SOFA rising

Barbara Harris is the art production coordinator for Becoming Independent and manager at The Gallery of Sea and Heaven on A Street, in Santa Rosa. (Christopher Chung/PD)

Within walking distance of downtown Santa Rosa, the rustic A Street neighborhood near Juilliard Park seems a prime spot for visitors.

Long a haven for artists, both at public galleries and in private studios, the area has been evolving for the past decade. Locals have organized themselves as South of A Street, or SOFA, and now host several public street events a year.

But since the opening of the Spinster Sisters restaurant last month at the corner of Sebastopol Avenue and A Street, there’s a sense of new energy up and down the block.

(Look for the review of the Spinster Sisters by Jeff Cox, coming this Friday online at 707.pressdemocrat.com, and this Sunday in the Sonoma Living section of the Press Democrat)

“The neighborhood’s really jumping,” said Barbara Harris, who runs the Gallery of Sea and Heaven art gallery and artists’ studio complex on A Street.

“We’ve crossed a threshold, and we’re not going back,” Harris said. “A quarter of the people who come to our events say, ‘I’ve never been here,’ but once they’re here, they love it.”

Some neighborhoods seem to change almost overnight, but on A Street, the transformation has been gradually building for roughly a decade.

Nearly a century ago, the corner of Sebastopol Avenue and A Street, not far from downtown Santa Rosa, was a busy crossroads. Then the freeway arrived. By the latter decades of the 20th century, the A Street neighborhood, just behind Juilliard Park, had a reputation for drugs, transients and crime.

“It was sketchy down here 20 years ago, but now it’s a vibrant, welcoming neighborhood,” Harris said.