Santa Rosa celebrates 150 years with birthday cake, time capsule, champagne

Thousands of people converged on downtown Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square Saturday to celebrate the city’s founding 150 years ago, marking a once-in-a-lifetime event for many, filled with music, a variety of historical tributes and even a 150-pound cake adorned with an equal number of roses.

The vibrant seven-hour party in the city’s reunited downtown heart drew a wide range of local elected officials, community leaders and residents taking in live entertainment, food, drink and activities to honor the sesquicentennial of Sonoma County’s largest city.

Set to conclude the birthday party was a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film “Shadow of a Doubt,” filmed in Santa Rosa.

In a brief early evening speech, Mayor Chris Coursey sought to connect the city’s historical growth with its most pressing current problem: an extreme housing shortage worsened by the loss of thousands of homes to the devastating wildfires last year.

Coursey traced Santa Rosa’s population growth from about 3,000 people in the mid-19th century to upwards of 175,000 today. He said most of the city’s growth in recent years has come not from an influx of new residents but from last year’s annexation of Roseland, previously an unincorporated neighborhood southwest of city limits.

“That really indicates the problem that we have about housing,” Coursey said. “We need more housing in Santa Rosa ... the next 150 years - next 150 days - probably aren’t gonna be so much about how much growth as it’s gonna be about where we grow.”

Coursey later joined other city officials and Brent Farris, the program director at KZST, in cutting the towering birthday cake from Costeaux Bakery in Healdsburg. Attendees toasted the occasion with glasses of Korbel California Champagne. The cake was decorated with 150 roses supplied by Pedy’s Petals in Santa Rosa.

One of the day’s most poignant elements was a display featuring the contents of a time capsule to be buried later this year on the square’s southern end along Third Street.

Among the capsule’s contents are several artifacts commemorating the deadly wildfires last October, including bits of fused metal found after the fires by Coursey and china salvaged from the destroyed home of county Supervisor Susan Gorin.

Also included are two front-page printouts of The Press Democrat: one from Oct. 10, 2017, featuring the first-day firestorm coverage and another from April of this year after the newspaper won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

“The goal of the time capsule was to put together documents and items that show who we are today - documents and items that communicate the social mores and events and issues that have happened now,” Staci Pastis, a board member of Museums of Sonoma County who helped put the time capsule together, said in an interview.

Other items in the capsule include a Snoopy figure from Jean Schulz, widow of the late “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz, and local philanthropist Connie Codding’s Planned Parenthood card. In contrast, Codding’s late husband, developer and former Santa Rosa mayor Hugh Codding, put his MasterCard in a previous capsule buried in 1968 and opened earlier this year.

The new capsule will be buried alongside another one from 1968 that was intended to remain underground for 100 years. Both are set to be opened in 2068.

Another speaker at Saturday’s event was Press Democrat columnist and Sonoma County historian Gaye LeBaron. She spoke of the newspaper’s long legacy - which predates the March 16, 1868, incorporation of Santa Rosa - and concluded with the commentary of the newspaper’s first subscriber, rancher John Taylor.

“He suggested that any town that was to survive needed a newspaper,” LeBaron said. “I would offer the flip side: That any newspaper that is to survive needs a town full of ambitious, interested, intelligent, forward-?looking readers. And I think, taking stock of the last 150 years, we can safely say that that’s what we’ve got going here.”

Sonoma State University professor Margaret Purser set up a booth in the square encouraging more people to participate in an interactive online project where people can upload stories and images about neighborhoods and places in town. She has called the project a “citywide selfie.”

“The whole idea is to get the whole city on the map, and whole city is an interesting concept, because Santa Rosa is a bit of a fragmented city in a lot of ways,” Purser said, noting the areas bisected by Highway 101 and other geographic divisions.

Purser said she plans to have neighborhood-specific parties later this year after she identifies areas of the city that need more participation. The mapping project is accessible at sr150heritagemap.net.

Sponsors of Saturday’s event included the city of Santa Rosa, the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber, Exchange Bank, Ghilotti Construction Co., The Press Democrat and Redwood Credit Union.

The birthday party drew out some longtime Santa Rosans, among them 40-year resident Louisa Leavitt and 49-year resident Susan Curry.

Leavitt said the city has changed in many positive ways since she first arrived.

“It’s a lot more diverse now than it was, in ethnicity, in gender acceptance” and more, she said. Traffic, however, is “ridiculous” now, Leavitt said, a problem not limited to Santa Rosa.

The two women had long lists of reasons they love living in the city, including its proximity to the coast, relatively small-town charm and temperate weather. The sesquicentennial was a welcome and bonafide celebration.

“It’s not very old compared to the East Coast, but it’s significant,” Curry said of the anniversary. “It’s just such a lovely city.”