Petaluma’s days as a roadside attraction

On September 3, 1925, an auto caravan of 40 “cavemen,” clad in the skins of mountain lions, panthers and wildcats, set off from Grants Pass, Oregon to take possession of Petaluma, California. Before departing, they made sure to book 26 rooms at the Hotel Petaluma — first requesting permission to set up a cave in the lobby.

The cavemen were bound for a convention promoting the Redwood Highway, a new auto route extending from the Oregon Caves Monument outside Grants Pass to the docks of Sausalito. The name “Redwood Highway” was coined in 1921 by A.D. Lee, a Crescent City hotelier, who believed the new scenic thoroughfare too lucrative to be designated by merely a number. Regardless, in 1926 it would officially become part of U.S. Highway 101.

Lee’s inspiration for the name came from a conservationist group called Save the Redwoods League, who in 1918 mounted a campaign to preserve what remained of California’s old growth redwood groves by making them state parks.

The conservationists’ call of the wild spoke to a new wave of automobility sweeping the country. No longer hampered by wretched roads, the limited speed and endurance of the horses pulling wagons and stages, or the inflexible timetable of steam locomotives, motor-savvy Americans were setting out aboard their gas-powered “vacation agents” for road trips to the wildest and most natural places on the continent.

To capitalize on the craze, Lee and a group of fellow entrepreneurs in Del Norte, Humboldt and Mendocino counties launched the Redwood Highway Association. For help in convincing other counties to get on the bandwagon, Lee reached out to fellow “booster extraordinaire” Bert Kerrigan, secretary of Petaluma’s Chamber of Commerce.

Known for putting Petaluma on the map as “Egg Basket of the World,” Kerrigan specialized in the sort of razzle-dazzle stunts that attracted filmmakers screening newsreels in movie houses across the country.

His National Egg Day was full of eye-catching visuals like the Egg Parade, Egg Queen, Egg Ball, Egg Day Rodeo of hens and horses and a “chicken chase” down San Francisco’s Market Street accompanied by a biplane dropping chicken feathers affixed with coupons for free Petaluma eggs.

The opportunity to position Petaluma as one of the last civilized outposts before driving off into the woods captivated Kerrigan. He went to work convincing Petaluma merchants to be the first to adopt the use of “Redwood Highway” in their advertising, followed by the Sonoma County Board of Trade and the mayor of San Francisco.

By the time Lee and 150 other members of Redwood Highway Association gathered at the Hotel Petaluma in 1925, Kerrigan had been shown the door as Petaluma’s ringmaster, having bled the Chamber of Commerce dry with his flamboyant stunts.

His Redwood Highway legacy however lived on in the steady stream of autos and “auto stages” passing through town on summer weekends, bound for what travel brochures described as “the world’s most scenic Paradise Wonderland, 100 miles of giant redwood trees, primeval, primitive, and untrammeled, with streams full of fish and woods full of game.”

The majority of tourists drove up from Southern California. That led the Redwood Highway Association to believe they had a shot at displacing Highway 99 — the future Interstate 5 running up the Sacramento Valley — as the main trunk between San Francisco and Oregon, and raking in some of the estimated $2 million ($32 million in today’s dollars) spent at roadside attractions along the way.

Turning to tourist conquest, they changed their name to the Redwood Empire Association.

The keynote speaker at their 1925 convention was Harvey Toy, California’s commissioner of state highways. Thanks to a recent two cent per gallon gasoline tax imposed by the state, Toy informed the group he had the funds to iron out the kinks in the Redwood Highway, making it a safe and efficient thoroughfare.

The association’s treasurer, Santa Rosa banker Frank Doyle, was part of a group advocating construction of a bridge across the Golden Gate. He informed the group of the impact the bridge was expected to have on tourist traffic north. To avoid becoming a bottleneck, Petaluma would need to widen its Main Street from two to four lanes.

The prospect gave local merchants pause. Main Street was not only the town’s main artery of commerce, but the heart of its social connections and celebrations, with ample 12-foot wide sidewalks and convenient diagonal parking lanes.

