It’s been a long and often lonely 14 months for business owners in Napa’s Oxbow district. In June of last year, the historic bridge that had carried First Street traffic across the Napa River since 1915 was closed for demolition and reconstruction, turning First Street into a dead-end just east of COPIA. A few months later, COPIA itself closed down, removing one of the chief reasons people were still visiting the two-block area between Soscol Avenue and the bridge. What remained was a hopeful-but-anxious group of vendors in the Oxbow Public Market, and a handful of neighboring businesses clustered around the intersection of First and McKinstry streets.
Without access to the Silverado Trail and eastside Napa, these merchants had to rely on customers’ ability to find a way around the obstruction; for many residents of the Alta Heights neighborhood, which overlooks the Oxbow district, the detour was simply too much trouble. (If that sounds lazy to you, you haven’t wasted enough of your life waiting for the lights to change at Third and Silverado. Trust me, it gets old fast.) Meanwhile, tourists entering Napa from the east were also forced to bushwhack their way north or south to locate the public market, the Napa Valley Wine Train and the seasonal farmers market in the Wine Train parking lot.
This month, all that is due to change with the opening of the replacement bridge to motor vehicles and bikes. Pedestrian access is expected to take a few more weeks, according to City of Napa spokesman Barry Martin. But the prospect of cars and bicycles carrying new customers to the area has vendors—including First Street’s newest tasting room, Uncorked at Oxbow, and the folks at Pica Pica Maize Kitchen, which is opening a bar inside the public market this month—hoping fervently for a much-needed infusion of business.
Steve Carlin, founder and CEO of the Oxbow Public Market, is even planning a big party to celebrate the bridge’s projected August 1 reopening. Carlin has hired the legendary Mean Time Playboys, featuring Carlene Carter’s guitarist Sean Allen, to play music for dancing; of course, there will be plenty of food as well. “Our vendors are going to set up and barbecue in the parking lot,” says Carlin. “It’ll be a fun outdoor event.” And Carlin knows how to create a fun event: His weekly “Locals Night” at the Oxbow has transformed Tuesday evenings from the slowest in the week to the market’s busiest, with live music and promotionally priced menu items drawing locals and tourists from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The Tuesday night event has become so successful it’s now being imitated downtown, where businesses in the old mill now known as the historic Hatt Building are hoping to attract similar crowds to their Wednesday “Locals Night” from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. There’s live music and specially priced food and drink; but while most of the Oxbow Public Market is enclosed and air-conditioned, the Hatt Building event is an outdoors affair, held on its riverside patio amid lush landscaping and mosaics. Other ways in which the Wednesday “Locals Night” differs from its Tuesday model on the other side of the river include $5 specialty cocktails at Celadon restaurant (none of the Oxbow vendors has a license for anything harder than wine and beer), $1-a-minute mini-massages from La Pelle Skin Spa, exhibitions of work by Napa Valley artists and 20-minute free walking tours of the landmark 19th century building.
Built over 40 years with bricks made from Napa River clay, the Hatt Building—named for Prussian-born Napa merchant Albert Hatt—has housed a grain mill, a feed warehouse and a skating rink over its long history. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the structure houses the Napa River Inn with its spa and gift shop, the Napa General Store with its restaurant and wine bar, Angele restaurant, Celadon, Silo’s Jazz Club (where you can hear much more than jazz) and both the Vintage Sweet Shoppe and Sweetie Pie’s Bakery. The riverside patio is also the home of an extraordinary piece of public art created by Napan Alan Shepp. It’s a multi-level fountain, depicting—in colorful mosaics—both the human history of the Napa Valley and the natural history of the Napa River. On the upper part are scenes of railroad construction, fruit harvesting and even a man soliciting a prostitute in the city’s old red-light district. On the lower level, there are fish, otters and other denizens of the river’s water. Shepp’s work has won an award of merit for public art from the Napa County Landmarks preservation association; I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve visited it, yet every time I take a few moments to gaze at the mosaics, I find myself discovering something new.
One thing I haven’t yet found in Shepp’s masterwork—though I’ll keep looking—is a reference to one of my favorite facts about Napa history: The loudspeaker was invented here in 1915, by Peter Jensen and Edwin Pridham. They were experimenting with ways to improve on the radio transmitter, when they discovered they could amplify sounds by stretching a coil of copper wire between two magnets. The two men named their invention the Magnavox—Latin for “great voice”—and it made its public debut a few months later during San Francisco’s annual Christmas Eve celebration.
When well-known attorney Thomas W. Hickey picked up a microphone and made the first amplified announcement in history, his thunderous voice astonished a crowd of 75,000 outside City Hall. Millions of rallies, football games and rock concerts later, the only local acknowledgement of this technological breakthrough is a small, shabby, slightly dented monument on First Street and some photographs and documents displayed at the nearby Goodman Library, home of the Napa County Historical Society.
Still, the creation of the Magnavox is celebrated in Napa every time we hear amplified sound—whether it’s on Tuesday at Oxbow, Wednesday at the Hatt Building, Thursday at Chefs Market, Friday at the Napa City Nights concerts in Veterans Memorial Park or any evening in our music-loving restaurants and wine bars. Turn it up!
