It’s not cars on State Street. It’s unending construction on the 101.

By NATHAN VONK

Sullivan Goss Gallery has been part of Santa Barbara’s downtown community for more than 30 years, making it one of the older retail businesses. We regularly collect address information from our customers so that we can deliver, install or ship paintings to collectors when an exhibition ends. We do business with people from all over the country. But most of our sales — nearly 50 percent over the past two decades — are to people in one zip code: 93108, aka Montecito. 

In recent years, my colleagues and I have noticed that we have been making fewer and fewer deliveries to our neighbors just down the 101. So while visitors were scarce during July’s extended heatwave, I decided to dive into our institutional database to see if I could get a measure of what was going on. The results were surprising, and suggest that the heated discussion we have been having about cars on State Street might be missing the point entirely.

After many years of slight fluctuation, our business with Montecitans more than doubled in 2020,  when people were unable to easily travel, see movies, attend performances or dine out. As a result, people focused their spending on sprucing up their isolation chambers. They remodeled. They built additions. When the new construction was finished, there were bare walls that needed new art. And for the next three years, people came downtown to appreciate art at Sullivan Goss in record numbers. 

In May 2020, as the pandemic settled in, State Street closed to auto traffic and many shops and restaurants spilled out onto what became a promenade of people, eager, despite the worldwide pandemic, to carry on with living and be safely around other people. The record sales we had during the first three years of the promenade — and that I know my friends who own restaurants also had, with the explosion of al fresco dining — suggest that State Street’s closure was no hindrance to getting people downtown to shop and dine.

So what happened in 2023 that caused sales to suddenly drop by 50 percent from the previous year to pre-pandemic levels? There still were no cars on State Street. But traffic elsewhere in the area — especially due to construction on the 101 — can absolutely explain the downturn since.

In 2023, the freeway widening project moved north over Ortega Ridge from Summerland and began to have a significant impact on travel between Montecito and Santa Barbara. Since then, with freeway entrances and exits closed through Montecito, traffic in the area has become increasingly tedious and time consuming. As a result, it has become increasingly hard to persuade people from the 93108 to come to downtown Santa Barbara. Now that the freeway construction has overtaken Hot Springs Road, our sales to Montecitans for the first six months of 2026 suggest we will have another record breaking year — but not the kind you celebrate.

We have been fixated on the fight over cars on State Street when we ought to acknowledge the impact of construction on the 101.

For the restaurants, retail establishments and cultural institutions downtown that rely on business from Montecito — and we all do — the current impact of freeway construction seems far more significant. As further evidence, consider the daily traffic jam that clogs Coast Village Road.

Yet no one has been talking about this. Not city hall, not the downtown business community, not the chamber of commerce.

Locals, especially those from 93108, have more buying power than all of the tourists combined who visit our beautiful city each year. It is locals who sustain the art and culture that make Santa Barbara such a special place. If we continue moving toward a State Street where art and culture thrive, then when freeway construction finally ends, State Street will still be a unique place that locals and tourists alike are excited to visit.

Nathan Vonk owns the Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara.

STATE STREET WAS BUILT FOR PEOPLE — KEEP IT THAT WAY [Edhat]

We can do better

YARDI UNVEILS EARLY DESIGNS [Independent]

MOTHER OF CITY’S POLITICAL MATRIARCHY DIES [Independent]

VIDEO: REMEMBERING SHEILA LODGE

Sheila Lodge (from Pearl Chase with love)          

By LUIS MORENO | October 29, 1992

Presented at the Museum of Natural History performance of political humor, Calaveras, a Mexican Dia de los Muertes tradition, by the Santa Barbara Theater Co.

Dearly beloved
We are gathered in prayer
To pay last respects 
To Santa Barbara’s mayor.

Through thick and thin 
She paid her dues —
At ribbon cuttings 
and barbecues.

Most politically correct
Was Ms. Sheila Lodge
I believe she recycled
Out of her garage.

But she angered some motorists 
When she tried to close off State;
They weren’t going to be “malled.”
They would retaliate.

She tried to convince them
It would reduce air pollution,
But they considered this
A pedestrian solution.

So they took this matter
Into their own hands,
And organized squadrons
Of cars, trucks and vans.

As they descended upon her
She made gestures to talk.  
Then she was run down,
Caught in the crosswalk.

That familiar smiling face
That once graced our stage
Was now out of focus
On the News-Press front page.

