On the Magnolia Trail, over 200 specimens from 90 species of magnolias - The largest collection of magnolias in North America - Botanical Garden Golden Gate Park - Tuesday, February 18th, 2025
Join our new Program Chairman Joe Hanneken on Friday, April 25th for a North Bay land and sea adventure, including a peek at Petaluma.
By Peter Hartlaub, Culture Critic Feb 17, 2025
In the days after the massive 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco, dispatches from historic Bay Area towns were shades of grim and horrific.
“SAN JOSE IS RUINED,” “SANTA ROSA IS A TOTAL WRECK” read two typical Chronicle headlines.
But one city was stunningly, almost eerily, undisturbed: the growing farm town of Petaluma. Spared from cataclysm, the Chronicle reported that residents immediately began sending steamships full of goods south to San Francisco, and caravans north to Santa Rosa.
Petaluma’s good fortune 119 years ago begins to answer a question that has long perplexed me: How does downtown Petaluma remain so perfectly, otherworldly, charmingly frozen in time?
The city, founded in 1858, doesn’t carry the tourism-playground reputation of North Bay neighbors Napa, Healdsburg or St. Helena. Petaluma was dubbed “The City of a Million Hens” in a 1908 Chronicle headline, and has been embracing its campy egg-capital-of-the-world reputation since.
But with its downtown anchored by stately 1800s buildings and shops selling seeds and Christmas ornaments year-round — and a folksy/quirky mood that feels like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry filmed by David Lynch — there’s nowhere in the North Bay that I’d rather spend a sunny weekday afternoon.
A day trip to the past? This underrated North Bay town makes time travel possible
Greg