Construction on future home of Gilroy Garlic Festival
Association begins Monday
Gilroy – The city’s premier nonprofit association breaks ground Monday on its future downtown home.
Over the next year and a half, the new headquarters of the Gilroy Garlic Festival Association will rise on the parking lot at the corner of Monterey and Lewis streets, once the site of a Greyhound Bus Station.
The three-story building with street-level commercial space and two floors of condominiums has been hailed as a vital piece of downtown renewal, a project that will give much greater prominence to the nonprofit group that helped Gilroy earn its reputation as the Garlic Capitol. For more than two decades, the GFA has shared space in a white brick building facing Monterey Street, just north of Sixth Street.
The organization secured the new spot a few blocks north in a land swap with the city, which hopes to use the festival’s current parking lot facing Eigleberry Street as the location for a future parking structure.
Jeff Martin, project manager and a member of the GFA’s board of directors, said the project exemplifies the vision laid out for the area.
“(The building) puts people on the street, which is critical to the downtown’s revitalization – to have new businesses come to the area and to have the people to support those businesses,” he said. “Having the 24 residential units and the commercial space does that.”
Downtown business owners and workers have decried the loss of the Lewis Street parking lot, which was financed through a tax on area businesses. The new Garlic Festival building will include 26 underground spaces, nearly all of them reserved for the two dozen apartments above.
To soften the short-term loss, Martin said the GFA held off on the start of construction until the city re-opened Monterey Street last month. A two block stretch of the road was closed for half a year while workers resurfaced the road and installed sprawling new sidewalks.
The GFA building is part of a broader effort to breath new life into the beleaguered area, where businesses have struggled to survive as customers head to outlets and shopping centers in east Gilroy.
GFA officials say the building will tie the downtown area together by filling in an “urban disconnect” created by the parking lot, and by serving as the gateway to one of the most anticipated projects in the city’s history: a 201-unit housing complex slated for the site of the old cannery.
The project, put forth by nonprofit South County Housing, lies one block east on Lewis Street and has been dubbed the northern linchpin of the area’s renaissance. Once complete, the South County project will include 40,000 square feet of space for coffee shops, book stores, and other retail uses, as well as apartments, live-work lofts, and townhouses.
To ensure a sense of continuity, the GFA hired the same architects who designed the cannery project. The GFA building will have a stucco and terra cotta exterior and balconies overlooking Lewis and Monterey streets. Large windows at street level will let downtown shoppers peer into the festival association offices.
Martin could not say how much the above-ground condominiums will cost, but predicted they would start in the $300,000 range.
