ASHES TO ASHES: By the time you read this, it will already be obsolete, superseded by more timely information. But in many ways, the basic information — or lack thereof — remains timeless. Every 50 years or so, Santa Barbara’s downtown business core is forced by external pressures to metamorphose into something different. The old model — a downtown anchored by Fortress Paseo Nuevo surrounded by a string of multistory parking lots that cost City Hall hundreds of millions — is functionally defunct. Even before COVID, the old regime was DOA, done in by cell phones and personal computers that allowed us all to shop and watch movies without leaving the comfort of home. Then COVID came along and hammered six stakes into downtown’s palpitating heart.
To its great and everlasting credit, City Hall responded by trying something genuinely innovative, new, and previously heretical to even contemplate. Like Moses banging his staff upon the rock, they declared a state of economic emergency and banned cars from a nine-block stretch of State Street. State Street was to become a “pedestrian promenade,” and City Hall decreed unto the multitudes, “Let there be parklets.”
Santa Barbarans being Santa Barbarans, we’ve been bickering about it ever since.