Railroad Square and the Italian Bricklayers

When the railroad reached Santa Rosa, in eighteen seventy, on a line later absorbed into the Northwestern Pacific, it found a small county seat of around one thousand people. Within five years, by the most widely cited accounts, the population had risen to five thousand. That kind of growth leaves a neighborhood behind, and the one it left behind here, just west of the rail yard, is still intact enough to give you a sense of what a working agricultural shipping district looked like in the years before the automobile.

Railroad Square, as the neighborhood has been called since its commercial revival in the nineteen seventies, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with the listing confirmed in nineteen seventy-nine. The buildings that earned that designation were constructed between eighteen eighty-eight and nineteen twenty-three, primarily by stonemasons from northern Italy who had come to California in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and who knew how to lay stone and brick with a precision that mattered.

That precision mattered more than anyone expected in April of nineteen oh six. When the earthquake collapsed every unreinforced brick structure in downtown Santa Rosa, the rail district warehouses held. The Italian masonry work had been done differently, with more attention to mortar joints and foundation, and the result was that the California Northwestern Depot of nineteen oh four, the Western Hotel of nineteen oh three, and the La Rose Hotel of nineteen oh seven survived while the courthouse turned to rubble four blocks away.

For the next sixty years, the district ran as it had been built to run: canneries, packing houses, macaroni factories, breweries, and cold-storage facilities moving Sonoma County's agricultural output through the rail yard. In the nineteen thirties, the railroad began its long decline, and by mid-century the warehouses had mostly emptied out.

What saved them was the same thing that saved them in nineteen oh six: they were built to last. Adaptive reuse converted the packing houses into restaurants and specialty shops, and the neighborhood became, somewhat improbably, one of the more livable corners of downtown. The Italian families who had lived west of the tracks in what is now called the West End Preservation District are mostly gone, but their brickwork is still doing its job.