Congressman Josh Harder is going to be in Manteca today at 11 a.m. at the animal shelter to present an $850,000 check from the federal government to help with the shelter expansion project.
The mercury is expected to reach 98 degrees today and he’ll be within four blocks of the Dairy Queen which begs the question: Will he stop by to get a Blizzard?
“The Manteca Dairy Queen is my favorite Dairy Queen,” the Tracy Democrat said during an interview on Wednesday at the House of Mokha in downtown Manteca.
His favorite Blizzard?
It’s a half and half combination of Reece’s Pieces and Cookie Dough.
The history of the wall
& adjoining parking lot
In June 2022, the city bought “The Wall” where the new parklet is being created and adjoining parking lot for $80,000.
It stood for 40 plus years in the 300 block of West Yosemite Avenue in downtown Manteca.
“The Wall” was a ruin, if you will, of the start of downtown’s glory days,
The Roaring 20’s a century ago gave the downtown area of the city that had been incorporated five years prior a presence out-of-proportion to the city’s 1,286 residents.
It was an era long before Sam Walton opened his first Walmart or Jeff Bezos came up with the idea to sell books on the Internet via a company called Amazon.
The age of the super-commuter had yet to dawn. Traveling to San Jose or San Francisco was an overnight trip.
Yosemite Avenue was hotel row back then.
All except the Waukeen Hotel were second floor affairs. Some live on today as efficiency apartments.
The Waukeen Hotel was all hotel from the ground floor to the third floor.
It abutted “The Wall” and stood on the northwest corner of Yosemite and Sycamore avenues.
A deadly fire in the 1980s gutted the Waukeen and the adjoining building. All that was left was “The Wall.”
The 6,500 square-foot parcel has been committed to eventually become a five-story low-income senior housing complex in a deal the city enter into with a non-profit housing concern. The complex, however, may not break ground for five or so years at the least.
The city tore the wall down last year with the idea of eliminating the eyesore in the meantime and putting the area to community use.
The parking lot didn’t materialize until 20 plus years ago.
And it came about as a requirement that the city had of Lee’s Chinese restaurant to provide more parking. And the city was going to help that happen through the use of redevelopment agency funds once the business secured permission of the property owner to lease the space.
In what is one of the biggest colossal oops in the annuals of City Hall history, senior staff never bothered to verify that the property owner agreed that the vacant lot could be converted into a parking lot and had not entered a lease with the business owner.
That didn’t stop the city from using RDA funds to construct the parking lot.
Long story short, the property owner — when they found out — went ballistic. The city finished the RDA project that was already started.
It was immediately chained off for public use once the parking lot was completed.
To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com
