Sacramento restaurateur wants to turn Cesar Chavez Park into cultural hub

SACRAMENTO — Scott Ford sees Cesar Chavez Park every day. As executive director of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, his office is just across the street from the park that owns a prime piece of real estate at the intersection of I, J, 9th and 10th streets. 

"It's a great civic asset and in a lot of ways it's been an underperforming asset for many generations," Ford explained. 

Natasha Wilson, a hospitality manager for the Ernesto Delgado Hospitality Group, has noticed a bit of an uptick in foot traffic as of late. 

"It's getting better," she said. "People are hybrid. You get a lot of local people. Bikes, families coming here. The coffee shop helps."  

Wilson's boss, local restaurateur Ernesto Delgado, is aiming to reimagine the park as a cultural hub. Currently, Cesar Chavez Park is the site of a Concert in the Park series. 

"It's definitely helping get more traffic in here," said Wilson. "More vibrant, more community, more family coming through."

But now, behind Delgado as well as multiple civic organizations and city leaders, there is a vision for more. The first step is more investments in chairs, tables and things to make the park more vibrant.

"The next phase is lawn games, roaming book carts that introduce literacy into the public realm," Ford mentioned. 

Wilson said there are plans for pop-ups outside of vacant storefronts, plans for bringing K Street's old Wednesday market concept to Chavez Park on Thursdays and other ways to bring people into the park. But Delgado's vision is also specific to the namesake of the park. The hope is that it becomes a hub for the city's Hispanic population, which is roughly 30% of the total population of Sacramento.

Renderings of the reimagined park include street art and new signage along with plans to bring more Hispanic-centered cultural events to the area.

"How can these culturally centered locations drive more of the cultural events that align to our population, in this case, Hispanics particularly, right?" asked Anna Padilla-Marquez, the communications director for the Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "This is one of many and this will hopefully help open the doors to many other projects ahead."

With so many parks in the city, Padilla-Marquez hopes that other parks follow suit. Wilson sees the utility of parks as a cultural touchstone and feels this may be the start of a new set of communal events. 

"I think all cultural places get forgotten but they're the places that bring people together so let's start doing that," Wilson said.

As vacant buildings and storefronts still stretch around the area of the park, Ford hopes that the park's revitalization will make the real estate around it increasingly attractive to retailers and residential developers. 

"Downtown really starts to have a different feel to it and it feels as connected as we want this to be and that's the big vision that we're working towards," Ford explained. 

"It's a representation of the diverse population that we have here in Sacramento and our Greater Sacramento region, so yes having more of these spaces, not just for Hispanics but for the diversity that we have in this community is crucial," Padilla-Marquez concluded.

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