City of Trees

Sacramento's Capitol Park is ablaze in color. It was nearly 80 degrees earlier today, bringing out the city's bureaucrats to sit a spell, hike, gab and stroll amid the leaves of autumn. We, who work for the state downtown, benefit from visionaries of a century ago, the tree planters and landscape architects who envisioned such a creation as you see here below:

Young Capitol staffers with the Legislature out of town.

Crossroads.

Somewhere it's snowing, but not in California

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Pacific Grove, California

My wife and I ventured off for a long weekend to Pacific Grove, a small Monterey Penninsula city best identified by dual icons of monarch butterflies and Victorian architecture. We walked, we ate, we sat and watched the Pacific Ocean. It had been a dozen years or more since we last set eyes on a town that we explored when we first met nearly 35 years ago. It has lost none of its charm in a world that leans toward big box stores and shades of beige.

The private residence of Dr. Hart in the good old days of style and taste.

Nothing beats an explanation of this old house.

We had a great breakfast in this busy family-owned restaurant.

What town wouldn't kill for such a benevolent mascot?

 Even the trees in Pacific Grove have interesting design. Living in the arid Central Valley of California I also tend to forget about ice plants. Here are an big fertile belt of them to frame this old Monterey Cypress.

Another spectacle at the sight of the Point Pinos Lighthouse, the Pacific Coast's oldest continously running lighthouse.

A beauty in itself.

We got there too late to see the newly remodeled interior. This guy in the blue coat and his colleague told us it was closing time. Next trip.

Enter the Christmas Tree

The Capitol Christmas Tree arrived today on the West Steps! 

  (A few days later, updated Wednesday, November 13)

Give us a few more days and we'll be looking like this, Christmas 2010.

Presidential Taste

One of my favorite pastimes is presidential history. While in Fremont, Ohio, in October, I had occasion to visit the home of President Rutheford B. Hayes. They had just done a $1 million renovation inside to bring several rooms back to their original splendor. Pictures weren't allowed inside, but I shot these of the Hayes house while waiting for my brother to arrive for the 3:30 p.m. tour, where we were joined by two sisters driving from Chicago to Boston on I-80. They dropped into town just to take in the place.

The house in Spiegel Grove, a huge park filled with large trees and endless walking space. Hayes is buried on the grounds with his wife and horse.

I sat here awhile and thought great thoughts on the benches. What a porch!

And the view!

Again, the View! Great time of year to sit on the President's porch.

My Home Town

I recently spent most of a week in Fremont, Ohio, visiting family and enjoying the full colorful spectacle of an eastern autumn. It's a small town of about 16,000, built by pioneers with great taste. They've left us dozens of great monuments, especially beautiful churches and public buildings.

When I grew up this was the county jail, blackened with soot and dark as coal. My brother helped organize a cleaning and burst of adaptive reuse that turned it into offices for the county commissioners.

Built in 1890.

The Sandusky County Courthouse. Dignified.

Pioneer history in the park out front of the courthouse.

Classic. Built to last by ancient founding father Lutherans.

Another Lutheran Extravaganza just blocks away. Grace Lutheran. 

Catholics were no slouches, either. This is St. Joseph's. Less than a mile away is St. Ann's, also built of red brick. Both beauties and speaking to the high aspirations of the county seat of Sandusky County.  While I was home it occurred to me that there are literally thousands of small

American towns with this kind of architecture. I don't have pictures of the houses, but the whole town is filled with giant old two-story's, many of them kept up, many struggling and selling for less than $100,000. Great place to visit, town of my father's people and cemeteries filled with my relatives.

The ambience of 15th and L

  I walked east to buy chocolates at Ginger Elizabeth on Thursday and strolled here through the tree canopy at downtown Sacramento's lively corner of 15th and L streets. There's always a lunch gaggle here, the office crowd and lobbyists gossiping about who's up and who's down. Eye-catching. Great little detail there with the rickshaw. 

The Indefinable Look of the 2000s

The 1990s and 2000s have possessed a certain indefinable look - especially in infill housing of the sort that just opened in downtown Sacramento. This is Mercy Housing's income-qualified housing project  near the courthouse and county jail on a formerly very dead corner. It's a great little piece of infill development - the kind you see featured in one of my favorite magazines of all time, Urban Land from the Urban Land Institute. They love this stuff. So do I.