The Willow Glen Resident

Symbiosis: Newspapers and Communities

By Dan Pulcrano

The avenue was characterized by postwar signage, thrift stores and appliance shops, a reminder of a simpler California and of a commercial life that had seen better days. Older residents, who lived in nearby homes built in the '20s, '30s and '40s, strolled down the now quiet street, remembering the days when its corners were filled with conversations. If anyone drove there, it was to get a chair re-stuffed or something, not hang out.

That was Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, in the late 1970s. A weekly newspaper, the L.A. Weekly, started writing about the few offbeat businesses that began occupying the storefronts vacated by retiring shopkeepers. Joie Davidow, who was the arts editor back then, remembers, "I started discovering these funky little stores and wrote about them in my column."

It wasn't long before Melrose became the place to people-watch, shop for clothes or sip cappuccino. Then came the TV show, Melrose Place.

"It's like shining light on a plant," Davidow says of newspaper coverage of an emerging district. "It helps it grow."

Cut to Los Gatos, 1982. Santa Cruz Avenue was populated by gas stations and stores with names like "Fred's Shoe Box" when the new Los Gatos Weekly started writing about the town as if it were the center of the known universe.

It was the same when Metro opened for business in 1985 amid the sex theaters and auto body shops of South First Street. San Jose, David Cohen and I were warned, was a place where people mowed lawns and coached Little League on weekends, not the kind of city where night life would thrive. Having seen the cultural lives of Los Angeles and San Diego transformed when weekly newspapers appeared, we ignored the advice and started treating San Jose as if it were a sophisticated urban setting. Twelve years later, downtown San Jose contains a concentration of nightclubs, cinemas, theaters, professional sports, art galleries and sidewalk cafes. I have a hunch that Metro contributed to shaping San Jose's urban downtown, much as the Chicago Reader helped spawn Chicago's Lakeshore district and weeklies in other cities shaped parts of their respective cities.

Although I believed in the symbiosis, I did not expect what occurred in San Diego, Los Angeles, Los Gatos and downtown San Jose to take place in Willow Glen. It was, after all, just a quiet neighborhood with poor freeway access and just a few blocks of retail. Besides, with Valley Fair, downtown and a Starbucks in every strip mall, was there room for another hot retail zone?

Still, when Joe Guerra sold the Willow Glen Resident to our company in January 1992, we set about doing what we usually do: trying to staff it with skilled reporters, improve its visual appearance, and write about the community as if it's the most important place on earth. Because if you live in Willow Glen, it is.

We took a big risk and began publishing twice-monthly, worrying all the while whether Willow Glen could support its own regularly published newspaper. The results proved encouraging, and we closed our eyes and took the leap to weekly frequency. Today, the Resident has surpassed all of our original expectations.

Paralleling the newspaper's growth has been the blossoming of Lincoln Avenue as a vibrant commercial district and the emergence of residential Willow Glen as one of the valley's hot addresses. While no one factor is fully responsible for this renaissance, a chain is as strong as its weakest link, and the Willow Glen Resident--along with equally committed businesses, real estate agents, activists, politicians, and service and retail workers--helped yank Willow Glen out of the doldrums.

It has been enjoyable to watch Willow Glen flower with wonderful owner-operated businesses like Aqui and Casa Casa, as well as attract some of the brightest lights in national retailing. For us, it has been more than pure business. Both principal owners of The Resident live in or around Willow Glen and spend time and money in the Glen. So there's a little bit of self interest in seeing a community with personality, good aesthetics and soul, not to mention a wide range of coffee and juice beverages and 40 flavors of bagels.

I have come to realize, by watching the effect of newspapers on their communities, just how important they can be to the areas they serve. Without a newspaper of its own, a neighborhood is just another brand of real estate--an economically depressed backwater, swallowed up in the identity-neutering mass media of the region.

A good community newspaper is good for retail, good for schools, good for real estate values. Most of all it is good for the residents, elevating the quality of life and the character of their community.

We are proud to be part of Willow Glen's vibrancy and plan to continue to do what we can to keep Willow Glen vital, livable and fun.

Dan Pulcrano is executive editor of Metro Newspapers and co-founder of Metro and the Los Gatos Weekly.

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