(The Modesto Bee carried the following Associated Press article by Jim Wasserman on its website on April 13.)
SACRAMENTO — One hundred and forty years after businessmen drove the first spike of the Transcontinental Railroad here, California developers plan one of the nation’s biggest, most innovative downtown expansions on the 240-acre cradle of American railroading’s most storied accomplishment.
On a littered, rusty landscape where laborers built trains for a railroad that opened the nation, designers of Minnesota’s Mall of America and the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas plan a flashy new swath of housing, shopping and entertainment to pump fresh urban pizazz into a stately, quiet capital city of 418,000 people.
“What we will be building doesn’t exist today in Sacramento,” said Jon Jerde, owner of the Jerde Partnership and Millennia Associates, of Venice. “We’re introducing a very vibrant real-life urban core for the capital.”
Real estate brokers and Sacramento city officials call the development one of the largest infill projects in the United States.
A new wave of development
National analysts call it a new wave of American city building that mixes entertainment, housing, transit and shopping for an intense urban sensation. As urban crime declines and suburban commutes grow more painful, they say people under 30 and baby boomers over 50 increasingly crave such environments.
“It’s the beginning of a whole new trend to create whole new integrated communities instead of office buildings and retail,” said Michael Beyard, a retail and urban entertainment specialist with the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C.
Jerde’s specialty of reinventing down-and-out places with “entertainment retail” that attracts crowds and new housing includes Universal CityWalk in Universal City, Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego and Canal City Hakata in Fukuoka, Japan. Most recently, the firm opened a similar, but smaller, railyard project called the Gateway in Salt Lake City.
Plans for the Sacramento railyard include 3,000 multistory residences, acres of new shopping, a large transit station, the continent’s most significant railroad museum and possibly a new basketball arena for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings.
Jerde’s firm is also designing a gradually sloping shopping avenue that carries walkers above working Union Pacific and Amtrak railroad tracks.
The Jerde Partnership is in the final weeks of negotiations to buy the site.
“It seems like the stars are all starting to line up with this thing,” said Sacramento Deputy City Manager Thomas Lee. “It’s not a pie-in-the-sky story. They’ve done it in other cities.”
The project next to downtown Sacramento and its Gold Rush-era old town is symbolic of a
decade-long renaissance among the nation’s downtowns, which have seen billions of dollars in new investment after decades of abandonment. In the West, old railyards from San Francisco to Denver to Salt Lake City are playing a major role in the trend.
The Sacramento development would occupy a site opened in 1867 by the Central Pacific Railroad, two years before the Transcontinental Railroad linked the nation by connecting Sacramento with Omaha.
Across 132 years before closing in 1999, what was once the West’s biggest industrial center turned out thousands of cars and locomotives for the cross-country railroad.
“This is a complex of incredible rarity in the United States,” National Park Service historian Richard O’Connor recently told the Sacramento City Council.
Noting the buildings’ survival and the historic role of the Transcontinental Railroad, O’Connor compared their 19th century significance to the Civil War battlefields in Gettysburg, Pa.
Still standing, industrial brick buildings almost as long as two football fields appear cathedral-like with their abundant windows and giant interior spaces. Old pictures of locomotives built and rebuilt in long rows resemble giant aircraft factories in Washington’s Puget Sound.
But across decades of hard, dirty and greasy work, the complex also built a toxic legacy.
The site’s current owner, Omaha, Neb.-based Union Pacific Railroad, has undertaken a multimillion-dollar cleanup before development begins, digging up tons of polluted dirt and shipping it to Utah.
Company officials did not return telephone calls from The Associated Press regarding cleanup costs.
The Jerde Partnership, buoyed by its successful 30-acre Gateway development in Salt Lake City — near the 1869 site where business barons drove the Transcontinental Railroad’s last spike — aims to break ground in 2006 and finish by 2016.
Gateway, opened in 2001 on a blighted railyards section of downtown, is a popular Utah gathering place of shops, restaurants and homes. Despite a ban on large department stores at Gateway, Nordstrom has begun pressing city officials to allow it to move there.
The Sacramento railyard’s leading anchor will be the California State Railroad Museum, which attracts 500,000 visitors yearly and aims to double that with a $25 million expansion. The museum, already highlighting western 1860s-era Transcontinental Railroad history, has greater ambitions.
“In terms of facilities and exhibits we would be unrivaled anywhere in North America,” said museum director Catherine Taylor.
In one restored shop where laborers once rebuilt engines in 22 days, tourists will watch state museum workers rebuild old locomotives, freight and passenger cars.
“It’s a world that the public never would get involved in,” Jerde said. “Hot metal and sparks, and this would now be opened to the public to watch it happen. This will be a really big show.”