Downtown Bakersfield From Chester Avenue: A Skyline Built by Oil, Rail and Reinvention
Downtown Bakersfield's towers, theaters and older commercial blocks tell the story of a city built on oil and agriculture — best read on a cool November walk along Chester Avenue.
Downtown Bakersfield is compact enough to read in a single walk, and Chester Avenue is its spine. Along it stand the markers of the city's successive booms: early commercial buildings from the railroad era, the Fox Theater's tower, banks and office blocks from the oil decades, and the civic buildings of a county seat that serves one of California's largest counties by land area. In November's mild weather, the downtown core is an easy place to take that history in on foot.
The skyline tells the economic story honestly. Bakersfield grew on agriculture and then on oil, and its downtown has always been a headquarters and services center for the fields, both kinds, that surround it. The Haberfelde and other early twentieth-century blocks along Chester and the side streets survive as the physical record of the first boom, while the arena and theater district at the core's western side carry the city's entertainment business today.
Downtown has spent years in the familiar American cycle of decline and reinvestment. Older buildings have found new uses, restaurants and offices have returned to historic blocks, and the Fox Theater and the arena anchor event nights that bring the whole county, from Rosedale to Oildale, into the center at once. The work is unfinished, as downtown work always is, but the raw material, a real street grid, real history and a county's worth of institutions, is all present.
November is the kind season for exploring it. Highs in the low to mid-70s and cool evenings make downtown comfortable from morning to after dark, a fact Bakersfield residents, who plan around summer heat as a way of life, appreciate more than most Californians. A walk that strings together Chester Avenue, the theater district and the museum a few blocks north covers the city's essentials in an afternoon.
Every oil and farm city eventually has to decide what its center is for. Bakersfield's answer is being written storefront by storefront, and a fall walk along Chester is the best way to check the progress in person.
