“ This meant a lot to the community to ( be able ) to see opera , theater and musical performances that only went to larger cities with larger stage potential . It was another effort to keep up with San Francisco .”
MARCIA EYMANN City historian , City of Sacramento
lighting systems and its acoustics to allow traveling Broadway shows to be performed there while the SAFE Credit Union Performing Arts Center was undergoing its rebirth .
One of the more interesting aspects about the Memorial ’ s history is that while its ostensible purpose was to build a functioning monument to those Americans who had lost their lives fighting in wars past ( and wars to come ), it was primarily built as a major sortie in Sacramento ’ s seemingly eternal battle to emerge from the shadow of the Bay Area .
“ The general secretary of the Chamber of Commerce in 1916 , Henry S . Maddox , wanted to make Sacramento a convention city and needed an auditorium to make that happen ,” says Marcia Eymann , the City of Sacramento ’ s historian . In addition to being built to promote conferences and trade shows , Eymann says , the facility would provide a venue for cultural and sports events . “ This meant a lot to the community to ( be able ) to see opera , theater and musical performances that only went to larger cities with larger stage potential . It was another effort to keep up with San Francisco .”
There were other elements of progressive thinking that went into building the Memorial — among them the issuing of municipal bonds . These tax-free funding devices are still employed ubiquitously ( and certainly here in Sacramento ) but had actually been around for a century before the Memorial was financed . ( If your inner fiscal nerd demands to know , New York City issued the first recorded municipal general-obligation bond to build a canal in 1812 .)
Carson Anderson , Sacramento ’ s director of preservation since 2016 and a senior planner for the city , says the design of the building ’ s exterior was not quite as all-American as the facility ’ s expressed patriotic purpose would suggest .
“ The Memorial is a prime example of Northern Italian architecture of the late 1920s ,” he says , a hybrid of “ Lombardic- Romanesque design with Byzantine elements .” Architect Arthur Brown Jr ., best known for his designs of city halls for San Francisco and Pasadena , worked on the Memorial , Anderson says . ( If your inner history nerd would enjoy learning more , Brown ’ s dad , Arthur Brown Sr ., had been an engineer for Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s when the transcontinental railroad was finalized .)
If you note a seeming discrepancy between the initial 1916 spark of building Memorial Auditorium and the fact that it took 11 more years for its final I beams to be dotted and T-nuts to be crossed , historian Eymann offers some surprisingly contemporary perspective on that .
“ Though the public liked the idea , city government was slow to act ,” she
In its 93 years , Sacramento Memorial Auditorium has held many events , including this banquet in 1961 . PHOTO COURTESY OF CENTER FOR SACRAMENTO HISTORY
says . “ In 1921 , City Councilman H . W . Funke brought up the building of the auditorium to the city council , and a committee was appointed to look into the project .” It apparently took the rhetoric of Clyde Seavey , Sacramento ’ s city manager at the time , to tell the hesitating council in 1921 that “ as the capital of the State , and … the center of the State , Sacramento should have many large conventions and meetings which are not coming here because we have no auditorium for a meeting place ,” according to “ Sacramento Memorial Auditorium : Seven Decades of Memories ,” by Bonnie Wehle Snyder and Paula J . Boghosian . Seavey told The Sacramento Bee that “ the need for the auditorium is primarily a need of the Sacramento people themselves .”
Any comparison between that argument and everything that went into the Golden 1 Center finally opening in 2016 after years of uncertainty and lack of political will is purely coincidental . And , someday , is sure to be historic too .
Ed Goldman is a Sacramento freelance writer . He wrote the Working Lunch column for Comstock ’ s for 15 years and a daily column for the Sacramento Business Journal for eight years . His thrice-weekly column , The Goldman State , is online at goldmanstate . com .
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