national register nomination for boulevard park historic

neighborhoods of historic interest without discouraging the return of the middle class to
central cities? Can these goals be achieved without requiring a social revolution or
dramatic changes in how we view private property? Professors Robin Datel and Dennis J.
Dingemans explored this topic in “Historic Preservation and Social Stability in
Sacramento’s Old City.” 47
The authors sought to explain why Sacramento’s old city did
not gentrify as rapidly or as completely as other cities’ historic cores. Utilizing a pair of
surveys, conducted in 1987 and 1992, they found that part of the answer was in the
structural composition of the city, and part was in the attitudes and interests of the
middle-class pioneers who might have gentrified the old city, but failed—and liked it that
way.
Sacramento’s central city functions as an expression of how neighborhoods
worked in the era prior to the era of zoning. Instead of large regions of solely residential
character and separate regions of commercial character, commercial uses are interspersed
with residential uses. There are definable retail corridors, mostly along former and
current public transit paths, but they exhibit a fine-grained mixture of residential and
commercial functions.
48
Sacramento’s repetitive grid pattern also lacked distinctive
identities for its individual residential sections, and many carried a high volume of traffic,
decreasing the appeal of the central city neighborhoods. The zone of the central city that
was most distinct is the central business district and government office area, a region
47
Datel, Robin and Dennis J. Dingemans, “Historic Preservation and Social Stability in Sacramento’s Old
City,” Urban Geography, 1994, Vol. 15 No. 6, p. 565-591
48
Datel and Dingemans, “Historic Preservation and Social Stability in Sacramento’s Old City,” p. 581
32