The back-and-forth about the medical center moving to Monterey
Street has certainly added a new twist to discussions about
downtown.
The back-and-forth about the medical center moving to Monterey Street has certainly added a new twist to discussions about downtown. As much as everyone’s paying attention to the Davis Recall/Circus Of The Absurd and all the excitement over who will get to run Gilroy and be the city’s verbal punching bag, I hope this discussion of our town’s plaque-clogged heart doesn’t just fizzle out.
Denise Baer Apuzzo’s column in the Aug. 7 issue of The Dispatch threw verbal ice water all over everyone who’s been thinking that downtown Gilroy might be on the cusp of a renaissance when she said, “Our downtown is never going to be a vibrant downtown like Morgan Hill.”
She may not be wrong – only time will tell. But I’m hoping she isn’t right. And deep down, I don’t think most people want to admit that downtown may indeed be as good as it gets. At least she had the nerve to say it, and it needed saying, even if only to stir the pot a little.
I’ve tried to avoid thinking that downtown is dead, although maybe it’s time to say, “Yep, it’s really, truly dead. Let’s move on.” But there’s always a glimmer of hope. What might be lacking for all of us, though, is infinite patience and infinite time, and so with nothing promising on the horizon, we certainly have the right to be dispirited. Remember, though, we’re only looking at a small slice of time here and a small slice of a fairly large (and growing) town.
Having lived in Campbell for years, I was used to being in a town with a “former downtown.”
Campbell’s downtown was easily as screwed up as ours – maybe worse. Through some loony edict in the 1960s, the city rerouted traffic around the main part of downtown – bypassed it completely, not just made it snaky and strange like Gilroy did — and killed it deader than dead. It remained in decay for almost two decades, and only was resuscitated by the dot-com boom that made Campbell desirable enough to people to make it a place to be. Not Los Gatos desirable or Saratoga desirable, but at least affordably desirable and well located. Only a couple miles away, Los Gatos had a vibrant downtown that had loped along for years mostly in a state of semi-decay/semi-suspended animation before it became THE place to be during the 1980s and ’90s.
Some might blame downtown’s current situation on a lack of planning, or poor planning, on the part of the city over the years, but expecting City Hall to have been fighting what might have been inevitable is looking in the wrong direction entirely. Everyone and everything has changed.
People wanted malls, big stores, and all the things that booming suburbanization brought. Downtown Gilroy was once a destination, a central hub, for what was a farming/ranching community.
Farming and ranching are still here, but Gilroy the way it used to be isn’t. Most people here don’t work the land. They work in stores, sit in cubicles, and drive trucks to construction sites or to make deliveries.
And most people are too busy to spend a lot of time just strolling. They’ve got kids to haul to soccer, groceries to buy, and more things to do than they have time to do them. Idling the hours on a park bench, absent-mindedly window shopping, or just chewing the fat at the local ice cream parlor? Forget it. We’re in the 21st Century.
Despite a gloomy prognosis for downtown, I’m glad to say that Gilroy itself isn’t dead. Time marches on, as they say. Even if Monterey Street were bulldozed, as some have suggested, our city would do just fine. We’d lose some cultural heritage, but when you look at our downtown, you have to sort of search for the heritage part among a lot of empty buildings, many of which are decaying and will probably continue to do so. Gentrification would do as much as continued decay to mess with the heritage part, but none of those buildings in downtown, with the exception of the old City Hall, was put there for posterity’s sake. They were all erected to be places of commerce.
None of the buildings in downtown Gilroy were here 200 years ago. Most weren’t there a century ago, and virtually all have changed hands multiple times, alternately sat empty or bustled with activity, and were renovated, renamed, and sometimes subdivided. Change is inevitable. We now have huge stores like Lowe’s and Costco and the Outlets, and we’ll soon see dozens more, including Target and Kohl’s and Best Buy. Meanwhile, a new downtown – or what people think of as downtown – will eventually emerge, whether it’s on Monterey Street or First Street or on some street that isn’t on the map yet and won’t exist for another 25 years. Or, maybe there just won’t be another downtown, ever. Maybe the concept is obsolete, like World’s Fairs or dial phones.
