Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by Jeff Kearns

With the summer heat still thick in the air at night, the heat lamps disappear from the patio at C.B. Hannegan's.

Boom Town

On Friday and Saturday nights, many Los Gatans wonder: Whose town is it anyway?

By Jeff Kearns

'There's a lot of girls our age," says Zack Frost, 16, who's just driven down from Fremont with two buddies, presumably to look for some of those girls. "And there's not a lot of older people around." It's a little after 10 on a Friday night. Downtown is swimming with teens at just about the time when the older couples and parents pushing strollers have retired for the night.

"They need a strip like this in Fremont, where it's cool and the teenagers can just kick it," Frost adds.

Frost's thoughts get at the heart of what's happening downtown, where the area's charms seem to make it its own worst enemy. The weekend crowds downtown are nothing new, but after a long, wet winter, a suddenly scorching summer has combined with an apparently infallible economy to make this what some residents and bartenders alike are calling the most crowded summer in five years.

And the reason, say most of the teenagers milling about, is that there's no place like downtown Los Gatos where they're from. All over the South Bay, but mostly San Jose.

"We don't have anything like this in San Jose," says Santa Teresa High School student Shannon Croom, 16, who's downtown with three of her friends, sitting on the edge of a planter box watching the crowds ebb and flow on the jammed sidewalks. "We run into a lot of people down here from San Jose. You can't do anything in downtown San Jose."

"Campbell doesn't have anything like this, not even close," insists Robert Young, 20, who's downtown to get some coffee and smoke some cigarettes with a few friends.

"There's nothing in Saratoga," says Saratogan Renee Nelson, 16. "This is somewhere we can go where our parents trust us because it's safe. If we told them we were going to downtown San Jose, then they'd be like, 'Oh no you're not!' " Nelson, with a small group of girls, says they usually just get ice cream and shop. Then she betrays herself: "Wait, I'm missing the guys driving by," she says, turning to see who's calling out from the slow creep of cars on the street.

Bruce and Ronda Protho are out for a stroll with their 2-year-old baby earlier, after dinner. The younger crowd, Ronda Protho said, is just part of downtown.

"I don't like the kids bunching up like that and smoking, and I don't like walking past them," she said. "I wish they'd go home."

"Parking and traffic have gotten worse in the last few years, so now just getting across town is hard," Bruce Protho said. But it's not just a coincidence. "Los Gatos is getting what it always wanted--to be a time destination place," he continues. "It brings in money, but it's harder to get to tables at the restaurants. ... In '92 and '93, the restaurants weren't as busy, and some shops went under. It's definitely got a correlation with the economy."

Protho, who lives in Los Gatos, said he misses the way the town was before the Loma Prieta earthquake. "There were a lot of shops that were geared toward the people here, but now you're getting chains moving in, like Juicy Burger, Borders, The Gap, and we're losing some of the town's identity.

"And Saratoga's dead. Try going there at night," he adds, "It's like what Gertrude Stein said [about Oakland], 'There's no there there.' "

"But it still beats San Jose," Ronda Protho said.

Los Gatos, in all of its infinite atmosphere, suffers from the same malady as any attractive, thriving downtown area: the non-secret of its own success. Places like Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay are turned into gridlock on sunny summer days, when their lifeblood has a tendency to clot in shimmering strings up and down the roads leading in and out of town. It's a nightmare for residents, but the day-trippers are an acknowledged part of the local economy, which undoubtedly wouldn't be as bright without them.

Residents who gripe about downtown almost always start with the same thing: parking and traffic. And on a busy weekend night, the line of headlights and taillights stretches down the length of N. Santa Cruz Avenue. The cars run the gamut from fancy new German roadsters to lowered, tricked-out Japanese models to old American muscle with no paint and no muffler. The cars look different, but their purpose is the same: to show off and make a statement, whether it be rich, tough or sophisticated.

Police, who patrol on foot and in their own cruising vehicles, give warnings and citations to drivers who rattle windows up and down the block by generously revving a bored-out 350, or chirping a pair of fat Pirellis. Town ordinance includes laws banning noisy cars, and also takes aim at the quintessential prop for any cruisemobile: a stereo that can drown out an air-raid siren.

