Scenes from Silicon Valley, 6/11/09: Weed-covered Jeep dealership and Deli for lease

[Amerigo Vespucci]

All photos from Sunnyvale, CA.

[Taverner]

1. I remember that place - its on El Camino right?

[Amerigo Vespucci]

2. Yes, right near El Camino & Mary...

...the deli is on Mary in that little shopping center across the street from all of the doctor / dentist offices.

:toast:

On edit: The dealership looks a LOT worse than it does in the photos. The area between the palm trees is basically one big pile of junk.

[Taverner]

3. Up near Mtn View on the El, there was an old Emporium that was like that

[Amerigo Vespucci]

4. Oh yeah, I remember that one...

...when I moved to California, my brother-in-law worked at the Emporium in San Mateo. At the time, shopping there was a big symbol of "having made it" (or at least wanting people to think you had made it because you were trotting around with Emporium bags).

I have a really odd feeling when I go to the Rasputin Music store on San Antonio & El Camino...I used to go there several times a week when it was a Tower Records. So many things in this area are gone...just GONE.

[cascadiance]

9. I remember visiting Mountain View right before Tower closed there...

... and getting a few CDs there in their closing sales. I used to go there all the time when I lived in the Bay Area... I had a few tears leaving the store then...

Another closed place that made me sad when I drove by there around that time was Szechuan Garden on Castro Street in Mountain View. That was my FAVORITE Chinese restaurant of all time! I miss their Szechuan shrimp a lot!

[Amerigo Vespucci]

11. I did the same thing in Campbell...

...the WORST part is that the employees of the Campbell store didn't see it coming.

I read a newspaper story about the fact that Tower's distributors were going to cut off shipments because they'd crossed the line of acceptable debt.

I don't know how representative the Campbell employees were of employees in OTHER Tower stores, but I can confirm from first-hand experience that they DID NOT SEE the end coming.

They were cool people...I used to access Ice Magazine...which has also bitten the dust...for new release info. Every Tuesday I'd be there when they opened, hunting them down.

We may live in the age of iTunes and MP3s, but for me, nothing will ever replace "wasting" many precious hours in "brick and mortar record stores."

:toast:

[cascadiance]

12. Used to go to the Campbell tower a lot too the years before I left in 2001

when I lived in Campbell, Los Gatos, and more on that side of town then and worked in downtown San Jose.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

14. Campbell's Tower was always a minor or "lesser" Tower...

...but the employees were so NICE. I really don't care about founder Russ Saloman...I'm sure he's OK, and the online version of Tower still exists.

I miss the cool people I'd see every Tuesday morning.

[Taverner]

16. It used to be the ONLY Tower in the area - and I used to work there

Waaaaaay back in 87

Let me put it this way - the store had a vinyl section, a tape section and a video rental (VHS) section

[cascadiance]

25. There were so many interesting places along Bascom Avenue there...

Rasputin Music or Streetlight Records just down the road from Tower if you wanted to sell or buy used cds/records...

Dive shop, and even close to El Camino a strip joint right next door to a baby clothes store, and Yiasso for a gyro...

[Amerigo Vespucci]

26. Tacos Mexico...

...hole-in-the-wall place at the end of a beat-to-hell strip mall a couple of blocks up from Hamilton on Bascom. The real deal, authentic Mexican tacos (not Taco Bell) run by a woman who looks like someone's mom, and the place is always packed at lunchtime. A detailed review with a lot of photos can be found here:

http://www.jatbar.com/reviews/San_Jose/Tacos_Mexico.asp

[cascadiance]

28. And there were three Starbucks within a mile or so of each other...

... right near the corner of Hamilton and Bascom.

Two of them right across from each on the corner northwest of the intersection and the other on the southwest corner next to Whole Foods (within probably a few hundred yards of each other). And the other across the freeway just a little north on (I think) Winchester.

Did they close one of these down when they had the big number of closings of Starbucks recently? It would seem logical to close at least one of those.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

29. Not sure...I avoid the Bascom-Hamilton stretch because it's always a mess...

...primarily because of Whole Foods, but the Bascom-Hamilton and Hamilton up to San Tomas is one of my least favorite commutes in the area.

