Joe Blundo wants to set the record straight. The retired Santa
Clara County road worker knows the real story behind the most
puzzling
– and some say annoying – road name in Gilroy: No Name Uno.
Gilroy – Joe Blundo wants to set the record straight.
The retired Santa Clara County road worker knows the real story behind the most puzzling – and some say annoying – road name in Gilroy: No Name Uno.
How does Blundo know the truth? Well, he’s he says he’s the guy that named the 2.5 mile road that runs past Saint Louise Regional Hospital in northeast Gilroy.
“This happened when the freeway went in,” said Blundo, who helped build U.S. Highway 101 in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “There was a frontage road there and we took it over, and for everything we did, we charged it to the road. Material, labor, everything was charged to a specific road. So we had to have a name for the road. You can’t just say you spent $5 million in South Santa Clara County. You had to say what road you spent it on.”
So for billing purposes, he and other workers came up with No Name Uno – he says it’s spelled as two words, though a hospital sign has it as three words – as a moniker for the 2.5-mile road that hugs the east side of the highway. They also created No Name Dos, which later became Condit Road in Morgan Hill, perhaps saving that city from the squabbles and urban legends that have proliferated in Gilroy.
Saint Louise Regional Hospital incurred the wrath of a handful of residents in the early 1990s when they tried to recast No Name Uno as Community Drive. The road name, they figured, would be less confusing for patients, vendors and others who conduct business at the 26-acre medical campus at 6400 No Name Uno.
But hospital officials backed off the idea in the face of an angry response from neighbors, who balked at the prospect of changing billing addresses, letterhead and countless other personal documents to accommodate a new road name. Now, hospital officials are quietly exploring the prospect again, though city officials have proposed naming the circular driveway that passes through the medical campus as an option to avoid another fight with neighbors.
A few also seem to have a strange affection for the name, which has inspired a number of legends about its origin in recent years. Some say the street was named after an Indian chief – Noname – who lived in the hot springs east of Gilroy, a myth likely born from a street sign in which “No” and “Name” are printed as a single word. Another legend says the name was thought up by a spiteful farmer who was ordered to name the road by a judge.
Such myths are just plain wrong, said Blundo, who said he personally submitted No Name Uno as the official name for the road.
“We were waiting for the city of Gilroy and the county and we waited and waited, and after two years I put in a notice with the county engineer for it as No Name Uno,” Blundo said. “It could have been named anything. We could have called it Joe or Pete.”
