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August 7, 2002
Saratoga, California Since 1955 |
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Photograph by Kristopher Gainey
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The community pool serves as a perfect gathering place for Saratoga Woods
neighbors—and also a great place
to cool off.
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Saratoga Woods: A 'small town' kind of neighborhood
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Kate Carter
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One of the best ways to get to know the
residents of the Saratoga Woods neighborhood
is to swim. Or to pretend to.
By most accounts, the Saratoga Woods Swim
Club is the hub of neighborhood activity for
the approximately 400 homes bounded by
Saratoga and Cox avenues, Saratoga Creek and
Prospect High School. The club is about far
more than swimming, however—it boasts a
volleyball court and a clubhouse, and is home
to the Saratoga Woods Community Association.
The association, comprising approximately 130
families in the neighborhood, not only
gathers for swim team meets on summer
Saturdays, but also holds parties all year
long, providing even non-swimmers with plenty
of chances to become better friends with
people who live down the block.
The community association, however, is not to
be confused with the Saratoga Parkwoods
Homeowners Association. In that association,
every resident in the community is
automatically a member and is invited to
become involved with community issues like
opposing West Valley College's Measure E
proposal or supporting a single-story overlay
in the neighborhood. Saratoga Woods residents
not only enjoy fun in the sun but care deeply
about community issues and neighborhood
involvement—the community has even been the
home of several Saratoga City Council members
in recent years.
But where is it? Even knowing its boundaries,
the neighborhood is difficult to find and
access. There are only a few points of entry
into the community, off Saratoga and Cox
avenues, and those are easy to miss.
That insulated quality is something else that
sets the community of mostly single-story,
ranch-style homes apart from others like it
throughout Saratoga, and indeed throughout
Santa Clara Valley, and it's something that
its residents cherish and fight tooth and
nail to preserve.
"This has always been a very involved
neighborhood—it's quite well-organized and
quite cohesive," says Saratoga Woods resident
and city Vice Mayor Evan Baker. "The people
here care a lot about their neighborhood and
the city. And the swim club is the glue that
kind of holds everything together."
"The swim club helps draw people together,"
agrees Marsha Ferris, longtime resident and
former homeowner association president.
"People go out of their way to move here.
It's almost like a small town within itself."
Successful swim club
That "small town" first came to be when
Saratoga itself was a small, newly formed
city. Developer George Day completed the
first homes in the community in the late
1950s, and a neighborhood association formed
immediately. In addition, local lore holds
that the city's then-planning commission
required Day to contribute space in the
development for a community pool, says
community association president Rick Ridder.
Day had only built homes in a section of the
area now known as Saratoga Woods, and over
time more developers added their own until
the last few were finished just four years
ago, Baker says. As the residential area
expanded, so too did the activities available
for them to join.
Of course, there is the pool. And the most
visible activity at the pool is that of the
competitive swim team, which wrapped up its
annual summer season this year at its
championship meet July 20.
"We had our best year in 20 years," says head
coach and Saratoga Woods resident Marie
LaForge. "We usually lost every meet."
The team, a member of the Junipero Serra Swim
League, competes against five other similar
teams in dual meets running through June and
July. This year, the Saratoga Woods Dolphins
went 2-3 in dual meets and came in fifth
at the championship meet.
LaForge attributes much of the team's growing
success to its growing size. When her
children first joined the team in 1994, it
had only 45 members. This year, it had 122,
and a growing component of that was
hard-to-retain teenagers. (The team allows
only community association members, ages 4 to
18, to participate.)
The increased participation, LaForge says, is
due in part to the club's new pool, built in
1996, which is now the regulation 25 yards in
length. The next club project, she says, is
remodeling the clubhouse, and that is
expected to occur during the winter of
2003-04.
But LaForge, her husband, Mark, and their
children didn't move to Saratoga Woods eight
years ago to be part of the team—they were
just looking for a nice place to live.
"It just felt like a nice, family community,"
Marie says. "We didn't know how good it would
be."
She says the team is a great way for families
to become friends with other families, if
they don't already meet through the schools.
Almost every child in the neighborhood
attends either Country Lane Elementary School
in the Moreland School District or Sacred
Heart Catholic School. The pool hosts several
summertime activities, like barbecues on the
Fourth of July and Labor Day and gatherings
on Memorial Day, in addition to parties at
Halloween, Christmas and New Year's, and even
two activities that are open to nonmembers,
says Ridder.
Those events, he says, are to encourage
Saratoga Woods residents to become members of
the club. The community association allows a
limited membership of nearly 200 families.
Thirty of those can be people who live
outside the neighborhood's boundaries, as
long as they do live within five miles of the
neighborhood and are sponsored by a Saratoga
Woods resident.
While the waiting list for those 30 spots is
years long, he says, there are still about 30
spots available to people living in Saratoga
Woods. Noreen Little, who has lived with her
husband, Chuck, in the neighborhood for 29
years (and between them the two have served
14 years on the pool club board), says the
majority of Saratoga Woods residents at some
point have been members but perhaps stopped
when their children left home. However the
community doesn't suffer when not everyone
belongs to the club, Ridder says.
