Sacramento could get a park over I-5 to connect downtown to the riverfront

A new plan seeks to connect downtown Sacramento with the city’s riverfront by building a deck park over a stretch of Interstate 5 between Capitol Mall and O Street.

The proposal, called the Sacramento Stitch Park Riverfront Reconnection Project, is supported by the Downtown Sacramento Partnership and Rep. Doris Matsui, who has requested $5 million in federal funding to help with planning efforts.

As it is, the city’s downtown is separated from Old Sacramento and the waterfront by I-5. Backers hope the proposed 4-acre park would make the river more accessible for pedestrians, increase green space in the area and provide opportunities for infill development.

The area is also historically and culturally significant, where neighborhoods such as Sacramento Japantown were demolished and residents displaced during construction of the freeway. Planners across the country hope to use federal funds to reconnect neighborhoods that were divided during past infrastructure projects to begin rebuilding lost connections. 

Scott Ford, deputy director of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, spoke with CapRadio’s Kate Wolffe on Insight to talk about the project’s vision and how it plans to reconnect communities. 

Interview Highlights

Can you give us an overview of this project and how long has this idea been in the works?

The future of downtowns all over the country, not just Sacramento, is going to be something more than just a single use office district for the region. As part of that, obviously, clean, safe green, foundational fundamentals that makes any neighborhood, any commercial area viable is a big part of that. But another big part is to capitalize and to better leverage some of our great assets that we have. We’re at the confluence of two beautiful rivers here. The American River Parkway is a great jewel. The Old Sacramento waterfront and even the West Sacramento waterfront has seen some really compelling development along it over the past couple of decades. But I think all of us would agree that it’s still a largely underutilized resource in the riverfront. 

So this opportunity, we really started to look at some previous work that had been done many decades ago. There's a Sacramento Riverfront master plan that dates back to 2003 [with] talk of decking over portions of I-5 to reconnect the community, the downtown area specifically, to the riverfront in a more compelling way. But now with federal infrastructure dollars supporting these types of projects in cities across the country, it's something that we wanted to make sure that Sacramento wasn't missing an opportunity to leverage some of those available federal funds.

Can you give us an idea of what this park might look like?

This is gonna take a lot of community participation in the process. The sky is the limit on what this park could be. It's literally a park that would be created out of thin air. Some other similar models that we've seen, I had the chance last week to be in Dallas, Texas and there's a similar project that was done in 2013 called Klyde Warren Park. It's a 3-acre park where they reconnected two neighborhoods that were divided apart in the 1950s, the 1960s by federal infrastructure. They were able to create a really compelling community gathering place in this park. It's got a small outdoor amphitheater, it's got some restaurants, some food trucks that are on site there. It has over 1,300 free community events that are programmed there every year, so daily programming taking place. And it's created a place where people from all over the Dallas area can come together. 

What was originally located in this area where this new bridge park is being proposed between Capital Mall and O Street?

Well, this part of Sacramento was a really diverse area of town known as the West End. It's also where the historic Japantown was along the Fourth Street corridor. Chinatown was on the north end there. This is a really sad part of American history in a lot of ways when, under the guise of urban renewal, the infrastructure projects that came through and physically tore communities apart and segregated neighborhoods. It's something that not just in Sacramento but cities around the United States this type of issue occurred. I think that it's important, it's incumbent on all of us to understand the history, learn from past mistakes and also capitalize upon some of these grants that are now available that are really all about repairing some of the damage that was done and in previous generations to these neighborhoods. 

The city demolished Sacramento Japantown decades ago. A new mural aims to uplift the community’s history

The community Stitch Park Reconnection, that's really what this is. This is bridging neighborhoods back together. This is doing the best we can to repair some of the past damages. Obviously, you can't go back and undo all of it, but you can make strategic investments in not just physical infrastructure but social infrastructure, infrastructure that supports the livability of a central neighborhood. We know that we want residential populations to continue to grow in downtown Sacramento, on the West Sacramento Waterfront, throughout the central city. Environmentally, it's good financially, it's good for cities to grow kind of that gentle density, but you need to have dynamic public realm spaces and great parks to support people to be able to live in close proximity to each other and have these great shared spaces.

Like many downtowns, downtown Sacramento has changed a lot over the past several years, especially considering the impact of Covid-19 and remote working. Has that shaped how you're looking at this park, this new connection?

Yeah, 100%. I think that any downtown that is looking in the rearview mirror for answers is probably going about it the wrong way. The world has changed. The past four years have been inflection moments in many ways and the cities, the regions that are going to be successful in the future are going to be ones that are going to be retrofitting themselves to, frankly, better serve the regions then they did previously. 

There were a lot of positive things that we saw pre-2020 in downtown Sacramento investments, like the Golden 1 Center and the expanded convention center. Those have become destination drivers that bring outside dollars into the Sacramento economy and they support local jobs. They support local opportunities, but I think that we need to be very realistic that the future of downtowns are not going to be single serving districts that are simply office centers for a broader region. They're going to be mixed-use, integrated, much healthier and hopefully more sustainable urban neighborhoods where people live, they work.