Fremont Park's Redesign Keeps Circling Back to a Pool That Was Never Built

Come into Fremont Park from Fourth Street and the layout pulls you north. A brick path runs between two rows of narrow, columnar Irish yews and ends at the dry fountain near the Fifth Street sidewalk. It feels formal, as if every piece is where it was meant to be. It isn't. Howard Gilkey drew this axis in 1929. In his plan, the space between those yew rows was water, a long rectangular reflecting pool with stone coping and a metal trash basket at each corner.

The pool was never built. That gap matters more now than it has in almost a century, because Santa Rosa has reopened the redesign of the 1.7-acre park between Fourth and Fifth streets. The two loudest arguments are about the yews and the fountain, the two features that were built specifically to frame water.

What Gilkey Drew, and What Santa Rosa Could Afford

The city's 2023 Historic Resource Assessment, prepared by the Berkeley firm MIG, lays out the original sequence. It started at Fourth Street with three brick paths meeting at a terrace with a small circular fountain. Next came a sunken promenade with the long pool between a double row of trees. Irish yews formed the inner rows, and double red flowering peaches were to stand between them on the outside. The promenade stepped up to an oval plaza with an elliptical lily pool. A three-tier stone fountain sat at the north end, with water pouring from a lion's head.

Gilkey's own note on the plot plan shows how the water was supposed to move:

"Water enters cascade thru lion head, spills into elliptical pool, thence overflows into bubbler in pool thence, over flows into sewer. Fountain jet in small pool from main supply – overflows into long pool."

The park went in from 1930 to about 1932, and the Great Depression cut into both labor and money. Newspapers from the time say both pools were staked out on the ground. Only the elliptical lily pool was finished, in 1931. The outline of the long pool got a flower bed "as a temporary measure" while funding stalled, and that bed stayed for decades. According to the city's study, the Cancer Survivors Memorial was installed in that same footprint in 1997.

The park you walk through today is a partial build. The yews line the edges of a pool that never existed, and the fountain was the start of a water system that was never completed.

Why the First Redesign Stalled in 2022

Santa Rosa took its first run at the park in 2021 and 2022. The Press Democrat reported in March 2022 that the city had shown four concepts with a $2.5 million renovation budget funded by development impact fees. Ideas included a dog park, a playground, bocce courts and skate park features. Two of the layouts kept some yews, four trees in one and two in the other, and two removed them entirely. None kept the historic water features or the Cancer Survivors statue.

The pushback focused on history. Former mayor Jane Bender told the paper that removing the original features would take away what makes Fremont unique among city parks. She called it "a beautiful, downtown kind of contemplative kind of park," and also acknowledged how hard the nearly century-old water feature is to maintain. Brian Meuser, then chair of the city's Cultural Heritage Board, raised the idea of making the park a city landmark and said he wanted the fountain restored. Bill Montgomery, the city's deputy parks director from 1990 to 2003, suggested the yews could be pruned, narrowed or thinned to every other tree instead of removed.

The city paused the master plan to study whether the park was historically significant. The answer reshaped the second round. MIG concluded that Fremont Park is eligible for individual listing in both the California Register of Historical Resources and the National Register of Historic Places, based on its ties to community planning and landscape architecture. MIG also said the park should be treated as a historical resource during design review.

Being eligible is not the same as being designated. As the Press Democrat noted this October, the park is not a designated historical site. The city is using federal rehabilitation guidelines as a framework, and city parks planner Scott Wilkinson described the approach as honoring the spirit of those guidelines rather than following them as a strict prescription.

Two Concepts, Two Ways to Finish an Unfinished Park

About 50 people came to a community meeting on Sept. 30 at First Church of Christ, Scientist on Hope Street, next to the park. MIG is leading the design work this time, and it showed two concepts.

Neither concept rebuilds the long pool. Read against Gilkey's plan, each one takes a different stance on the half-finished axis. Concept one treats the yews and fountain as leftovers of a design that never came together and swaps them for shade and seating. Concept two keeps the outline of the formal axis and makes the fountain a place to gather instead of a water feature.

MIG landscape architect Cathy Garrett told the room the two schemes aren't fixed. "This is a set of things to react to. Each scheme is not sacrosanct. You can borrow pieces," she said, as the Press Democrat reported.

The Yews Are the Debate Because They Were Built for the Pool

The yews became the main argument for a reason. Supporters see the two parallel rows as central to Gilkey's vision. People who want them thinned or removed say they block sightlines across the park. The paper reported one attendee backing a plan that kept a good number of the trees, followed immediately by another calling out, "Down with the yews!"

Both sides are partly right about the history. The yews are original to Gilkey's design. They were also meant to stand beside a sheet of water that would have kept the center of the park open to view. With the pool missing, the two rows enclose a narrow corridor, and that corridor is where the sightline problem comes from.

The room agreed on one point. Few attendees liked "forever lawn," the artificial turf that showed up in both proposals.

The Cancer Survivors Plaza is part of the same question. The installation sits in the central walkway between the yews. It was donated by the Richard & Annette Bloch Family Foundation and is one of 24 such installations around the country, according to the foundation. The Press Democrat reported that neither 2026 plan keeps the metal statues.

A Neighborhood Park With More Neighbors Than Gilkey Planned For

The pressure on these 1.7 acres has grown. The 108-unit 888 Fourth Street apartment complex now stands across Fourth Street from the park. Santa Rosa City Schools recently put security fencing around its campuses, including the Santa Rosa French-American Charter School site across the street. According to the Press Democrat, that leaves Fremont Park as the only accessible green space in the immediate area. Attendees asked the city to plan for how the neighborhood is changing and not only for how it's used today.

The comparison point is a few blocks south. Gilkey also designed Juilliard Park, the 9-acre park between Santa Rosa Avenue and South A Street, with its rose garden, bocce courts, concrete-lined waterway and the footbridge that shows up in so many engagement and graduation photos. Fremont was built on many of the same ideas at a much smaller scale. Juilliard got room to spread out. Fremont has to fit play areas, shade and a historic axis into less than a fifth of the space.

The name may come up as well. When an attendee brought up John C. Fremont's legacy, Wilkinson called the park's future name "a valid question." That same month, the state proposed renaming Fremont Peak State Park "tooyohtak State Park," an Ohlone word meaning "place of the bumblebee."

What Happens After Friday

The city's community survey covers both layouts and individual elements such as play structures and surface materials. It closes Friday, Oct. 30. After that, the process looks like this:

1. Further input from community stakeholders and the city's Recreation and Parks Department.
2. A refined design, which can mix pieces of both concepts according to MIG.
3. A City Council vote.
4. A bid process, with construction targeted for fall 2028.

The construction budget is now $3.5 million, up from the $2.5 million reported in 2022. That figure does not include design, permitting or project administration costs.

There's still time to walk the axis before the design is settled. Start at the Fourth Street entrance and stand between the yews. The strip of ground under your feet is where Gilkey drew his long pool in 1929.

Rhonda keeps track of how civic projects like the Fremont Park redesign affect the downtown blocks around them. If you live near Fremont Park and want to talk about what your home is worth, Rhonda Alderman can show you how she would present it. Request Your Complimentary Home Valuation.