For anyone who remembers the Johnny Rockets in the Pruneyard, it is a Mojo Burger now. I at ate that particular Johnny Rockets once and got one of the worst bouts of food poisoning I've had in my life. I was overjoyed when they closed down. Mojo Burger, for people who aren't familiar with it, is somewhat like In 'n' Out (although I prefer In 'n' Out without question). Mojo Burger review, with photos, here (for the Snell Ave in San Jose location...they haven't been to the Pruneyard yet):

http://www.jatbar.com/reviews/San_Jose/Mojo_Burger.asp

[TahitiNut]

15. That was on El Camino near Hwy 85.

The Chrysler LeBaron I'm STILL driving was bought new at Sunnyvale Chrysler-Plymouth ... very close to the Dodge-Jeep dealer ... and possibly owned by the same folks.

[EFerrari]

18. I took the census in that neighborhood one year. 76 maybe?

Lots of apartment buildings and retired people and people who thought I was there to steal their souls for the government.

lol

[imdjh]

5. Because the stuff behind the palm trees was junk. nt

[AndyTiedye]

6. Jeep. You Can Drive Anywhere In It, EXCEPT Past a Gas Station

[EFerrari]

7. Oh, no. That's really, really sad!

All our doctors used to be in that center across the street.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

8. I went to the Deli with the intention of doing a Web Site for them...

...I was actually going door-to-door to the dentists across the street, and spotted the Deli yesterday. I made a mental note, checked out the Yelp reviews, and went back today with my brochure and business card. What I saw is what you see in the photo (and that's me, taking the ic with my cell phone).

It is definitely sad. I've had a love/hate relationship with this Valley...hate the overcrowding and high prices, love everything else...but every time a business owner hits the mat, it hurts me personally. I know what I have invested in my own business. I can only guess what that Deli owner invested in his.

[EFerrari]

10. When my family moved to Sunnyvale (Fremont and Hwy 9)

the Mary-El center was the only one outside of downtown. There were no busses and all my friends' dads worked at NASA. There was no 280 and there were still orchards all over the place. Down across 101 on Fairoaks, I think, was a place where people used to take their fruit to dry. We had three apricot trees left on our corner lot and there were always bags of dried fruit in the freezer. The valley was beautiful when the trees were blossoming.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

13. I used to live on Michelangelo Drive...

...which was directly across the street from one of the few remaining orchards in the valley.

Every year, the orchards would "burn off" the trees. It was a controlled process. And every yeary year, like clockwork, my yuppie townhouse owner neighbors would complain.

The family that owned the orchard put it forth once again, politely: "We can do this once a year or you can live across the street from another townhome development."

LO AND BEHOLD, a property developer wanted to build townhomes across the street, and the yuppie townhome owners went BALLISTIC.

Sometimes I think the BEST of Silicon Valley went to the WORST of its residents. Sweet JESUS, I can't help thinking that yuppies are the worst class of people on the PLANET.

[EFerrari]

17. I was good and ready to leave by 1976. Everything was uglied and cheapened up.

Nobody knew their neighbors any more and didn't seem to mind that in the least.

The best time was from 63 to about 70 -- until the development was mostly finished. As soon as that happened, it was over. A short run, when you think about it. There was no real public square and the whole place depended on cars and credit cards. It was sterile as hell for a "model city".

My best example is that before the theater was built at the then new "center", the Sunnyvale Players worked out of a church and we had a blast on about $2.40 per production. As soon as they moved into the new facility, it became a reason to vote people off the island, to exclude new people in a total status game. I was gone by then, thank goodness.

[Art_from_Ark]

21. That seems to be the American model

And yes, the uglification and cheapening really seemed to have gotten into high gear in the '70s. Decent towns were trashed out, neighborhoods destroyed, farmlands and woodlands bulldozed over, all in the name of "progress".

[EFerrari]

22. The developers in the Santa Clara Valley buried some fine farm land.

Because that's what is was, a funeral. Now I sound like Grampa on The Real McCoys, lol, but it's true. We got our character "developed" right out of us and everything was a chain or a franchise. When I used to window shop in old Sunnyvale, there were maybe three blocks of stores that nobody had ever heard of and they were all in buildings from the 40s and the economy was still very locally based.

