Del Paso Blvd.: Once and Future Glory?

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Del Paso Boulevard is decades away from its glory days. In the 1950s, it was a main drag full of drive-in theaters, grocery stores, auto dealers, restaurants and retail shops — a commercial hub in a small, separate city known as North Sacramento. Then came the 1960s. The small town merged with Sacramento, freeways swooped down and out, directing cars toward modern shopping malls in different places. Businesses moved out and drugs moved in, drawing criminals, hobos and prostitutes.  

“If you’ve got a run-down neighborhood, it’s going to attract run-down people, and the crime rate goes up,” says Sacramento Police Lt. Gina Haynes, who has worked in the area for 19 years. “I think a lot of people had given up hope. They would go home, lock their doors and stay there.”  

Between El Camino Avenue and Northgate Boulevard, Del Paso became a one-and-a-half mile strip of broken business dreams and vacant lots with iron gates, a has-been boulevard that commuters would bypass en route to elsewhere.  

“There’s no reason to come down this boulevard,” says Lil Joe’s owner, George Halaway, 50, whose father opened the restaurant on Del Paso in 1946. “Malls started popping up, and the nearest grocery store is four, five miles (away), at least. You’ve got a good flow of traffic, but nobody stops. It’s the slowest year I’ve ever had.”  

But the new black and brick Art Deco clock tower that stands 28 feet over the boulevard may indicate that times have changed. Uptown’s historic Hwy. 40 is in the midst of a multimillion dollar makeover. The government has invested about $50 million in the area over the past 10 years, says Rob Kerth, former City Council member and current president of the North Sacramento Chamber of Commerce. Improving the streetscape of Del Paso Boulevard alone cost $6.7 million to complete, funded by the city, the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency and a loan from the California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank.

The sidewalks have been repaved, new lampposts installed. The two-lane boulevard has been reduced to one lane each way to accommodate angle parking and force drivers to slow down. New Faze Development, a Sacramento company that focuses on urban redevelopment, hopes to build 200 condominiums and 70,000 square feet of office and retail space in the immediate area.

New restaurants, a wine bar and even a boxing gym have sprouted in recent years as community leaders tout Del Paso as the city’s renewed and trendy thoroughfare.  

The goal is to bring retail power back to the boulevard. And in the citywide fight for the attention of new businesses and investors, Del Paso’s weapon of choice is public art. Outdoor galleries of public artwork such as sculptures and murals by local artists adorn the medians, building walls and sycamore-shaded sidewalks. In 1993, the North Sacramento Chamber of Commerce initiated Phantom Galleries, converting empty buildings into art spaces for local artists to showcase their work in front of some 2,000 people on the second Saturday of every month.  

“We’ve been using the arts as a redevelopment tool,” says Doug Austin, 57, a photographer with a 2,500-sq.-ft. studio on the boulevard. “I personally think that’s one of our biggest distinctions now. There is no other neighborhood that has any display of public art.”

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