By Harrison Power
Love Modesto is coming up this month, and with it a spike in community involvement with volunteer projects being organized that pop up all over the city. In prepping to come together to show our love and support for our wonderful city, let’s also take the opportunity to remind ourselves that “loving Modesto” should also mean loving our community’s history and appreciating the historic buildings and landmarks we have.
Past preservation efforts, and those assuredly to come, have allowed our downtown and our sprawled city to have architecturally and historically wonderful connections to our past. We must as proud Modestans care for our designated landmarks and other buildings deserving of such status, and must hold on to these places as a continuing source of civic pride. We deserve to have monuments and structures pointing to our past, reflecting the different periods of progress the city has made over the last 150 years.
As Harry Marks (Modesto Mayor 1952-1960) was quoted in championing for a new City Hall in 1957: “In this city there is a great need for municipal buildings which are a source of citizen satisfaction – which we can point out with pride. A city hall is more than just an office building. It is a symbol of strength and stability and stature…Modesto needs a city hall which is such a symbol, indicative of public pride and of faith in the future of our community.”
The aim at the time was simple: make Modesto an attractive place for future generations with buildings that highlight and represent the strength of the community. The “new” City Hall went in at the site of the burned down Hotel Modesto, and even incorporated a sunken courtyard reflective of the prior hotel’s basement level. Though in the subsequent decades much of “old Modesto” was lost or torn down, today there are vestiges protected or worthy of preservation to be thankful for and to appreciate.
With our City looking forward into the future of what our city will look like in the coming decades, the same sentiment of establishing new buildings and features in our city to be proud of ought to be applied to the preservation and acknowledgment of our community’s history as well – to include preservation as part of progress. Efforts of the newly launched Modesto History Project, the McHenry Museum, and other interested groups, are working to highlight these fascinating stories worth knowing as part of our communal fabric, not just tidbits and fun facts relegated to the history books.
So as you get ready to love Modesto this month, make sure to love your community’s history too. Look for the Modesto History Project posters throughout downtown buildings and storefronts giving a peak into our town’s past, visit the McHenry Museum to brush up on our city’s colorful history, or drive by a Modesto Landmark that you haven’t visited before.
