Petaluma’s Walnut Park benefits from upgrades, police presence

In its 143 years of existence, Petaluma’s Walnut Park has been a community gathering spot and sometimes a star in movies and commercials.

It’s been the setting for concerts, farmers markets, art shows and political rallies. But despite its prominent downtown location, it’

But today, thanks to physical improvements made by service clubs and renewed attention from the Police Department, those problems have eased and the park’s revival is a success story.

More than $150,000 has been invested by seven service clubs to spruce up the park. The beautification effort is being capped off with the remodeling of an old maintenance and storage building to serve as a police storefront. Not precisely a substation, it will be a place for officers to write their reports, make phone calls and serve as a presence, beginning sometime this month.

Police Lt. Ken Savano said it makes sense for police to have a satellite location “to keep the park nice and safe.”

“They were having problems with transients and homeless and other criminal activity in the park. They engaged us in the project, to make sure whatever work they did to restore it to its former glory for citizens and families didn’t get undone,” he said.

Over the past two years, the Petaluma Service Alliance, representing Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis and Elks, put in new pathways and benches in the park, repaired picnic tables and fixed up the bandstand, among other improvements.

Maureen Frances, a Rotarian who headed up the effort, said it was badly needed because the 1.5-acre park built in 1873 was “going to ruin.”

Not only had the park physically deteriorated, with warped asphalt pathways that made it hard to navigate with a wheelchair or child’s stroller, there were also illicit activities that made it unwelcoming for families.

Frances said there was prostitution, with sexual activity occurring under blankets, “during the day, out on the lawn.

“Young girls were being picked up there regularly,” she said. “It was blatant, and everybody knew it.”

Lt. Savano said some of what people witnessed may have been “sex acts in exchange for narcotics.”

He said the drug use mostly involved heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana.

With increased police enforcement and patrolling, he said, “calls have gone way down.”

In addition to more lighting and some surveillance cameras that will be installed, having officers there on a regular basis is also seen as a way for Walnut Park to maintain its appeal.

“When the community comes together to take care of its own park and works collaboratively with law enforcement and other departments to look after it, it’s a great project,” Savano said.

Walnut Park was documented in 2000 in the U.S. Library of Congress as a “Historic American Landscape” and “significant in social history as a community builder.”

Only 14 years after Petaluma incorporated, the park was established in part with funding from mill owner John McNear and upgraded a few years later by the Ladies Home Improvement Club. In the 1941, famed Petaluma architect Brainerd Jones designed a building in the park for use as a children’s playroom and restrooms.

Petaluma historian Skip Sommer noted that presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson spoke at Walnut Park in 1952 and President Ronald Reagan’s television commercial “Morning in America” was filmed there in 1984. Scenes from the films “American Graffiti” and “Heroes” were also shot there.

With the rehabilitation effort, the park is back in the limelight.

“It’s very heartening to see kids come back and families all saying ‘thank you,’ They’re so grateful to have the park back where their legacies and stories are,” Frances said.

Editor’s note: a previous version of this story had the incorrect year for when architect Brainerd Jones designed the building in Walnut Park.

You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@clarkmas