WIDE-OPEN TOWN: PART I
"Nostalgia ain't what it used to be," Stan Kenton famously said, and anyone tempted to wax sentimental about old-time Santa Rosa needs to take a closer look, starting with a peek at the maps.
I've been spending much of my research time recently with the 1904 Santa Rosa Sanborn maps (project TBA). These maps can be found for many communities in the U.S. and were made for fire insurance assessment. They show the precise outline and some basic details for every building (even outhouses, sheds, and chicken coops), the type of roof and chimney, where the fire hydrants are, diameter of the water pipes, and all those other details an insurance company might think important before insuring the property owner. The maps were updated every few years, so through them you can often watch a town grow. But that's only the tip of the proverbial iceberg; ethnic neighborhoods are sometimes indicated (hello, redlining) as well as redlight districts and other details that would be otherwise lost.
Before diving into the maps, first an update to an earlier post, "When we all met Downtown Saturday Night:" The first item below shows that the free Saturday night entertainment in downtown Santa Rosa not only included band concerts from the courthouse balcony, but also moving pictures and slides of illustrated songs. One of the dials on my time machine is now set for a Saturday midsummer night in 1905 when the whole town's in the square singing "Wait 'Till the Sun Shines, Nellie." The sweet little Iowa town in "The Music Man" was never half as charming.
But come the start of horse racing season, we got trouble right here in River City.
As will be shown in a following post, the saloons and hotels along Fourth Street and Main Street were openly running illegal games, including roulette, craps, faro, and klondike, which apparently was similar to six-card stud. The Santa Rosa Republican, which exposed the gambling that local police apparently...