VACAVILLE — Cooperation, not competition, marks the relationship between the city and Fairfield, Vacaville Mayor Len Augustine has said, although a rivalry seems to remain.
Vacaville’s vibrant downtown contrasts with the central business district in Fairfield that’s often described as still reeling from the decades old Solano Town Center mall.
Some of the problems associated with Fairfield’s status as the county seat – inmates released from the Solano County jail, it’s said, sometimes stay on the streets of Fairfield – don’t pop up in Vacaville.
Still, the northern neighbor of Fairfield shares many similar municipal traits. Vacaville reaches back for a century but like much of California it was after World War II that Vacaville boomed.
Population now puts the municipality at third in Solano County, behind Vallejo and Fairfield, although many Vacaville residents would say that’s a contest they’re not entering.
Rather than look at numbers, Vacaville’s boosters say its benefits include a thriving downtown and a quality of life unmatched in Solano County.
Long known as the home of the Nut Tree, the restaurant and shops along Interstate 80, Vacaville saw the retail establishment close in 1996 but reopen as a reborn commercial center in 2009.
Vacaville is not a city stuck in the past, but many residents are sweet on the old Nut Tree and what it represents.
When a sign along Interstate 80 marking the former business was taken down in March 2015, devotees of the old Nut Tree were there to mourn and memorialize the moment.
Shawn Lum, executive director of the Vacaville Museum, was there to help preserve two of the 12-ton panels of the 72-foot-tall sign that marked the site of the Nut Tree restaurant, the historic site where a San Francisco mayor was once said – erroneously he insisted – to have met with the Mafia.
“I wish it wasn’t happening,” said Lum, who handed out final paychecks when the Nut Tree closed in 1996 – and said in March that dismantling of the restaurant sign wasn’t as traumatic as the Nut Tree’s end.
Still, the half-century-old sign represented a part of what made Vacaville, Lum said, a monument of cement and crushed glass that took two years to build – and a day to take down, panel by panel.
“It was, for want of a better term, like looking at Disneyland,” Lum said of the Nut Tree and the freeway sign that was work of Don Birrell, the late design director for the Nut Tree.
A decade-old development agreement called for the sign’s removal and a Saks Fifth Avenue outlet was built on the property where Lum once worked as human resources manager for the restaurant.
The Nut Tree, Lum said, was for decades the successful business of a family of entrepreneurs. Over time, though, it became like the Titanic, she said.
“It was big. It was grand. It was expensive,” Lum said. “The Nut Tree was too big to change. It wasn’t nimble enough.”
Solano County Supervisor John Vasquez saw the sign as an icon and he was at the site to secure one of the six panels for history. “I want to leave it right where it’s at,” he said. But plans were to haul the parts of the sign off the property, Vasquez said.
Richard Rico, former owner and publisher of the Vacaville Reporter, spoke at the site about how “people of my generation pretty much grew up with the Nut Tree.”
“It’s sad and nostalgic,” he said of the sign’s end, “the last vestige of what we knew as the Nut Tree.”
Now Vacaville is better known as the home to life-science companies that include Genentech, Alza and Chiron.
Vacaville at a glance
- City Hall: 650 Merchant St.
- Website: www.cityofvacaville.com
- City manager: Jeremy Craig. Reach at 449-5100, [email protected]
- Mayor: Len Augustine. Elected in 2014, term expires in 2018. He previously served two terms as mayor. Reach at [email protected]
- Vice Mayor: Dilenna Harris. Elected in 2008. Term expires in 2020. Reach at [email protected]
- Councilman: Ron Rowlett. Elected in 2008. Term expires in 2020. Reach at [email protected]: Dilenna Harris. Elected in 2008. Term expires in 2016. Reach at [email protected]
- Councilman: Mitch Mashburn. Elected in 2010. Term expires in 2018. Reach at [email protected]
- Councilman: Curtis Hunt. Appointed in 2007. Elected in 2010. Term expires in 2018. Reach at [email protected]
