Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind …

Signs bloom like wildflowers in Old Sacramento and, in the absence of protests to the contrary, I'm going to show you more of 'em. These pix come courtesy of Heather Lavezzo Downey, the city's interpretive specialist. The signs are part of a broader project by the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation and the Center for Sacramento History to inform visitors about the origins of Sacramento.

Somewhere in back of this Waterfront Park sign (left; click to get a close-up) is a real steamboat, the Delta King, which did its work (including as a troop transport during World War II, painted Navy gray!) in the 20th Century, and now is a hotel and theater. Though part of Waterfront Park, the restrooms are not the focus of the sign. You can find smaller interpretive signs along Waterfront Park now, too.

Heather got much better pix than I did of the Lauriet Assay site, where signs have blossomed as well (left and below). It's a quirky site: You can see below the sign the foundation of the buildings and the hollow spaces beyond. Someone has put doors where the brick-barrel vaults were, and created small narrow shop spaces (unused at the moment). Right behind the sign would have been the Assay office, where Prof. Lauriet weighed miners' gold and assigned value to it.

Heather wrote the text for the signs, and has a great way of engaging visitors to think about how they would have lived in Sacramento during the gold rush, and the decisions they would have made.

I'm sure I mentioned it before, but "gold rush" wasn't in use until 1860, more than a decade after the gold rush began. California-bound gold seekers were more likely to call their venture "going to see the elephant." Since a circus elephant was sure to be the most exotic thing Americans had seen up to that point, adventurers equated their Westward journey with it. Whether they struck gold or not (and it was usually the latter), they would say they had seen the elephant.





























Also, they often called themselves Argonauts, after the Greek myth of Jason, assigned the task of finding the golden fleece. Jason and his sailor searched aboard the Argo; thus, Argonauts, sailors of the Argo, because whether traveling by actual ship or covered wagon across the plains (which is hard to do in a ship), they looked like windborne sailors on a mission. Now you have 1/47 of my Underground Sacramento tour for free. You're welcome.

Signs have gone up around the base of Pioneer Park, so that while visitors approach the strange sight of cast-iron pillars holding up nothing but the shade, they can find out why these ancient ruins are there. While one person reads and learns, another, having read and learned, refreshes himself with drink; a little girl uses her sign to hide; the traffic cone seems transfixed by the new information.

Encouraging signs

A sign, serving its humble purpose! Success!

Two-thirds of the signs I illustrated for Old Sacramento have been installed. Hoo! Ray!

The signs went up at Pioneer Park (right) and at the Lauriet Assay Office. I know you join me in anxious vigil for the Waterfront Park signs to appear. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Seeing the signs for the first time last week, I did three things:

1. Wiped off pollen and smudges with my shirttail,
2. Wondered morbidly when someone would deface them, and
3. Realized they are awash in a great ocean of signs in Old Sacramento; so many signs, each so different from the next, you'd think they're what holds up the buildings.

Named for a bakery … that occupied
the site next door.

These new signs are necessarily understated, a dark chocolate on a cream background, designed by Lisa Park to blend in to the 19th Century surroundings, and then become visible to provide handy information the moment visitors wonder what the heck they're looking at.

Though I understand that, I wouldn't mind a little neon, or maybe another sign telling visitors, "Hey! Look at this cool sign!"

As I guide visitors through Underground Sacramento (in the character of an Irish lout-turned-clerk) I tell them with a wink the signs are new and that I'm familiar with the artist's work.

Though the signs are pebbles in a pond, I'm happy knowing they're part of a much larger long-term plan to reveal more of the lunatic history of Sacramento, in which founders built too close to the Sacramento and American rivers, and solved the problem of their own making by lifting the city out of the floodwaters.

A good place for a sign answering,
"What the heck is this?"

Eventually, as The Sacramento Bee reports, the state would like to re-establish two levels of the city in what seems like an empty lawn at Front and I streets in the heart of the old city — the 1849 level of the city, where foundations are still intact, and the post-1864 city level, some 20 feet above.

I'm hoping sooner than later, and that the economy turns around to make it so.