It’s never dull on Santa Rosa Avenue

Carne asada sizzled on a taqueria's grill, a sound like rain. In a tattoo shop, a needle spat ink, guided by a diligent hand. A young woman bought a sewing machine; now, she said, her husband would get the vest he's been waiting for.

The owner of a restaurant in a building that once was a Greyhound station gifted waffles to two guys because “they're from the ‘hood.” Mid-afternoon would bring a parade of school children from down the street to the crosswalk.

A steady trickle of some hard-up men and women made their way in and out of the corner store, some from the nearby half-remodeled motel that has two names and a reputation as a hub for prostitutes and johns.

On his stoop, a man watched his dog nose around the grass out front, short steps from Santa Rosa Avenue, which grumbled with twilight traffic.

“It's never dull on The Avenue,” said Aaron Gutierrez, 28, a tattoo artist at The Hole Thing, a tattoo and piercing studio in a squat brick building on the east side of the street, the side officially within the Burbank Gardens Historic District. The building used to house a clock shop.

Indeed, life along these two blocks of Santa Rosa Avenue between Mill and Charles streets has a different rhythm, a different texture, than Santa Rosa's main downtown just half a mile to the north.

“It's urban, it's life, it's not a quiet little dead street,” said Gig Hitao, 66, who lives across the street from Juilliard Park. He's the longest-term resident of the block. “There's action, there's lights and sirens, it's happening. So, yeah, I like it. It suits me.”

The traffic, and its brief cessations, is the soundtrack to a routine that most of its regular inhabitants, the residents and business people, consider satisfying, at times challenging, invigorating, even inspiring.

“This was just a really rundown corner on Santa Rosa Avenue. We had to clean up a lot of activity: landfill waste, heroin users, needles,” said Dalia Martinez, 30, chef and proprietor of The Naked Pig.

The pork-centric restaurant sits on the corner of Santa Rosa Avenue and Sebastopol Avenue, which turns into Mill Street on the east side of the thoroughfare, and faces an auto repair shop.

Former bus station

In the mid 1990s, the square little wood-sided building was a Greyhound station. In recent years it was a coffee shop for what seemed a minute, then an empty space that drew the lost and lonely, transients and ne'er-do-wells.

Now, in The Naked Pig, it is a signpost of a particular brand of Sonoma County ethos, that businesses should be linked closely to local commerce and, in the food industry, to the land - that they should support a sustainable, environmentally sound economy by using local products and plowing dollars back into the local marketplace.

On the avenue, that hopeful philosophy meets a gritty surround.

“We still are smack dab between two hotels that are accommodating prostitutes,” said Martinez, “but it's part of what makes this place really special because it's really urban.”

That is to say, the hard edge of the neighborhood is an opportunity in sync with her local-first credo, said the Santa Rosa native.

“That reality of that street life, and what it looks like to be marginalized in society, that is a reality,” she said.

“Rather than shun it and pretend it doesn't exist, or move away, we hope we can work with the community to help people who need it.”

The older timers have seen worse, said Jim Wyllie, 74, who with his wife owns Park Side Sewing Centre across the street.

Thirty-five years ago he opened the store there. He was a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War, and one wall of the comfortably cluttered shop is decorated with photographs of local veterans. In the store's early days and for years thereafter, the park was “sadly, full of guys with booze,” which sullied the neighborhood, Wyllie said.

“When the liquor went, then it changed,” he said. That would have been a little bit over a decade ago, when the corner store owned by a husband and wife team, Me and Em's Liquor, changed hands and the new owners couldn't get their own liquor license.

Now, another change of hands later, the store is BJ's Market. He would have applied for a liquor license, said owner Nav Singh, but it was too expensive. Still, he does just fine, though he draws what can be a rough crowd.

“It's not okay,” he said, speaking about the more hard-bitten of his customers, “but we manage.” There are fewer prostitutes around these days, he said. And the trouble he had with people breaking his windows has ceased.

Lights in the parking lot have helped, said Singh's neighbor, Juan Arballo, owner of Las Palmas, a taqueria he and his brother founded in 2003 that draws a crowd from around Sonoma County. The neighbors joined forces to press the city for that, he said,

“The neighborhood works together, we go to meetings,” said Arballo, 40. “There's a lot of nice neighbors, and they help each other.”

“It's not like it used it be,” said Singh, 36; or it is, but only a little. “Once in a while you see a character and you call the police and they get rid of him. Then a new character comes around.”

Singh is one of the few who don't seem to consider the neighborhood very deeply. Most of his neighbors - whom he describes as “very nice” - have more developed views of their place in the city.

It may sound odd, but the neighborhood reflects the county as a whole, said Maj Barkai, a tattoo artist at The Hole Thing.

“I think that there's a lot of haves and have nots, and there's a vast discrepancy between the two. The juxtaposition between the two is really interesting,” said Barkai, 42.

“You've got your homeless, then you've got the rich. It's kind of seedy. Then you've got the working families. Then the people in their Mercedes.”

Lots of energy

The two short blocks have an energy working in their favor, said Mark Dierkhising, owner of Dierk's Parkside Cafe, a popular gathering spot on the east side of the street in a building that once held a hair salon and a bail bondsman's office.

“It's a great little part of town that's someday going to be fabulous. It already is in its own sense,” he said.

