Platform

Downtown Santa Rosa is a moving target...In Italy there is a special symbol for the 'Centro' with a black and white series of concentric circles with a bull's eye in the middle. This symbol appears on all the signs leading into town.

This picture is the train station which isn't really a station because the process is automated. Nor is it really downtown. The man with the bicycle is buying a ticket. He needs his bicycle because there is no place to park, and this isn't really a residential area. There is an impressive depot built in 1885 by Italian stonemasons of local dark grey basalt, but it is now a Tourist Information bureau. 

The train doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't cross the bay to San Francisco, or even stop at the large shopping center near San Rafael in Corte Madera. I'll bet the sign on the platform says Downtown San Rafael, but I wouldn't know if it is really downtown because I've never taken the train there. OilMan grew up in San Rafael and we used to go there quite often, but I never knew where the downtown there was either.

Many people would say the Santa Rosa city hall is downtown, but it is an unimpressive brick building. The original City Hall fell down in the 1906 earthquake. It was rebuilt, but when they put the freeway and a big shopping mall right through the center of town, the unimpressive red brick building was put up and it isn't really downtown. In fact it doesn't look very different than the shopping mall.

At some point there was a central plaza near the train platform, but it was moved to the the place which probably is downtown. Then they put a street through the middle of it so that it really wasn't a central plaza anymore. 

Last year, after years of discussion and public meetings, contests and reviews and a year of road closures and construction, they reunited the two sides of the central plaza, but it is so stunningly ugly and uninviting that the only time anybody goes to it is when they have special events there. It was race headquarters for a triathlon and they painted lines on the newly laid stones for erecting marquees. The problem is, that somebody used indelible paint so they had to replace all the newly laid stones with even newer ones.

I think downtown is probably where there are a couple of tall banks and a movie theatre. The banks look just like the movie theatre and the mall, city hall, and the main library. The main library isn't really downtown either....

There is a second dark grey basalt stone building near the depot which isn't a train station. It used to be a hotel, but now it houses Flying Goat coffee where I went this morning for an Aztek mocha (see extra). The mocha, as always, was delicious, but I'm glad I hadn't ridden my bicycle there because by the time I had to go all the way across town to go home, the skies had opened and were pouring with rain...