Bill Lynch: New life for old corner on Broadway

‘Gateway Project’ at Truck and Auto site has been a long time coming|

The recent announcement in the Index-Tribune that a use permit had been granted by the city for “The Gateway Project,” a multi-use development with 33 housing units and 3,500 square-feet of retail space, will revive that derelict and dreary acreage at the corner of Broadway and East MacArthur St.

It was at one time a lively center of local education and commerce that goes all the way back to 1864 when it was the site of a school called Cumberland College. In 1906 the building was renovated and became Sonoma Valley Union High School.

My grand aunt Celeste Murphy, attended high school there. The high school campus we see today, a block south was established in 1823.

Starting in the early 1920s, while the high school was still on the site, but set back several hundred feet from Broadway, the first Ford Motor Company agency was established in front of it.

There was a story in the April 1, 1922 edition of the I-T that reported the business of the “Busby & Coats Ford agency is good. …Purchasers of new touring cars include C. Dresel, K Hylander, MacKenzie & Kearny, C.J. Kiser, J.R. Walton and F.W. Peterson.”

In the late 1940s, Hutch Whitehead, a local businessman, took over the dealership and ran it for several decades. He was active in the local Chamber of Commerce and sponsored one of the softball teams that played first at the old field where the Black Bear Diner is today, and after 1952 at Arnold Field.

In the 1970s, Ford opened a new agency on Highway 12, where the Sonoma Community Health Center is today.

The former Ford agency site was taken over by Bob Bohna, who operated it as Country Motors and then Sonoma Truck an Auto used-car agency for the next 39 years. The dilapidated old high school building behind it was used to store cars.

Bob passed away in January of 2010. And eventually the site was put on the market. Since then a variety of proposals for developing the site have been floated before various city bodies, but nothing stuck until now.

It will be good to see that site improved, and Sonoma certainly needs the 33 housing units.

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