Building Our Future

It was hard not to feel nostalgic looking at photos of a demolition team tearing down old Arco Arena. Like many Sacramento residents, I spent a lot of time there and have a head and heart full of memories.

Many are wonderful, like the games my family and I attended when Chris Weber, Mike Bibby, Vlade Divac and the rest of the talented roster made a heartbreakingly close run at the NBA Western Division championship in 2002.

A little more than two years ago, Sacramento’s core suffered a nasty one-two punch. COVID-19 and the March 2020 lockdown removed about 100,000 state workers who poured into the central city each day. Suddenly, they were working at home—many still are—while many restaurants, bars and other small businesses depending on them collapsed.

Throw in the late-spring and summer of sometimes violent protests over the murder of George Floyd and other outrages, and the central city became a ghost town by day and frequent crime scene at night. What finally seemed like a Sacramento renaissance months earlier dissolved into a sad, depressing mess.

Recent hand wringing about the American River Parkway being destroyed by illegal camping reminds me of the old Yogi Berra line: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

If you listen to the critiques, including those from such stalwart advocates as the American River Parkway Foundation, you’d think the popular trail is a dangerous place best avoided at all costs.

“The parkway is in crisis,” Dustin Luton, president of the foundation’s board, wrote city and county officials this year.

A few months ago, I saw a flurry of nostalgic photos on social media from longtime friends and former colleagues working or posing in room 1190 of the state Capitol.

That’s the place in the old Capitol annex where reporters gathered for jousting sessions with governors and other elected officials. Because I spent considerable time there when I covered politics for The Bee and later as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speechwriter, the photos and social media posts caught my eye.

But I have to confess, I feel no warm sense of nostalgia about the place and agree with political columnist Dan Walters, who wrote: “No one who works in and around the Capitol will be sorry to see the annex disappear. It is not only plug ugly 1950s brutalist architecture at its worst, but dysfunctional to the max.”

What a difference a pandemic makes. In spring 2019, a buoyant Mayor Darrell Steinberg, doing his best Daniel Burnham imitation to “make no little plans,” unveiled his big vision for Old Sacramento and Downtown.

Sacramento would leverage more than $40 million in hotel taxes left from the Convention Center and Community Center Theatre renovation and jazz up the waterfront. New attractions would include an outdoor concert venue, rooftop bars and a barge docked so people could swim safely near the Tower Bridge in our namesake river.

The central city had arrived. Downtown would finally get its must-see family attraction. Construction cranes were everywhere. The future looked bright. Steinberg would have a legacy other than heartache over the growing homeless and housing crises.