{"id":3082,"date":"2015-07-15T10:24:21","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T17:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3082"},"modified":"2015-07-22T08:31:48","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T15:31:48","slug":"diary-sacramento","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3082","title":{"rendered":"Diary: Sacramento"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I’ve passed through Sacramento fairly often, but only last weekend did I get a chance to really explore the city \u2014 by which, of course, I mean explore the city by\u00a0bicycle. I’d had my suspicions that its flat, orderly downtown would prove highly bikeable, as indeed it did. \u00a0And since I rode around on a Saturday and Sunday morning in a town dedicated to state government, traffic certainly never became an issue.<\/p>\n

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You can’t really get lost in downtown Sacramento. Train tracks border the north side of its ultra-regular grid, and freeways take the other three sides: the 50 to the south, the 80 to the east, and the 5 to the west \u2014 particularly unfortunate, that last, since it stands between downtown and the Sacramento River (with the wooden-sidewalked Gold Rush tourist trap of Old Sacramento wedged in between).\u00a0You can only see so many waterfront freeways before you figure 20th-century urban planning is just punking you.<\/p>\n

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Downtown also seems, alas, to have gone\u00a0all in on one-way streets, but what\u00a0they\u00a0lose urbanistically, they almost make up for orientationally,\u00a0going\u00a0from west to east in numerical order and north to south in alphabetical order. Between the east-west streets come smaller stretches called “Alleys”: Fat Alley, Jazz Alley, Quill Alley, Victorian Alley \u2014 they, too, adhere strictly to the alphabet.<\/p>\n

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People who’ve lived in Sacramento in decades past tend to regard\u00a0the city as a pretty dull place, possibly out of comparison to San Francisco a hundred miles to the west. For all I know it may still be, taken in the long term, but I found myself impressed by a number of its urban features. Most visibly, it\u00a0has the beginnings of a rail system (which actually began operation in the mid-1980s), though it for the most part lacks dedicated lanes and, to look at the map and service schedule, seems mostly commuter-oriented.<\/p>\n

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That aligns with the description of Sacramento offered by one\u00a0friend who grew up there\u00a0as a city where “everyone sort of flees to the suburbs after work.” Perhaps that made me hyper-aware of the signs of nightlife I did see, up to and including a steady stream of pedicabs I watched pass while sitting outside at a wine bar. (One pedicab company offers complete crawls of the city’s wine bars \u2014 mental note.) But there I also had a view of the\u00a0“could do better” column: the clubbing crowd looked demographically bland and rather trashily dressed even by clubbing standards, and street craziness clearly remains a problem: at one point I watched a tie-dyed tweaker\u00a0chase a much cleaner-cut fellow down the street with a knife.<\/p>\n

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Seated at another sidewalk table for brunch the next morning (downtown Sacramento definitely has brunch covered, if that’s your metric), I watched a similarly afflicted middle-aged man whip off his shirt and start screaming about the government. Bring up this problem in California, and someone will usually reply, bitterly, that it only became a problem because “Reagan closed the mental hospitals” \u2014 and leave it at that, as if it precluded all further discussion. I mean, I don’t have a solution myself, but I figure much\u00a0of it just comes down to outnumbering: if the meth-head or shirtless\u00a0conspiracy theorist\u00a0stands alone on the sidewalk, you sense\u00a0a blighted\u00a0neighborhood; if he’s surrounded by hundreds of “normal” people, you don’t even notice.<\/p>\n

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That’s happened to an extent in downtown Los Angeles, seemingly in line with how much new housing has appeared there. Downtown Sacramento has a fair few new-looking residential and mixed-used projects too, and scrolling through the archives of Living in Urban Sac<\/a>\u00a0I see plenty more on the way. Even apart from the much-publicized Kings stadium now under construction (which overwrites a 1990s-era mall<\/a>), the\u00a0place will probably change more over the next fifteen years than it has over the past 25, when all \u2014\u00a0all<\/em> \u2014 of the ten tallest buildings on its skyline opened for business. The average newness of its built environment makes downtown Los Angeles look like Uruk by comparison.<\/p>\n

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But the past\u00a0still exists there.\u00a0Riding through the quiet streets of trees (it turns out that “City of Trees” nickname isn’t just #branding) and modest houses out front of which oldsters read the newspaper and hipsters lounge around on junky lawn furniture, I happened upon the remains of a Japantown. I couldn’t resist\u00a0stopping in to Osaka-ya, a century-old shop named after my favorite Japanese city, to buy a couple trays of their famous peanut butter mochi (one chunky, one smooth) to take home. According to the\u00a0Sacramento Bee<\/a><\/em>, the city’s original Japantown succumbed to the bulldozers during a mid-1950s building boom.<\/p>\n

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Not far from there stands Insight Coffee Roasters<\/a>, the first of the company’s three\u00a0locations in downtown Sacramento. I sought it out on the recommendation of Detroit-based math podcaster Samuel Hansen<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0who particularly endorses their decaf, but I went early in the morning, so, well, yeah. Sitting with my americano at their front window for an hour or two, I watched a couple of runaway types idle and chat\u00a0on a bench outside.<\/p>\n

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It then occurred to me what other runaway-friendly city Sacramento reminded me of. Coffee, rail (at least some of it), a river (albeit not a well-used one), trees, bikeability (though it could use more infrastructure), a lot of low-rise skyscrapers built not that long ago, not that much diversity: why, it felt like no other place in California so much as it felt like Portland, Oregon. I’ll want to check in again after a decade not just to have a look at the new towers, but to see who’s successfully living the dream of the nineties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve passed through Sacramento fairly often, but only last weekend did I get a chance to really explore the city \u2014 by which, of course, I mean explore the city by\u00a0bicycle. I’d had my suspicions that its flat, orderly downtown would prove highly bikeable, as indeed it did. \u00a0And since I rode around on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","category-sacramento"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3082"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3101,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082\/revisions\/3101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}