To the casual observer, Town and Country Village is simply a unique shopping center, which is located in the northeastern part of Sacramento. And although this is a factual statement, there is much more to the intrigue of the shopping center, which is often referred to as The Village.

It has been 62 years since a visionary contractor, named Jere Strizek, had a 90-foot building containing a market and several small stores built at the corner of Fulton and Marconi avenues. This was the first of the structures, which would eventually occupy The Village’s initial 42,890 square feet of store space.

Although The Village, which officially opened in 1946, has undergone a variety of changes throughout its history, including separate expansions of 60,000 and 191,000 square feet of additional store space, there is undeniably one aspect about this site that will continue to remain unchanged.

That aspect is The Village’s notoriety as the oldest shopping center in Northern California.

But this distinction alone is certainly not this center’s only unique highlight.

It Takes a Village
When The Village sprouted up in practically the middle of nowhere, its location was somewhat odd, yet nonetheless systematically placed.

Sacramento resident Penny Kastanis remembers seeing the center during its earliest years.

“When they built Town and Country, there was hardly anything out there,” Kastanis said. “There were goat farms and things like that in the area and the next thing you knew, buildings were going up and things were changing.”

Conveniently built to accommodate residents of Strizek’s nearby 200-house Bohemian Village and 155-house Vienna Woods, The Village was constructed within a 10-acre tract, which was previously the site of wheat fields, about four miles outside of downtown Sacramento.

This location, in turn, provided an alternative shopping destination to the much busier downtown shopping area with its very limited parking availability.

Another unique aspect about The Village was that it was aesthetically full of character and far from any kind of “cookie cutter” building project.

For Strizek, who began his career as a carpenter apprentice in Seattle in 1918, Town and Country Village was not only a shopping center, but a physical representation of his childhood vision of the things that symbolized California, such as Spanish buildings and tall palms hovering far above the ground in the warm sun of the Golden State.

The unique appearance of The Village includes buildings with red Spanish tile roofs and overhangs and of course, large palms.

Older features of the center included wooden benches, urns, hanging pots and a wide variety of shrubbery and flowers.

Although The Village was constructed as a new shopping center, it most assuredly never presented itself as something new and shiny, but instead it opened as a place with a rustic and country-like feel and appearance.

The building materials used to construct the center, for instance, were far from new.

Since supplies were limited due to effects of World War II, Strizek purchased timbers from a defunct section of the Southern Pacific Railroad line that ran from Woodland to Marysville.

After having the timbers, which were formerly part of 25 Southern Pacific train bridges, relocated to the site of his future Town and Country Village, Strizek then acquired old telephone poles from the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co. The poles were later used as uprights to support the Spanish tile topped overhangs of the Village’s buildings.

Using old materials was not a disadvantage for Strizek, who liked the way that the aged lumber created a sort of old California ranch atmosphere.

The Village also included another unique feature, an Adobe Court, which Fair Oaks resident Dee Ellsworth said that her father, Les Meinzer, built.

“I remember going with him on the [Adobe Court] job and helping him clean up when I was about eight years old,” Ellsworth said.

“But at that age, I also played a lot and I remember swinging around the large [telephone] poles that held up the buildings’ overhangs. My father was the only adobe builder in Sacramento, so just about anything that was built in Sacramento with adobe was built by my father.”

The Community’s Marketplace
Naturally, one of the most important draws to the center was its businesses.

Staying clear of national chain stores, The Village, which consisted of about 60 stores by 1949, was completely composed of independently owned businesses with a wide variety of offerings.

Some of the earliest Town and Country Village businesses were: The Chuck Wagon restaurant, The Kid-E-Korral, Town and Country Pharmacy, a post office, a pet shop, an ice cream parlor and many businesses that utilized the name Village such as Village Cleaners, Village 5 and 10 store, Village Flower Shop and Village Shoe Shop.

Among the oldest existing businesses in The Village are: Bonney and Gordon, William Glen, Anderson Brothers Pharmacy and Helen Jones Gallery and Custom Framing.

Although The Village is still considered historic, a fire destroyed a large section of the shopping center on the evening of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, resulting in a combined $3 million in building and inventory damages. A project to reconstruct the damaged buildings, as they appeared before the fire, began the following day.

A second, less devastating fire occurred two years later and workers once again brought charred areas of the center back to life.

About a decade after the second reconstruction, Charles Chatfield, one of The Village’s many owners throughout the years, described the shopping center as “one of the true real estate jewels in the Sacramento area.”

This week marks a year since the completion of a $5 million renovation and expansion of The Village, which is currently owned by Donahue Shriber. It was also at this time that five new businesses opened at the site and a section, called “The Collection,” was launched to showcase independent stores.

Despite the center’s many changes, the majority of The Village’s shops are still independently owned, thus carrying on the tradition initiated by Strizek.

Sacramento resident Norma Idzinga, who formerly worked at the U.S. Geological Survey office that was kitty corner from The Village, said that she has fond memories of this tradition.

“It was a nice place with a lot of [independently-owned] stores,” Idzinga said. “I don’t remember much about the individual stores there, except that they were small and there were a lot of nice little oddities that you wouldn’t see at the big stores. I’d never seen anything like [The Village]. It was the first [shopping center] in town and it was quite a place.”

And 62 years after its opening, Town and Country Village continues to be quite a place with much tradition and, with its continuous improvements, an apparently very bright future.