Ridder and his family moved to Saratoga Woods
in 1980, and then moved within the
neighborhood to a larger home seven years
ago.
"I love the neighborhood, primarily because
of the swim club," he says. "It has a very
strong unity. It's a great place to raise a
family."
Traveling through the quiet streets, one sees
plenty of people out enjoying good
weather—youths on bikes and skateboards,
seniors walking, parents chatting while
walking children or dogs. On weekends, Ridder
says, Westview Drive turns into a roller
hockey court.
"The kids are out in the street more than in
any other neighborhood that we know of,"
Marie LaForge says.
Little says that is an outgrowth of the
community's safety.
"We know so many people," she says. "When you
know your neighbors, you're just safer."
The neighborhood also fosters smaller
community events. LaForge started up a Bunko
dice game group, needing 12 people to
participate. So many people wanted to join,
though, that they had to start up another
group, she says.
Ridder's street, Obrad Drive, holds an annual
block party, scheduled for September this
year, and for that the street is closed for a
few hours. And, he says, transplants to the
community from the Willow Glen neighborhood
of San Jose have brought with them their
annual tradition of setting up small, lighted
Christmas trees on their front lawns during
the holiday season—the number of
participants in that activity has grown in
the three or four years since the tradition
began.
"There are many spontaneous get-togethers of
large groups of people," Ridder says. "That's
what's fun."
Serious side
But Saratoga Woods is not just about fun and
games.
The soberer half of the neighborhood's
association duo is the homeowners
association, and it has a definite mission.
Just check out its website at
www.saratogawoods.org.
Listed there is information about citywide
issues that affect the neighborhood, a link
to information about the 18-year-old Saratoga
Woods Neighborhood Watch Program and another
link to the Saratoga Woods Emergency
Preparedness Team. This association is not
for the meek.
Homeowners association president Ron
Schoengold, recently retired and a three-year
Saratoga Woods resident, describes the
association this way: "I can't affect the
world, but I've always felt a responsibility
to know my neighbors. I think the idea is to
go out and meet your neighbors and try to
have some relationship with them to the
extent possible. It's just a friendly thing.
Saratoga Woods adheres to that more than any
other place that I've ever lived."
The homeowners association holds one annual
general membership meeting that gets a
respectable turnout of between 50 and 100
people. They have plenty to discuss—the
neighborhood is not without its issues, says
neighborhood association board member Pete
Wohlmat.
Traffic heading to and from Highway 85's
Saratoga Avenue on- and off-ramps can be a
challenge for residents, who have so few ways
to enter and exit their community, he says.
"If I'm trying to get out of the
neighborhood, it makes it real inconvenient
and tough," he says.
Those traffic concerns reached epic
proportions when West Valley College proposed
the construction of a stadium on its
Fruitvale Avenue campus. The Saratoga Woods
neighborhood, like many others throughout the
city, actively opposed the idea because of
the impact West Valley as a destination for
thousands of event-goers would have on their
quiet communities. That community action led
Measure E to be the only school bond in the
area that was defeated March 5.
Another of the homeowner association's recent
accomplishments was getting the city council
to likely approve a zoning ordinance overlay
to keep the neighborhood's houses single
story. The final decision is expected Aug. 7.
"That has certainly been an issue that has
been around for a long time," Ferris says,
referring to the many years of neighborhood
opposition to any attempt to build a
second-story addition. Fed up with constantly
battling such incursions, the community
banded together in support of an overlay that
would require homeowners to get a variance to
build up. Not everyone supported the idea,
but enough did to make it a resounding
success.
Perhaps the neighborhood's biggest challenge,
though, is dealing with its changing
demographics, which Wohlmat described as a
shift from mostly retired people or families
in which one parent stayed home during the
day, to a younger population with most of the
adults working.
"As the prices have gone up, it's the younger
executives with the young families moving
in," he says, adding that new residents often
don't have time to become involved in
neighborhood activities. "Involvement is
strong from the people who've lived here a
long time. Things like the website help get
others involved."
"We're trying to encourage, as much as we
can, participation by the younger people
coming into the neighborhood," Schoengold
says. "That's been a very important
element—it's very attractive to young
families."
Wohlmat says the homeowners association works
with the popular community association to get
out the word about its events in the club's
monthly newsletter. He is also in the process
of updating information on the homeowners
association's emergency database, which keeps
an inventory of how many people live in each
house, what their medical needs are, who is
willing to volunteer and where equipment is
located throughout the neighborhood.
"We just felt we needed a way of being
organized in the event of an emergency," he
says of the idea, which was conceived by
Harry Wenberg.
Saratoga Woods seems to be home to the kind
of people prepared to change with the
changing times to keep their quiet community
vibrant and an important part of Saratoga's
civic life. Few have plans to leave.
"I feel like we'll be here the rest of our
lives," Schoengold says.
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