Halloween looked the part this afternoon: cool and misty, almost clammy. By dark, 22 kids had come by. Twenty-two in ’22. We gave away full-sized candy bars.
This isn’t the California State Capitol.
Such is the zeitgeist that someone, somewhere could claim that it is, and that nefarious persons — lizard people, even — are up to no good inside, and it would have some chance of being believed, at least by a fraction of the population.
I won’t be that person. That’s the Golden 1 Center. It happens to be in Sacramento too, and I happened to see it. I will say that it has some interesting detail.
Design by AECOM and Mark Dziewulski Architect, the arena was completed only in 2016 and is home of the Sacramento Kings, a team originally formed 99 years ago as the Rochester Seagrams. The development of Golden 1 Center was a “long-running and convoluted… drama,” according to the Sacramento Bee.
Anyway, this is the state capitol of California. It has interesting detail of its own.
San Francisco architect Reuben S. Clark, clearly inspired by the U.S. Capitol, designed the building, which was constructed between 1861 and ’74. Sacramento had been state capital since 1854, apparently picked as a midway point between where the action was in early U.S. California, namely the Sierra Nevada gold fields to the east and the port of San Francisco to the west.
The building is currently undergoing renovation. The park behind the capitol, which takes up many whole city blocks, was entirely closed off by a temporary wall (ah, that’s where the lizard people are scheming).
Too bad. I hear it’s quite a park. But Lilly and I could get into the capitol itself, via a temporary covered walkway through a construction site, and through metal detectors.
If there’s a rotunda, the thing to do is look up at it.
State capitols tend to feature portraits of governors, and California is no different. Some are more recognizable than others, though I imagine even Arnold’s fame will fade over the coming decades.
On the other hand, Minerva isn’t likely to fade from her fame among classicists, eccentrics and a few schoolchildren.
Minerva and not Athena because the signs with this depiction of state seal (mounted in the capitol) called her Minerva, and besides, Athena has been associated with another place for thousands of years.
A few other details about the seal. The bear is a California grizzly which, despite being important to California symbolism, was hunted to extinction. There are 31 stars, the state being the 31st to join the union. A miner toils for gold, and ships connect California to the rest of the world in the early days.
Why Minerva? She was born fully an adult from Jupiter’s brow. As for California, it was born fully a state, skipping territorial status.