The magic word in Santa Barbara has always been “paseo.” It’s still that way, just more so. An extended bike lane designed to connect the city’s Westside to its Eastside via Sola Street has been dubbed a “paseo” for purposes of city planning. This Thursday, an exuberant clutch of downtown movers and shakers — bedecked with gold-plated shovels — assembled together in the mysterious nether region between the Granada Parking Garage and beside the Granada Theatre to declare that area a “paseo” too. Not only that, they each unearthed a pile of dirt with ceremony to mark the beginning of a transformation of a space that for more than 40 years has qualified as neither fish nor fowl.
There was an almost giddy sweetness to the gathering, reflecting, perhaps, the great relief that those in attendance — both participants and reporters — felt at being in the actual presence of fellow homo sapiens as opposed to a Zoomified facsimile. Or it could have reflected the ridiculous degree of difficulty involved in unifying the back-of-house public-private space into a unified purpose: so that large buses bearing even larger musical ensembles can deposit the show-biz infrastructure necessary to put on their really big shows.
If all this seems too obvious and boringly basic to justify Santa Barbara Mayor Cathy Murillo, City Administrator Paul Casey, and a host of Granada Theatre potentates swinging gilded shovels, bear in mind one unbudgeable scientific reality: This is Santa Barbara, where nothing is ever simple.