On the 1913 route.
Right there in the SF Bay Area’s backyard is Stockton. This is not some place in the Rust Belt 2000 miles away in Indiana, Ohio or Pennsylvania – it is 84 miles (135 km) from downtown San Francisco. Just under two hours by car in good traffic.
The California heartland is hurting, too. One only needs to go to downtown Stockton to see it firsthand. Truthfully, I had not driven through there since a visit to Stockton to the former 49ers training facility for a pre-season open practice at some point in the late 90s; that’s 17 or 18 years ago as I write this. One does indeed see many prospering communities (particularly on the northern portion above Sacramento) on California’s State Route 99 (a/k/a “Highway 99” or “99”), but there are some sad stories too, especially on the stretch from Stockton to Bakersfield (which is a lot of distance). It is not one’s vision of the affluent Golden State.
On this quest to photograph (and see) what it’s like on the old Lincoln Highway in California in the 21st century, I ventured out to Stockton a few times over the last year or so. Historic Stockton – right on the Lincoln – is one of the most distressed cities along 99.
I spoke with some people working on a new restaurant – right by where the murals are (behind the old Kress store) and across from what was O’Ryleigh’s – they believe the downtown has bottomed. There are some new buildings (one across the street just over from O’Ryleigh’s is pictured) and small signs of progress on the more blighted streets, and they think it will come back. Read about what they are doing here. Right now it is pretty bleak in the central city and in places very, very dodgy. I did not linger in the central area. It was on “Black Friday” last month when I did the downtown shoot, and the streets were pretty much empty other than some people wandering the streets here and there (many with shopping carts or plastic bags holding what may be their worldly belongings). Very sad and eerie. Lots of buildings were boarded up. In several places one could see that there had been what was most likely arson (a plague in America’s semi-abandoned historic urban cores). Shocking, really. I had no idea how far the place had fallen.
Stockton is tremendously historic and its decline (both physical and financial) has been precipitous. It filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in 2012; at the time this was the largest US city to file (Detroit appropriated that booby prize a year later). It “emerged” (as we say in the law) from bankruptcy in 2015 but still faces ongoing financial and other challenges.
Some of the older neighborhoods did not look that inviting with boarded up houses and signs of arson. The sad looking Lido Hotel (1910) from the Lincoln Highway era on N. Wilson Way is in one of the photos in this set. The historic mission revival Western Pacific passenger depot (1910) at Main and Union streets was gutted by a fire in 2015. (See the next post for some pictures of the restored SP station nearby.)
Ending this post on a more positive note the old homes in the Magnolia district are special, and many seem to be in good shape and well-loved…
