Funky, Funky Southside

1911     Something was amiss in "South Side." The air south of R Street was was thick, hazy, and malodorous, and you couldn't just blame La Garnacha, like we do now. According to a November 2 article in the Sacramento Bee, a dozen underground fires were burning at a vacant lot between 14th, 15th, V, and W streets, "sending up a volume of smoke of sickening odor." As did the famed peat bogs of Ireland, the reporter notes, the subterranean smoldering undermined the ground above, causing the cover to give way. From the cracks in the collapsed dirt billowed the foul smoke, which blanketed much of the southern section of the Old City.

Fortunately, city officials had a more solid explanation than pinning it on Sacramento's most obnoxious Mexican restaurant. Dr. J.W. James of the Sacramento City Board of Health claimed the situation had existed intermittently for years and that it was due to the (apparently spontaneous) combustion of garbage the city had dumped there in years prior. The problem tended to be worse after dry summers, like that of 1911. Garbage burning underground! This makes perfect sense, given that the area south of the old R Street levee was, until the early 20th century, swampy and uninhabited. That this former wasteland would have been used as one of the city's early landfill shouldn't surprising. However, around the turn of the century a new levee was built along Y Street (the current Broadway) and the R Street levee was removed. These developments helped make the residential settlement of of the area between R and Y streets feasible in the first decades of the 20th century.

This brings us to November 1911, when the not yet fully-developed Southside Park neighborhood was in the midst of its siege. The Bee reports that, although Southside residents had issued numerous complaints, the city still hadn't taken demonstrable action to stem the noxious plume. In a moment that reeks of local civics self-parody, Dr. F.G. May, also of the Board of health, announced that he had appointed a commission to investigate the phenomenon. Thank god, he also promised to ask the fire chief to send a crew to the site to extinguish the smoldering mess.

(P.S. For more on the history of the Southside Park neighborhood, you should check out the work of William Burg. He wrote the book on the area. Literally. Though I usually don't recommend those Arcadia picture books, I am comfortable endorsing his. It's well-researched and full of great stories, photos, and trivia. He's also written solid articles on the neighborhood, like the one I used in my perfunctory research on SSP.)