the district and he, again, dresses of the period, he goes around
and takes care of everybody’s sign. He touches them up when they get
bad he keeps them looking fresh and he does it with the tools of the trade
of the period, he’s trained as an interpretor, he’s part of the scene. And
there’s enough work in the volume of signs to keep a person busy all the
time. That’s the kind of stuff that makes it work. Next you’re talking
about the transportation system. The transportation system in Old
Sacramento today is a bunch of individual entrepenuers who have a
carriage. Well, I don’t doubt that there were a handful of carriages in Old
Sacramento that were reminiscent of the ones we have now that are new
but have a style or character about them. The problem is they’ve now
become the mainstay and they were the exception. Private carriages –
people didn’t have a lot of private carriages – and there were just a handful
of them down there at any one time. What was down there were the big
commercial vehicles: the dredge wagons, the delivery wagons, the streetcleaning machines – all horse-drawn – the transportation system that was a
street car. All that kind of stuff, we don’t have any of it, none of that’s
there. What it very desperately really needs is a viable transportation
system and an internal loop is not going to do that. Anything that goes
around in a circle in Old Sacramento is a tourist thing. It’s a novelty. It’s
to be ridden for the fun of it. It doesn’t serve a viable transportation
system reason – first of all it’d be too expensive. So it needs to be a
system that reaches out of Old Sacramento and that system to me, it
probably needs to go underneath the freeway and go up to the mall on K
Street. It probably needs to go north over towards the depot and
eventually get into the rail yards if the Railroad Museum is going to
expand over there, there needs to be a viable transportation connector
between them. It probably would do well to go down the waterfront in
Old Sacramento on the Railroad Museum’s tracks down to something
down there that is …
PRINCE:
South …
HENLEY:
South, that may evolve. Maybe parking structures will come in down
there that will help bring them in. Horses aren’t going to do that. Horsedrawn streetcars aren’t going to do that. So you have to look at what is
realistically possible and I would argue that it needs to be an electric
streetcar and that electric streetcar either could be with an overhead
electric line, which kind of brings a certain pollution into the area that
maybe Old Sacramento really shouldn’t have. But Old Sacramento is
telling the story before electricity becomes a major issue so that interface,
that contact with electricity is the end of the era for Old Sacramento. So I
could see an argument be made to show that interface and an overhead
line might not be that bad. But – there is an historic precedent. Old
Sacramento – Sacramento tried battery-operated electric cars in 1880.
PRINCE:
That’s perfect.
HENLEY:
So maybe we could use modern technology in battery-operated cars,
period vehicles that were actually of the horse-drawn streetcar, batteryoperated, and create that loop and be functional. And then the fare – if
you could run it often enough, and you can create a structure where it’s
viable, I think that would go a long ways to solve the issue. Then I would
limit the number of those carriage rides to a smaller number of people.
You could still have the carriage rides down there but you can’t use it as a
transportation system down there.
PRINCE:
Well, that sounds like that would be very helpful for the transportation and
parking.
HENLEY:
Yeah. The other issue is – I can’t even imagine right now, I can’t
remember – how much money we have spent of public funds to develop
the waterfront. And talk about under utilized space. That is where
interpretation activities should be occurring.
PRINCE:
Now you’re talking about the waterfront – the whole area from I Street to
…
HENLEY:
Capitol, Tower Bridge.
PRINCE:
Okay, but not beyond Capitol.
HENLEY:
Well, beyond Capitol sort of may be important too but I’m thinking about
Old Sacramento and its problems I’m not thinking about south of the
bridge.
PRINCE:
Sure, okay.
HENLEY:
But what an under utilized piece of property that has some pretty
expensive improvements on it: a couple of restaurants and a riverboat, and
a big wooden structure that’s sitting there. I think the opportunity for
interpretation along there is enormous.
PRINCE:
What would you like to see happen there?
HENLEY:
Well, I think it’d be nice to see one of those waterfront buildings that were
reconstructed period buildings actually be used in its historic purpose – a
freight shed kind of operation. I think that you could have a lot of event
related activities along the waterfront. You know, it used to be they had
an art show and a few things down there in the past. I think there ought to
be more of that. It ought to be programmed with activities. I think the
waterfront would be a tremendous place to do a cavalcade, to do sort of a
panoramic history on any number of subjects. You’ve got this long, linear
expanse where the action could move down the waterfront and the
audience could be fixed and allow – you know it could be anything from
the history of transportation to the people coming off of the boats and
coming over the levee and trying to determine what their future will be,
and maybe see their future from their arrival to their departure whatever
that is.
PRINCE:
So are you talking about – would this be like a mural type of panoramic
thing or would this be …
HENLEY:
Oh, there’s lots of ways you could do it. I know that in the 1850s
Sacramento was completely impressed and overwhelmed by theatrical
presentations on stages where they actually created the history of the
world or something on a two-hundred foot long canvas rolls and the actors
would do the part and they would crank the history of the world through
from one roller to the other behind the stage. And I remember in the
1930s sometime, in Chicago they did a thing called “Cavalcade of
America.” And what they did is they created a fixed stage and they told
the story of the development of the American West. Everything occurred
across the stage – came up on one side and exited off the other. It even
went from building the transcontinental railroad having the steam train go
through on the stage, which is one of the engines that the Railroad
Museum used before for that.
