But the sidewalks are filled with children on roller skates and bicycles, circling through driveways and winding down the block under the watchful eyes of their parents.

This oasis just off of El Camino Real, between Bernardo and Grape avenues, is living proof that as much as things change, they also stay the same. What started out as a neighborhood of close-knit families is seeing its second generation come through, but now it's a new group of parents and children from all over the world that plays and converses in the streets just as its counterpart did decades ago.

And even with today's busy schedules, the newcomers have helped rejuvenate a Parkington tradition: Their yearly September block party, when the street closes to traffic and everyone brings a dish to share, stories to tell and activities that last from the mid-morning bike races to the 10 p.m. bonfire.

The block party is part of the glue that keeps this tiny neighborhood close, even as the neighbors now represent two different eras of Sunnyvale—the early days of suburbanization in the midst of orchards and two-lane roads, and the current flow of young, diverse families looking for jobs in Silicon Valley.

"This is the best block in the county," declares Pearl Ramos, one of the few original homeowners left. Ramos turns 90 in September and moved to Parkington with her late husband, Ralph, in January 1956. "I keep telling my kids not to take me out of this house. I want to grow old with my block."

Ramos—whose parents were Spanish immigrants who had labored in Hawaiian sugar cane fields before moving to San Francisco—worked in Libby's Cannery as a teenager. Ramos and her husband wanted to move out of San Francisco with their children, and while visiting her husband's brother in Sunnyvale, the couple spotted advertisements along a two-lane El Camino Real for a new housing development.

"We stopped in at the model home, and my husband just breezed through and waited for me in the back," she says. "I had to stop and look at everything, even the doorknobs. I loved every bit of it." By that time, there was only one house left that fit their specifications: a stucco finish on the south side of the street. "There was just something about the breeze on that side of the street," Ramos says.

In fact, the two opposite sides of Parkington Avenue were built as separate parts of a patchwork of tracts established in the Cherry Chase area in the mid-1950s. Diana O'Dell with the Sunnyvale Planning Department says that this section of Parkington was originally subdivided for development in 1952 and the units were constructed in 1955 by McKenzie & Crawford, one of several companies building on the south side of El Camino Real.

Despite the piecemeal construction, the homes all had something in common—designer T.J. Martin.

According to Sunnyvale Realtor Blaine Cate, Martin was responsible for the architecture for a number of homes throughout Sunnyvale, including those in the expanse between Bernardo and Mary avenues that encompasses Parkington. The one-story, ranch-style homes topped out at 1300 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

The style charmed Luddy Wendering, who bought her house with her late husband, Art, before it was even built. "There was nothing here before," she says. "We got to pick out everything, down to the color of the tile in the bathroom." While the land had previously featured cherry orchards, she recalls a plethora of pear trees that entrepreneurs offered to remove for $5.

Like Ramos, Wendering had children who found new playmates in the neighborhood. "We were all young couples, and when we first moved here, everyone either had children or was pregnant," she says. She recalls Parkington youngsters gathering together for water fights on various front lawns and playing with sparklers on the Fourth of July long before fireworks were outlawed. "At one time, there were 30 children living on the block," Wendering says. "They all played together, so we never had to go out and watch them."

The camaraderie extended to the parents, who established tight relationships among themselves. Ramos' husband was an electrician, and he offered to hook up utilities for free for all of his neighbors as they were moving in.

As children grew up and moved away, the mood morphed from one of exuberant youth to one of comfortable maturity. Some homeowners moved away, and new residents came in who added new porches, additional bedrooms and even one second-story addition. Ramos points out the original characteristics of her home with pride, including her beloved green shag carpet.

"God made a lot of things out there green, because it goes with everything," she says.

Someone who significantly changed his house is Bill Charles, who moved in across the street from Ramos with his wife, Jody, in 1988. Because law required it, the Realtor told Charles there had been a suicide in the garage before they bought their home, so as an exorcism of sorts, Charles refurbished the space.

"Now, it's a rec room with games and whiteboards, and the neighbors comment that it's really changed. The garage used to always be closed," he says. Charles and his wife have two young daughters, so the space is a magnet for children on the block. This impresses Ramos, who watches the flurry of youthful activity from her front window. "Those kids come over to hug and kiss me," she says. "We have the best parents around here—I really mean it."

But Charles happened to hit Parkington on a downswing: "When we moved here, only one family had kids." He and his family are part of the new flood of parents with school-age youngsters revitalizing old Parkington traditions, including the annual block party. "The first one we went to was basically just people sitting out in the street and talking," he says.

