For years, whereas driving up or down the California coast, we might cease for an evening or two in Santa Barbara.
Often we might keep on the venerable Resort Santa Barbara and stroll throughout the road for dinner at Joe’s Café, with its red-checkered tablecloths, picket cubicles, and no-nonsense servers who’d been there for many years and knew their manner round a menu stuffed with sincere old style food and drinks.
State Road aesthetically was a delight, with its Spanish-style structure, brick sidewalks, flags flying within the golden daylight, lush plantings, and mature bushes swaying within the cool and delicate breeze.
Just one factor was lacking: The place had been the folks?
Because the years handed and storefronts emptied, the road appeared ever quieter on each go to. However no much less beautiful.
Then got here the pandemic.
My spouse, Barbara Kate Repa, and I seized the chance to go away San Francisco and the authorized world and pursue our dream of dwelling right here. We arrived on Memorial Day weekend in 2020 — the very weekend the State Road Promenade was born.
These first few weeks had been wonderful. All of a sudden, regardless of the lockdown all over the place else, State Road got here alive. Eating places and retailers spilled out onto the sidewalks and into the road, which was blessedly freed from automobiles. It was a walker’s paradise.
We managed to discover a townhouse close by to hire — no simple feat then or now. Almost day-after-day we ate outdoors, both in our again yard or at one of many eating places providing outside eating. We shopped on the farmers market on Saturday mornings and Tuesday afternoons. We knew only a few folks, but we weren’t alone.
For 3 years now, we’ve been on State Road practically day-after-day, taking a stroll, wandering into the paseos, amassing our mail at one of many world’s most stunning put up workplaces, each of us working at companies on the road. I’ve develop into a docent on the magnificent Santa Barbara County Courthouse and are available to know extra concerning the historical past and cautious planning that formed Santa Barbara into the jewel it’s as we speak.
State Road is a livelier and extra nice place now than at any level within the three many years we’ve been coming right here.
That has continued to be true even because the transfer onto the road has been hacked away by tighter restrictions on sidewalk eating, within the identify of accessibility; and cutbacks in on-the-street commerce, within the identify of fireplace security.
Inventive issues are occurring. The newest instance is the attractive inexperienced house the Neighborhood Environmental Council opened final week throughout from the Granada Theater, vowing to assist make State Road “a vibrant middle for retail, arts, and leisure, but in addition only for the neighborhood to come back and be with out having to spend cash.”
That’s higher — significantly better — than extra automobiles and extra procuring.
Sure, typically bicycles could be a difficulty. I used to be practically run over within the car parking zone at House Depot final week by a child popping a wheelie. However most cyclists downtown are extra like retired Santa Barbara Excessive College historical past trainer Rodger Hembree, who rides his bicycle on State Road thrice a day.
A lot stays to be executed to make the promenade work for the long term and align it with Santa Barbara’s signature model. That planning is underway, and it’s being executed within the deliberate and considerate method that made this particular place what former mayor Sheila Lodge known as, within the title of her wonderful pandemic treatise, “An Uncommonplace American City.”
That is no time for weak-kneed nostalgists {and professional} cynics. The great outdated days by no means had been, and so they’re not coming again. Neither is Macy’s, nor Nordstrom, nor Saks, nor Montgomery Ward, nor even Woolworth’s.
First, do no hurt, because the Hippocratic Oath cautions physicians.
Wiping out the vitality that has spontaneously erupted on State Road throughout the previous three years — an actual silver lining of the pandemic — could be silly. Three-quarters of the locals say they prefer it. To suppose that we might squash out the life that has come to the road organically and restart it in a prettier bundle, with a brand new set of extra elaborate guidelines, is nonsense — contradictory and never potential.
As lifelong newspaper and journal editors, we have now been informally chronicling life on the promenade throughout the previous three years. Now we’ve created a brand new voice for vitality we’re calling The State Streeter. It’s largely photographs and quick movies, with as few phrases as potential, plus hyperlinks to articles we discover insightful and to teams imagining the long run.
You’ll be able to subscribe at statestreeter.com. It’s free, and we’re not asking for donations.
The long run is already right here in Santa Barbara. Be a part of us in recognizing and celebrating the progress that has come our manner, nearly unintentionally, and in serving to to make this an much more excellent place to stay.
