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Saratoga Stereopticon
Timing was everything in local real estate
By Willys Peck
It looks as if I'm going to have to face up to the fact that the plethora of real estate ads describing Saratoga houses selling for well over a million dollars, sometimes several million, is undermining my psyche to the point of personality-warping. Just the other day, for instance, I caught myself referring to a carriage house, which is Saratogaspeak for detached garage.
Then there is the weekly summary of residential real estate sales published in the San Jose Mercury News. Usually I can count on Saratoga heading the list with an average selling price of well over a million, with Los Altos, Los Altos Hills or Monte Sereno snapping at the heels. But then there are weeks when Saratoga is down to around the $600,000 level, with the others leading the pack.
"Hmph!" I hmph on such occasions, "Now they're selling shacks and fixer-uppers around here. Prices like these spell neighborhood blight. Hmph!"
All of which leads to the question: What in the name of buyer's equity am I doing here? That's essentially the query posed by a newspaper colleague at a staff picnic here more than 20 years ago. "How come," he asked, looking over my back yard with its section of creek and adjoining woods, "a copy editor is living in a place like this?"
The explanation really is rather simple: timing. As in other fields of human endeavor, timing is everything. In the case of Saratoga real estate, all that was necessary for us Joe Sixpack types was to be born in the early 1920s to parents already living here. Then, when the time came in the early 1950s to think about getting one's own house, there was a considerable selection. Ten thousand dollars would get you a nice dwelling in Cambrian Park, now part of San Jose, or an acre building-site on a hill between Saratoga and Los Gatos.
Fact is, an accident of birth wasn't necessary; anyone who turned up here in the Truman administration, or even into the Eisenhower years, could find what would now be classified as affordable housing.
There is, of course, the inflation factor in this matter of comparative prices. While 10 big ones now represent more than pocket change, they're hardly big bucks, house-wise. Back then, they were. The point is, though, buying a house in Saratoga was a doable proposition for, say, your average newspaperman. In the unlikely event I ever find time heavy on my hands, I'd like to assemble a chronology of real estate trends and prices in Saratoga, which probably could be done by referring to newspaper advertisements of the time.
Large-scale development began around 1950 within the wedge formed by Quito Road and Saratoga Avenue. There was Quito Park, at the apex, and the onomato-poetically named Workman tract along Afton Avenue, bordering the railroad tracks.
One vignette sticks in mind, from the days when I used to take the commuter train from Los Gatos to San Francisco just for the ride. Passing this tract, I could look out the window and see the refrigerator-lined back yard of some friends of ours where the husband was into composting. His technique was to buy up old refrigerators and iceboxes and use their air-tight interiors to speed the composting process. It worked. This was at a time when there were news stories of small children getting into abandoned refrigerators and suffocating, and in a different milieu, our friend could have had a problem. But there were no such episodes here, and the success of his project was evident in the streetside trees in front. On each side of his house the trees were small, if not scraggly. His were healthy and huge.
Other subdivisions at about this time in the 1950s were Merrivale, along Merribrook Drive, and the top-of-the-line Argonaut, off Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road. I think those Argonaut houses were in the $20,000 to $30,000 range when they were built, but a few years later they came up with two or three that went for a staggering $60,000. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, we draw the curtain of charity across this scene and what those houses would go for now.
Anent what may have appeared as a snide reference to use of the term carriage houses, it has been pointed out to me that it is not purely an affectation. These structures do house horseless carriages.
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Saratoga, California Since 1975
