Leonard Building, 1894

The senior center walking group sponsored a downtown history stroll this morning. We covered only a couple blocks, but were treated to many decades of facts and entertaining stories. The Leonard Building, for instance, sports an embossed grapevine design because there was a bar at street level, a popular haunt for the lawyers who had their offices upstairs. There was even a tunnel that connected this building to the courthouse across the street, to make it easier for the judges to access the smoky backroom where deals were made. The running themes over the years were fire and earthquake. It seemed like every time someone built or rebuilt, another fire devastated the town, or an earthquake brought everything down. Wooden construction brought one problem, bricks posed another. And yet, here we are with a vibrant downtown.

The tour awakened many bittersweet memories of places that I knew years ago, mostly sites destroyed in the 1989 quake, but some things just lost to progress.  I forgot, for instance, where Woolworth's had been (present site of The Gap).  And we all mourn the Cooper House, a wonderful landmark that was thoughtlessly razed after the quake. I regret giving away the photos of downtown that I took at that time. My reason was that they were too heartbreaking to look at, but now I think I'd like to see them again, just to see where things were. You think you're going to remember forever, but you don't.