Editorial

Determination kept hotel vision alive

When Diane Ogilvie began pestering the planning department about her vision to build an upscale hotel in downtown Los Gatos, she was in her early 70s. With her 81st birthday just around the corner, Ogilvie posed for our photographer last week on top of a pile of rubble where her hotel will soon rise. She could barely contain her joy.

Diane Ogilvie is nothing if not tenacious.

Over the years, she's modified her plans and changed architects. She's battled planning staff--and exhausted them with her unconventional approach, which included exploring ideas far beyond the cutoff point most developers would set.

But if it seems like Ogilvie has been promoting her hotel to planning commissioners for a long time, consider that her passion to make an impact on E. Main Street started long ago.

She opened Sir Toby's on E. Main more than 25 years ago in the location that eventually became known as La Strada. Gradually, she acquired neighboring property, including the Foster Freeze and eventually, the Kerful Laundry which she purchased from the Christian Science Church next door.

Before her proposal was reduced to a hotel sans retail outlets, Ogilvie had held on to a vision that the complex would be called La Strada. In 1995, she told the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, that when she was a professional singer performing in the early 1950s at the Barbary Coast in San Francisco's famed International Settlement, "La Strada was a very expensive restaurant across the street from the Barbary Coast. I couldn't afford to eat there, but I used to peek inside, and I've never forgotten the name, which is Italian for street."

Her earliest plans called for a hotel with shops above, townhouses and courtyards complete with fountains and orchards--scenes she'd seen many times in her travels to Europe.

But when she first presented these plans to the Planning Commission in 1993, commissioners said the project was overdeveloped for the area and sent her back to the design review committee.

Over the years, Ogilvie met rejection with resolve. And little, by little, she turned doubting town officials into believers.

Not everyone is happy to see construction begin on a new hotel. There's no question it will change the way that part of town looks. Some fear that it will replace Los Gatos High School as the dominating architectural feature at that end of town.

That might have happened if Ogilvie's original vision of La Strada had come to pass. But it didn't. That's because her tenacity was matched with a stubborn planning department which refused to let Ogilvie's vision of a European courtyard impose itself in a location where it would have detracted from its surroundings.

Tenacity versus stubbornness. It can be a good formula for local planning.

Police Report

DeCinzo: Dueling parking consultants

Photo: Debbi Ricks to perform on harp

Picture From the Past: Old-timer remembers familiar quotations

Photo: Senior Arbor Day

Sports Briefs

Eastman sisters star for Wildcats

Little league pitchers shut foes down

Los Gatos boys track team goes 6-0