Assignment: Ukiah – Local Bosses 17, Historic Buildings 0

For many years city administrators have worked, if only by doing nothing, to destroy Ukiah’s history and its most treasured buildings.

There may be other, more sanitary explanations for how it has come to be that one landmark building after another is doomed to abandonment, then on to neglect and deterioration before succumbing to the twin pressures of rot and indifference. I’d like to hear those explanations.

For now, it is enough to know they’ve succeeded again, working silently and with apparent indifference to the demise of the Palace Hotel. At many instances along the 40-plus year journey to demolition the city of Ukiah could have intervened and made a positive difference.

Now the hotel gets added to Ukiah’s sorry Hall of Shame list of architecturally significant castaways.

1) Our beautiful Carnegie Library was donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie along with hundreds more libraries (and church organs) built across the nation. They brought beauty and civic improvement. Ukiah’s stately library building, now a real estate office at South State and Clay Streets, was abandoned in the 1960s in favor of a cheap, schlocky pile at Main and East Perkins. Ever since, Ukiah’s library looks like Rite-Aid Jr.

2) The U.S. Post Office has sat empty while surrounded by chainlink fence 10 or more years. If we wait long enough it will crumble. Ukiah’s new post office out near Highway 101 would embarrass a Motel 6.

3) All Ukiah’s old school buildings were prettier and the source of more pride than any of the pre-fab replacements. Many classrooms are trailers, originally promised as temporary, but 30 years later those promises are revealed as just more lies.

4) Though a minor piece of civic and historic significance, a tiny tin shed at Perkins and Main Streets illustrates city administrators exercising a brutal display of power. If doubt remains that Ukiah leaders are hostile to the old in favor of the shiny and new, consider this: In order to demolish a significant piece of local architectural history, officials were willing to violate their own published guidelines about what qualifies as “historical significant,” then suggested those destroying the town’s last tin building were delusional.

That’s hardball.

5) In 1980 the magnificent grounds ..and structures known as Mendocino State Hospital were offered to county officials at a price of $1. The new / old campus would have immediately been recognized as one of the most beautiful in all of California. But county administrators decided to keep that dollar, in the event an even better real estate offer came along.

Many many millions of (taxpayer) dollars later, Mendocino College was thrown together out north of town. It’s an anonymous collection of chintzy buildings that looks like a State Farm Insurance complex from San Jose.

6) Our downtown courthouse is a patched-together mismatch of incongruent styles and eras; it could reasonably be described as a mess, especially when compared to its predecessors.

But wait til we see the replacement courthouse Ukiah’s administrators are eager to welcome. It will look like a State Farm Insurance complex in San Jose.

The future of the present courthouse? Cue dark and foreboding music; the rugged old pile will no doubt meet the same fate as every other piece of worthy architecture in Ukiah.

What will happen to downtown Ukiah? Fret not.

Our streets will thrive with numberless vape shops, smoke shops, CBD shops, pot dispensaries, rehab clinics, tattoo joints and six or eight Asian Massage Parlors. And our beloved Redwood Rail Trail will draw dozens of visitor per year when completed circa 2050.

Yes, Ukiah will be even uglier in another decade, but will have plenty of community-based resources to help foster community within our community.

Be there.

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Stop Making Sense

Official gobbledygook has been with us too many years to think it will ever fix itself and return to a time when businesses or government issue statements that make sense.

Add nonprofits to the list of relentless, meaningless non-communications; in fact, put nonprofits at the top of that list.

A Ukiah Daily Journal front pager last week about a grant for the rehab-type enterprise over on Clara Street was a prizewinner. I didn’t read it, but this is what it said:

“Through the use of communication strategies and by working together to form grassroots input to affect marginalized groups while focusing on proven goals strengthening potential factors in realizing a shared vision of interpersonal development and recognizing growth as a nurturing experience and a lifelong journey, we hope to attract more money from more agencies that already have more money than they need so they’ll even give us even more, within the program’s sustainable framework of inclusiveness and self-awareness evolving in a community of progressive progress.”

(Tom Hine, who writes this column, has never typed a more ugly, less meaningful paragraph in more than 50 years of random keystrokes. TWK says, “The drinking will continue until the economy improves.”)