City Beat

In my family, only one person likes Old Sacramento. That’s me. I enjoy the wooden sidewalks, wrought iron balconies, tourist traps, train sheds and steamboat docks.

My feelings for Old Sac are nostalgic. I’m the only one in the family old enough to remember what Front and Second streets looked like six decades ago.

In those days, Old Sac was the West End. Residents were derelicts, bums, drifters, tramps, winos. They loafed in the shade, weary from picking fruit, drunk.

I looked for Randy Paragary in an alley behind the Sheraton Grand Hotel and found Cesar Chavez. At least I think it was Cesar Chavez. It resembled him, though someone painted the name “Randy Paragary” under the mural.

Mistaken identity happens everywhere. Police lineups and courtrooms are notorious for confusing who was present when the gun went off. Some witnesses blame poor lighting. Or poor eyesight.

Which doesn’t mean I expect street murals to be precise representations of the people they wish to honor. A painting on the side of a building isn’t John Singer Sargent mixing bone black and lead white to produce skin tones for “Portrait of Madame X.”

Authors love to make news when their books come out, but John Burton went to extremes. Three days after his autobiography was published in September, Burton died.

The grand old California politician slipped away at 92, silenced after six decades of wrangling votes, calling in favors and raising hell across a legislative landscape that stretched from Pat Brown to Gavin Newsom.

At least Burton lived long enough to hold hardcopies of his new book, “I Yell Because I Care.” His coauthor, Sacramento journalist Andy Furillo, helped arrange for a box of special editions from publisher Bloomsbury Academic.

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.

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.