PRINCE:
Seems like something like that would really capture the attention and the
imagination of people – the public just passing through the area a lot more
than a mural …
HENLEY:
We promoted that idea in a way in the alley between I and J and Front and
Second, where the Enterprise Hotel – which is the great big undeveloped
brick building – of using the back of that brick wall as a sort of theatrical
scrim for productions – building an actual stage in the alley and having
vehicles and things come through the alley, go over the stage and go out
off the other side, and sitting people in the back in what now is the grassy
area – facing it and putting on a regular show every night or every
weekend or something that is a regular event to draw people down there
that is about telling the story. It’s not just about being entertained it’s
about telling the story.
PRINCE:
So, why do you think that didn’t pan out? Or do you think that’s still an
idea that could possibly happen?
HENLEY:
Oh it’s an idea that could happen but all these need to be put in a plan.
There is no plan to put the flesh on the bones. And that’s why I think that
historic district administrator would be important. There are a lot of iffy
things. There are a lot of things that are tough to deal with. What’s the
role of the museum in Old Sacramento now? I don’t know, I don’t know.
I know that if they want it to be the community’s museum, in my mind it’s
not possible in that site. It’s just simply not a big enough building. But
Old Sacramento desperately needs an orientation or interpretation facility
for Old Sacramento. So if that building changed its focus into being an
orientation center, an interpretive center for Old Sacramento and out of
that came the programming to work with State Parks to make the whole
area come alive it would be a huge step towards making the vision of Old
Sacramento possible. Now I don’t think the vision needs to be what
Aubrey did in his painting. Aubrey – I’ve said this before, was a hopeless
romantic. I’m not even sure that’s true, I just think really what Aubrey
was trying to do was he was trying to suggest that you need to stuff a big
story into this area and if you draw a single picture you have to draw all
the stories in the picture. I don’t know that he ever envisioned it would all
happen at one time but I think he conceived that there are so many stories
to tell there and that he’s trying to make people realize what was possible.
I would think that an administrator, and an interpretive center and a plan,
an adopted plan to deal with not the physical structures but the rest of the
story. As I’ve said here several times – putting the flesh on the bones.
PRINCE:
Putting the flesh on the bones … so was that something that you thought
about early on? Would you say maybe that entered your thoughts in terms
of your own specific goals for the historic area?
HENLEY:
Well, I think I thought that it was an important element of the historic
district thirty-five, forty years ago. I thought that. I guess I naively
thought that one was going to follow the other – that it’s kind of like build
the diamond and they will come, you know? I honestly thought that if we
were restoring these buildings these other things that we envisioned would
come and frankly they are harder than pulling teeth.
PRINCE:
And so like you said in our last conversation that early on some of the
early merchants did have more cohesion in what they were trying to do
there in terms of history or at least an aspect even if it’s in a tourist
framework, at least they were aware that this was a different type of area
that required something different.
HENLEY:
I think that the merchants when they – I don’t know about the developers
so much – but the early merchants that came into Old Sacramento in the
beginning were really quite excited. They might not know the history but
they at least had their own romantic concept of what it should be. And
they felt that it could be an asset to their business. And so you did see
people dressing in period costume
[phone ringing, pause]
Most of those early merchants were infused with enthusiasm and they
dressed the part and they created fictitious political offices like the Mayor
of Old Sacramento and the Sheriff of Old Sacramento, and the Harbor
Master or the Harbor Mistress. They created all these titles for themselves
and they ran for political office and they had fun with things but they used
it as a vehicle to raise money to promote Old Sacramento and their
activities through these mock elections where you bought your office by
paying a dollar for each of those and they raised money that kept them
active for a year but it was that enthusiasm for it that looked like, gee, now
here’s something we can work with to try and eventually move it into a
little more historic area but we didn’t succeed. And over a period of a
fairly short few years I think many of those merchants got worn down,
some of them financially didn’t make it but in many cases I think they just
got disinterested or discouraged by the process of what was going on and
they had to build themselves up for a few battles that maybe shouldn’t
have happened. One was over in the development of what was called the
Stagin Building on Capitol Mall. Another one came up whether or not
there should be validated parking or free parking under the garages – they
were always arguing about parking issues. And then another case sort of
evolved over the idea of whether automobiles should be banned from Old
Sacramento, which was actually part of the original plan that the
automobile would be restricted out of it and there were a group of
vociferous merchant/developers who wanted it out. We wanted it out too
so we were probably prematurely agreed to do that and so we – they got
together and trashed us so badly in front of the City Council – the little
group of merchants – I think their argument was basically correct that we
couldn’t survive and the leaders in that group included the restaurants
because they were very dependant on people coming down there for lunch.
So from my point of view I just remember being lectured by the mayor at
the time saying, “Don’t you ever, ever bring this back to Council again
until the merchants want it.” And we haven’t.
PRINCE:
So that’s when the automobile was going to be allowed to drive through
the streets?
