Editorial
Guadalupe College can now rest in peace
Piece by piece, Los Gatos is finally ridding itself of Guadalupe College, which has bedeviled the town despite the college's pious intent. On Aug. 28, a demolition crew began the onerous task of tearing down what was once used as a school to train nuns.
In 1968, after being open only four years, the school was closed by the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary because of a shortage of students. In retrospect, the productive life of the campus were those initial four years, not counting the time someone spent there cooking methamphetamine, a very dangerous undertaking given the volatility of the chemicals involved.
When Los Gatos-Monte Sereno police discovered the lab in January 2000, they said the operation would have yielded a batch of the drug worth more than $1 million on the street.
In the years that the college lay fallow, neighbors complained of people using the abandoned buildings to drink, smash bottles, and create a general nuisance.
Not to say attempts weren't made to rejuvenate the property. A federal emergency training site, a school for chiropractors and a state minimum-security prison for women were among the proposals submitted through the years.
From 1984 to 1997, a Taiwanese businessman proposed creating a university for Taiwanese girls. Battles over this use were waged from the planning commission to the California Supreme Court. Eventually the applicant went out of business, and the nuns regained control of the property.
In 1998, developer Joe McCarthy bought the land. McCarthy evidently realized that the town and its residents had had enough of grandiose plans and snake-oil sales pitches. McCarthy's first order of business was to adopt a conciliatory, accommodating stance with his neighbors, the people who would eventually judge the merit of his plans.
Instead of spooking the locals with the threat of more people traipsing through their neck of the woods, McCarthy said he would build just six houses on a portion of the property, one house for himself. He also agreed that half of the property would be used for open space. And when local residents nixed his request to pipe in water from the San Jose Water Company through their land, McCarthy didn't fret; he not only agreed to create his own water system, he also promised to share it with neighbors in the event of an emergency.
The methamphetamine scare of 2000 was probably the icing on the cake for McCarthy and he got final approval from the Los Gatos Town Council in June to begin transforming the troubled property.
Hopefully, McCarthy will realize his plan to the satisfaction of the town, the five future homeowners and his neighbors. It's relatively easy to tear something down, figuratively or literally, and Guadalupe College is, or was, an easy target. Now the real work will commence.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
