This story was featured in our SacramenKnow newsletter. Sign up to get updates about what’s happening in the region in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.
A modified downtown Sacramento map underneath the Goodside Coffee sign. A Google Street View history of a DeLorean in a Sacramento mechanic shop. The (allegedly) tallest stair set in Sacramento.
All three of those things have one TikTok user in common: @heckinsick, or Logan Ivey.
The 30-year-old started making TikToks in 2021, and has almost 166,000 followers on the platform, where he makes a range of videos about Sacramento and surrounding areas. He also posts the videos on YouTube, where he has over 83,000 subscribers.
Ivey has always stayed local to the Sacramento area — he grew up in Colfax, went to school at Sierra College and graduated from UC Davis (which he also unofficially redesigned a logo for) before moving to Sacramento proper in 2015.
“I’ve mostly stayed local because I really value being close to family, and after college there were just more job options in Sacramento than anywhere else close by,” he told me via email. “After living here, I learned to love it.”
Telling Sacramento stories
Ivey has a playlist of Google Street View histories, including the aforementioned video about the DeLorean, but it’s hard to pigeonhole his content into one bucket.
His videos range from Sacramento history to shenanigans with friends, and he also chronicles the process of hiding items (some might describe them as art!) throughout the city — including a stuffed peanut toy in a peanut butter container, placed on a shelf at the Safeway on Alhambra Boulevard. He also once planned a scavenger hunt that netted its first finishers tickets to a Sacramento Kings game.
His favorite video, he said, is his “Sacramento Mirror” video — a project that “made me realize how much positivity can be spread with not a huge amount of effort.”
Logan Ivey poses in his first "Sacramento Mirror," which was affixed to a wall near the Sacramento River in Old Sacramento for two days in April 2022.Screenshot via TikTok
Last April, Ivey purchased a mirror on OfferUp for $15, spray-painted it and wrote “you are here” with an arrow across the top, and “#SacramentoMirror” on the bottom, before placing it on a wall near the Sacramento River in Old Sacramento.
“People loved it for some reason, and they were very excited that something ‘fun’ was happening in their city,” he added. The mirror, which he hung up with command strips, fell after 2 days.
“So this year, I’m doing nothing different, and still using command strips to hold it up to the wall,” Ivey quipped in a video from this June, chronicling a replication of the mirror project.
That mirror was hung up along the American River bike trail — what he called “the coolest thing about Sacramento.” (This year’s mirror lasted longer than 2 days, but is now gone.)
“I have some video ideas like ‘try to ride a Jump bike to the airport’ that have been on my list for over a year,” Ivey said. “But then sometimes I just have ideas, like the history of the Governor's Mansion, that I make the day I get the idea.”
One relatively unsolved mystery, he added, is related to his first viral video, on a Midtown Jimboy's Taco that became the Midtown Taco Company. It stayed under their ownership for a year before reverting back to a Jimboy's.
While he makes most videos by himself without thinking too much, he said he sometimes talks with his fiancée, brother or “Sacramento expert” friend for input. But for the Kings scavenger hunt, he said he wanted to hit the sweet spot between being impossible and being solvable within 30 minutes.
“It took the winners 3 hours, which felt about right!” he told CapRadio.
Getting recognized
Ivey’s passion for creating informative and silly videos has also led him to a career — in May, he started working for a start-up making short-form videos.
“I am just most proud that I am able to do this as my career now,” he said. “Just being able to be creative for a living is pretty great. And it became a reality from just making silly videos.”
Ivey said he’s always surprised to be recognized around town since he doesn’t usually show his face in videos, but it’s happened five times.
“The weirder ones are when someone sees me but doesn't say anything and then they comment on a later video like, ‘I saw you yesterday at Home Depot,’ or ‘I saw you at the park on Sunday,’” he said.
The coolest person he’s met through videos, though, isn’t a person per se. It’s Slamson, the Sacramento Kings mascot, who brought Ivey and his friends dessert after he made a video about how hard it was to get dessert at a Kings game. (Ivey said this has since improved.)
Other fun facts he shared via email: The fact that Tom Hanks went to Sac State, which he said “isn’t talked about enough,” and that all the alleys on the Midtown grid are named with the letter after the street they follow — E Street is followed by Eggplant Alley, and so on.
“Sacramento gets a lot of hate, especially from people who grew up around it, and I think there is a lot to love that may not seem so obvious,” Ivey said. “I enjoy being able to show off some of what it has to offer in terms of interestingness.”
CapRadio provides a trusted source of news because of you. As a nonprofit organization, donations from people like you sustain the journalism that allows us to discover stories that are important to our audience. If you believe in what we do and support our mission, please donate today.
Donate Today