Then there's the curfew, which the town recently revised to sharpen a few fuzzy definitions. Cops rarely enforce the curfew on the lone teenager out for a nighttime stroll, but rather keep it handy to use as a tool for breaking up the mobs of kids on busy nights.

It's the same drill up and down the avenue: the cops walk up to a group of kids, standing in a circle smoking, and ask: "You guys 18?"

When they say no, the cops politely inform the kids that there's a 10 p.m. curfew in town, and that they should be moving along. Sometimes there's an ID check.

"It sucks," says Aaron Baskin, 17, of San Jose. "We're not doing anything, we're just kickin' it. There's no need for this--people are having fun, no one's getting hurt and we're not causing problems."

Outside of the occasional skateboarders and rowdy barhoppers, the town is currently enduring a heat wave, not a crime wave. Police, longtime bartenders, kids and middle-aged strollers are all hard-pressed to come up with any instances of crime.

"That's the only reason [out-of-towners] come here," says lifelong resident Jack Walker, 26, who's apparently graduated from the sidewalks to the bar scene. "It's clean, it's classy, and you don't have to worry about punks. In San Jose, you're always looking over your shoulder. There's so many people that just want to fight, it's just not worth going down there."

Walker says he's happy that people come to town from all over the South Bay. "They make it fun to meet new people," he says. "That's the only reason we go. ... Everyone's looking to have a good time." Read: Women.

"Every year it gets busier and busier, but that's important; it generates business and income, and without it, all the shops are going to close," he insists, adding that the town needs more places with music and dancing.

It's a thorny political issue. Town officials scrutinize new applications for bars and restaurants that serve booze like each one is a potential Trojan Horse, just waiting to bring in a new load of drunks to pick fights, smash bottles and otherwise sack the town.

In Mountain View, where Castro Street and the rest of the downtown area are almost unrecognizable from a decade ago, the city keeps a close eye on potential trouble spots, according to assistant economic development manager Barney Burke. When police noted that they were getting called to the same bar more and more often over the last six months, city officials, cops, and local business owners came to a special hearing on renewing the bar's conditional-use permit. The bar's owners agreed to keep the back door closed, turn down the music and add more security personnel. Everyone left happy.

"The main thing was to have the discussion. Everyone wants a nightlife, but nobody wants the troublemakers," Burke says.

Downtown activity in Mountain View has picked up over the last couple of years, which Burke attributes to an increase in popularity of downtowns throughout the region. "You see more activity now," he says, "There's a trend. More people are finding they don't have to go to San Francisco to go have a good time and a club-like experience."

The city narrowed Castro Street from four lanes to two in 1991, put in rows of trees and brick sidewalks and revamped the downtown parking lots. The city also expects to add a second downtown parking structure in the near future. By the year 2000, there should be a VTA light rail station on the edge of downtown, right next to the Caltrain station that's currently there.

In the peninsula city of Burlingame, where the downtown area has had a similar resurrection in recent years, officials deal with annoyances by adding police patrols and requesting that trouble spots help out by hiring their own security. The local Starbucks helped keep pedestrian traffic moving by converting outdoor benches to planter boxes.

Burlingame City Manager Dennis Argyres says that a lot of the complaints come from senior citizens, "but to some seniors, any teenager looks scary."

In Los Altos, the city is pushing to turn downtown into more of a destination, but still has a ways to go. Acting City Manager Bruce Bane says that Main Street has been repaved and spruced up with new landscaping and brick crosswalks. Visitors and business are on the rise, he says, especially on weekends. "It's picking up, but it used to be a very sleepy town," he said, noting that new restaurants are opening up. "But there's only one sports bar downtown."

As for downtown Los Gatos, it looks like everything old is new again. Even though downtown is more than a century old, suburbs around the region are scrambling to either copy or re-create something like downtown. Foremost locally is the controversial plan to transform the 1960s-style Town and Country shopping center across the street from Valley Fair into an ersatz downtown.

But as cities move toward embracing the downtowns that have gone neglected for much of the postwar era, they are also moving away from the giant malls that once ringed the outer edges of suburbia. Some malls are starting to collapse under their own weight like dead stars, and the role they formerly occupied in the fuzzy geography of the teenage social life is slowly being passed back to the traditional town layout, whether real or imagined.

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