City, Napa County
© McCormack's Guides
Zip Codes: 94558, 94559, 94581
Largest and most populous city in the county. Dedicated to fine living. Pays a lot of attention to the arts, to wining and dining and to tourists. www.mccormacks.com
An attractive city with scads of undeveloped land at its city limits but also a city that intends to stay within those limits.
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At the insistence of residents, who do not want to encroach deeper into the vineyards, the city council has drawn what is called the Rural Urban Limit Line around the city of 77,106 residents. Inside the line, houses, stores, offices and factories may be erected. Outside, only the vine and flora may be grown. www.mccormacks.com
The results: no one knows yet but the fear— if it can be called that — is that property values will ascend and that the poor and many of the middle class will be driven out, changing the town’s character, which can be approximately described as low income to middle-America traditional.
Copia has everyone's tongue wagging. Funded by $55 million in private money and a $70 million bond, Copia is the brainchild of Robert Mondavi, an energetic vintner famous for taking chances. Among Copia's offerings: a first-class restaurant, a museum, cooking classes, concerts, wine tastings, modern kitchens, three-acre garden, and exhibits on food controversies and problems, such as famines and genetic foods. Many people are not quite sure what to make out of Copia but it has generated much interest in the world of wine and cuisine. On its opening day, it was front page in the New York Times (western edition). www.mccormacks.com
Some predict that Copia will make Napa a destination city and attract 300,000 more visitors a year. The city has approved plans for more hotels. The old opera house was restored into a 400-seat concert hall and the community theater renovated. An esplanade is being built along the river. Many stores are fixing up, in anticipation of the visitors. Bistros, delis, sidewalk cafes, upscale restaurants. Brick crosswalks. Ornamental lights. Murals celebrating the town's history. Old buildings preserved; bank now a wine bar.
Median age of Napa residents is 36. Children and teens under 18 make up 26 percent of town. Rounded demographics. www.mccormacks.com
Schools
Academic rankings across the spectrum, low, middle and high but many kids scoring above 50th and 70th percentiles, some above the 90th. Bond passed in 1996; money was spent repairing roofs and upgrading heating, plumbing and electrical, and wiring school for computers. Another bond passed in 2004 to renovate and build schools.
School district has several alternate schools and charter schools that put variety into educational choices. See Schools. www.mccormacks.com
Crime
Crime rate low. Two homicides in 2004, zero homicides in 2003 and 2002, one each in 2001 and 2000, two in 1999, one in 1998, two in 1997, zero in 1996, two in 1995, one in 1994, three in 1993, two in 1992. The counts for the previous years are one, one, zero, three. See Crime.
Commute
About 50 miles to downtown San Francisco, an awful slog on many a morning and evening. But if you work locally or in Santa Rosa or in Contra Costa or Solano, the commute is more endurable. See Commuting. www.mccormacks.com
Weather
In winter, temperatures usually sail between 37 and 57 degrees; in summer, 52 and 82. On summer mornings, giant balloons and their gondolas rise from the valley floor, float around for a few hours, then touch down before the warmer, erratic winds show themselves.
Winter rains in the past occasionally have flooded parts of the downtown. In 1998, Napa County voted in a flood control plan that should relieve pressure on the trouble spots (but in the heavy rains of winter 2005-6, a few downtown streets flooded.) www.mccormacks.com
Salmon are making a comeback in the river.
Pretty town. Trees galore, their leaves dappling the sunlight and in the fall dazzling the town with color. With few exceptions, well-kept and pretty: lawns mowed, shrubs trimmed, streets clean, homes painted. Old fashioned street lights. Sidewalk cafes, many restaurants. Victorians, Queen Annes, bungalows; sense of history. Napa River flows through town. Wine country at your doorstep. www.mccormacks.com
Because of its charms and beauty, Napa has a reputation of being Upscale and Pricey. Many parts of the city are in fact U and P and require a robust income. But Napa City has its affordable neighborhoods.
Before gold was discovered in the Sierra, Napa (after the Nappa Indians) had been surveyed and laid out as a “city.” It was nourished first by cattle and lumber, then by mercury mined from the nearby mountains. The first settlers planted wines and pressed the grapes, and in 1861 wine making as a business took off with the introduction of Riesling cuttings. www.mccormacks.com
As novel as this may sound, many towns around the Bay Region followed similar paths: They started as trading centers, then became farm centers connected by rail and road to the large cities.
Napa, however, turned out different. Besides the wineries, it had for a job base the state mental hospital and the city being the county seat, the county government buildings. As a result, Napa was by 1940 a solid town of about 7,700 residents living in about 2,500 residences. www.mccormacks.com
When the great migration swept over California following World War II, it turned countless small towns into bedroom suburbs, destroyed their commercial centers, and created new centers that seemed to exist only for freeway traffic. In American literature, precisely when millions of Americans were delighting in their new surroundings, “suburban” came to suggest the bland, the rootless and the fragmented.
