One of the guilty pleasures of this column is finding predictions by gurus and seeing if they turned out.
When noted architect Lewis Q. Crutcher toured San Luis Obispo in 1966, he visited a very different downtown than we know today —and he had ideas.
Mission Plaza was a street, trees were still small — only planted three years earlier and not established. Major retail of the era, Sears, J.C. Penny and Montgomery Wards and local department store Riley’s were all downtown along with hardware stores.
The architect hated neon, but I personally can’t imagine downtown without the Fremont. Unfortunately another neon movie palace was lost in 1975, the Obispo Theater …