The valley had a boom from the space program and then another from computer chips and then a shorter one from dotcoms but, it will never be stable again as it was when it was living on agriculture and canning. And that's a shame because my kids will never know that kind of deliberate living -- before men's wages started going south and before you needed two incomes and before even that stopped being enough for a young couple to get a start. Neither of my boys are married and I can't say that I blame them. Their father and I barely made it into family life before it became nearly impossible.

[Art_from_Ark]

23. You could be talking about my hometown

1960s-- almost no national franchise/chain stores except for Western Auto, A&W drive-in, car dealerships. Piggly Wiggly came and went. Most of downtown buildings were built in the 1880s-1910s, with a few more added through the '60s. Stores there offered nearly everything that was useful for daily living.

But in 1971, the first hamburger chain came into town-- Mr. Quick! Apres ce-la, la deluge. Now it seems that practically everything has to be a franchise/chain in order to survive. Downtown is all but forgotten. Mr. Quick is long gone, but the road it fronted is now cluttered up with the ugliest assortment of franchise restaurants and strip malls imaginable. What one author referred to as "the sloburbs".

Northwest Arkansas used to be America's Number 1 apple growing area--- now, it would be quite a challenge to find an orchard of any size there. They deliberately tax farmers out of existence, it seems. Can't have someone growing apples when that land could have yet another fast food restaurant/ strip mall/convenience store combination sitting on it.

And you're right, it will never be stable again.

[EFerrari]

24. Ironically, I worked in commercial real estate for a while in the 80s

in a family business. We'd put up "for lease" signs in store fronts in malls. Those signs never came down because that tenant wasn't going to be there long enough to make taking the sign down and putting it up again worthwhile.

I think (and hope) that part of the fall out from this meltdown will be that we go local again. It will be a little too much like "Road Warrior" for me to get used to it but, I don't see another answer for what we're facing.

And local in every sense of every resource we have. I used to laugh (out of discomfort) hearing good people like Al Gore say that even if our manufacturing went overseas, we'd develop new industries to replace those jobs. Because that's not going to happen. Gore talked about information industry as Obama is talking about green ones and neither is going to happen. It's up to our localities to repair what has been broken as far as I can tell.

Maybe I'd have more of an appetite for that challenge if I hadn't been a witness to the forty years that came before.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

27. A block off of Lawrence in Sunnyvale...

...the actual street is San Zeno, I believe...I used to work for a company on that street, in the times when National Semiconductor and Intel and Signetics were the major players in town, and the hundreds of "start-ups" that sprouted up were still someone's unfinished dreams.

We had the opportunity to make Adobe, which was one of these tiny little start-ups, one of our clients. Our sales manager came back from and initial meeting with them and said that he turned them down: "They're not going anywhere," he said (he had similar vision on other clients).

ANYWAY...

...when I worked for this company there was a HUGE, football field-sized dirt vacant lot directly across the street from us, with some grass and weeds and such. Not an eyesore, just a big vacant plot of land. I used to get to work early, and in the seasons where early translated into sun-up, I would sit in my car with my coffee and watch jackrabbits criss-cross all over that field. It was my "moment of Zen" that got the day rolling.

Those days are gone. All that's left is concrete steel and glass. Or as Joni would say, they "paved paradise and put up a parking lot."

[EFerrari]

30. My sister in law was the first secretary Intel hired when they got big enough

to have one.

And I think the first bus in town went Hwy 9 to Fremont, down Wolf and up Stevens Creek, taking local housewives over to the mall and to the big boxes then on Stevens Creek. If you didn't want to go shopping, you were out of luck. I don't remember it going to the bus or train station but maybe there was another one that did.

[Warren DeMontague]

19. I know exactly where that is.

Didn't there used to be a bike store in the same or adjacent strip mall? :shrug:

[EFerrari]

20. I don't remember the bike shop but remember a bakery and a bowling alley!

For some reason, that intersection gets confused for me with the Mary X Fremont intersection. There was a bike shop there that I remember.