LeBaron: Santa Rosa's '69 earthquakes show Napa what lies ahead
The damage estimates keep rising. The photos of devastation, inside and outside, greet us on Facebook, on the evening news and in our morning papers.
“Napa” and “earthquake” are two words that have become like one word this past week and will remain so - at least until the next big one jolts another unlucky town.
If all this doesn’t bring you close-to-home echoes of an earthquake past, then you’re not old enough to remember the back-to-back shakers that did to Santa Rosa pretty much what last Sunday morning’s roller did to Napa.
For those who do remember it is, to coin a well-worn phrase, déjà vu all over again.
ON OCT. 1, 1969, at 9:40 p.m., two earthquakes an hour and a half apart, the second one larger than the first, rumbled across the Santa Rosa plain. This city of 50,000 had the bad luck to play host to the strongest earthquake recorded in the United States that calendar year. Odds are that Napa will have the dubious distinction this year.
Looking at the photos, hearing the reports of the heaps of bricks and plaster in the streets, the cracked and crumpled chimneys, broken water mains and gas lines, the ongoing inspections and condemned buildings that Napa’s 6.0 earthquake left behind, we can relate. Oh boy, can we relate!
But all we can offer Napa is the suggestion, based on experience, that the town - specifically the downtown - will never be the same again. Maybe better. Maybe just different. But not the same.
THERE IS MUCH to compare - starting with the happy parts. We remember that, like Napa, Santa Rosa’s quake of 45 years ago occurred at times when there were no people on downtown streets, which means no lives were lost and there were few serious injuries.
We remember that, like Napa, babies were born, proving that life goes on, despite the tectonic demons.
Apart from the black humor that always comes with disaster - the quirky stories centered on plumbing and the inevitable “Did the earth move?” anecdotes - that’s about all the happy comparisons we have to offer. Nobody gets nostalgic over an earthquake.
The images we see in our mind’s eye when we think back would seem strange to those whose memories of the city’s center don’t reach back that far.
Santa Rosa then, like Napa now, was “given the opportunity” (one way to put it) to reconfigure the downtown. Smart-ass columnists of the day referred to the quake as “nature’s urban renewal.”
That turned out to be more truth than poetry. It was the federal government’s Housing and Urban Development Agency that bought the land the earthquakes wiped clean.
THERE ARE DIFFERENCES, of course. First the magnitude. Our earthquakes were magnitude 5.6 and 5.7, but the one-two punch made the damage extensive. Napa’s was 6.0 - and earthquakes, remember, increase exponentially in force, so the difference between 5.7 and 6.0 packs considerably more than a point three wallop.
Napa is half-again as populous as Santa Rosa was in ’69 (roughly 70,000 to our 50,000)
And Napa’s downtown is generally considered charming. The Napa River runs through it. Several historic buildings, including the Opera House, have been rehabbed in recent years. It is charming, as befits a tourist town. In recent years, it has bustled with tourists and residents alike.
Santa Rosa’s downtown in 1969 was neither charming nor bustling. It was old. It hadn’t changed much from the business district that was rebuilt after the 1906 quake. And its glory was fading fast. There were two big hotels, the Occidental and the Santa Rosa Hotel, both outdated since the late ’50s-early ’60s by the Flamingo and El Rancho and Los Robles Lodge on the edges of town. There were two department stores, small specialty shops (shoes, women’s wear, millinery), three or four drugstores and three banks (the only three in town!). There were a couple of coffee shops and/or soda fountains, the fanciest restaurant in the county and lots and lots of bars, many of them with residence hotels on the upper floors.
The parts of Fourth Street that were hardest hit were the blocks from Courthouse Square west to the freeway. The two aforementioned hotels, the Poulsen Building, with its second floor Rainbow Ballroom, Hardisty’s, the pioneer coffee, tea, spice and cookware store, the Elks Lodge upstairs, Lou’s Sporting Goods and Levin’s Hardware Store, which was so set in its early century merchandising methods as to be considered an anachronism.
Developer Hugh Codding had been raiding Fourth Street for most of the decade, luring the most prosperous businesses to the new concept of his regional shopping center.
In addition, the county had moved out, building the new seat of government on Mendocino Avenue north of town.
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