While much of Petaluma is caught up in a furious debate over what constitutes acceptable public art along Water Street, developers are busy pursuing their own agendas for the area, with little regard for the historic guidelines set out in the Central Petaluma Specific Plan. The area’s first major proposed development—the Haystack Pacifica complex intended for the former Petaluma and Santa Rosa Railway yard between Weller and Copeland streets—is an ultra-modern complex with no visual compatibility to the historic downtown.
Now, the new owner of the Steiger Building, home to the Riverfront Art Gallery at 132 Petaluma Boulevard North, is proposing to hollow out much of this prominent landmark, while preserving its street-facing façade (“Revamp for Historic Building,” Argus-Courier, March 21, 2019). Known in the development trade as “architectural facadism”—preserving the face of a building while constructing an entire new building behind it—the practice is popular in older cities like San Francisco that are looking to build up rather than out.
For the Steiger Building however, there’s a hitch—it was built in two phases, the Greek Revival storefront in 1876, and a back addition in 1905. Both halves were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 as they were part of a continuous family business. In order to hollow out the Steiger Building and construct a new three-story structure, the developer is reportedly challenging the historic status of the building’s back half.
The Steiger Building is steeped in Petaluma history. It occupies the site of the town’s first grocery—Kent, Smith & Coe—established in 1852. It was here, according to meat hunter John E. Lockwood, founder of Petaluma’s initial trading post in 1850, that the town’s first 4th of July celebration was held, with a grand ball that lasted for three days.
William Steiger, a colorful German immigrant, arrived in town in 1856 and opened up a gun and locksmith shop on Main Street near where the current day Odd Fellows Lodge sits, later moving in the 1860s roughly to where Thistle Meats resides today. In 1876, he moved again into the newly constructed building at 132 Petaluma Boulevard North, sharing the building with its owner, George Ross, who operated a photo gallery on the second floor. Not long after, Steiger purchased the building from Ross, and posted an iconic large sign in the shape of a rifle above the front entrance. Upon his death in 1878, his son, P.J. Steiger, renamed the shop Steiger’s Sportsman Emporium, and made it the founding headquarters of the Petaluma Sportsman Club, which operated a rod and gun preserve down the river through the 1920s.
One of P.J. Steiger’s sons, Joseph, turned out to be an adventurous entrepreneur. After purchasing Petaluma’s first bicycle, he convinced his father to open the town’s first bicycle outlet at the store just as the bicycle craze of the Gay 90s was taking off. In 1902, he purchased one the town’s first automobiles, a single cylinder Oldsmobile Runabout, and the next year persuaded his father to establish in the store Petaluma’s first automobile agency. After his father added the back extension to the building in 1905, Joe used the space to open Petaluma’s first auto repair shop, as well as its first “livery auto,” or taxi service. In 1907, after he and his brother Will assumed ownership of the store upon their father’s death, they began selling Indian motorcycles in addition to guns, fishing gear, automobiles, Victor phonographs, and sewing machines.
Steiger’s eclectic sporting goods store remained a popular downtown anchor until Joe’s tragic death in 1924, when he and a close friend, city councilman H.S. McCargar, both drowned while fishing for bass in a rowboat near the Sportsman’s Club. Joe’s premature death put an end to Sonoma County’s oldest family-owned business. The Steiger Building went on to house many businesses over the years—including the Petaluma Power and Water Company, a real estate office, and most recently Murray Rockowitz’s photo studio and a co-op art gallery—as well as to become a cornerstone of the Golden Concourse.
If there’s a site that deserves protected landmark status, it’s the Steiger Building—both halves of it. The downtown needs to continue evolving and being revitalized, but not at the price of losing its historical fabric. Merely paying lip service to that fabric by retaining a storefront façade undermines the downtown’s authenticity. Unlike the debate raging over public art, there can be no question of the Steiger Building’s legitimate standing in town.
A version of this article appeared in the Petlauma Argus-Courier on March 28, 2019.
