Do you know where the photo below was taken? Does it looks a lot like Downtown Gilroy, with the exception of the lights in the trees? Notice the one lane of travel in each direction, mid-block crossings, angled parking (all full) and real street trees that aren’t those pathetic crepe myrtles that are planted everywhere.
This city even has the prerequisite brick on the sidewalks and, if you look close, hanging baskets on old fashioned light standards. All in all, it’s a pretty good representation of Gilroy—or what Gilroy could be.
The photo was on a blog I follow called Granola Shotgun. The author lives in San Francisco but travels around writing about other communities and their form, architecture and what works and what doesn’t.
In the blog post called, Silicon Valley: Jelly in the Jam, the author says this about the photo:
“This is the town of San Carlos twenty five miles south of San Francisco and an equal distance north of San Jose. We all have our biases. I’m partial to the kind of walk-able Main Street small town that was common everywhere a century ago. I like a place with mom-and-pop shops and a mix of modest cottages and grand stately homes a few blocks in each direction. For me that’s the perfect balance of city and suburb. A Main Street provides a broad range of activities while accommodating pedestrians, cyclists, and cars without prejudice. These places can also be well served by public transit—not so much to get around town, but to efficiently connect people to other towns that are also walk-able. If these small towns are then surrounded by working farms and a bit of nature all the better. Toss in a nearby city for access to culture and jobs and I’m in heaven. But such places are hard to come by in America these days. Fortunately, Silicon Valley has a string of such places along the historic rail line like little gems imbedded in the post WWII sprawl. ”
Couldn’t the author’s description of “heaven” be Gilroy? We’ve got it all, and yet we can’t figure out how to fix it, market it, or build firewalls necessary to keep the bad stuff from occurring and developing the right specific plan to execute what needs to be done in order to capitalize on all the good things about downtown Gilroy and its historic neighborhoods.
Yes, heaven really is on our doorsteps, now if we could only stop tripping over it.
See http://granolashotgun.com/2015/04/19/silicon-valley-jelly-in-the-jam/for the full article.
Gary Walton is a Gilroy businessman, founding member of the Save The Red Barn Committee and a champion of the downtown. He submitted this piece to the Dispatch.
