Old Sacramento's Buried Streets

You are standing on a city that is walking on top of another city.

Sacramento flooded so catastrophically and so repeatedly in the eighteen-fifties that the city government made a decision that sounds, at first, like it should not have worked: they would simply raise the entire downtown district. Not build levees. Not abandon the site. Raise it. Engineers filled the streets with dirt. They jacked buildings up from beneath. They poured new foundations on top of the old ones and built new floors above the old floor level. The original Gold Rush sidewalks, the doors that opened onto the streets of the rush, the storefronts where men bought picks and pans in eighteen forty-nine, all of that became basement. The old city is still there, ten to fifteen feet below your feet.

The flooding was not random. Sacramento was built at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers, on the flattest land available at the natural terminus of the Sierra Nevada emigrant routes. That position made it inevitable as a commercial city. It also put it squarely in the path of whatever those rivers sent down in wet years. And in the eighteen-fifties, those rivers were full of hydraulic mining debris, which raised the riverbeds upstream and pushed flood waters higher and farther than the rivers had gone before.

The buried Sacramento is still there. The underground walking tours that go below street level in the Old Sacramento district are not a theatrical recreation. They are the actual city of the Gold Rush, the floors and walls and doorways of eighteen fifty and eighteen fifty-one, preserved because dirt kept water out and the buildings were too solid to tear down.

The state capital that sits on this city was built on top of a flood plain that was made survivable by one of the most unusual engineering decisions in nineteenth-century urban history.