Reunified Old Courthouse Square poised to make its debut in downtown Santa Rosa
After a year of surgery on the ailing heart of its downtown, not only has Santa Rosa survived the procedure, it's about to get out of bed and run a triathlon.
The city next Saturday will unveil its long-awaited reunified Old Courthouse Square, the ambitious $10.5 million project to restore the central space to its original configuration in the hopes of revitalizing the downtown core.
It won't take long to see whether the new public space - with its wide side streets, newly planted trees, benches and verdant patch of turf - is up to the challenge.
After the ribbon cutting, the repaired square will get an immediate workout. A festival follows the Saturday afternoon ceremony. The popular Wednesday Night Market moves in May 3. And thousands of elite athletes and their supporters will descend on May 13 for the Ironman 70.3 Santa Rosa triathlon, which is set to finish downtown.
The intense usage - from community gatherings, to special events designed to draw in tourists, to daily visits by the downtown lunch crowd - is exactly what Mayor Chris Coursey believes the square was designed for and needs to succeed.
“It's not just a nice park in the middle of the city. It's a place for things to happen,” Coursey said. “This is for everybody, and it will be more enjoyable if everybody uses it.”
A journey since 1854
The remarkable journey of Santa Rosa's central square is as old as the city itself. It began as an open plaza, then was home to two county courthouses before being unceremoniously split in two by a four-lane road. Now, after years of debate and stasis, it has been made whole again.
The formal space dates back to a partnership between Julio Carrillo, who in 1849 inherited a substantial portion of his family's land grant, and a merchant named Barney Hoen, who teamed up to create a new county seat. Carrillo filed the first official map of Santa Rosa in 1854, with the central square clearly labeled in capital letters “PLAZA.”
The first courthouse on the 1.5-acre square went up in 1884, came down in the 1906 earthquake and in 1910 was replaced by the larger version that lasted until 1966, when it was deemed seismically unfit and removed.
That's when the decision was made to take Mendocino and Santa Rosa avenues, both of which dead-ended at the square, and link them with a four-lane road through the center. The side streets - Hinton on the east and Exchange on the west - were removed, and, eventually, two narrow parks created.
The decision, in retrospect, is now widely viewed as having been a poor one.
“It's a little bit like cutting your heart in half,” said John Sawyer, a three-term councilman and former downtown retailer. “What do you have? You're dead.”
While the idea was to make it easier to bring traffic downtown, the reality was it only helped people drive through, Sawyer said.
Without the side streets, businesses on the east and west sides of the square suffered from inactivity. Facing competition from Coddingtown Mall, which opened in 1962, and later Santa Rosa Plaza, the downtown mall that opened in 1983 - and effectively walled off eastern downtown from Railroad Square - the city's core struggled.
“It didn't take long for the regret to set in,” Coursey said.
The city took steps to make downtown more pedestrian friendly, like narrowing Fourth Street to two lanes and throwing a few kinks into it, forcing it to meander and slow traffic.
But continued competition from new shopping options on Santa Rosa Avenue kept many independent merchants from thriving. In the mid-1990s, those additions included Santa Rosa Marketplace - home to Costco and Trader Joe's - and the Santa Rosa Town Center, home to Bed Bath & Beyond.
To some, reunification was the obvious solution, one repeatedly validated by visiting architects and urban planners.
“Every single expert who ever came to Santa Rosa and talked about the potential for downtown said it starts with the square,” Coursey said.
But consensus remained elusive, despite the efforts of myriad groups seeking to improve the downtown business climate, including the Downtown Partnership Commission, Downtown Business Association and Downtown Development Association.
In the early 2000s, a coalition of downtown interest groups and businesses convinced the City Council to study the reunification concept. Those spearheading the effort included Bernie Schwartz, owner of California Luggage, Richard Carlile, founder of engineering firm Carlile-Macy, and Bill Dodson, president of CityVision.
By 2004, the council made it an official goal and agreed to pursue a federal grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission if private groups would raise a quarter of the cost, then expected to be $4 million.
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