Sacramento and the Catholic Church: Shaping a Capital City

2. Cathedral Building As Urban Project, 1865–1889

Sacramento’s Catholics built the majestic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in 1889. At the time of its dedication it was the largest Roman Catholic church west of the Rocky Mountains. Although today dwarfed by large skyscrapers, for many years its stately dome and towers loomed large over the flat city. Together with the imposing state capitol, a block away, the cathedral provided Sacramento with its first real skyline. The Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament was no ordinary building. Its placement , size, and grandiose architecture were part of a deliberate plan by the city’s first bishop to put the Catholic Church “on the map,” while he materially assisted Sacramento’s dreams of urban glory. All this took place within the context of a number of developments that ensured the city’s social and economic dominance in the Central Valley. building a respectable city Sacramento passed through another period of environmental travail as the city flooded again in 1861–1862.1 This time some businesses and c h a p t e r 2 Cathedral Building As Urban Project, 1865–1889 “It is high time we had a new church” 43 commercial houses evacuated the city never to return. The city population leveled off, and questions again arose about the suitability of the site for the state capital. City buildings were functional and uninspiring at best. Roads were dusty in the dry months and mud-choked in the rainy season, sewers did not always work, and the levee system around the River City had proved inadequate. Sacramento was damp in the winter and beastly hot in the summer. San Francisco, the city’s rival, occasionally lobbed insults at the provincial state capital, and its “cow town” image contrasted badly with San Francisco’s cosmopolitan atmosphere. The egress of the fabled “Big Four”—Stanford, Huntington, Crocker, and Hopkins—all of whom had made their railroad fortune in Sacramento, set an unfortunate pattern for those who had “made it” in the state capital, leaving as soon as they could. This was a sensitive point revealed in the 1916 obituary of local entrepreneur and politician Jesse W. Wilson quoted in the Introduction . Some of the worst critics of Sacramento were state legislators who came to the capital for legislative sessions and complained bitterly about the dismal living and working conditions. Sacramento did not have good hotels, paved roads, or decent drinking and bathing water (although it did have plenty of gaming tables and whorehouses). Some state offices, such as the supreme court, were located in San Francisco and strenuously resisted periodic calls to relocate to the seat of state government. The floods may have discouraged some, but for others the deluge unleashed the “indomitable” energies of the city founders (in fact, the motto Urbs Indomita was added to the city seal after the floods of 1861). Within a year after the floodwaters receded, the city began a multiyear process of revamping its sewer system and raising the grade of its streets. In what even today remains one of the most remarkable feats of urban survival, residents and shopkeepers living or working along the path of the street raising spent thousands to elevate their structures to the new city level.2 Out of the travails of the early 1860s, a stronger, more stable Sacramento emerged. By the turn of the century Sacramento was well on the way to the respectability it craved with a stable and productive local economy, a growing number of cultural amenities, and the beginnings of a building renaissance that improved the appearance of the community . The symbolic center of this urban resurrection was a permanent and 44 s a c r a m e n t o a n d t h e c at h o l i c c h u r c h c at h e d r a l b u i l d i n g a s u r b a n p r o j e c t 45 beautiful state capitol building, which Sacramentans hailed as an anchor and a benchmark for future developments. Since 1855, the state government had been meeting in the city’s courthouse , but by the late 1850s demands for a larger and more permanent statehouse became more insistent.3 The first plans called for the new capitol to be erected on the public square between i and j and Ninth and Tenth, today’s...