Sep 28, 2025
Show me a city that doesn’t demolish old buildings, and I’ll show you a graveyard. Progress cries out for rubble and rebirth.
This summer, the old Sacramento Bee headquarters at 21st and Q streets joined the roster of demolished landmarks. Wreckage never rests in a city hungry for growth.
Despite protests and lawsuits, the decrepit annex to the State Capitol was torn down in 2023. East Sac elders still dream about the Alhambra Theatre and its Moorish pillars and fountains, pulverized in 1973, replaced by a supermarket.
Sep 28, 2025
I don’t have much use for social media. Deleted my accounts years ago. But I’d like to see what TikTok can do with an Environmental Impact Report.
Despite their reputation as weapons exploited by self-interested neighbors and extortionist labor unions—all true—environmental reports dispense useful information. I’ve read dozens. Learned something every time.
Trouble is they are tough to read—ponderous, repetitive, silted. No narrative energy. No character development. Just facts presented in proscribed formats. Boxes checked, dry as cotton.
Which is why I waited three months to tackle the city’s new environmental report on the Sacramento River Parkway Project, otherwise known as the levee bike path.
Sep 28, 2025
I went to a minor league soccer game this summer and had the best time ever. Better than a thousand big league games I watched as a sportswriter freeloading on a press pass.
The game was in Albuquerque at a place called—deep breath—Rio Grande Credit Union Field at Isotopes Park. A minor league baseball yard. Newer, upscale cousin of Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento.
The home team, strutting in black and gold flecked jerseys, was New Mexico United of the United Soccer League Championship level. Rival to Sac Republic.
I forget the score. Had to look up names for the stadium and league. Nobody at the game mentioned formal names. Names didn’t matter.
Aug 28, 2025
I finally have something nice to say about the Land Park Interstate 5 bicycle bridge fiasco. The mess proves civil engineers are civilized people.
Even when faced with angry clients and legal threats and questions about their competencies, civil engineers working on the bridge never blew their cool.
At least not in public. And never in writing.
Aug 28, 2025
Joe Gedeon was a bartender with a sense of humor. He would love the gambling ads that bombard Sacramento sports fans today.
You can’t watch an A’s or Kings game without getting hustled to make a bet. The irony would make Gedeon laugh.
Joe Gedeon poured drinks at Riverside Clubhouse two iterations ago. He predates the Clubhouse’s predecessor, Hereford House. He oversaw the bar when it was a Depression era speakeasy called the White House.
Aug 28, 2025
If you wonder why Sacramento does such a lousy job with homelessness, consider those 102 acres on Meadowview Road.
The land behind the Job Corps Center encapsulates how City Hall deceives residents, squanders millions of dollars and lets a local social problem spiral into a national disgrace.
Those 102 acres are a snapshot of missed opportunities and political failures.
To find the story’s thread, I dug back to 1952. That’s when California decided to build a Highway Patrol training academy in South Sac.
