Solvang, Calif., with its windmills and half-timbered architecture, draws more than 1½ million visitors a year. It's a virtual ghost town now.
With his wire-rim glasses, burly build and shock of alabaster hair tucked into a bike helmet, Chuck Stacy looked a little like Santa Claus on vacation as he pedaled through Solvang’s quaint business district last week.
A wooden sculpture of one of the founders of Solvang wears a surgical mask with the message, “Wear Mask - Keep Solvang Safe,” in front of the Copenhagen House in the California town. On a typical spring weekend just a handful of the city’s 847 hotel rooms would be empty and the lines to get into the wine-tasting rooms and restaurants would be long. This weekend just a handful of the city’s hotels were even open and the longest line was outside Bethania Lutheran Church, where people queued up for food donations.
Toussaint, 33, said he is asked every day when things will go back to the way they were before, a question he can’t answer. But the new normal, he acknowledges, is not sustainable.Solvang’s majestic festival theater is among the city’s many shuttered businesses, the nonprofit having already postponed most of its summer season.
Not everyone is as stoic. About a quarter-mile down Mission Drive, the main road through town, Allan Jones has placed a sign in front of his real estate office asking passersby to honk if they want the shutdown to end. Chuck Stacy, 72, bikes down a street that is usually filled with cars and tourists in downtown Solvang last week.
“The way that my business partners and me see it, it’ll be a new paradigm,” Bill Rodgers said. “People are going to be thinking quite differently so we are already exercising a lot of best practices in things like sanitation.”
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