Let’s hope Ukiah is sufficiently heads-up to send out a few photographers to snap glamour shots before the trees on School Street get harvested.
When the call goes out to goose tourism numbers, the city will need pictures. Pictures will be the only bait in the Visit Ukiah! creel that could potentially persuade newcomers into thinking it’s a pretty little town in Northern California.
Just one tiny speck in the ever-sprawling beast we call Ukiah is pleasing to the eye: the 300 foot west side sliver of South School Street as yet unblighted by progress. But minus the glorious foliage of the doomed trees the pictures will suffer mightily, as will tourism for a decade.
Not that it’s ever robust.
But the bigger question is this: Aren’t the prettiest and most beloved parts of any town anywhere in America the old parts? Aren’t pictures of the grand old neighborhoods with the gaudy, solid homes built 100 or more years ago the ones that show up in magazine photo spreads and on real estate websites?
And in travel brochures? Travel any distance from home and you will wind up spending time in motel lobbies or highway rest stops.
These are among the locations where our friends in the tourist industry place racks holding scores of colorful folded pamphlets suggesting places and sights you ought to visit. The guides are intended to entice visitors to their little towns and cities, their festivals and shops. And what pictures appear in these miniature brochures?
Invariably they are the same:
1) The town square with a Civil War monument.
2) A church built in 1788 that continues to hold services and host weddings. Free tours Monday thru Friday.
3) Vintage shops along McFussel Street, including the original Henry Bros. Hardware store, a drinking fountain used by both President James Buchanan and singer Bob Dylan, and the oldest bakery in the state of Indiana.
4) Lovely old neighborhoods with three story Victorian houses, massive brick Colonial mansions, and six houses once part of the Underground Railroad.
These are the attractions tourists hope to see. They are the prettiest, most remarkable blocks and sights in any town. Yet in so many cities so much of the history and beauty that once graced downtown streets and gracious old boulevards has been destroyed.
Why are local leaders indifferent to the old churches and houses and classic post office buildings? Why are massive old big city landmarks and hotels left to wither and rot, then razed so a soulless shopping mall or office complex can take their place?
Detroit’s Grand Trunk Railway station, an astonishing and beautiful architectural marvel is now a brick and broken glass rubble. Cleveland’s Millionaires’ Row, a seemingly endless stretch of fabulous mansions (John D. Rockefeller’s home was among the more modest) is 100% gone.
In nearby Sonoma County the impressive Santa Rosa and Occidental Hotels were bulldozed off Fourth Street in the mid-1970s. Can you name what structures took their place?
Me neither. But I guarantee pictures of the (obviously anonymous and uninteresting) replacements will never appear in a Santa Rosa website or travel brochure.
Ukiah? We are busy erecting some of the least beautiful buildings I have ever seen. Artist renditions depict a new courthouse that would be ruinous on any cityscape and deadly on Ukiah’s. Our stately old Post Office was abandoned 15 years ago in favor of an appalling box on Orchard Street.
There is already talk of demolishing the (mostly old, mostly admirable) downtown courthouse in exchange for a patch of grass and some benches. Maybe a plaque.
So, again: We love old buildings, we value beautiful neighborhoods, we admire grand architecture, but we tear it all down in favor of Lego-like monstrosities.
Do you think our new courthouse will ever grace the pages of a “Visit Ukiah!” brochure? Or pictures of the “park” where the old courthouse once stood?
In the face of all this I am powerless to express the outrage mingled with disbelief that our society, in defiance of even its own limited comprehension, still barrels along on this path of ignorance and regret.
Instead we will wind up sending drones with cameras to take aerial photos of the Walmart parking lot, or a series of shots showcasing our beloved Redwood Rail Trail Homeless Hiking and Drug Encampment Excursion Tour Facilities.
Fun for the whole family. Reserve picnic spots now. Check our brochure.
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