Uneasy Rhetoric

Wouldn’t that be a great name for a club? An article in today’s Bee suggests that the old PG&E generating plant, between Old Sacramento and the Jibboom Street area, might be turned into something more useful, like a museum or a nightclub.

A museum would make some sense and there would be precedent. The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, when it moved from Washington Park to its current location on the bank of the Willamette in a formerly rundown industrial area (hm, sounds familiar), took over an old Portland General Electric generation facility.

But I have to admit I’m intrigued by the idea of a nightclub or some other kind of mixed-use nightlife scene. In my bicycle utopia-addled vision, I see a club/restaurant complex with some car parking but that makes significant use of proximity to the bike trail and offers a place for cyclists, joggers, pedestrians, and others to stop for refreshments or good times.

Okay, that’s a little crazy, but I do think that any development here would help to expand the attractiveness of Old Sac as a destination and, ultimately perhaps, help to connect Discovery Park (and maybe Gold Rush Park?) to Old Sac via a pedestrian-friendly route. It wouldn’t be bad at all for Sacramento to have a long public space fronting the river.

This is one place where I think a high rise is a bad idea. Keep the buildings low to maintain the integrity of Old Sac and to maintain at least some semblance of river line. Build the high rises east of the freeway.

I’ve always loved that building. Growing up, we’d drive by it all the time coming back from destinations north. I was 16 or 17 - the age at which I started riding the bike trail - before I saw the river side of the building. I can’t wait to find out what development proposals the city will consider.