To be fair, I need to give at least recognition to both sides. The side that wants a general annexation into a bigger Santa Clarita has a general belief that bigger is better. In many cases, bigger is better. But this is not true in every situation. For example, I will be very relieved if the cold I am suffering from today doesn’t get any bigger.
But I feel I understand individuals who want their stages to get bigger. It is natural to want the play you are performing in at a tiny regional playhouse to be good enough to perform the play on a big Broadway stage in the big city.
So I understand why there is a natural animal feeling that – if you are a mayor or a city council representative – you would rather represent a city of 300,000 than 150,000. It is also understandable if you are a local newspaper person of any level – owner, publisher, editor or reporter – you feel you are getting closer to the major leagues if the city your newspaper represents suddenly gets twice as big in area and population.
But for the great majority of the ordinary people living in these cities, making things bigger gives everyone a bigger headache.
I am not trying to make some tightly-wound people mad with these words. You have only to look as far as Fresno to see what happens when a city slams on an accelerator with the hope that growth will lead to greatness. In fact, Fresno is the only California city I know whose recent acceleration in its Fresno Valley equals the kind of rocket-explosion that Santa Clarita has experienced in its Santa Clarita Valley.
To be fair to Fresno, there are many fine aspects to the community. After all, I am a graduate of Fresno State. But Fresno State has become too cloistered from the hurly-burly of the city of Fresno. The fine teaching professors at Fresno State act as if the mishmash of the city were beneath them, and so they have set up their own isolated university city on Shaw Avenue.
Fresno still has some outstanding isolated aspects.
The city has one of the best zoos I have ever seen, which is accompanied by an equally impressive recreational lake and boating area for families. It has one elegant outdoor shopping mall, and it also has what I believe to be the best science museum for children that I have ever visited. Plus it has a great little art museum led with original art by the iconic Mexican painter Diego Rivera.
But Fresno grew so rapidly and disproportionately over the past fifty years that it has left the end result of bodily deformity. Downtown Fresno has such anarchy that most shops are afraid to stay open after six o’clock. Because of urban-squalor fear, even most of the downtown restaurants close before a civilized dinner hour. Outside of the downtown area, the rest of Fresno looks like it has been orphaned and abandoned.
But that is typical of what happens to cities of rapid growth. Growth does not make great or even good cities. If there is one quality that practically formats a city to become good or even great, it is a pervasive influence of good art and architecture.
I know that statement makes me sound like an artistic snob. Still, I guarantee around that a city whose community theater amounts to keeping its rabbit costume for repeated performances of “Harvey” will not have the property values and the quality of life of a city that stages the best modern … and I mean truly modern … plays and musicals.
You can ask yourself this question. Can simply multiplying the area and population of the city of Santa Clarita make it more like a New York City with its artistic magic, or would it make it more like a Rochester? Or would annexations build it into something like a London with its artistic magic, or would it make it more like a Manchester?
The answer is that a city no matter how small will offer a better quality of life than anything tens times its size if the smaller city’s art is better, newer and has better outreach.
Aside from the examples of great little cities I gave last week, consider little East Haddam, Connecticut with its centuries-long support and operation of its Goodspeed Opera House. This is an opera house that is still feeding New York and the outer world courageous new operas and musicals, and the impact has lifted the quality of life of its 8,000 people into a higher stratosphere.
Even Santa Clarita is starting to develop the confidence to stage modern plays and performing arts. Witness the Canyon Guild Theater’s current staging of “Phantom” with a book by Arthur Kopit. At age 72 Kopit can no longer be considered a young playwright, but he has always been and always will be a catalyst of modern American theatre.
I’m just hoping that once Santa Clarita producer TimBen Boydston gets comfortable with the work of writers like Kopit, he might cowboy up into staging works by such as Beth Henley, Brian Friel, Lanford Wilson, August Wilson, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and all the great Pulitzer Prize winning plays the Santa Clarita Valley has missed out on over the past thirty years.
All in all, it is much better to live in an all-too-rare arts city than an all-too-common far city.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.