Will the city's G Street "improvements" actually improve the dining experience on G Street?
The long and winding road from Point A to Point B has been full of missteps and lack of input
We've always heard you shouldn't mess with Texas, but apparently, you shouldn't mess with Davis either.
Residents of my hometown of Davis, California, USA, 95616 (and sometimes 95618) have fond memories of the Mace Mess that cost the city heaps of cash, piles of bad will and enough headaches to keep Excedrin in business until the start of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
And all because no one bothered to get sufficient input from the people who would have their daily lives so wildly disrupted.
Well, we now have the G Street Gaffe, another one of those situations where the city moved forward with big plans despite a lack of sufficient input from those who would be most affected by those very plans.
G Street, along with all of Downtown Davis, is one of those places that was special to me in my childhood due to establishments like Spudnut and Vienna Bakery, the Blue and Gold Fountain, Rogers Five and Dime and Davis Lumber.
George Bailey from "It's a Wonderful Life" would have fit in perfectly in the Downtown Davis I was so fond of long ago. He'd have no doubt had his office on G Street and taken a sack lunch to Central Park, grabbing a box of maple bars from Louie Vienna to take back to his staff for their afternoon break.
Later, G Street remained special due to places like Deebo's and The Club and the Antique Bizarre and A.J. Bump's and Taco Bell and the Blue Mango.
In adulthood, G Street was where I showed up for work at 4:30 in the morning, with two young kids in tow, to pound out my column on a manual typewriter at the world headquarters of the Daily Surprise.
The best part about that experience is that the typewriter always rewarded me with the ringing of a little bell every time I finished another line of copy. Editors didn't tell me to give them 20 inches on a story but rather 60 bells, since it was about three bells per inch in those days.
And thank goodness the nearby Jack-in-the-Box was a 24-hour operation with a highly controversial drive-thru window so I could get those kids a carton of milk and some hash browns for breakfast.
The drive-thru was controversial, you see, because the city claimed that one of the civic goals of our small town was to get people out of their cars to "mingle" with the populace in a neighborly manner.
Hey kids, wake up. It's time for some early-morning mingling.