HENLEY:
Yeah, yeah, but it’s still fraught with problems, you know. They’ve had
heavy police presence, they have had times when they’ve had to block it
off and close it down to traffic because they get parading down there by
the lowriders and various things that just cause them all sorts of problems.
PRINCE:
So they close off the streets.
HENLEY:
Yes, and that sometimes gets other people angry. They want that traffic
you know, we can see that tension between the people who want the cars
and the people who don’t want the cars. But they wore out – those people
wore out and the merchants – the makeup of the merchants slowly
changed too. The people who were less and less interested in the history.
They really wanted to go down there and make money, they didn’t want to
have any fun down there they wanted to make money, and unlike some of
the early merchants who thought this should be enjoyable. But they
wanted to make money and as far as they were concerned all issues
needed to be resolved like garbage and – and rightfully – you know, traffic
parking and circulation and issues between merchant staff and visitors
who are parking – they wanted those issues resolved. And they wanted
unified marketing campaigns and things like that and history became less
and less an issue.
PRINCE:
Well, that covers a lot of issues and problems and we’re getting down to
the very end here, but I do have a couple more questions I wanted to ask
you, about you specifically, Jim. This is kind of an odd question I guess,
maybe in some abstract way you can answer it. But I’m wondering if you
can tell me what you would consider your legacy is for Old Sacramento.
HENLEY:
Well, I think I came into it as an already conceptualized project. It had
some form to it by the time I arrived and I think I understood the vision of
the people who I think put it together because I certainly had the chance to
interact with them. I accepted that vision and I think I tried to carry it
forward and carry it out. We got almost everything going, there are still a
few, a handful of projects to go but it’s mostly built out. I don’t consider
the State Park to be my responsibility and most of it is not built. That is a
disappointment to me but I think I brought twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five
years of consistent opinion to it. And I guess I had in varying degrees I
had more or less authority to make that happen, sometimes with actual
authority and sometimes by bluff. But, you know, I feel that there’s some
consistency in the approach we used. And I think the project needs
consistency. I think for a lot of people the historical image, which is not
necessarily a good visualization, is associated with me more than almost
anybody else. So that means I guess I have to wear that cheap piece of
cloth if that’s the right word. And you know it isn’t necessarily the
historical impression I would like to leave but the potential is there. I
would say the same thing about Old Sacramento as I said about a couple
of other projects that I’ve been associated with for a long time. I grew it
and it’s somebody else’s job to mature it.
PRINCE:
So do you feel that that’s where things are right now, today? You’ve
come this far with it, and I’m thinking also about the archives here. I
mean this sort of grew out of that, didn’t it? I would think that that is an
enormous legacy on your part.
HENLEY:
Yeah, I think I can claim more territory in the archives than I can claim in
Old Sacramento. There are other players and you know, it’s not about one
person and their vision, it’s about a lot of people’s vision and how they
merged together that make Old Sacramento and the archives – maybe
that’s a little different. I don’t think that one actually comes from the
other. I don’t think the archives grew out of Old Sacramento, if anything
it was at a slow moment in Old Sacramento that the opportunity to do the
archives came along. I don’t know that we ever really seriously thought
about building an archives. We were very serious about building a
museum. We were into building a museum collection and museum
collections interact a lot with archival materials, it’s just two different
approaches, one is more specific than the other. The museum might
collect paper as well as three-dimensional objects whereas an archive
really deals with original paper records and all those other manifestations
– audio, whatever. And I think it just happened to be – I don’t want to say
a slow day – but there was a moment when the opportunity arose. And I
think we thought about it in terms of growing the museum collection
originally and it wasn’t until the sheer volume of materials started
materializing we realized that it need a separate sort of structure – that the
archives needed its own set of controls and regulations that governed it.
And that’s probably part of the confusion that goes on here to this day is
how you separate one from the other. It’s because we didn’t separate them
good enough.
PRINCE:
Sort of like you say – not the same thing but parts of the same thing. So
that leads me to my last question.
HENLEY:
Old Sacramento is something that forced us to use historical resources
from every source imaginable, so we came to appreciate and hunger for
materials that we didn’t have sometimes in Old Sacramento that sharpened
our eyes and when we saw things, we went after them. I mean certainly,
this collection in large measure is in fact, yes, shaped by Old Sacramento
because it showed us how much we needed to do, how much we needed to
save.
PRINCE:
And I think it’s just sort of an off-shoot of the whole – preserving history
basically, which really caught fire in that time, instigated by what was
happening with the urban renewal and the freeway and historic
preservation – and actually building that district, and all the research that
went into examining the history there and the buildings and the people and
all of that that still needs to be told.
HENLEY:
Well, whenever you have a vision very soon you have to look around and
see how you can make it happen. There were new tools available in the
1960s and 50s. There were new tools available and they might not have
been exactly the tools we were used to but they had money and so when
we looked at redevelopment we looked at them as a tool to make
something happened and they did.
PRINCE:
And it worked.
HENLEY:
And it worked.
PRINCE:
And that part of it did work.
[End of Tape 5, Side B]