Old Sacramento State Historic Park

A 26-acre historic district of cobbled streets and wooden plank sidewalks running along the Sacramento River levee. The buildings date mostly from the 1850s to the 1870s and include restaurants, shops, a paddle-wheel riverboat, and several museums — including the California State Railroad Museum, which anchors the northern end of the district.

Tourist-oriented but not unpleasantly so. The B&O Tavern has been serving drinks more or less continuously since 1852. The Sacramento History Museum occupies a reconstruction of the 1854 City Hall and Water Works building. On summer evenings the Embarcadero fills with people watching the sunset over the river, and the Gold Rush-era street lamps give the whole place a genuinely atmospheric quality.

things to do neighbourhood sight
A story
During the floods of 1862 — the same catastrophic floods that would kill Sacramento's plan to be the state capital's permanent site — the city decided to raise the entire downtown district by up to 10 feet by filling in the streets with rubble and soil. The original street-level storefronts still exist underground, accessible via tours. The Sacramento History Museum runs occasional underground tours that show visitors what the ground floor of the Gold Rush city actually looked like.