I like to walk from downtown across the D Street bridge and then
down Hopper Street. It’s a walk through town
that has a strong industrial feel to it which is a major repeating theme of the
older as-built fabric of Petaluma. Shollenberger Park is on the south side of
Petaluma. It contains 165 acres of wetlands and 16 acres of accessible trails.
Along the way on Hopper Street, there is a redi-mix concrete yard on the river, a large rusty
barge that has never been in the water, and the new huge Riverfront subdivision
which has all the underground work and streets in but no buildings yet. I am always
impressed by how good looking the new Marina apartments are – a five story
building with 90 units that sold to one buyer not that long ago. Across the
way, the Altura apartments are going in and look to be wrapping up construction
on the outside.
Shollenberger Park can be accessed by a trail through Alman
Marsh which starts at the Sheraton Hotel at the south side of the Marina
parking lot. People are often fishing in the Petaluma River there. This route
also makes for a fun moderate bike ride as well; keep going into the Ellis
Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.
If you get lucky, you’ll see the train go by and people
paddling on the river. Another one of my favorite walks through Petaluma.
