Sacramento: P corner 10th

Would I be able to loose my way in a city designed as a perfect grid? With streets named with the alphabet letters in perfect order and crisscrossed by numbered streets strictly following the natural numbers order, my goal seemed to be a difficult – if not impossible task. At the moment I realized that, the city lost its magic. The eternal appeal of new places was not functioning here; serendipity seemed to be a foreign concept in Sacramento. There was no chance to enjoy this short visit to a still unknown city.

After a few minutes of such useless thoughts, I found myself still staring at the dull P and 10 junction signs. Back into reality, I began searching for adventures in a perfect grid. Maybe it would produce perfectly Cartesian adventures; I only knew for sure that radial adventures where not an option here. It was a Pythagorean kind of town.

Shocked by all the perfect squares and right angles surrounding me, it took me a few minutes to notice another striking feature. It was the early afternoon of a perfectly cloudless, pleasantly warm day, but I was walking alone. Had the imperfectly straight line drawn by my path scared away the inhabitants of the perfect grid? I never found out the answer to that, but the non-event helped me to explore the town under perfect conditions.

Wide, spotless sidewalks delimited perfectly asphalted roads. Perfectly trimmed trees showed the exact hue of green needed to create a pleasant contrast with the surrounding buildings. Soon, the spell was broken. I had stumbled upon a bookstore and came out of it with a new and shiny guide of Sacramento. I studied it at the nearest Starbucks and prepared a quick plan for the next hours. After all, my unplanned stop was turning out to be a meaningful one. Old Sacramento was the first logical stop and I began walking the few blocks separating us, lamenting only not to have emptied my camera’s memory cards before this trip. Serendipity and the weather were on my side.

After a short walk toward Old Sacramento, the initial Pythagorean shock began to evaporate; Sacramento was obviously nice, neat, and well organized. However, a few more trees providing organic shade would have improved the walking conditions. Old Sacramento can be entered at I and 3rd Streets or at Capitol Mall and Front Streets.

The historic district keeps alive the California’s Gold Rush era and had been designated thus as a State Historic Park. The settlement was founded by John Sutter in 1839; nine years later, gold was found nearby in Coloma and Sacramento began a fast period of growth. Saloons, hotels, a firehouse, a theater, a schoolhouse, bathhouses and many shops were built during its period as a gold trade center in the 1860s, and those had been reconstructed or restored for the joy of modern visitors. An unimaginable spot is the Pony Express Terminus (!) at the B.F. Hastings Building, built in 1853. If that wasn’t strange enough, the building housed for a while the California Supreme Court. Old Sacramento houses also the California State Railroad Museum, displaying original locomotives and cars from the 19th century; nearby are the Military Museum, the Schoolhouse Museum, the Wells Fargo History Museum and the Discovery Museum History Center.

However, I do prefer my first impression of a place being a result of seeing its surroundings, the place where people live and walk. The Sacramento River is the most clear and attractive feature delimiting Old Sacramento; the Tower Bridge at the end of the Capitol Mall marks another edge. Front Street is the first street next to the river and it offers several attractions. The Waterfront Park separates between Front Street and the railways and next to it is the Old Sacramento Schoolhouse, thus several attractions can be covered at once. Beyond the railways is the pier which hosts the much recommended Rio City Café. Nearby is the booth selling tickets to the Tour Boat. The Discovery Museum, the Eagle Theatre, and the Railroad Museum can be reached by walking along the piers until J Street, an easy stroll along the nineteenth century. A point of special interest is at the corner of I and 2nd Streets, where the raising of the streets can be observed. Early Sacramento was usually flooded and in 1862 the streets were raised with dirt dredged elsewhere.

Needless to add, such a place attracts myriads of merchants and businesses, which can be visited with the help of Horse Drawn Carriages. Other mobile attractions are the Weekend Excursion Steam Train and the River Otter Water Taxi. The names alone justify a visit.

Interesting comparisons can be made between similar establishments located in different cities or countries. Starbucks Bangkok – for example – offers pumpkin flavored coffee in beautiful china cups and comfortable coaches places in well decorated spaces. After visiting several Starbucks branches in the USA, I did not expect anything but paper cups and a long line of customers. Yet, in Sacramento, even that seemed to be too much.

The coffee served was as good as in any other Starbucks’ branch. The cakes, cookies, and other snacks were obviously fresh and of high quality. However, the place was oppressingly narrow; it didn’t offer the necessary space to relax and enjoy the steaming, aromatic cup of coffee offered by the shop. A few harsh-looking tables with two simple, uncomfortable chairs each were encaged between a glass wall and the long bar where the orders were placed. The customers line run between the tables and the bar; wide shouldered customers invaded the personal space of the sitting customers. At the end of the bar people tried to reach out for the cream and the sugar without bothering the customers sitting just next to them. Sitting customers burned their tongues in the attempt to quickly free space for the customers waiting to sit down with steaming cups of coffee held by their impatient hands. The setup created an ambience of pressure amidst a sleepy town and missed the whole concept of a coffee break.

The spacious mall in which this branch was located did not offer a suitable amount of benches to solve the problem and thus there was no real alternative to waiting within the shop for a free space; the scorching July’s sun wasn’t an attractive solution to the problem. Is Sacramento so void of excitement and pressures that its residents purposely created an artificial pressure inducing environment for their breaks?

