Joyeux Noel, 2012

Christmas is gone and New Year's Day is soon to come. I end 2012 with this small memory, a picture taken on Christmas Eve while waiting for light rail to the suburbs. This is Ambrosia Cafe, a lovely little place on a corner in a main downtown square of Sacramento.

Waiting for the train on late darkening afternoons of fall becoming winter this year, I have often felt spellbound by the warm welcoming light coming from this little coffeehouse. Ambrosia is a favorite gathering place for Capitol policy wonks, lobbyists and the ocasional legislator. They drink coffee and tea here and gossip about the latest.

The cafe anchors the ground floor of an older building about six stories high, approximately the favorite height of people strolling urban areas. I forget now where I read that. I believe it was about Paris being abundant in that kind of architecture. I love the holidays wreaths here, the Christmas tree anchoring the corner and the informality of the street-level holiday greeting.

So many of the best architectural sights, the litlte feel-good places, happen almost by accident without trying too hard. Small holiday sights can get frozen into memory. This is mine, Christmas Eve with Ambrosia closed for the holiday.  The cheer was contagious. Happy New Year everyone, and happy sight-seeing in 2013!

School of Design

My wife and I sauntered off today to the Elk Grove Pumpkin Festival, stopping first to tour the Elk Grove Historical Society's heritage park. Next door is this renovation-in-progress, the historical old home of  the 1884 Reese School.

I add it here because of the classical entrance. They obviously added this touch to say: "Enter here a place of learning, a very important place."

Contrast this with today's schools, which seem designed by the same companies that do prisons. 

Writers, Governors, Presidents, Light Rail

A few days ago I went to the Center for Sacramento History to look up an archives file from the 1950s. I got on Regional Transit's new Green Line and rode out to Richards Boulevard and 7th Street and got off at the city's newest light rail station. It's a nice one, made of bricks from the recently demolished Richards-Bercutt cannery. It's been torn down to begin construction on a new urban neighborhood out there north of downtown named Township 9.

What I really liked was a collection of sayings by notables who came from or worked in Sacramento. Here are a few of them: 

Wells Fargo Bank Plaza

I wandered out today in the heat for a lunch-time walk on Capitol Mall, passing the Thursday farmer's market and coming across the Sacramento branch of Wells Fargo. One thing I say about my philosophy of architecture is I know what I like and I know what makes me feel good. This is one of those places, with creative use of space and a focus on beauty. I like the flowered squares here and arrived, indeed, as the groundskeeper was touching it all up. I have liked coming into this space the whole 11 years I've lived in Sacramento.

Men To Match My Mountains

Mornings now, I get off my #52 bus and walk past this beauty on the way to a new state job I started in April. It's the Jesse M. Unruh State Office Building. Note the memorable motto inscribed across the top. Sexist, yes, but written in 1894 by Eastern poet Sam Walter Foss. It's now home of the State Treasurer among others.

The building dates to just before the Great Depression, and it has a twin on the other side of a plaza - which houses the State Library. Inscribed on that building - now being renovated - is an even greater saying: "Into the Highlands of the Mind Let Me Go." 

In the early part of the 2000s, I used to walk there during the lunch hour and sit in the lovely reading room on the second floor. It was just a magnificent high-ceiling, elegant and classical space to sit near a window with a view of giant camphor trees, reading The New York Times and feeling like I owned the world.

Government Town II: The Mural Spirit

Only in a state capital would this be possible. A government bureaucrat is welcoming guys who are leaving artist Stephanie Taylor's mural of the historic 1872 painting by Charles Christian Nahl,  "Sunday in the Mines."

The thoughtful bureaucrat is rather like the one in my Government Town post a year ago from another part of downtown.

 It's all very clever, and a nice touch on an otherwise bland part of J Street in downtown Sacramento. Here's a guess: They're off to Happy Hour at McCormick and Schmicks down the street?

By the way, do you think they could have made the back side of this building any more ugly? That needs a forest of redwoods in front of it.

Courthouse in Gold Country

When friends visited recently from elsewhere in California they drove us up into the Sierra foothills to spend the day in the lovely old gold rush city of Auburn, just east of Sacramento. Looming above us all day long was this lovely Placer County Courthouse, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. I went inside years ago when I was covering the politics of homeowners associations and private communities for The Associated Press; I was looking up a lawsuit related to Del Webb's Sun City Roseville. 

   When I see this picture I think of a million small-town courthouses spread throughout the U.S., often with a square in front and always the most majestic government building in town. This one is especially nice.

 We had a great time visiting Auburn that day, wandering the Farmers Market, strolling through an Oldtown Auburn Historic District and then downtown Auburn. My favorite was a serious store for miners and a couple of wonderful old used bookstores. Very civilized and walkable little city. 

   

California Teachers Association Chic

I remember this building rising in the early 2000s in downtown Sacramento because it had to fit a really tight space next to the fortress architecture to the left of it - known as 925 L Street. I've always liked it, six stories serving as the Government Relations Headquarters for the powerful California Teachers Union.

The architects express some pride in their creation here, as do the builders here. 

I've tried to learn more online about the design style and locals' opinions about it. But I find almost nothing about this little gem. It's one of the great overlooked buildings in the "power and money" square mile surrounding the Capitol. 

Update May 2014: Sunrise

Big Yellow School Bus Goes Electric

Today I headed back into the California EPA building after a long walk in the February sunshine - and ambled by surprise onto a remarkable mobile architectural feat above. It's the first all-electric bus sold to a U.S. school district. 

Turns out it belongs to the Kings Canyon School District in Reedley near Fresno. I got to talking with the district's transportation chief who gushed enthusiasm over his new wheels. Then he asked flat out if I wanted to go for a ride. Sure enough, we took a slow spin around the block in a silent school bus that gets 120 miles to a charge. 

This is what I love about living in California. As the sign says: The Power to Change the World.

The Geography of Nowhere

This roadside attraction near Modesto, California, brings to mind one of my favorite books in the 1990s: James Howard Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere."

Kunster erupted onto the scene of urban planning with his wild manifesto of criticism about the state of the "public realm" in the United States. This above is the kind of thing he called "highway crud," as he described an assault "by the chaos of gigantic, lurid plastic signs, golden arches, red-and-white-striped revolving chicken buckets, cinder-block carpet warehouses, discount marts, asphalt deserts, and a horizon slashed by utility poles." 

My wife and I occasionally stop here for a Starbucks coffee while on Highway 99. It truly typifies a kind of off-ramp soul-deadening landscape that so often greets the American traveler.

I couldn't help myself. I came out with a latte', pointed the camera and drove away.