Rosie Trolley Tour
I spent $25 on a history tour on the Rosie trolley on Friday — the money goes to the scholarship fund for summer camp for the local kids. I learned some things that were interesting to me: why St. Eugene’s is where it is. My guess is that, because it is adjacent to the Carillo adobe, and Carillo owned 40,000 acres, they contributed the land for the church. So Maria Carillo was considered a wealthy, well-connected land owner.
I wondered why St. Rose church was where it is, and why it is neither a Franciscan (Spanish) mission nor the seat of the Diocese of Santa Rosa.
Now I know that the Stonehouse on Hwy 12 was the boarding house for the Basalt quarry workers. The quarry was behind the Stonehouse. Basalt is a stone that is soft in the earth but becomes very hard when it dries out. The most profitable way to quarry it is with skilled workers who shape it when it is soft so that it is in ready-to-sell condition when it reaches the rail line. The quarry owner imported skilled Italian stonecutters to Santa Rosa.
He built a small rail line that went down what is now 4th St/9th St to connect the quarry to the main railroad line which ran parallel to Old Redwood Highway. St. Rose church is near the end of the quarry line and near the start of where the Italian neighborhood cropped up. The stone workers eventually bought property to build “shotgun-style” inexpensive houses on “the other side of the tracks.” The 9th St underpass is the start of the “Westside” neighborhood where the Italians lived. So I guess St. Rose was the Italian neighborhood church made of Basalt rock — not suitable for wealthy, landed Spanish people and new settlers from the East.
Other basalt rock buildings that survived the 1906 earthquake — which wiped out 3% of Santa Rosa’s population (and 1% of San Francisco’s population) — are the downtown train depot and the Hotel La Rose which was originally a 40-room boarding house, now a 25-room luxury hotel.
Came home and finished Whalefall by Daniel Kraus, a very fast read because it was so absorbing. I hated Finnegan’s Wake because it was word salad, but as the main character, Jay, dissolves into nitrogen narcosis inside the diving whale, the jumbled words make sense. Whether he survives, how he survives is the “McGuffin” that drives the book. On the framework of the McGuffin that keeps us turning the pages, author Daniel Kraus hangs the story of a teen boy bedeviled by his attentive but abusive father and his loving but powerless mother and two older sisters. Jay is flashing back to when he was 15 and the pressure from his father became unbearable in the aftermath of the loss of the boat after poor-maintenance caused two paying passengers to fall overboard. The father’s descent, and his mistreatment of Jay, drive the boy to risky behavior that leads to his becoming entangled in a giant squid which is the prey of a large sperm whale hunting in the Monterey Canyon. As you can see from the Google Earth image below, Monastery Beach features ditches that slide into the depths. My PADI Open Water diving certification took place in the water off Monastery Beach. I had to enter the surf (backwards) in full wetsuit and tank gear, swim out past the surf line, sit on the bottom with my regulator in my mouth, take off my mask and my air tank and put them back on, underwater with my eyes closed. I passed and went on to dive the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.
