Recollections Around R Street

For complete authority on  Sacramento's Southside, see Sacramento's Southside Park by William Burg and Sacramento's Historic Japantown: Legacy of a Lost Neighborhood by Kevin Wildie.

Look out an upper-floor windowpane from one of the office buildings situated on R St. Tree-topped neighborhoods and urban skylines dominate the scene. To the west, an occasional high-masted sailing ship peeks above the landscape from afloat the Sacramento.

For a good part of the city’s history, to land at the Sacramento embarcadero meant an initial stop at the shops along K before proceeding straight onto J Street: the most direct route out of town and to the Mother Lode.

But R Street, too, is an important part of Sacramento’s past.

R Street was once bisected by a critical levee stretching east from the river more than a mile. On top of the levee sat tracks carrying California’s first railroad.

Beginning operation in August, 1855, the Sacramento Valley Railroad was acquired by Central Pacific (then Southern Pacific, now Union Pacific) in 1865, which connected the Sacramento waterfront with transcontinental customers.

The Central Shops north of downtown were specifically purposed to produce engines powerful enough to scale the Sierra Nevada Summit.

The R Street Levee, built after a series of floods in the early 1850s, was the effective southern edge of town, separating the nascent city from swampy marshes and Burns’ Slough.

At that time, as the city was expanding eastward, the entire tract south of K Street was considered ‘Southside’. Today, R Street is commonly thought of as the northern boundary of the Southside Park neighborhood.

With construction of the levee at Y Street (now Broadway) completed in 1902, and more robust flood control upriver the American, a large district of previously sparse inhabitance became attractive to new residents.

The park was commissioned in 1906, under consultation from Dr. John Hays McLaren, horticulturalist and 53-year-superintendent of Golden Gate Park. The now 20-acre Southside Park was once much larger, before the freeway’s incursion reduced its size by nearly 40 percent.

Adjacent the park, both passenger and freight trains traveled from Chico, via the Sacramento Northern Railway, and Stockton, by way of the Central Valley Traction Company. The two lines shared tracks along Eighth Street.

While horse-drawn cars, then electric street cars, and eventually automobiles allowed some folks to escape the noise and pollution of the urban core, others settled near where jobs and services were plentiful and convenient—and where no discriminatory housing provisions engendered exclusion.

A friendly but active debate persists between Masjid Al-Jame on V Street and the parishioners of a mosque in Detroit about which is actually the longest-practicing in the United States.

The oldest black religious congregation on the west coast, St. Andrew’s African Methodist Episcopal, founded in 1850, moved in 1951 to its current home on Eighth Street.

At one time, R Street, and the surrounding neighborhood, was the nexus of economic activity for inland California.

Electricity service first became available in Sacramento in the late 1880s, allowing the canneries and mills to run around-the-clock operations during peak production periods.

The Del Monte cannery stood at the foot of Q Street and the PG&E plant at the end of T Street—ground Interstate 5 entrenches upon today.

Beginning as a failed 1954 bond measure, the City of Sacramento funded a series of redevelopment programs by borrowing against future expected increases in tax revenue—employing a method known as ‘tax increment financing’.

The programs were popular with municipalities nation-wide, as cities clamoring to compete with newer suburban developments sought to rejuvenate their urban cores by eliminating properties thought of as ‘blighted’.

The California State Capitol Urban Renewal Plan was executed in three phases, replacing the area surrounding M Street (Capitol Mall), along the river, and south to S Street with superblocks, office buildings, and modern apartment complexes.

The population of central Sacramento dwindled from a peak of nearly 60,000 residents before 1950 to under 30,000 today.

Still, many wonderful old-neighborhood mementos are found amongst the new.

Like a nail house, the Stanford Mansion protrudes from a moat of asphalt at Eighth and N Streets, while the Nisei War Memorial on Fourth is all that remains of Sacramento’s Japantown.

The old Portuguese commercial district lined Third Street. The building housing the Continental Grocery Store, established in 1912, is still standing on the corner at U Street.

In 1974, the artist group known as the Royal Chicano Air Force composed the mural that anoints the Callahan Memorial Bandstand, which was erected in Southside Park in 1934. The bandstand lies directly across T Street from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where Cesar Chavez’s 1966 march from Delano, Calif. concluded.

Uptown, a new saga of redevelopment is bringing sidewalk improvements and restaurants and lofts to the recently consecrated historic district. And with the all-but-certain construction of a new sports arena on K Street, more changes for the neighborhood are likely on the horizon.

Southside Park celebrated its centennial on June 14, with walking tours, face painting, and free swim at the pool.