Our waterways - resources wasted

[What is a Rivercat?]

So I'm here in Boston and just think the city is gorgeous. But it upset me to see all the waterways handsomely developed and to think of home and the gigantic waste waterfront property has gone to in Sacramento. What on your thoughts on the stunning lack of anything on our rivers?

[wburg]

So I'm here in Boston and just think the city is gorgeous. But it upset me to see all the waterways handsomely developed and to think of home and the gigantic waste waterfront property has gone to in Sacramento. What on your thoughts on the stunning lack of anything on our rivers?
http://sacramento.pastperfect-online.com/30528images/071/19730031370.jpg
We used our waterfront plenty during Sacramento's first century. The first thing we did to the waterfront was build a levee to stop it from drowning us. Then shortly afterward, we built a bigger levee because the first levee wasn't big enough. Then we jacked up most of downtown and built more levees. So if it seems sometimes that Sacramento doesn't trust its river, just think about how much you would trust someone who had tried to kill you, multiple times, and still had to be kept behind solid walls. It tends to put a damper on a relationship.
http://sacramento.pastperfect-online.com/30528images/071/19730031369.jpg
This didn't stop Sacramentans from interacting with the river. Until the 1870s, the river was the main transportation route from the Bay Area and Pacific ports to Sacramento, and the major route north to Red Bluff, Marysville/Yuba City and other smaller cities in northern California. The Central Pacific Railroad ended right at the riverside docks to facilitate easy transfer of passengers and freight to riverboats.
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By the beginning of the 20th century, Sacramento's waterfront was a continuous row of warehouses from K Street to R Street. Aside from a couple of open platforms, you couldn't even see the river from Front Street because of all the warehouses.
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South of R Street, the river bent to the west. The Sacramento Southern Railroad ran along the riverside levee (and still does) and both Sacramento Northern and Central California Traction railroads ran along Front Street.
http://sacramento.pastperfect-online.com/30528images/009/19700010092.jpg
One of the biggest structures on the southern part of Front Street was the massive PG&E natural gas storage tank complex, originally a coal-gas generating plant. This complex also included a gym with an indoor baseball field. Coal-gas generation is particularly toxic, so much so that its former site is still a bare gravel field.
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At the southern end of Front Street were oil companies, whose storage tanks still sit on the waterfront. Today they are fed by an underground pipeline, formerly barges shipped oil products up from refineries in the Bay Area to waterfront unloading pumps.

Between Front and Second Street were a row of industrial processing centers and transportation buildings: canneries, ironworks, box factories, lumber mills, rice mills, trucking companies, railroad freight depots, etcetera.
http://sacramento.pastperfect-online.com/30528images/074/19820780010.jpg
On the northern end of town, the Southern Pacific Shops were right up aganist the waterfront, along with the PG&E powerplant. These were nestled right up against the levee, with one set of tracks running south along Front Street and another set running across the river on the I Street Bridge (and its wooden predecessors.)
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Between the Shops and the industries south of Front Street was the Labor Market, what we now know as Old Sacramento. Thousands of farm laborers lived here between jobs, along with traveling railroad workers, along with assorted vagrants and those down on their luck. They lived in the cheap boarding houses and residential hotels of the West End, drank in the plentiful neighborhood bars, and ate in the cheap restaurants near the waterfront.
http://sacramento.pastperfect-online.com/30528images/097/1983001SBPM06882.jpg
In the decades after World War II, Sacramento's waterfront changed radically. Sacramento's riverfront dock wasn't deep enough for modern shipping, and the completion of the Port of Sacramento made the waterfront docks unimportant. Jobs and population were shifting rapidly eastward, to the new Air Force bases and Aerojet, and even the canneries were moving out to places like Polk and South Sacramento. There wasn't much call to make the waterfront into a tourist attraction, and most of it was considered dangerous. Racial covenants were still legal in the 1950s and 1960s, so the waterfront neighborhoods became the non-white neighborhoods.

The end came with redevelopment and the highway system. Interstate 5 demolished what redevelopment projects did not. A small portion of the Labor Market area, now known as Old Sacramento, was retained and turned into a tourist attraction, but most of the previous century's built environment along the waterfront was demolished--except for the levees, which are needed now as they were then, to stop the river from killing us.

We are not unique in this. Plenty of cities used their waterfront for industrial purposes, and built freeways that served the dual purpose of allowing suburban commuters easy access and demolishing poor neighborhoods near downtowns. San Francisco's much-touted "Fisherman's Wharf" was a lot like Front Street: an industrial district with freight trains trundling down the Embarcadero, it went into decline when industries moved to cheaper places and a freeway (the Embarcadero Freeway) cut the city off from its waterfront. It took an earthquake to demolish the Embarcadero Freeway, and a combination of tourism and massive public/private investment turned Fisherman's Wharf into the tourist destination it is today.

Old Sacramento certainly counts as a tourist destination. While many will pooh-pooh it, and there is certainly room for improvement, they do get millions of tourists a year, and many people know Sacramento primarily because of their visits to Old Sacramento. We could have had a much larger Old Sacramento district, with many more original structures, but at the time Sacramentans' higher priority was demolition in order to make way for the future--in many places, a future that never arrived. There are still vacant lots (used for parking) in the redevelopment zones that were cleared in a hurry 40-50 years ago. Our waterfront district was scrubbed so thoroughly that many people simply assume that Sacramento never did anything with its riverfront. We did--we just buried it.

(edit: All images are from the Sacramento Archives & Museum Collection Center: http://www.cityofsacramento.org/ccl/history/index.html)