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CLOVERDALE’S TEMPORARY ASTI BRIDGE TO BECOME PERMANENT
December 14, 2023
Healdsburg, California Healdsburg, California
Date, Date, 20202020
ANNUAL SPAN UNDER REVIEW BY COUNTY FOR $20 MILLION REPLACEMENT Staff Report
Photo courtesy of Healdsburg Museum
Sonoma County is taking a closer look at plans for the Asti Bridge, a seasonal span over the Russian River just south of Cloverdale. For decades the bridge has been built and torn down every year, at a cost of at least $200,000 annually, to accommodate high water flows in the spring. But in 2017, the Pocket Fire in the area forced the emergency evacuation of residents on the east side of the Russian River, an evacuation that raised anew questions about a more permanent bridge across the river near Washington School Road. “During that particular fire, we understand that residents in the community of Asti on the east side of the Russian River could potentially have been left stranded had the temporary bridge at the Asti Crossing not been in place,” read a 2019 engineer’s report to the Alexander Valley Citizens League. “Without that bridge, the nearest all weather crossing of the Russian River is located approximately five miles to the north at Crocker Road in the town of Cloverdale. If a fire was to cut off access to that northern bridge, the Asti residents would be trapped without an allweather bridge in place at the Asti crossing,” the report concluded. The fire led to the formation of the Alexander Valley Citizens League, which has lobbied the county ever since for a permanent replacement. A durable Asti Bridge would provide an additional, reliable, yearround egress, particularly
THE WAY WE WERE Healdsburg’s main street, West Avenue, almost 90 years ago as replicated by master woodworker Jon Lacaillade. The exhibit is on display at the Healdsburg Museum through April 2024.
Take a Time Machine Into Healdsburg’s Past WOODWORKER’S OBSESSION BRINGS HISTORY TO LIFE AT MUSEUM By Christian Kallen
The past comes to life, albeit on a reduced scale, at the Healdsburg Museum this week with the new exhibit “Modeling Healdsburg: Creations of a Master Woodworker.” It is a collection of replicas, micro-sculptures and reconstructions by woodworker Jon Lacaillade, who for past museum exhibits has provided model street scenes, railroad bridges and historic houses from Healdsburg’s heyday. Now he’s been given full rein of the rooms by museum Executive Director Holly Hoods, who knows talent when she sees it. He started volunteering at the museum doing odd jobs and solving long-standing problems, but it soon became clear that Lacaillade had more
to offer than just a handyman’s skills. His amazing recreations of historic artifacts and periods fills the museum with living miniatures of eras gone by. Using recycled and found materials, and combining his woodworker’s eye and natural attention to detail, Lacaillade creates a strange voiceless reality, too big to be a toy and too small to be real—but not by much. The exhibit’s most familiar work may be the “Destination Healdsburg, 1935,” diorama, showing a busy West Street (now Healdsburg Avenue) filled with clothing emporia, drug stores and a dozen miniature cars backed up in front of the shops across from the Plaza. Nearly every parking space and the street itself is filled with replica pick-up trucks with wood bed rails, town cars or sedans. A large green neon sign points the way east to the Russian
River Resorts, toward Fitch Mountain, Camp Rose and Palomar. It represents a time nine decades ago when the city actively encouraged tourism, going so far as to set aside a lot away from the plaza for locals to park, thus freeing up the valuable downtown spaces for commercial visitors.
The More Things Change
While that all rings a bell with today’s business climate, it served a different purpose then. “Healdsburg wanted tourists as potential residents to make up for population loss,” Hoods said. Healdsburg’s population had dropped to only 2,296, having lost almost 5% in recent years. The hope was that tourists would like the town so much they’d make it their home. “It’s a snapshot in time of one of Healdsburg’s major tourist eras,” Hoods said. Museum visitors will find the snapshot eerily
familiar in many ways to the photo op that the Plaza now presents. Although the downscaled scenes of Matheson Street in 1935, and another from 1893, are compelling in their own right, it’s the little things that count: the individual faces on the six-inch inhabitants of the town created by Maggie Bates, the white-walled tires of the pricier cars, the paint palette of a preKodachrome era. The replicas are handcrafted by Lacaillade at his Tucker Street workshop, reduced in scale with an eerie accuracy. A former resident of the historic whaling town of Nantucket (ironically, the birthplace of Henry Delano Fitch), Laraillade and his partner Pam Vana-Paxhia moved to Healdsburg in 2007 and became volunteers at the museum, and the rest, as they say, is history. Soon, the former restoration contractor focused
➝ Asti Bridge, 4
his attention on revealing Healdsburg’s own historic past by contributing models and replicas to exhibits already in the works. This exhibit, Modeling Healdsburg, puts those contributions center stage.
Master Woodworker
Lacaillade, now 73, works three hours every morning on his construction projects, working from historic photos and newspapers in the museum collection and other sources to craft his architectural models. Before moving to California he and his wife spent 18 years on the island of Nantucket where he managed a construction company specializing in historic renovations. They are both now busy museum volunteers, and she a master gardener. His long career in carpentry in the historic town of Nantucket, center of the 19th century whaling industry immortalized in Moby Dick, gives him an almost superhuman ability to ➝ Time Machine, 4
HEALDSBURG LOCAL JOINS TRIBUNE, WEEKLYS STAFF FORMER HHS JOURNALISM STUDENT, PATCH REPORTER
Last month, Healdsburgnative Simone Wilson joined the Healdsburg Tribune team as a staff writer and senior product manager. She will send out an email newsletter about Healdsburg a few times per week, containing a quick synopsis of everything you need to know about what’s happening in town. To sign up, see page 2. LOCAL GIRL Simone Wilson returns to Healdsburg to write
for her hometown newspaper.
By Simone Wilson
I admit, I never thought I’d
see my name in the pages of the Healdsburg Tribune. As a teen growing up here in the ’90s and early 2000s, there was only one thing I wanted to do: get out. So I did. Inspired and enlivened by Camille Lehrmann’s journalism class at Healdsburg High School, I went on to run the student newspaper at the University of California, San Diego, while attending college there—then spent the next decade or so working as a journalist for print and online publications in Los Angeles, New York City and the Middle East. As I’ve grown, though, the more obsessed I’ve become with finding a sustainable business model for small-town news. And the more I’ve had to admit to myself: There’s nowhere I’d rather center my efforts than my hometown. (Hey—as far as hometowns
go, you can do a lot worse than Healdsburg. Whenever I’m feeling down on it, I like to pretend I’m in a cozy Christmas romcom about a thirtysomething who moves back home and finds herself.) To that end, I couldn’t be more excited about my new role at Weeklys, the local newspaper group that—in a dramatic acquisition last year, at the final hour—saved the Tribune from going out of print. Alongside the Weeklys team, with whom I’ve been wildly impressed so far, I hope to help make sure it never comes that close to the guillotine again. I’ve already begun sending out an email newsletter about Healdsburg three times per week under the Tribune masthead, as a supplement to the heavyhitting reporting you get ➝ Local Joins Tribune, 2