The city had bent over backwards to assimilate the automobile since its arrival in 1903, paving Main Street’s bumpy cobblestones with asphalt, converting hitching posts to parking lanes, replacing liveries and stables with garages and filling stations. But reducing the width of the sidewalks and imposing parallel parking so as to accommodate four lanes of through traffic, struck many as a death knell for Main Street.

In 1935, with construction of the Golden Gate Bridge finally underway, the chief engineer of the state highway commission, Col. John Skeggs, paid Petaluma merchants a visit. Either widen Main Street to four lanes, Skeggs told them, or else the state would reroute Redwood Highway to the flats east of town.

Merchants proposed a compromise. They were willing to reduce the sidewalk widths from 12 to 9 feet to create a center third lane for making left turns, while retaining diagonal parking.

The matter remained at a standstill until May 1937, when the new bridge opened. The flood of through traffic the first two weekends convinced merchants they had no choice but to surrender to the motoring hordes of the Redwood Empire, converting Main Street to four narrow lanes and parallel parking.

Twenty years later, Kerrigan’s two lingering Petaluma legacies came to an abrupt end. The advent of poultry-raising factory farms throughout the country emptied the Egg Basket of the World, and the Redwood Highway abandoned Petaluma’s sluggish Main Street for the breezy new U.S. 101 freeway constructed east of town in 1957.

Into the vacuum poured thousands of auto commuters, who, thanks to the new freeway and Golden Gate Bridge, found San Francisco within easy driving distance from Petaluma. As the ranchlands east of town began filling up with suburban tract homes, Petaluma found itself transformed into a bedroom community.

While the new freeway alleviated through-traffic on Main Street, it also dealt a blow to the hotels, restaurants, bars and gas stations that catered to it. In an effort to attract freeway travelers, in 1958 the city changed the name of Main Street to Petaluma Boulevard North. Third Street, which extended from B Street to the new freeway entrance south of town, was renamed Petaluma Boulevard South.

It wasn’t enough. New shopping malls on the east side drained the downtown of foot traffic. By the 1960s, Petaluma Boulevard was pockmarked with empty shops and old, dilapidated buildings, forcing the city to impose an ordinance requiring owners to bring them up to code or else tear them down.

Many chose the latter.

In 1969, the city put before voters an urban renewal proposal calling for the demolition of all the buildings on the east side of Petaluma Boulevard from B to Oak streets, for the installation of a six-lane thoroughfare. Voters rejected it.

In the mid-1970s, the city turned to historic restoration as a means of reviving the downtown, beginning with the Great Petaluma Mill, an abandoned grain mill downtown converted by Skip Sommer into a gallery of boutique shops and restaurants.

In a town besieged by homogeneous housing developments, garden-variety business parks and uniform chain stores, the unique character of Petaluma’s historic downtown proved the catalyst of its rebirth as a trendy nightlife and shopping district. That brought with it increased traffic and accidents, most of them sideswipes of parked cars due to Petaluma Boulevard’s inherently narrow travel and parking lanes.

In 2003, city planners proposed a traffic calming measure known as the “road diet." Much like the city’s 1935 compromise proposal, it called for reducing the number of travel lanes from four to two, with a center third lane for making left turns.

But unlike in 1935, many merchants opposed it, worried it would reduce downtown traffic. Like a gradual approach to healthy eating, the city administered the road diet in three stages, beginning in 2007 and 2013, with the final stage along Petaluma Boulevard South scheduled for completion in fall 2022.

Studies show the road diet has reduced collisions while maintaining the same level of pre-diet traffic, meaning that — a century after Kerrigan surrendered Main Street to the traffic of the Redwood Highway — Petaluma has finally recaptured the pedestrian-friendly heart of its downtown.

John Patrick Sheehy is an author and historian living in Petaluma. His blog, “Petaluma Historian,” chronicles local historical events. He is the author of “A River Winding Home: Stories and Visions of the Petaluma River Watershed,” with photos by Scott Hess. Sheehy is contributing to the creation of a new exhibit at the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum, the subject of which is Petaluma’s historic Main Street. It opens on Aug.11, 2022.