1932 Labor Day Snapshots by Arnold Rosenwald & El Rodeo (273)

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1932 El Rodeo, Labor Day Description

As reported in the previous DHT post -- number 272 -- Arnold Rosenwald made 12 photos of  Davis campus events in 1932, nine featuring Picnic Day and three of Labor Day. 

The meanings of the name, and observances of, “Labor Day” differ greatly between the U. S. and the UC campus at Davis. In the larger U.S., Labor Day is, quoting Wikipedia, “a public holiday [that] honors the American labor movement and the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, laws and well-being of the country.” Unions began to promote such a day in the late 19th century and, in 1887, Oregon was the first state to make it an official holiday. “By the time it became an official federal holiday in 1894, thirty U.S. states officially celebrated Labor Day.”

A curious and interesting aspect is that, starting in 1897, the same name was used at the University of California (then meaning Berkeley) to label a campus-wide day of voluntary labor devoted to campus improvement projects (Ann Scheuring, Abundant Harvest, p. 35).

Given what we know about the intensity of public sentiments for and against labor unions, it is not a stretch to guess that Berkeley’s Labor Day was a sideways negative comment on the larger and “real” Labor Day.

1932 Picnic Day Snapshots by Arnold Rosenwald (272)

Picnic Day page, 1932 El Rodeo

 

In post 266 on this blog, I reported on Dr. Arnold Rosenwald’s amazing home movies of ‘60s UCD Picnic Day parades and related public events. That report is at the URL immediately below and the movies themselves are at the URL below it.

http://www.davishistorytoday.org/2017/07/eleven-1950-60s-home-movies-of-davis.html#more

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAAm_bLB_TCrni8FTmeAMtg

Dr. Rosenwald was a poultry disease researcher and extension practitioner at UCD for some seven decades, dying at age 98 in 2008. He was also an undergraduate at the “Branch College,” graduating in 1930 (and subsequently earned a DVM degree, an MA in bacteriology, and a PhD in veterinary science).

Apparently also a “shutter bug,” the materials I acquired from his estate sale included not only the movies mentioned, but also an envelope containing 12 snapshots stamped on the back as developed in May of 1932. He had completed a BA at Davis in 1930, and was apparently visiting the campus and made nine photos of Picnic Day and three of Labor Day. (I report on them in the next DHT post, #273.)

The envelope also had negatives of 11 of the 12 snapshots and I have used them to make fresh images for this and the following post.

The First Core Area Plan’s Smooth Journey From Conception to Policy: Part II, July-December 1961 (271)

1. City Council Minutes, July 24

This post continues Post 270 on “the 1961 Core Area Plan’s smooth journey from conception to policy.” The previous post stops with the dramatic and mid-point moment of the formal presentation of the plan to Davis people. This post continues through City Council Adoption in December, 1961.

As with the first post, I try to let the story tell itself.

The First Core Area Plan’s Smooth Journey From Conception to Policy: Part I, January-June 1961 (270)

1. January 5

In reading the 1961 Davis Enterprise recently, I was struck by how matter-of-factly and amiably Davis civic leaders commissioned a planning firm to work up a radical scheme to redevelop a newly invented “core area,” walked that plan through a complex series of public hearings, and anticlimactically adopted it into the Master Plan of the City of Davis by a unanimous City Council vote. Not least of the amazing aspects, virtually all of this happened in the single calendar year of 1961.

The purpose of this two-part post is to depict the tenor or emotional tone of how this process worked, at least to the degree one can understand it from Davis Enterprise reports on it. Put differently, I try here to capture the attitudinal atmosphere of that year.

I am struck, for example, with such aspects as the degree to which civic leaders appear to have agreed on the need for rather radical ideas about a new “core area” and were willing to work together rather than endlessly to bicker.

The 1961 Enterprise coverage of the core area story is rich and exceeds the conventions of length for a single Google blog post. The material does, though, fit reasonably well into two posts. The first six months of 1961 are presented in this post and the second six months in the next post  (#271).

I believe the reports are pretty much self-explanatory and I provide little interpretive comment.

The Davis Core Area Plan of 1961: A Moment of Development Audacity in Davis History (269)

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 In May of 1961, urban planners Lawrence Livingston and John Blayney presented to Davis citizens a 44 ledger-size page document that: 1) argued the existing Davis downtown was obsolete and should be replaced by a larger "core area;" 2) provided a vision of what should replace it; and, 3) outlined a plan for getting from the first to the second. 

This was a plan for which City officials and a 60 member Davis Core Area Advisory Committee had contracted many months ago. They were receiving what they asked for.

Daunting in its scale and complexity, the plan was nonetheless widely and positively received with upbeat sentiments and the document itself exudes “can do” optimism.  

While it was never implemented wholesale, it did become official policy for a time and parts were implemented. Significantly, it enlarged and reframed the way Davis people thought about  the "downtown." Not least, these gentlemen introduced the term and concept “core area,” a shift in Davis’ cognitive map that endures.

Be the longer term reception aspects as they may, the features of this document that fascinate me include the very fact it was created and that it was embraced and thought, in its time, to be a wonderful thing. Its place in Davis life of that time exudes audacity.  It was a moment when people still believed that bold and positive development visions were worthwhile and could be carried out.

We do not see this kind of “go get ‘em, we can do it” attitude in city affairs much anymore and so I thought it might be at least a little refreshing to remind ourselves that such a mindset could at least exist. So reminded, perhaps people can be emboldened to think it could happen again.