Dierkhising points to its proximity to downtown, the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, Juilliard Park and the alley that connects the neighborhood to the trendy South of A Street Arts district as assets the neighborhood can build on.

“At some point, some day, this area's going to go through even more dramatic changes than since we've been there, which is nine years,” he said.

“And someday the Astro will get its act together. They've redone some of the inside stunningly. You should talk to Sonny.”

The Astro, opposite Dierkhising's restaurant, is the motel with two names. One face of its sign announces Wine Country Inn & Suites; the other side is draped in a banner that reads Astro Motel. It is separated from Juilliard Park by a narrow street and from BJ's Market, on the other side, by a used car lot and its locked, abandoned office.

The hotel has been a fixture for decades, with a reputation still as ragged as it was before Sonny Patel fixed it up.

Patel, 50, bought the motel - long known for its active drug and prostitution trade - six years ago, determined to turn it around. City, fire safety and handicapped access building codes have held up the project, he said, “but the building is complete. We've been desperately trying to open it.”

He kept nine rooms open for cash flow and said the remodeled portion of the hotel will open within a few months.

Neighbors are doubtful.

“They've been remodeling since I've been here, 12 years,” said Kelley Singleton, owner of The Hole Thing, which has a perfect view of the two-story hotel with its new portico, paint job and a lobby bare but for unfinished furniture.

Acknowledging the many years it has taken, Patel swears it will happen.

“The community thinks, ‘What the hell's this guy doing?' Well, all this costs money,” he said.

LED lighting

The building will be environmentally friendly, with LED lighting and green materials, he said proudly. Marble counter tops and polished wood-laminate floors accent the rooms. The still-wrapped mattresses are plush. He went to open houses in Fountaingrove to research the amenities “high-end people” expect, Patel said.

“You can go to the Hilton, and you're not going to find half the stuff I have,” he said.

He concedes that prostitutes have and still may use the hotel as a base (Santa Rosa police report no calls for service to the hotel involving prostitution in the past year).

“We kind of eliminated a lot of it, but it's hard because you can't tell who's what when they check in,” Patel said. Before he opens, the plan is to shut down completely for a few weeks, he said, to “eliminate the traffic.”

Maybe, or maybe not, said Doc Bones, 46, a tattoo artist across the street at True Till Death, the block's second tattoo and piercing shop.

“They can change the face of that place, but they'll never change the place that it is,” he said.

Later, from his remodeled hotel balcony, Patel pointed out what he wants and doesn't want, giving roughly as good as he got.

He wants a more pronounced link to downtown, perhaps through a line of trees, he said. “Dierk's is fantastic. I don't know about the tattoos. Does it go with the downtown district? I don't know. I'd like to see some shops, maybe a spa.”

Late one day, kitty corner from the hotel, Jean Von Trende, 56, talked about the neighborhood. As she stood in front of her home - a well-kept Craftsman - Doc Bones walked by.

“These guys are great,” said Von Trende. Bones nodded as he passed by. It's the people that make the place, she said.

“There's every walk of life. It's good, it's bad. There's people walking by, saying, ‘Oh, look at the houses.' Then, of course, you have troubled people.”

Juilliard Park reminds her of Mary Poppins, the magical British nanny.

“Have you seen it?” Von Trende asked, pointing across the street. “Have you seen it when all the flowers are grown in?”

The park, with its large lawns, pond and iconic stone bridge, is both pleasure and thorn for the neighborhood. It's a hangout for people who are homeless, drug users and wayward teenagers; a place of serene lawns and picnickers; a site for community-wide festivals.

“The most beautiful park in Santa Rosa is right here,” Wyllie said.

“Would you take your children there? I don't think so,” said Patel.

“I was sitting there having lunch, and I got propositioned twice,” said Barkai. “‘Hey, are you working?'”

“Sometimes I just walk around that park and meditate,” said Libby Murphy, 31. She and her husband were married in September at the historic Church of One Tree, next to the park. Their home next to Von Trende is their first house. Doc Bones did her tattoo.

Purple and pink

Sunset was falling. It had been a rainy day and the sky was bruised with dark purple clouds behind a faint flush of pink. Von Trende, extolling her neighborhood, turned her attention to the house next door, to Gig Hitao.

“You've got to talk to him,” she said. “He's Mr. Santa Rosa Avenue. I say that. He doesn't call himself that.”

A trained sociologist, a former Peace Corp worker, Hitao has lived in his 110-year-old Craftsman-style home since 1994.

The neighborhood had even more of a reputation when he moved in, he said. That's why he could afford his house.

“I said, ‘If no one wants to live here then I'll move in and clean it up.'”

He co-founded the Burbank Gardens Neighborhood Association, helped organize the drive to have the neighborhood recognized as a historic district. He paints over graffiti the day it appears.

“I've been conscious about it,” he said. “Meet your neighbor, work together, make your community.”

This is his home. He rattles off the advantages: downtown close by, the neighbors, residential and commercial, burritos at Las Palmas, breakfasts at Dierk's. His wife takes her sewing machine to Jim Wyllie's shop, he can grab some milk and other sundries from BJ's Market.

And then there is the expanse across the street, which now, under night, is a blend of dark shapes that grow more indistinct the farther they fall from the street lamps and passing headlights.

“The park is absolutely beautiful,” said Hitao.

“If I was rich and a had big estate, that would be the garden I'd want. So I just pretend that it is.”