Who can claim that the environmental movement hasn’t effected
permanent change on the American psyche when nowadays even news
stories get recycled?
Who can claim that the environmental movement hasn’t effected permanent change on the American psyche when nowadays even news stories get recycled? I speak of course about the recent here-we-go-again flurry of public pronouncements on the evergreen question, Should downtown Gilroy be destroyed, annihilated, bombed back to the stone age, erased from human memory, placed in a museum of painful mistakes along with the leisure suit and the Edsel, or should it remain as is because as one writer puts it, “it’s a real downtown.”
It’s questions like this that vex the mind of man and cause him to cry out in despair “Honey, where’s the sports page?” Yes, it is indeed “a real downtown”: it’s very real, and it is in fact downtown in the convention sense of the term, although it is also true that smaller communities such as ours have no discernible “uptown” with which to compare it. That’s what I mean about vexing questions, because it forces one to confront the Zen koan “Can there be a down without an up?” best expressed as “What is the sound of one part of town clapping?”
Both sides of this great issue have their points, depending on whether they see the aforesaid real estate as half-full or half-vacant, half-derelict or half-homey. Some decry the fabled Traffic Slalom Course, while others see the required bob-and-weave driving style so reminiscent of Ali in his prime as a fun way to stay alert. Some believe that what currently passes for downtown retail would in other cities be immediately recognized as Skid Row; some are gratified that the area has remained free of the predictable row of chain stores that has sanitized and standardized so many other cities.
Gilroy has a common small-town problem, namely how to define what we even expect a downtown to be in an age when almost all the business that was once conducted there is now done in suburban malls. Downtowns are no longer economic power centers, so what do we put there? Most places are going for an “evening entertainment” theme: micro breweries, jazz clubs, trendy eating spots, multiplexes – basically Main Street Disneyland for grownups, all cute and glitzy. Of course, you can also go all the way the other way; the city of Santa Clara, for example, has no visible downtown at all. It had one once, but they got rid of it, and if the citizenry is suffering a consequent loss of self-esteem they’re doing a great job of hiding it.
So how much do we really care about turning what’s there into something significantly different? Oh yes, one can certainly produce a series of dreamy renderings of architecturally-dramatic storefronts and fountains and landscaping and the like, but (1) any unified plan is taking a big risk that the public won’t throng to the area on cue – witness the great Pavilion fiasco in downtown San Jose where the spiffy construction/multiplex/restaurant/ sports bar/video arcade project produced little but a black hole of failed businesses and public debt; and (2) comprehensively remaking downtown is financially so far out of reach that even thinking about it can only produce frustration.
Let’s just face it: downtown Gilroy is few people’s idea of a postcard picture the tourists will want to send home to their relatives, and pending the inevitable piecemeal renovation-by-fire-and-earthquake to which all California towns are hostage, that’s the way it’s gonna stay. So how about a reasonable compromise: what if we give the whole place a nice coat of paint?
Robert Mitchell practices law in Morgan Hill. His column has appeared in The Dispatch for more than 20 years. It’s published every Tuesday.
