The Continuing Echoes of Rome

Forgive me the brief ramble of history, but I am engrossed this winter in the first and second volumes of  Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." That means being hyper conscious of the Roman Empire's influence still visible in our lives. I'm a guy who took Latin throughout high school. I visited Rome twice, in 1978 and 1981, to soak in the ruins of what must have been a truly magnificent display of architecture in its time. I came across the Sacramento County Law Library on a recent lunch time walk. It's a little corner place near the Amtrak station, all tucked away and invisible to most of the city. The ancients' good taste endures.

Room With a View

We went to the Crocker Art Museum in downtown Sacramento last Sunday and ran into a huge crowd visiting for the Norman Rockwell exhibit. It was great. So was this million-dollar view of downtown from inside the museum. Even better on a rocking chair.

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.