Sunday October 17th 2004 – Out with the Old In with the New

Sunday October 17th 2004 – Out with the Old In with the New

What do you do on a Sunday if you’re not involved in a religious following? Last Sunday, my wife “I” and I decided to visit Santana Row Shopping Center for breakfast and window-shopping. The Mall extends south from Stevens Creek Boulevard along Winchester to Interstate 280 and from Winchester along Stevens Creek east to Interstate 880. The area within that near perfect square of real estate is largely Santana Row.

We arrived by exiting 280 North at the 880 Interchange and taking the half cloverleaf off-ramp under Stevens Creek Boulevard right where San Carlos Street ceases and the road turns into Stevens Creek. The off-ramp swung us around onto Stevens Creek heading west, through the intersection on the other side of the 880 overpass. A right turn puts you into Valley Fair Shopping Mall but we proceed straight looking for the left turn lane that would take us into Santana Row.

Making the left turn, suddenly we were in a Mediterranean village and probably somewhere in Italy if the architecture could be a guide. We had been transported from the Santa Clara Valley across the North American Continent, the Atlantic Ocean, through the Straits of Gibraltar into the center of the Mediterranean Sea to the boot of Italy. My wife and I suspended belief and imagined we were in that distant peninsula, northeast of Tunisia after parking in a multi-story parking structure.

I had visited that boot-shaped country on a couple of occasions and the problem I was having with the wannabe was the immaculate perfection of the place: no liter, no panhandlers, no street performers, no Vespa motor scooters, no smells of a place that has been lived in for thousands of years. The wannabe place would take some more living before it even appeared as if people populated the place. Now, it had the appearance of a theme park that closed at night reopening the following morning.

In reality it is the chic shopping mall of any major metropolitan center in the world as you pass the 680,000 square feet of boutiques, shops, gourmet stores and restaurants: Anne Fontaine, Anthropologie, BCBG Max Azria, Borders, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Crate & Barrel, Diesel, Donald Pliner, Eli Thomas, Cole Haan … I could be in South Coast Plaza in Orange County, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, or any of a number of upscale shopping theme shopping malls.

I knew the land on which this mall was built, which previously housed one of the Town & Country Villages that that developer Ron Williams created in the 1960s. The village comprised rows of sprawling one-level Spanish-style buildings of stores and restaurants. One Town & Country Village is still going strong at the junction of Embarcadero Road and El Camino Real in Palo Alto, a bike ride from Stanford University. In 1963 when I was visiting a high school friend while on leave from the U.S. Navy, we hung out at the village on Stevens Creek. It was the Christmas before I was to be discharged from the Navy and he and I drove across Stevens Creek in his Willys Jeep, to the Macy’s in Valley Fair Mall where I purchased a matching earrings and a necklace set for “I” before we were married.

But the Town & Country Village had long since lost its appeal for shoppers drawn to the fully renovated and expanding Valley Fair. It was a no-brainer to sell the land to Federal Realty Investment Trust, which quickly demolished the old village and began construction of the multi-level shopping, living, and office complex. When you walk down the sidewalks of Santana Row—the main street of the mall, you are walking along a canyon of multilevel buildings that form a wall that dams the street on either side, except there is no sign of life on the upper floors—probably because it’s Sunday.

The New Santana Row shopping mall came into being like a house of fire. More accurately, on Tuesday, August 20, 2002, Building 7, under construction and to be the largest of the nine buildings at the site, caught fire and burned to the ground in one of the most spectacular blazes the city has seen in recent history.

The 11-alarm fire on August 19, 2002, at Santana Row construction site and the nearby residential neighborhood was the largest structure fire in the history of San José. It involved more than 200 firefighters from as far away as San Mateo County, and it caused damage estimated at more than $100 million.

In the course of the fire, which began around 3:20 PM and burned through the rush hour, airborne ambers from the fire touched off 15 smaller fires on nearby rooftops and buildings. Hardest hit was the Moorpark Garden Apartment complex south of the fire.

In the aftermath, the city came to the rescue of the developer. Santana Row would be a tax revenue stream for San Jose, which was suffering from the dot.com bust just like the bankrupt dot.coms. Curiously, this city government had backed the development whereas past mayor Tom McEnery—the San Jose Convention Center namesake—opposed it. He believed the mall would draw shoppers and visitors away from downtown, making it more difficult to develop the city center, though the number of multi-level condominiums cropping up in and around the city center would seem to contradict this assertion.

It will be interesting to see forty years from now, if Santana Row has developed a character of its own as well as a reason to be that the poor Town & Country Village lacked. Or maybe the place will be bulldozed down to be replaced by something else, a fate, I suspect will not befall downtown San Jose.