Health & Fitness
Once Again, the Albright Project ≠ Netflix. When will it end?
We’ve been hearing lots of talk lately about land use, the downtown, parking and what’s good and not good for town. I got to thinking about how does a community go about resolving its issues and then it struck me, you could look to other communities to see how well they deal with their own issues. I was thinking of getting on Google maps and selecting towns from all over the country for models of other styles and methods, but, hold on, we have a really diverse array of communities right here in our own valley. And using these local towns would give a discussion about community issues a familiarity and common base as most folks interested in such a discussion would all have some basic knowledge about these other, different, local places.
I wanted to go at this in a simple, logical, common-sensical manner, so I asked myself, which are my most favorite and least favorite communities in the Santa Clara Valley (besides Los Gatos, of course). Without a doubt, when I think of nice towns in our area, my mind always finds itself on Lincoln Avenue, right in the middle of Willow Glen. My least favorite places are the barren, sprawling boulevards like the El Camino Real and Stevens Creek, where you have acres of unused parking starting at the broad road’s curb and stretching unbroken until you come to some huge, unattractive, tilt-up big box store, strip center or massive shopping mall. Being the died-in-the-wool, old time, dirt farmer that I am, these massive, endless slabs of black top have always been very repugnant to me. To strangulate and cover some of the richest farmlands on the planet with stagnant, putrid oily crud, is less that just plain stupid, it’s down right criminal, from any sane person’s perspective.
I remember when my sister and I were little kids, our parents would take us to some huge furniture or carpeting stores in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale or Mountain View with the grandly large, empty, hot, barren parking lots. We used to tease my mom by telling her that if she might want to go to the store on the opposite side of the boulevard, she had better pack us a lunch. You see, the way we figured it, for us kids to walk from the front door of the store where we were parked, to walk across its parking lot, cross the boulevard and then cross over the parking lot of the opposite store, we would starve to death before we reach the opposite store’s front door. We’d tell her this and giggle, proud that we had learned the concept of exaggeration so well.
Back to the point, what makes Willow Glen so attractive and the barren El Camino so unattractive? . . .
