Poster issued by the London, Eng. Metropolitan Police in 1868

I love our new Street Smart pedestrian crossings and I think it’s great that our very first Sebastopol Walks event of the year is a tour of all the improved intersections. One of the hopes for the project was that drivers would slow down as they came through town. City Council member Sarah Gurney reported that she now sees more pedestrians on South Main, which has often been pretty much pedestrian-free. That said, I do wonder if we are now training drivers on the main streets to stop only for the flashing lights. I don’t have any real data to back that up–only my experience–but I’ve waited at couple of the non-improved intersections as car after car goes across the crosswalk. I’ve also waited at the one intersection that doesn’t have in-pavement flashers (at Calder and South Main Street, which was the first one improved). I’d hate to think that our improvements might have made other intersections in town more hazardous!

I am working on a small shed with my son and we took a trip recently to Daniel O. Davis  in south Santa Rosa to hunt for salvaged lumber.  January is unfortunately not a good time for hunting and the selection was disappointingly small…unless we’d been in the market for big glue-lam beams. While were staring at a couple of old windows small, another customer tipped us off to better hunting grounds at Windsor’s Industrial Reusable Materials.  What a great tip! We soon found ourselves in hog heaven and one of the workers commented that during demolition season, the selection is much, much better. We drove out of their yard a few hours later with a full pickup load of various pieces of lumber, a couple of windows and an old Sonoma County Transit bus stop sign (my son says he has plans for it) — all for the price of the sheets of plywood that we would have picked up at Friedman’s or Home Depot.

I wish I’d known about IRM when we were rebuilding our porch a couple of years ago. I’d hoped to use mostly recycled materials at the time, but finding the right materials in a timely fashion proved too difficult. The selections at Daniel O. Davis and at the lumber recycling facility on Mecham Road in Petaluma were poor. We ended up with a high percentage of new lumber.  We’ll be going back.

Peace Garden at Ragle Park

Sebastopol Walks now has its website as we begin the fifth year of walks in and around Sebastopol. Although we’ve made the schedules available through the City of Sebastopol’ s site and iWalk Sonoma, with our own site, we’ll be posting more updates and photos from our walks. I’ll be leading at least two walks this spring, including a followup walk to the popular Sebastopol Watersheds walk that will explore a branch of Calder Creek and Witter Creek. We will also be presenting the new series at the January 17th Sebastopol City Council meeting. Check out our schedule and put on your walking shoes!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,000 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Speas Distillery building in 1979 (photo by Hal Skinner)

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• Going to the Movies (socolife.wordpress.com)

While some trees, most notably the small redwoods closest to the skate park, are being removed, the landmark monkey-puzzle tree at the corner of Morris Street and Sebastopol Avenue will remain. The plans call for many new trees to line the parking lots,  new courtyards, and the extension of McKinley Street to Morris Street.

Aldrich has been lining up tenants, including a winery and two breweries, all of which gained licenses this fall. Several existing tenants will continue to operate in the project, including Bronze Plus and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts. A number of public spaces will also be made available and the Sebastopol Farmers Market will also find a new year-round home at The Barlow. The Sebastopol City Council helped speed things along by agreeing to defer a number of developer fees until a later date.

I regret that I didn’t arrange a tour of the old buildings before they were demolished, but I did go throughout the site with a camera a day or two before the fence went up. These photos, which include a few interior shots (some taken by inserting the camera through holes in the wall or broken windows) capture the some sense of the site. I also obtained a donation of photos from Katherine Austin, architect for the project. Eventually these photos will become part of the Sonoma County Library’s photograph collection.

The Barlow

Hitchcock's "The Birds" opens at the Analy Theater, 1948 (courtesy of the Sonoma County Library)

I took my family to the movies this week — taking advantage of the Sebastopol Cinema’s Tuesday discount night to see the new Muppets movie. We all thoroughly enjoyed it and didn’t worry too much that it was a school night (though that fact likely contributed to the minuscule size of the audience). Our movie outing was my first time to see anything on the big screen in years. I think my previous one was a cycling documentary at the late, lamented Rialto Theatre in Santa Rosa and before that?  I’m not sure, but I’d guess it was at least six, maybe seven years ago. The previews were quieter and digital projectors weren’t required everywhere.

I was huge movie-goer as a teenager and 99% of my dates involved going to see some obscure art house film at one of the repertory theaters. I’m afraid I wasn’t very imaginative when it came to dating (and/or shy), so my dates endured a lot of bad movies.

The Analy Theater in 1951

Sebastopol still had a theater on the corner of North Main Street and  Healdburg Avenue when I was young. Once upon a time, the El Rey Theater, the first theater in town, operated by the Tocchini familyin what is now the Funk & Flash space.  The Analy Theater, Sebastopol’s second movie venue, opened in 1948 (also by the Tocchini family), but by the early 1970s, the Analy was threadbare and struggling. Redevelopment doomed the Analy in 1974 as the entire block was razed to make way for Safeway. It was a bad time for old movie theaters. The old Roxy Theater in Santa Rosa was damaged by the 1969 earthquake and was torn down in 1973. The grand old California Theater, also in Santa Rosa, survived the earthquake, but met its end when the Santa Rosa Plaza was built.

Remains of the Roxy Theater, 1973 (courtesy of the Sonoma County Library)

Despite various proposals for a new theater that were floated in the 1970s and early 1980s, including one that would be located at the corner of Pleasant Hill Road and Bodega Avenue (present site of Unico Duo and other businesses), we had to go elsewhere for to satisfy our movie appetites. Eventually, the bonded warehouse of the old Speas Distillary property was developed as the Sebastopol Cinemas, but by that time I had graduated from college and moved away from Sebastopol.

California Theater, Santa Rosa, 1948 (courtesy of the Sonoma County Library)

Even if the Sebastopol Cinema lacks some of the charm of the old, funky theaters, it was great to enjoy a fun movie in downtown Sebastopol, minutes from our house.

I’ll just close with this quote…

TV Executive: No.

TV Executive: No.
TV Executive: Lo siento, pero no.
Kermit the Frog: [excited] Oh, you hear that, guys?
[the Muppets cheer]
TV Executive: That means no.
Kermit the Frog: Oh.

(courtesy IMDB)