But without the metal police barricades and fences now, no screaming fans from Germany, no crazy lady releasing doves, no satellite trucks and cables snaking across the lawns and sidewalks, nobody coming or going in silk pajamas. You pull right in and marvel at all the serenity. Inside, people are pleading no contest to possessing controlled substances or driving while intoxicated. In a matter of minutes, a thief is sentenced to probation, fined and told by a judge, "You are to stay out of the Sam Goody."

But it did. A year ago, a teenage boy took the stand in Courtroom No. 9 and testified that he was molested by Jackson at the singer's ranch. It was Court TV legal analyst's heaven; it was a Nancy Grace godsend. A droning three months of testimony and cross-examination followed, and Jackson was acquitted. (He promptly left the country; last week, state officials ordered Neverland ranch, his home and private theme park 30 miles south of here, closed for failure to pay his employees' salary and workers' comp insurance.) Jackson's trial was repeatedly described on the news as having a "circus atmosphere," but, really, it wasn't. It was orderly. It was Mayberry -- if it weren't for the subject matter.

When it was over, on a June afternoon, one of the more vivid memories the people who work at Superior Court have is how fast the media packed up and abandoned them -- leaving all that trash and wires and dead shrubs.

"The media were very effective at moving on; that's what they do. So it was over, like that. The shrubs have bloomed again, the grass has come back," says Darrel E. Parker, assistant trial courts executive officer, who ran the day-to-day logistics of California v. Michael Jackson . "I have to say -- and there were of people who told me this, and I felt it, too -- about a month or so after it was over, there was this weird . . . malaise, like 'Wow, I can't shake this.' It was a funk; that's the only word I can think of."

But many of the courthouse regulars liked it. It started every day at 8 a.m. and ended at 2:30 p.m. Some days it felt as if the court was running a summer camp for tabloid reporters, who would file their stories manically, breathlessly; then, at night, the Fleet Street freelancers and maybe the Japanese film crew, along with their new stateside colleagues, would all go to a bar down the street, Maverick's, which has a mechanical bull, and they would goad one another into riding it. It was Jacko porn by day and "Urban Cowboy" by night -- how American and frivolous it all seemed.

Even months later, Parker says, he went across the street to Coffee Diem, where owner Carmen Jenkins served lunch and coffee to hordes of media and starry-eyed fans or curious passersby. "Carmen was in the right place at the right time, that's for sure," he says. "And she says to me, 'You know, I'm only just now getting over all of it.' "

"Oh, we miss them so much. It hasn't been the same at all," says Jenkins, who at the moment has two customers. She is perhaps the only person you'll ever meet who loved having a media scrum camped on her street. "And it's not the money, not the business that I'm talking about. It was the total ambiance -- the people I met, the activity," she says. "And you know, people ask me, 'How's that new Beemer' that I bought with all the new business -- which I didn't."

Some events put a town on the map in a way it might not like to be remembered -- Waco, Tex., and its Branch Davidians, or Oklahoma City and the federal building bombing. The datelines pile up, but the place is never to be revisited again by all the networks. Santa Maria will for many people remain the place Michael Jackson walked free.

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