The County Coroner declared
Right after the cremation
That Mayor Sheila Lodge succumbed
Due to poor circulation.

Sheila Lodge submitted this poem from her files 34 years later to the Independent to be published alongside her obituary, which she wrote herself.

IN MEMORIAM: SHEILA LODGE (1929-2026)

By THOMAS REYNOLDS
for the Montecito Journal

Sheila Lodge, the first woman mayor of Santa Barbara and its longest-serving, died on July 8 at age 97. She probably always will be Santa Barbara’s longest-serving mayor, since term limits now restrict her successors to two terms.

She is less known all the way over in Montecito, which is not part of Santa Barbara except Coast Village Road, annexed for its sales tax revenue.

That had some advantages during her long political career — first as planning commissioner in the 1970s, then on the city council for six years, then as mayor for 12 years. Later she unretired and went back on the Planning Commission for another 16 years — and then, after retiring to get a new hip at 95, onto the Historic Landmarks Commission until the end of her life.

By then she herself had became a historic landmark, a sometimes lonely voice that for nearly a century after modern Santa Barbara was created following the 1925 earthquake kept reminding people how Santa Barbara had become such a special place: through careful planning that strictly limited growth to only what its natural resources could accommodate, and vigorous citizen involvement that made certain city leaders kept the faith. Also: that the earthquake wasn’t as devastating as it’s remembered, but merely cleared the way for Bernard and Irene Hoffmann to begin realizing their dream of a Santa Barbara that honored its Spanish and Mexican heritage with a cohesive architecture and the nation’s first Architectural Board of Review. “It wasn’t Pearl Lodge!” she insisted.

That Montecito was not part of Santa Barbara was something she frequently mentioned in her speeches when she was mayor. Contrary to popular myth, she maintained, Santa Barbara was not, in fact, a wealthy town. It was in the bottom half of California counties in per capita income. That was because Montecito and Hope Ranch weren’t actually part of Santa Barbara — and that’s where much of the big money was, and still is.

When she unretired again at 95 and went onto the Historic Landmarks Commission, she thought a new portrait was in order, even though she still looked pretty much as she had in the portrait used on the back cover of her book, Santa Barbara: An Uncommonplace American Town, locally published in 2020. Using an old photo wouldn’t be honest, she said.

Sheila Lodge died as she lived. When the pain in her new hip returned and became too much to bear, she called her doctor and told him, “I’m done here.” He ordered up the end-of-life medicine allowed under California law. She took it four days later, after all four of her daughters arrived.

The hospice nurse warned her it could take up to 18 hours to be fully effective, but that she would be peaceful and unaware. It took her almost 40 hours. She died on the morning of July 8, in the home she herself designed, atop Mission Ridge, with a view of the mountains and the shimmering blue channel surrounding the city she loved.

‘A pedestrian-first, park-like place’

From the report:

Before 2020, State Street was one of the premier retail venues in California, its unique form, reputation, and performance steadily increasing over time. Since 2020, several important national retail trends have conspired to reduce its expected evolution: the expansion of internet sales, the collapse of the department stores at Paseo Nuevo, and the erosion of its development potential due to uncertainty about its future. Yet, despite being subject to all these negative trends, its appearance remains poor and its current mix of modes chaotic; however, sales and tax receipts have plateaued, but not decreased.

A flex scheme reorders the form of State Street according to its traditional 75-year pattern as a pedestrian-first, park-like place. It recognizes its subdistricts and takes advantage of the ample garage parking that serves them. It acknowledges mode mixes unique to the mobility needs of citizens and visitors alike. It proposes infra-structural and ecological improvements and offers recommendations for the many actions the city needs to take in support of the proposed changes. Continuing the traditional trajectory of this extraordinary place will strengthen its claim as the commercial center of your city. Its physical regeneration also stands a good chance of achieving the full range of social and financial objectives expressed by the citizens of Santa Barbara.

DRAFT STATE STREET MASTER PLAN
APPENDICES, INCLUDING THE MOULE & POLYZOIDES REPORT
SITELINE’S SUMMARY

CITY HIRES NEW CONSULTANT FOR STATE STREET MASTER PLAN

MORE ABOUT STEFANOS POLYZOIDES

YOU’D NEVER KNOW it’s the end of summer. Toasty days and balmy nights are greeting visitors to Santa Barbara this Labor Day weekend — along with these cheery new umbrellas at Andersen’s.

MUSIC ACADEMY LAUNCHING DOWNTOWN MUSIC EDUCATION CENTER