The Parkington block parties began in 1970 as a joint effort among neighbors. Kelly Fairlee, who grew up on Parkington and moved back to the block with her family, is following in the tradition of her late mother, Mary Murphy. Murphy petitioned the city of Sunnyvale to block off Parkington for the first party. "I still have a copy of the letter," Fairlee says. "The party's evolved to a lot of people helping out, and that's how she envisioned it—as everyone's party."

Charles helped jump-start the block parties again when he served as the chairman of the planning committee for eight years, inaugurating a tradition of collecting money from the whole block to purchase chicken to barbecue. The activities also perked up with sack races, piñatas and a "jumpy gym" for the kids. One year, he even constructed a dunk tank.

Now that his children are getting older, Charles has turned over his duties to Deepak and Vaish Shankar, who coordinated the block party last September for the first time. The couple, who operate a software design business, moved to their home just around the corner on Bernardo in 1999. "When we were looking, we could see that the neighbors knew each other," Vaish says. Their experience in the Indian culture is that everyone in a neighborhood knows each other, so the openness made them feel right at home and confident that their future children would understand this Indian tradition despite growing up in the United States.

The Shankars collected money and oversaw a group of eight to 10 volunteers. The extent of the block party showed their efforts—the day began at 10 a.m. with activities like bike races, and for the first time this past year, a fashion show. Hors d'oeuvres began at about 2 p.m., with dinner starting at 5. "It's all about the food. I think there were 15 kinds of cakes and dessert," Deepak says. There weren't enough tables to handle all the dishes, and the Shankars had to scramble to find more space.

After dinner there were several rounds of bingo, complete with prizes, and neighbors gathered around a bonfire to toast marshmallows and tell stories around 10 p.m. Vaish said she was surprised to hear about the ghosts of the Sunnyvale Toys 'R Us this past year from a woman who lives on Parkington on the other side of Bernardo. "She's a great storyteller," Vaish says.

Among the 30 block parties held in Sunnyvale every year, the one on Parkington is one of the oldest and attracts interest from numerous streets surrounding the neighborhood. The block party is typically held the Saturday after Labor Day, so children are back in school and families aren't away on vacation. Relatives of Parkington residents and former homeowners consistently return year after year.

In recent years, many of the shared dishes have become more exotic as the demographics of the neighborhood have shifted. "When we first moved in, we were the only Indians in the neighborhood," Deepak says, "but even in the four years we've lived here, there have been five or six more [Indian] families moving in." They count ethnicities from Iranian to Italian among their circle of neighbors. The members of a Japanese family that moved in a week before last year's block party attended and even brought their own table to host their spread.

This sharing spirit permeates the neighborhood all year round. Charles typically holds a New Year's party that allows the kids the opportunity to blow their noisemakers—at 10 p.m. The Shankars have a number of fruit and vegetable trees and share their surplus and gardening tips with a couple down the street, who in turn act as caretakers for many families when they go on vacation.

With such harmony, any problems the block experiences come from outside forces. Wendering laments that it's a thornier prospect for the Parkington children to walk to nearby Cherry Chase Elementary than it was when her children were young. The most excitement seen in several years was the crash of a stolen Mercedes into someone's garage on Bernardo. When Vaish Shankar reported a fallen branch, the city of Sunnyvale removed it within 20 minutes.

In fact, a recent addition to the block parties has been a Sunnyvale fire engine, which appears at the request of Pearl Ramos. In 1999, Ramos was revived by Sunnyvale Public Safety officers with a cutting-edge defibrillator, and her saviors have since made several cameo appearances at the block parties. "For a while there, I was a celebrity," she says. "The neighbors couldn't get over it."

The incident was one of several that spurred Bill Charles to formulate an emergency plan for the block. Each resident has a sheet listing everyone's vital information, laid out to mimic a map of the street, but the juxtaposition of the waves of newer, younger residents onto a street with a number of old-timers has made the need for cooperation more necessary.

Now, elderly residents have signed waivers that allow their neighbors to enter their homes in an emergency if they don't display a flier in the window indicating that they're okay. "I wrote something up with the aid of a lawyer, and all the seniors signed it," Charles says. Everyone remarks that this kind of support and friendship isn't something they've found other places. "I've lived elsewhere, and it's weird not to know your neighbors," Fairlee says.

According to Charles, the scene of the day of the block party perfectly illustrates this uniqueness, and particularly, how it harks back to the block's carefree roots. "There are no cars on the street and none in the driveways, and the kids can ride their bikes and run around without being in any danger," he says. "It takes me back to visions I have of neighborhoods of the 1950s. That's the way it's supposed to be."