How Sacramento became the home of California’s most over-memorialized office building

California’s government is poised to undertake the thoroughly unremarkable task of tearing down a moldy mid-century office building. But try telling that to the operatives, lobbyists and journalists who have spent the past few weeks mourning the Capitol annex to the point that one might mistake the structure being demolished for the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The annex was tacked onto the Capitol in the 1950s, so it has roughly as much historical significance as a suburban tract home. Fittingly, its fate was all but sealed in 2018 by Gov. Jerry Brown, who has a more convincing claim to historic monument status than the annex ever will.

Besides governors, lawmakers and those who work for and attempt to influence them, the ensuing decades have seen the annex accrete obsolescence, inadequacy and fungus. And that’s before accounting for whatever lurked on the surface of the “bacteria bear,” a bronze Schwarzenegger-era statue with the misfortune of being a high-touch surface in a place frequented by microbe-rich anti-vaccine protesters.

The building’s human habitues were ushered out along with the bear this week to make way for the destruction and replacement of the annex — but not before the facility was commemorated with political and media tours, maudlin reminiscences and attempts to elevate it to an architectural embodiment of democracy, bipartisanship and civilization itself. Sure, many of us have had the experience of growing inexplicably attached to our cubicles, but few have a sense of self-importance so developed as to regale the public with tales from the water cooler.

The outpouring of angst over the annex even extends to protests and lawsuits, including a quintessentially Californian claim that this project could somehow have important implications for the environment. All the hand-wringing betrays an attachment to the past for its own sake that belies California’s reputation for innovation and iconoclasm.

It’s a lesser expression of the same instinct that keeps us mired in the era of single-family zoning, fossil fuels and drug warfare. Please, let the annex exit, pursued by a bacteria bear.

This story was originally published December 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.