I am not usually attracted to caged animals, however my visit to Sacramento was short and I couldn’t be too picky. The zoo offers plenty of educational activities for children, and I have little doubt the place has been designed and rightly so – mainly for them. Placed at a central location within the city, the zoo offered a perfect solution for my sightseeing plans. In the hour I dedicated to the place, it was impossible to study the many animals there, but the visit was a welcomed and pleasant green break within an urban experience. Its superb location near the State Capitol made reaching the zoo a breeze. An oddity telling sign of our times was the Cell-Phone Safari Tour; unluckily, lacking such a gadget I was unable to enjoy it.

The collection is divided into several categories. The cats section includes the Geoffroy’s cat, the jaguar, African lion, the margay, the snow leopard and the Sumatran tiger, which appears to be the favorite among the visitors. The primates are another big attraction of the park and include here lemurs, chimpanzees, orangutans, gibbons, and three less usual monkeys called mangabey, saki and guenon. A few giraffes, zebras, and bongos contribute to the savannah’s feeling of the place. Other mammals were in display, among them pandas, kangaroos, sloths, and hyenas.

Many colorful birds helped to diversify the visit: eagles and swans, parrots, and hornbills. The zoo appeared to give a special emphasis to frogs and toads, many of those were in display and kids seemed to be fascinated by them; lizards, snakes, and turtles made company to them. A small collection of fish was also in display.

The zoo is ordered in a friendly fashion. Cats, lemurs, and chimpanzees enjoy separated but nearby areas; birds and reptiles are placed around the mammals and the savannah animals surrounded the park. However, the main feature of the zoo is its extensive organization of activities for all ages. They include evening concerts, the Swingin’ Safari Golf Tournment, Zoovies (animal movies), reading meetings (!), and a special Ice Cream Safari. Unluckily, only those staying at town for most of the year can enjoy most of those!

Open daily - 9am to 4pm; except for special dates.
Guests may stay on Zoo grounds for 1 hour after closing time.
General Admission Weekdays: Weekdays $8.50, Weekends and Holidays: $12.

One of the most thrilling aspects of my visit to California was the obvious Asian influence on the local culture. In San Francisco I saw a Japantown for the first time. In Berkeley most restaurants were an eclectic mix of Asian cuisines. In Oakland I tasted the best Vietnamese sandwich ever. Even Sacramento enriched that angle of my Californian experiences, as happened in my short stop at the Crocker Art Museum.

I measure up a museum’s exhibition success by its ability to surprise me and transform the visit into an exciting adventure. A surprise in an art museum would mean an unexpected connection between two cultures or an unknown angle of a given artist. Crocker did it; after seeing its Asian collection I almost cancelled my scheduled trip to Thailand for the following month.

Crocker’s permanent collection is too big for being in display, only about 4 percent of its 14,000 works of art are in display at a given moment; however, Digital Crocker allows seeing works not in display during a visit. The collection is divided into eight categories, namely California Art, Drawings & Prints, Asian Art, International Ceramics, American Art, European Art, Photography and Recent Acquisitions.

The Early California Art collection includes outstanding examples dating from the Gold Rush through 1945, and was thus complementary to the visit to Sutter’s Fort. Judge E. B. Crocker assembled the core collection in the early 1870s; the collection was afterwards enriched by other contributors. It includes scenes from the mines, the Grand Canyon and the life in the nineteenth century settlements.

The main points of interest for me were the various Asian artifacts displayed in the museum. Korean ceramics, Chinese textiles, Japanese arms and armor, and tea ware by 20th-century masters as Shoji Hamada and Tatsuko Shimaoka were there to be seen. Thai and Burmese sculpture and decorative arts offer a foretaste of the rich religious tradition and the role of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. Overall, the collection shows the diversity of Buddhism in Asia, and makes a good prelude to a trip there.

Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am – 5pm; Thursday, 10am – 9pm
Adults: $6
Free admission on Sundays from 10am to 1pm

One of the benefits – at least for impatient travelers – of the spectacular growth of many cities in the last century is that attractions that were once outside their limits had been swallowed and are nowadays easily reached with the metropolitan mass transport system or even by foot. The results of the swallowing are always unpredictable and can limit on the ridiculous. In Sacramento it resulted in placing a fort aimed to defend the town from external attacks very close to downtown and in its being surrounded by commercial and residential areas. Actual attackers and defenders would have an excruciatingly hard time finding each other; unless they would agree to meet at Westfields’ Starbucks for a round of negotiations over a cappuccino.

However, my rush stopover in Sacramento wouldn’t have been complete without a visit there. John Sutter - a Swiss immigrant – received in 1839 a land grant in the Sacramento Valley from the Mexican government. He created an agricultural settlement called New Helvetia (New Switzerland). The central building – The Fort –walls were 2.5 feet thick and 15 to 18 feet high and from there Sutter controlled more than 150,000 acres of the Central Valley, where he developed what he considered to be the real wealth of California: grapes, wheat, and cattle. A carpenter working for Sutter, James Marshall, discovered gold at the sawmill Sutter was having built in Coloma, on the American River, in 1848. Before the mill could be finished, Sutter's workers deserted the Fort for the goldfields seeking their fortunes. Soon, all that was left of Sutter's Fort was the central building.

The fort has been restored to its former state based on an 1847 map and is open daily for tours. The only modern additions to the original fort are a Trade Store – where gifts and publications related to the Gold Rush and the Overland Trail are sold – and the Wi-Fi Service – for those unable to disconnect.

The Fort restoration was began in 1891 and was completed in 1893, by the Native Sons of the Golden West. It was donated to the State of California, and became a part of the California State Park System in 1947. It is the oldest restored Fort in the United States.

Daily from 10am to 5pm.