The Adventures of Robin Hood | Warner Street, Chico — the thank-you note a town paved

Chico did something in 1937 that no other location town did for this picture. It renamed a street. Warner Street, running along the western edge of what is now Chico State, was named for Warner Bros. as a plain civic thank-you for bringing a two-million-dollar production and its payroll to a Sacramento Valley farm town in the middle of the Depression.

The street itself is unremarkable, and that is the point. Student rentals, bicycles chained to porch rails, a few big shade trees, the noise of campus at the far end. Nothing explains it. There is no marker at either end saying why a residential street four hundred miles north of Burbank carries a studio's name.

The money behind the gesture was real. The Adventures of Robin Hood cost $2,033,000, more than Warner Bros. had ever spent on a film, and a share of the location budget went into Chico hotels, laundries, feed stores, lumber and day rates for locals hired as extras. The town spent a season pretending to be Nottinghamshire and got a boom out of it, then paid the compliment back in the only permanent currency a city controls — a name on a sign.

Walk it south from West Sacramento Avenue past students who have no idea. Then drive ten minutes east to the park and look at the trees that actually earned it.

Photo: Chico State, the campus Warner Street runs along. Wikimedia Commons.