Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Dave Flick stands by the principle that it makes more sense to make a new building look old than to make an old building function as a modern one.

Across The Bridge

Dave Flick hopes his building will bring people to the Main Street side of town

By Jeff Kearns

Dave Flick keeps his junk collection on glass shelves behind glass doors in a wall of bookshelves in his office. There are a few old Coca-Cola bottles, with the company's logo handwritten on the glass, a hotel key from the Los Gatos Hotel, a money bag from the First National Bank of Los Gatos, an artillery shell, glass inkwells, a carpenter's flask (fits right in your pocket), antique bottles from the old Los Gatos Soda Works on College Avenue, a rusty railroad spike from the trolley lines that once ran down East Main Street and other odds and ends.

Much of the new booty comes from the site of the recently completed Soda Works Plaza at E. Main Street and College Avenue--specifically, the old privy which was excavated during construction.

After two years, workers are putting the finishing touches on the building's four apartments and three stores. Behind the main building, the historic Puccinelli house and the Los Gatos Soda Works have both been essentially rebuilt during the construction.

The project also included renovations to the 86-year-old wall built by an Italian mason for the Mariotti family. The wall, which already ran around the Los Gatos Hotel's rear garden, needed to be strengthened and braced in parts, and some of its columns had to be rebuilt because it was starting to fall over. And yes, there's a big parking lot in the back.

Soda Works Plaza is Flick's paean to the old Los Gatos, an updated version of an old-style building that's brand-new. It's also what he hopes will be the cornerstone of E. Main Street's revival of the way things used to be on the other side of downtown.

"The downtown district used to go all the way down Main to Loma Alta, and N. Santa Cruz was mostly houses and car dealerships," he says.

The new building sits on the location of what was once the Los Gatos Hotel, a small, two-story building with shops at street level that burned down in 1968. Behind the hotel is the Puccinelli house, which belonged to the hotel's owners. The Soda Works building was built as a carriage house for the hotel, but the owner, Luigi Mariotti, who lived in the Puccinelli house, converted it to a bottling factory for flavored soda water in the '20s.

Both buildings were essentially rebuilt during their renovation. The Soda Works building was especially decrepit. "It was about ready to fall into the street," Flick says. Crews dismantled much of the building and put in steel braces on the inside, then nailed back in place what boards were in good enough shape to be reused.

Another building on the site, the Buffalo Trading Company, was eventually demolished after a high-profile battle with preservationists who argued that the building, which went up sometime before 1888, should be saved.

Flick eventually won a reversal from the town's Historic Preservation Committee, after an independent architectural historian--Anne Bloomfield, who prepared the town's Historic Resources Inventory in 1991--concluded that the building's condition was poor and it was of dubious historical and architectural significance.

Planning Commissioner Kathryn Morgan, who also sits on the Historic Preservation Committee, says the committee was "split on the Buffalo building, because we hate to see old things go, but a lot of people said it was worthless."

Except for some architectural details, Morgan says she thinks the Soda Works project turned out to be a "pretty good project," now that it's complete. "Sometimes he asks for too much, but he can also be very persuasive," she says of developer Dave Flick.

Many opponents, who Flick says used to drive past the site and hurl expletives at the builder, have come around on the project and have left praising messages on his answering machine.

"They were afraid I was going to put up a Home Depot or something," he says.

Home Depot isn't Flick's style. In his 16 years in the business, he's tried to stay within the realm of projects informed by a historic ideal. Flick, usually partnered with Berkeley architect Chris Spaulding, built the Cotton Works building at 58 N. Santa Cruz Ave. and the eponymous Flick Building at 37 E. Main St. The Flick Building, next door to the 105-year-old Beckwith Building, was designed to blend in with its neighbor, as if it, too, were a product of the 19th century.

Spaulding, who began drafting plans for Flick 15 years ago while he was still studying architecture at Berkeley, says Flick stands out as a builder. "Most of them are in it just for the buck, but he wants to build nice buildings everyone likes," Spaulding says. "Most of the developers just want to build these big monstrosities, and they don't care about the community. "

While some historical purists insist it's impossible to re-create historic buildings, Spaulding dismisses the notion that emulating historic styles is some kind of architectural misapprehension.

"There are a few pure styles, but most of the old buildings are really just a set of different styles put together. A lot of historic styles are actually eclectic," he says.

Before starting the Soda Works project, Flick took scouting trips to San Francisco, San Jose and other cities to see how historic corner buildings looked, what materials were used and how they held up.

But Flick says he doesn't necessarily subscribe to the new urbanist school of thought--which advocates a return to more traditional elements of urban design, such as mixed-use buildings, relaxed zoning codes and pedestrian friendliness as opposed to the suburban sprawl, mini-malls and mass reliance on cars and freeways that has characterized much development in the postwar decades. "I'm an old urbanist," he says, dismissing any pretension of some trendy, New Age ideal. "I just want to build things the way they used to."

Flick and Spaulding also build houses the way they used to be built. Flick says he's built about 50 homes in Los Gatos in the last 10 years, all of which are renovations of historic homes or new homes modeled after historic designs. "You have an obligation when you live in a historic town to make things fit in," he says.

Flick, 40, was born in Ohio, the middle of five children, and followed his dad's Air Force career to Florida, Alabama and Texas. The family eventually settled in San Jose's Rose Garden area after his dad, Bill Flick, left the service for a job as an engineer at Lockheed.

It was an old brick house, Flick remembers, and his dad was constantly struggling to make it function like a new house. His dad's constant tinkering with the old house made him realize what's become his mantra, that it's easier to make a new house feel like an old house than vice versa. "If you can tell it's new, we didn't do a good job," he says.

Flick's mom, Rose Mary, whom he credits as his main artistic and aesthetic influence, worked as a designer and a buyer for department stores and hosted one of the first women's talk shows on South Bay television in the '60s--The Wonderful World of Women, with Rosie Flick on Channel 36.

Flick's parents, now retired and living in Austin, Texas, will be getting the corner apartment in the new building, where they will live part of the year.

After high school, Flick indulged his arty side by taking classes in ceramics, metal sculpting, jewelry making and stained glass. He started his own business restoring old cars, but in the early '80s he decided it was time to get into real estate.

"The real estate market was going bonkers, and I decided if I ever wanted to own a house, I'd have to learn to build one myself. So I sold a convertible Porsche and put a down payment on an old redwood cabin up in Redwood Estates," he says.

Flick spent about a year restoring the cabin, doing everything by himself, including the plumbing and wiring, and when he was done, he sold it. More restorations followed, and Flick started hiring experienced subcontractors and looking over their shoulders.

"The only way I learned what I do was by hiring people who are the best at what they do and watching closely," he says. "Other than that, I'm basically self-taught." And rebuilding old houses, he says, gave him a unique look into how construction and materials hold up over time.

Flick lives in Los Gatos with his wife, Shari, who helps run their business by managing the properties they own, and their two kids, Jessica, 7, and David, 5. Their home, on Stacia Street, functions as a kind of model home, complete with Brazilian cherry hardwood floors with custom inlays by a Polish craftsman, copper gutters and a roof made of Chinese slate.

Flick keeps a close eye on the economy and housing market, watching what applications are coming in--and which are being approved. He also monitors the local political climate around development, which he believes is turning anti-developer.

But as the businesses in the Soda Works building--Kelly's Coffee and Fudge, the French Cellar and Tangles, a hair salon--start opening for customers, Flick says proudly that "pedestrian traffic in the area is up 100 percent," which he says was his main goal with the building. "We've given people a reason to walk across the bridge."

[ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ]