Sacramento, California (Editorial) – I was walking down J Street the other day, just killing time before meeting an old friend, and I stopped in front of another empty storefront with that sad “For Lease” sign taped crooked in the window.
The place used to be a little market that sold the best damn chorizo breakfast burritos on a Saturday morning. You’d walk in, the bell would jingle, and the guy behind the counter, his name was Manny or maybe it was his brother, I forget now, would already be reaching for the foil like he knew why you were there. Now it’s just another blank space between a new apartment building and a vape shop that smells like artificial mango from the sidewalk.
That’s the part that gets me. It’s not one big thing. It’s death by a thousand little replacements.
Corner stores, the weird old bars with mismatched stools and a jukebox that still had actual CDs, the family-run spots where the menu never changed because it didn’t need to. They’re slipping away, and with them goes something that made Sacramento feel like Sacramento instead of just another city trying to look like Portland or Austin on a budget.
I’ve lived here my whole life. Fifty-something years of driving these same streets, drinking in the same neighborhoods, eating at places that knew my face before they knew my order. Back in the ’90s and early 2000s, Midtown still had some grit to it.
You could find a bar where the regulars actually talked to each other instead of staring at their phones. There was a little spot off 21st or 22nd, I won’t name it because somebody might still remember, where the bartender kept a bottle of the cheap stuff under the bar just for the old-timers who didn’t want the fancy new whiskey list. The carpet was stained, the lights were too dim, and it felt like a place that had earned its personality over decades instead of getting it from a design firm.
Now a lot of those blocks look polished. Exposed brick, Edison bulbs, menus that change with the season and the Instagram algorithm. Some of the new places are fine. A few are even good. But they could be anywhere. The old ones felt like they could only exist here, shaped by the people who lived and worked in them for years.
Same story with the corner stores.
When I was younger, every neighborhood had at least one. Not the big chain kind with the bulletproof glass and the lottery machine that eats your dollar. The real ones. The kind where the owner’s kid was stocking shelves after school and you could still pay with a check if you were short.
You went in for a six-pack and ended up hearing about whose kid just made the football team or how the guy down the block finally fixed his roof. They were the last little pieces of the village that used to be inside the city. Now half of them are gone, replaced by something that sells overpriced cold brew and fancy candles. The ones that survive are hanging on by their fingernails, fighting rising rents and the fact that everybody’s ordering delivery instead of walking two blocks.
I remember taking my dad to one of those old spots in Oak Park years ago. He grew up around there when it was a different world. We grabbed sandwiches and sat on the curb like it was still the old days. Even then you could feel the neighborhood starting to shift, newer faces, nicer cars, a Starbucks that felt like it had been dropped in from another planet.
Now the change is everywhere.
The places that used to serve the people who actually lived there are getting priced out by spots that serve the people who just moved in. I get the appeal of a clean, well-lit place with good coffee. I really do. But I also remember when the weird little eatery on the corner had soul because the cook had been making the same green chili for twenty years and didn’t care if it photographed well.
Old Sacramento still has a couple of survivors that give me hope. Fanny Ann’s Saloon is one. Walk in there and it still feels like it belongs to this city, antiques on the walls, narrow stairs, the kind of place that tells you stories whether you ask for them or not.
It’s been there since the ’70s and somehow hasn’t been sanitized into another generic gastropub. Places like that are getting rarer. Most of the new development wants everything shiny and predictable. The kind of bar where you could have an actual conversation without yelling over a DJ or paying $16 for a drink that comes with a sprig of something you can’t pronounce.
It’s not just nostalgia talking, though I’ll admit there’s plenty of that.
These little spots did more than sell food and drinks. They held neighborhoods together. They gave people a reason to leave their house and see the same faces. When the corner store closes and the weird bar gets turned into luxury apartments with a ground-floor chain that looks exactly like the one two cities over, you lose more than square footage.
You lose the texture. Sacramento’s always been a working-class, government, river-town kind of place with its own quiet personality. We didn’t need to copy anybody. Now it sometimes feels like we’re sanding off the edges so we can fit into some national idea of what a “revitalized” downtown should look like.
I still love walking around this city. I still find pockets that feel like home, the river at dusk, the old neighborhoods where the trees make their own shade, the handful of places that have refused to change just because the rent went up.
But every time I see another “Coming Soon” sign for something that could exist in any mid-sized city in America, I feel a little piece of the old Sacramento slip further away. The magic wasn’t in the big buildings or the new arena or the farm-to-fork signs everywhere. It was in the small, imperfect, one-of-a-kind spots that made you feel like you were somewhere specific. Somewhere that knew your name, or at least remembered your usual.
Those places are getting harder to find. And when they’re gone, I worry we won’t just have lost a few businesses.
We’ll have lost part of what made this city ours.
By Bob Siemens,
Sacramento